Biographies & Memoirs

Expatriates and Artists

Lombardy was a foreign country: they did things differently there. The climate, the landscape, the lifestyle, the language – a German-influenced dialect, heavy on the zs, in which a Giovanni was Zoane and a Giorgio was Zorzo – were new and strange. The musical soirée and the military promises are not enough to suggest (as is often implied) that Leonardo was swept instantly into Milanese court life. He was more than ever an outsider, an expatriate, a beginner-again. This is both an isolating experience and a self-defining one: he will seldom appear in Milanese records without the epithet ‘Fiorentino’ appended to his name. He becomes a Florentine in a way he never was, and never would be, in Florence.

There was a strong Florentine presence in Milan, and this was probably Leonardo’s milieu in his first months here. The commercial arm of Florentine influence was present in the customary form of the Medici bank. Its headquarters was a large palazzo on what is now Via Bossi, given to Cosimo de’ Medici by Ludovico’s father; you entered through an ornately carved Corinthian arch in which Lombard and Tuscan motifs were diplomatically combined. It was a meeting-place as much as a counting-house – a kind of consulate for itinerant Florentines. The chief Medici agents in Milan were the Portinari family, whom Leonardo certainly came to know. In a memorandum of the early 1490s he reminds himself to ‘ask Benedetto Portinari how the people go on the ice in Flanders’.11

A well-known Florentine living in Milan in 1482 was the veteran traveller, author and diplomat Benedetto Dei, now in his mid-sixties. He had first visited the city in the late 1440s, and was there when, as he put it, ‘Francesco Sforza took it with his sword in hand.’ He too knew the Portinari, and in 1476 he travelled to France and the Netherlands as their agent. (The same business links presumably account for Benedetto Portinari’s knowledge of Flemish ice-skaters.) Leonardo may have already met Dei in Florence, where he was a friend of the scientist Toscanelli and the poet Luigi Pulci. The latter addressed a sonnet to him, ‘In principio era buio, e buio fia’ (‘In the beginning was the dark, and the dark will always be’ – a provocative parody of Genesis), which caused some scandal. One gathers from it that Dei was of a sceptical turn of mind on matters religious:

Hai tu veduto, Benedetto Dei,

Come sel beccon questi gabbadei

Che dicon ginocchion l’ave Maria!

Tu riderai in capo della via

Che tu vedrai le squadre de’ Romei…

[Have you seen, Benedetto Dei, how foolish are those hypocrites who kneel and mumble their Ave Marias! You would laugh from the top of the street if you could see the hordes of pilgrims bound for Rome… ]

Pulci was denounced by the philosopher Ficino for these infamies he had ‘spewed out against God’. All this was in early 1476, around the time of Leonardo’s portrait of Ginevra, with its Ficinian overtones. Pulci and Dei – like Antonio Cammelli – represent a spikier, more sceptical mood which seems to have been congenial to Leonardo. Between 1480 and 1487 Dei was more or less continuously in Milan, in the service of Ludovico Sforza. He was now at the apex of his career as a diplomat and reporter: the man who knew everyone and everything, ‘la tromba della verità’ (‘the trumpet of truth’). He collected and distributed news via a network of correspondents that ranged from his family and friends in Florence, whom he encouraged to write weekly, to the powerful dynasties of the Gonzaga, the Este, the Bentivoglio.12

Leonardo certainly knew this busy, gregarious Florentine, well placed though not always well paid as a political adviser to the Moor. (Dei speaks rather bitterly of having to ‘brave the plague’ in order to obtain his ‘tip’ from Ludovico.) He would have listened with interest to Dei’s tales of his travels in Turkey, Greece, the Balkans and North Africa: there were not many men who could give you, as Dei could, a first-hand account of life in Timbuktu. This interest is evident in a curious text of Leonardo’s, a kind of spoof travelogue or newsletter which begins ‘Dear Benedetto Dei’. It is datable to c. 1487, which was about the time of Dei’s departure from Milan. Its obviously fictive nature suggests an element of parody – Dei was regarded as a teller of tall tales. Its story of giants perhaps recalls the famous Morgante maggiore of Dei’s old friend Luigi Pulci, a book Leonardo is known to have owned.13

Another Florentine in the Moor’s service was Piero di Vespucci. He had been clapped up in the Stinche after the Pazzi Conspiracy, charged with abetting the flight of the conspirators, though more probably because he was an old enemy of Giuliano de’ Medici. The enmity stemmed from Giuliano’s courtship of Simonetta Cattanei, who was married to Piero’s son Matteo. In 1480 Vespucci was ‘restituted in all his rights’, but chose rather the dignity of exile.14 Ludovico welcomed him, and made him a ducal councillor, but in 1485 he was killed in a skirmish in the neighbouring town of Alessandria.

Bankers, diplomats and exiles: these men constitute an inner circle of Florentine influence at the court of the Moor, and would have been useful contacts for Leonardo. Another was Bartolomeo Calco, a distinguished Florentine Hellenist scholar, whom Ludovico appointed as his secretary, as part of his drive to ‘purify the coarse speech of the Milanese’. There are implications of intellectual snobbery in this phrase, and perhaps the Florentines’ presence was resented by the home-grown courtiers. A later Florentine protégé was the gossipy rimester Bernardo Bellincioni, whom Leonardo had known in Florence, though he was probably not in Milan until about 1485.

Artistically Milan was an eclectic mix. As a crossroads city, it sucked down influences from the north – German, French, Burgundian, Flemish – as well as those of neighbouring artistic centres like Venice and Padua. The city was full of Franco-German masons and sculptors, whose Gothic-influenced work adorned the cathedral. The chief engineer in charge of the cathedral works in the early 1480s was a German, Johann Nexemperger, from Graz. This mix of influences impeded the development of an identifiable local style, but in the new Sforzesco era of ostentation and aspiration there was plenty of artistic business. In 1481 the Milanese painters’ confraternity, the Scuola di San Luca, had some sixty members.

The greatest artist working in Milan in 1482 was another immigrant, though he came from the rougher country of Le Marche east of the Apennines. This was the painter and architect Donato Bramante. He became a good friend of Leonardo, who refers to him in a note as ‘Donnino’, and it seems likely that this friendship was formed early on. Bramante was born near Urbino in 1444: he was eight years older than Leonardo. As a youth he perhaps met the great Alberti at the Urbinese court of Federico da Montefeltro. He lived an itinerant life as a painter before settling in Milan in the 1470s. In 1482 he was working on his first major architectural commission, the oratory of Santa Maria. He was esteemed by the Milanese court poets, and himself wrote spirited satirical squibs. Vasari describes Bramante as a kind and genial figure, and also mentions his fondness for playing the lute. He is portrayed by Raphael in the School of Athens fresco and in a chalk drawing now in the Louvre: these much later images show a strong, round-faced man with scanty, dishevelled hair.15

Among the local artists prominent at this time were the Brescia-born Vincenzo Foppa, who had absorbed the influences of Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini, and whose mastery of a certain shimmery, silvery light seems to anticipate Leonardesco light-effects, and younger artists like Ambrogio da Fossano (known as Il Bergognone – ‘the Burgundian’), Bernardino Butinone, and Bernardo Zenale. But the local artists most closely associated with Leonardo’s first years in Milan were the de Predis family, two of whom are documented as his colleagues or partners in early 1483.

The de Predis studio was a thriving family concern: four brothers were active. The eldest, Cristoforo (who is described in documents as mutus, a mute), worked chiefly as an illuminator, producing wonderfully detailed miniatures in the manner of the Flemish masters. Leonardo’s particular relationship – one that lasted many years – was with Cristoforo’s younger half-brother Ambrogio, born in about 1455. He began his career in Cristoforo’s studio; his earliest documented works, c. 1472–4, are miniature illuminations in a book of hours for the Borromeo family. He later worked with another brother, Bernardino, at the Milanese mint. By 1482 he had begun to make his mark as a portrait painter; in that year the Duchess of Ferrara gave 10 braccia of satin to ‘Zoane Ambrosio di Predi da Milano dipintore de lo Ill. Sig. Ludovico Sforza’. He was thus already ‘painter to Ludovico’ at the time of Leonardo’s arrival, probably specializing in portraits, at which he excelled.16

Leonardo soon came to know this well-connected family of artists, and in the contract of April 1483 for the Virgin of the Rocks he is a partner of Ambrogio and Evangelista de Predis. It is a mutually useful partnership – Leonardo is the older and artistically senior, but the de Predis have the contacts and the clientele. In the contract, Leonardo is styled ‘master’, while Evangelista and Ambrogio appear without title. He appears to be lodging with them, or anyway near them, for all three have the same address: ‘the parish of San Vincenzo in Prato intus’. The early Romanesque church of San Vincenzo in Prato lay just outside the south-western stretch of the walls, near the Porta Ticinese. The part of the parish designated ‘intus’ – within the walls – would be the area now bounded by the Piazza della Resistenza and the Circo Torcio. Here Leonardo was lodging in the early months of 1483, with Zoroastro and Atalante Migliorotti in attendance and the de Predis workshop at his disposal.

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