Echoes of War

In 1494, amid the preparations for casting the Horse, and the disputes over the Virgin of the Rocks, and the revived emotions of his relationship with his mother, and the intricate mechanical studies of the Madrid codices, Leonardo pursued a round of daily life in which can be discerned some aspects of business and some of pleasure, and of which a few fragments remain in his pocket-books:

2 February 1494 – At the Sforzesca [Ludovico’s summer palace at Vigevano] I drew 25 steps each of 2/3 of a braccia and eight braccia wide.

14 March 1494 – Galeazzo came to live with me, agreeing to pay 5 lire a month for his expenses… His father gave me 2 Rhenish florins.

20 March 1494 – Vineyards of Vigevano… In the winter they are covered with earth.

6 May [?1494] – If at night you place your eye between the light and the eye of a cat, you will see that its eye seems to be on fire.

[1494 – Estimate for decoration work, probably at Vigevano:]

Leonardo is glimpsed at Vigevano as the Sforza’s interior designer, and he is also called upon to produce a different kind of design: propagandist political emblems – work that brings him into the realm of the Moor’s image-maker. Ludovico’s popularity was declining. In the clannish milieu of Quattrocento politics there were always those who felt themselves excluded and who formed a nucleus of resentment, and increasingly they had a focus. Ludovico’s hunger for absolute power was by now quite blatant. He kept Gian Galeazzo and Isabella isolated in the gloomy fastness of the Certosa at Pavia, where the young Duke’s health was failing. He severed relations with the King of Naples, who had protested against this treatment of his granddaughter. He courted the Emperor, who had the power to proclaim him the rightful Duke – the half a million ducats of dowry brought by his niece Bianca when she married the Emperor was widely seen as a bribe, at the taxpayer’s expense, to obtain the dukedom.

Various sketches can be interpreted as ideas for political emblems, designed to express the official line that Ludovico was the only viable ruler of the dukedom and should therefore be recognized as such. One shows a dog warily confronting an aggressive-looking snake; the motto reads ‘Per non disobbedire’ – ‘Not to disobey’.⁷³ The snake or serpent (the heraldic device of the Visconti) is Milan; the dog traditionally represents fidelity or loyalty. The emblem seems to convey the message that Milan should not ‘disobey’ its faithful guardian Ludovico; the scroll carried round the dog’s neck perhaps signifies that his leadership is sanctioned by the writ of law. Another sketched emblem shows a sieve with the motto ‘Non cado per essere unito’ – ‘I do not fall because I am united’: a similar message of political unity.⁷⁴

There is also an allegorical composition (as distinct from an emblem) – ‘Il Moro with the spectacles, and Envy depicted together with False Report, and Justice black for Il Moro’,⁷⁵ on a loose sheet now in the Bonnat Collection in Bayonne. The black-faced Moor holds spectacles, a symbol of truth, out towards Envy, who holds a banner depicting a bird pierced by an arrow. This is probably an idea for a piece of propagandist pageantry – a costumed, three-dimensional allegory. A similar description is found in a later notebook of c. 1497: ‘II Moro in the form of Fortune’ with ‘Messer Gualtieri [Gualtiero Bascapé, the Duke’s treasurer] reverently holding up his robes behind him’. The ‘terrifying form of Poverty’ – female, like the depictions of Envy, Slander, etc. – is shown running towards a ‘young lad’; the Moor ‘protects him with his robe, and menaces this monster with a golden sceptre’.⁷⁶ Leonardo mentions Bascapé in a fragmentary draft of a letter of c. 1495 complaining of unpaid money: ‘Perhaps Your Excellency did not give further orders to Messer Gualtieri, believing that I had money enough…’⁷⁷

These political emblems and allegories seem trivial as drawings and unsubtle in the meanings they convey. One suspects that being part of the Moor’s propaganda-machine was not particularly congenial to Leonardo. He has a vested interest in the continued ascendancy of his patron, and is ready to lend his skills to that end. He collaborates, as he later did with the ruthless warlord Cesare Borgia. His livelihood depended on such collaborations, of course, but one should register the element of acquiescence, the shrug of political indifference. He is a man without illusions: he knows the harsh realities of power, and he learns to live with them. Opportunism is all: Fortune must be grasped by the hair as she passes – not a moment too late, ‘for behind she is bald’. Perhaps his ambivalent feelings are in the emblem he sketches showing a blackberry-bush, with the motto ‘Dolce e agro e pungente’ – ‘Sweet and bitter and thorny’. Above it is written the word more, blackberries, punning on amore, love, but a further pun on Il Moro is hard to ignore, and with it perhaps an idea of the private bitterness of the artist in the pay of a despot.⁷⁸

15 September 1494 – ‘Giulio began the lock for my studio.’⁷⁹

The locksmiths were busy in Milan at this time. Foreign troops were in the land – the French, en route for the Kingdom of Naples, to assert with force of arms their claim to that territory. Ludovico had welcomed them in: allies against the hostile Neapolitans. He and Beatrice entertained the French king, Charles VIII, with pomp and revelry at Pavia. The bravados of one of his generals, the Duc d’Orléans – whose grandmother was a Visconti, and who claimed therefore a right to the duchy of Milan – were ignored; Orléans was currently occupied in occupying Genoa. In Pavia Duke Gian Galeazzo lay dying. King Charles visited him, and pitied him, but was embarrassed by the Duchess Isabella, who tearfully pleaded with him to have mercy on her father, Alfonso, now King of Naples after the death of Ferrante a few months before. ‘She had better have prayed for herself, who was still a young and fair lady,’ observed the historian Philippe de Commines, who was in Charles’s retinue. In these last days Gian Galeazzo seemed pathetically in Ludovico’s thrall – ‘longing on his deathbed for the uncle, who is far away, riding in splendour beside the French king’; asking one of Ludovico’s gentlemen ‘whether he thought his Excellency the Moor wished him well and whether he seemed sorry that he was ill’.⁸⁰

21 October 1494 – Gian Galeazzo, aged twenty-five, dies at the Certosa di Pavia. Suspicions are rife that he has been poisoned by Ludovico.

22 October 1494 – Ludovico is proclaimed Duke at the Castello Sforzesco.

1 November 1494 – Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, father-in-law of Ludovico, arrives in Milan. He is alarmed, as many are, by Ludovico’s rapprochement with the French. He is keen to bolster his defences against the possibility of French incursion (or against the aggression of Venice, also mobilizing in response to the French presence). The Duke is also a powerful creditor – Ludovico is in debt to him to the tune of 3,000 ducats. Under pressure, Ludovico offers him a ‘gift’: a large quantity of bronze suitable for casting into cannon.

17 November 1494 – A diplomat in Milan writes:

The Duke of Ferrara… has ordered Maestro Zanin di Albergeto, to make him three small cannon, one in the French style and two in another style. He has received from the Duke [i.e. Ludovico] a gift of 100 meira of metal, which had been purchased to make the Horse in memory of Duke Francesco. The metal has been transported to Pavia, and thence down the Po to Ferrara, and the said Maestro Zanin has accompanied the Duke back to Ferrara to make the artillery.⁸¹

Thus casually a diplomatic report announces the requisitioning of the bronze which had been set aside for the casting of the Horse – a tremendous blow for Leonardo and his studio, and an irony he could hardly fail to note: the great martial creation of the Horse rendered down into actual weaponry. How brittle and insubstantial the works of the imagination when confronted with the necessities of war!

Around the same time news was reaching Milan of events in Florence: the French were camped outside the city; Piero de’ Medici – Lorenzo’s son and successor – had signed a disgraceful treaty granting them control of Pisa and other possessions; the citizens had risen in fury. On 9 November Piero and his two brothers, Giovanni and Giuliano, slipped out of the San Gallo gate, on foot, heading for sanctuary in Bologna. The Medici had fallen. Resentful mobs swarmed into the Palazzo Medici, smashing and looting – a foretaste of the destruction to come, as the power-vacuum was filled by the charismatic theocracy of Girolamo Savonarola, the fiery Dominican friar who had been a figurehead for reform in Florence, and whose pulpit-rhetoric of moral purification now became the reality of the ‘Bonfires of the Vanities’, in which many paintings, books and manuscripts were destroyed.

Thus the year which had begun pleasantly enough for Leonardo, measuring the water-stairs at Vigevano, ends amid distant echoes of war from his homeland, and the great defining project of the Sforza years in ruins. Fuming in his studio at the Corte Vecchia, he drafted a letter to Ludovico, but the page on which he wrote it has been torn in half, vertically, and on the half that remains we read only truncated stuttering sentences:

And if any other commission is to be given me by some…

Of the reward of my service, because I am not in a position to…

Not my art which I wish to change…

My Lord, I know your Excellency’s mind is much occupied…

to remind your Lordship of my small necessities, and the arts put to silence…

that for me to remain silent would make your Lordship think worthless…

my life in your service, holding myself always in readiness to obey…

Of the horse I will say nothing because I know the times…

And so on, to the last plaintive lines:

Remember the commission to paint the rooms…

I brought your Lordship, only asking that you…⁸²

But enough. In theory the mutilation of the manuscript may have occurred at any time before the compilation of the Codex Atlanticus by Pompeo Leoni in the 1580s, but let us allow Leonardo da Vinci his moment of petulance, and the fleeting minor satisfaction of ripping the paper in half and stalking off to pace upon the roof of the Corte Vecchia, where on this day none will dare to disturb him.