With the official commission to create the Sforza Horse comes the tangible benefit of official accommodation, and it was probably at this time that Leonardo took up residence at the Corte Vecchia. This spacious new housing is a sign of his status, though in truth it was the colossal Horse itself which needed the space.
The Corte Vecchia had once been the palazzo and power-centre of the Visconti, the first great Milanese dynasty; during the Sforza era it was superseded by the Castello Sforzesco, and became known as the Old Court. It stood close to the Duomo, on the south side of the piazza, a grand but dilapidated symbol of former times. It was heavily fortified with towers and moats; inside the walls the buildings ranged around two large courtyards surrounded by porticos.118 One part of the palace was used for the melancholy young Duke Gian Galeazzo’s apartments, though increasingly Ludovico preferred him safely sequestered at the forbidding Certosa fortress in Pavia. No trace of the Corte Vecchia remains today: it was demolished in the eighteenth century to make way for the grandiose Palazzo Reale.
On one of those sheets of picture-puzzles or rebuses at Windsor there is a ground-plan of a palace which is probably the Corte Vecchia. The plan clearly predates the rebuses, for they are cunningly worked into its empty spaces, as if inserted into the rooms of the palace as notional miniature frescos. A later note gives some dimensions: ‘The hall of the Corte is 128 paces long and 27 braccia wide.’119 A pace (passo) is broadly reckoned as 30 inches, and a braccio as 24 inches, so we are talking about a vast space over 300 feet long and over 50 feet wide. This faded old Visconti ballroom was perhaps Leonardo’s workshop for the Sforza Horse.
It was certainly the Horse which was associated in people’s minds with Leonardo’s tenancy of the Corte. The Milanese court poet Baldassare Taccone writes stirringly:
Vedi che in Corte fa far di metallo
Per la memoria di padre un gran colosso
[See in the Corte how he [Ludovico] is having a great colossus made out of metal in memory of his father.]120
And in his famous eyewitness account of Leonardo at work on the Last Supper Matteo Bandello speaks of seeing Leonardo ‘leaving the Corte Vecchia, where he was working on his marvellous clay horse’.121
But it was not only the horse that required such space – there was also the ornithopter or flying-machine. A tantalizing page of the Codex Atlanticus has rough sketches showing a wide-spanned flying-machine, and a ladder leading up to it, and a note which reads, ‘Close up the large room above with boards, and make the model large and high. It could be placed up on the roof above, which would be in all respects the most suitable place in Italy. And if you stand on the roof, on the side where the tower is, the people on thetiburio won’t see you.’122 This is clearly the roof of the Corte Vecchia – close enough to the tiburio of the Duomo to be seen by the men at work up there. The tower which serves to conceal his activities from them would be either a tower of the Corte itself or the bell-tower of the adjacent church of San Gottardo, which had served as the Visconti’s chapel when the Corte was their palazzo. The presence of workmen on the tiburio would be more probable after 1490, when the building of it began.
Leonardo may have actually tested a flying-machine in Milan. The mathematician and philosopher Girolamo Cardano, who thought Leonardo an ‘extraordinary man’, states unequivocally that he ‘tried to fly, and failed’. Cardano was born in nearby Pavia in 1501; he was twelve when Leonardo left Milan for the last time. He may be recording some personal knowledge.123
It would also be the Corte Vecchia referred to in a note about fossils in the Codex Leicester: ‘In the mountains of Parma and Piacenza are to be found a multitude of shells and corals. When I was making the great horse in Milan, a large sackful of them was brought to me in my factory by some peasants.’124 The word Leonardo uses is fabbrica, which gives a sense of size and activity: a factory, or indeed a complex organization of specialist workers like the fabbriceria or works department of the cathedral nearby.
So this was now Leonardo’s home in Milan – a grand but rather aged palazzo, with colonnaded courtyards and draughty corridors, situated on the edge of the Piazza del Duomo. Here were his hangar-like workshops for the Horse and the flying-machine, his studio turning out court portraits and comely Madonnas, his study full of notebooks and manuscripts, the little rooms or studioli of his assistants, his laboratory for Zoroastran experiments, his shelves and chests and curios, his larders and stables, his cupboards full of pewterware – the 11 small bowls, 11 larger bowls, 7 dishes, 3 trays and 5 candlesticks carefully inventoried in a notebook of the early 1490s.125
There is a makeshift element to his accommodation – a disused Italian palazzo is not a homely place – but one knows also of Leonardo’s desire for cleanliness and order, his domestic fastidiousness. On a folio dated 23 April 1490, and therefore quite possibly written at the Corte, he says, ‘If you want to see how a person’s soul inhabits his body, look at how his body treats its daily abode; if the latter is disordered, so the body will be kept in a disordered and confused way by the soul.’ In another text written around this time he envisages the painter at work in ‘his dwelling full of charming pictures, and well-kept, and often accompanied by music or readings of various fine works’.126 One hears for a moment the tune of a lira da braccio floating out into the courtyard. This is an idealized picture, of course. It omits the carpenter who wants paying, the courtier inconveniently dropping by, the missing silverpoint pens, the dog scratching its fleas in the corner – the daily life of this busy, flourishing studio which is his creation and his livelihood.