In 1497 Leonardo became the owner of a plot of land with a vineyard. It was outside the Porta Vercellina, between the convent of the Grazie and the monastery of San Vittore. Strictly speaking this was not the first property that Leonardo owned – there was that heavily mortgaged house in the Val d’Elsa which features in the contract for the Adoration – but this was properly his, without strings attached, and it was still his when he drew up his will twenty-two years later. In the will it is described as ‘a garden which he owns outside the walls of Milan’. That was how he remembered it, as the shadows lengthened around him in France: his garden.
It was a gift from Ludovico. No record survives of the actual transfer of the land to him, but the date is given in a later document concerning a neighbouring property. In this – a contract between the Moor’s attorneys and a widow named Elisabetta Trovamala – reference is made to Leonardo’s vineyard having been ceded to him by the Camera Ducale fourteen months previously; the contract is dated 2 October 1498, so Leonardo took possession of the vineyard in early August 1497.127 This would have been around the time he completed the Last Supper.
The land covered an area of about 16 pertiche. The pertica (pole) is etymologically related to the English perch, but is a much larger unit. According to Leonardo it was equivalent to 1,936 square braccia. The value of the braccio is not precise – Milanese braccia were slightly longer than Florentine ones – but in rounded terms this makes the vineyard just over a hectare in area, or in English terms getting on for 3 acres, a good-sized country garden. According to Luca Beltrami’s classic study La vigna di Leonardo (1920), its dimensions were approximately 200 m long by 50 m wide (220 х 55 yards) – long and thin, as vineyards often are.128
It is always described as Leonardo’s vineyard or garden, but there was certainly a house of some sort on it. In a document of 1513 it is described as ‘sedimine uno cum zardino et vinea’, which estate-agents today might translate as ‘a detached residence with garden and vineyard’.129 It was by then under the management of Salai: he rented part of it out, for 100 lire per annum, while reserving some of its rooms to accommodate his widowed mother. It was thus something more than a vineyard casetta or wine-shed, though not necessarily very grand. There is talk of building-works in the garden in 1515, but whether this was a new house or the original house being refurbished is not clear.
Leonardo’s notes and sketch-maps minutely tabulate the lengths and breadths of his precious patch of land:
From the bridge to the centre of the gate is 31 braccia.
Begin the first braccia right there at the bridge.
And from that bridge to the corner of the road, 23½ braccia.
He disappears into a labyrinth of convertible units – parcels (particelli) and squares (quadretti) as well as perches and arms – and thence into related differentials of value. He calculates the value of the land at 4 soldi per quadretto, which works out at 371 lire per pertica, which gives an overall value of his land of ‘1931 and ¼’ ducats.130 These trailing sums – practical fruit of Paciolian arithmetic – convey Leonardo’s sense of the land as a tangible asset, a conferring of substance and security, something one can understand as important to a 45-year-old man of no fixed abode and no steady income. We can also guess how much Leonardo loved it for itself, for its beauty and tranquillity and verdancy, its refuge from the pestered streets of summer in the city.
The site lies south of the Grazie, behind the row of buildings whose frontage runs along the south side of Corso Magenta. When Beltrami was researching the case eighty-five years ago there was still a vineyard here. Today you can still see a thin wedge of greenery, with that focused lushness of the town-garden, and you can celebrate this partial survival with a meal at the Orti di Leonardo restaurant, at a spot roughly corresponding with the eastern end of the vineyard. This part of town is now a residential area for the Milanese haute bourgoisie. The tall, ornate apartment-blocks have neoclassical balconies and an air of Risorgimento self-esteem. To the south lies the San Giuseppe hospital, and the old San Vittore monastery with its fine Renaissance cloisters. From there you cut back up towards the Grazie, along Via Zenale, with the ghostly vineyard on your right-hand side. This road, connecting the Grazie with San Vittore, was built or enlarged in 1498. Some plans in Leonardo’s notebooks relate specifically to this project.131Perhaps the improvements to the road would enhance the value of his property: a kickback.
The area outside the Porta Vercellina was leafy and desirable, and there had been a good deal of development there in recent years, especially of houses and gardens for ducal functionaries. Among those who lived there was Galeazzo Sanseverino, the friend of Leonardo and Pacioli and probable patron of their ‘academy’. The stables of this fine horseman were famous – some studies of stables by Leonardo, dating from the later 1490s, may be a project for renovating them.132 According to a sixteenth-century chronicle, Arluno’s De bello gallico, ‘These stables were so beautiful and finely decorated that you would believe that the horses of Apollo and Mars yoked together were stabled there.’ Vasari is perhaps referring to them when he writes of some frescos by Bramantino, ‘Outside the Porta Vercellina, near the castle, he decorated certain stables, today ruined and destroyed. He painted some horses being groomed, and one of them was so lifelike that another horse thought it was real, and aimed several kicks at it.’133
Another prominent family, the Atellani family, were also given property here by the Moor. The front of their house was on the Vercelli road (present-day Corso Magenta); the garden at the back of it abutted on to Leonardo’s vineyard, forming its northern boundary. The house was later decorated with ceiling frescos by Bernardino Luini, full (like so much of Luini’s work) with Leonardesque motifs; these belong to the early sixteenth century, when the Atellani house was the focus of one of the most distinguished intellectual circles in Milan.134
A note of Leonardo’s refers to some other neighbours in this up-market suburb: ‘Vangelista’ and ‘Messer Mariolo’.135 It is tempting to think the former refers to his late colleague Evangelista de Predis, but it seems unlikely. ‘Messer Mariolo’ is Mariolo de’ Guiscardi, a leading Milanese courtier, and it is probable that a series of architectural plans in the Codex Atlanticus refers to Leonardo’s work on the Guiscardi mansion, which was described in 1499 as ‘newly built and not yet finished’. One of these plans has some specifications in the hand of the client himself:
We want a parlour of 25 braccia, a guardroom for myself, and a room with two smaller rooms off for my wife and her maids, with a small courtyard.
Item, a double stable for 16 horses with a room for the grooms.
Item, a kitchen with attached larder.
Item, a dining room of 20 braccia for the staff.
Item, one room.
Item, a chancellery [i.e. an office].
Leonardo’s own notes are revealing both of the requirements of rich, fussy clients and of his own fastidiousness:
The large room for the retainers should be away from the kitchen, so the master of the house may not hear their clatter. And let the kitchen be convenient for washing the pewter so it may not be seen being carried through the house…
The larder, wood-store, kitchen, chicken-coop, and servants’ hall should be adjoining, for convenience. And the garden, stable, and manure-heaps should also be adjoining…
The lady of the house should have her own room and hall apart from the servants’ hall… [with] two small rooms besides her own, one for the serving-maids and the other for the wet-nurses, and several small rooms for their utensils…
Food from the kitchen may be served through wide low windows, or on tables that turn on swivels…
The window of the kitchen should be in front of the buttery so firewood can be taken in.
I want one door to close the whole house.136
This last specification recalls a house-design in Paris MS B, within the ambit of the ‘ideal city’, with the note ‘Lock up the exit marked m and you have locked up the whole house.’137 This is eminently practical, but also suggestive of Leonardo’s fierce tendencies to secrecy and privacy – the hermetic closure within an interior world.
Within his ‘garden’ Leonardo is his own man. He paces his boundaries, and inspects his vines, and sits under shady trees plotting improvements he will never get round to making. He potters. And in the castle, as if to celebrate this pastoral mood, he is also creating a kind of garden – the wonderful fictive bower of the Sala delle Asse.
In sombre mood after the death of his wife in childbirth in January 1497, Ludovico Sforza began to remodel the north wing of the castle for his private retreat. On the ground floor of the north tower was the Sala delle Asse, the Panel Room, so called because it had wooden panels featuring Sforza family crests round the walls. Leading off from this were two smaller rooms called the Salette Negre (the Little Black Rooms), which gave on to the charming but now dilapidated loggia spanning the castle moat.
Here Leonardo was at work in 1498, as we gather from reports by the Duke’s treasurer Gualtiero Bascapé – the ‘Messer Gualtieri’ who is shown holding up the Moor’s robes in an allegorical drawing by Leonardo:
20 April 1498 – The Saletta Negra is being done according to your commission… and there is agreement between Messer Ambrosio [i.e. the Duke’s engineer Ambrogio Ferrari] and Magister Leonardo, so that all is well and no time will be wasted before finishing it.
21 April 1498 – on Monday the large Camera delle Asse in the tower will be cleared out. Maestro Leonardo promises to have everything finished by the end of September.138
Thus Leonardo was finishing decoration-work on the Salette Negre in April 1498, and the Sala delle Asse was being prepared for him to start work on it immediately. He undertook to ‘have everything finished’ by the end of September: five months away.
Part of the Sala delle Asse fresco.
The frescoed ceiling of the Sala delle Asse is virtually all that is left to us of Leonardo’s work as an interior decorator for the Sforza. Nothing remains of his work at the summer-palace of Vigevano in 1494, or in Beatrice Sforza’s apartments – the camerini – in 1496, or indeed in the ‘Little Black Rooms’ which he was painting just before he set to work on the Sala delle Asse. In this large, long-windowed but intrinsically rather gloomy room he created a wonderful fantasia, a rhapsody in green. A dense tracery of intertwined branches covers the walls and ceiling, creating a lush interior bower; through the glossy foliage meanders a golden rope, looped and knotted. G. P. Lomazzo is no doubt describing this room when he says, ‘In the trees one finds a beautiful invention of Leonardo’s, making all the branches form into bizarre knot-patterns, a technique also used by Bramante, weaving them all together’ – a comment which links the Sala delle Asse with the intricate knot-patterns of the academy ‘logo’, the originals of which would have been created around the same time.
The pattern is created by eighteen trees, their trunks beginning at floor level. Some ramify horizontally; two pairs curve inward to form leafy arches over the room’s two windows; and eight trunks ascend to the vaulted ceiling, there to converge on the central, gold-rimmed oculus bearing the jointed arms of Ludovico and Beatrice. The sturdy trees symbolize the strength and dynastic growth of the Sforza family (the rooted tree appears as a Sforza emblem in two roundels at Vigevano), while the golden thread running through the branches can be related to the d’Este fantasia dei vinci, and perhaps to the golden sleeve-patterns of the Lady with a Pearl Necklace, which may be a portrait of Beatrice by Ambrogio de Predis.139
The vineyard. Detail from the Hoefnagel map of Milan, showing the old Vercellina Gate (the L-shaped structure to the right), and Santa Maria delle Grazie (top). The wide diagonal road at the centre is present-day Via Zenale; the vineyard lay within the walled area to the right of this.
This dazzling mural was rediscovered in 1893, when the heavy whitewash which then covered the entire room was removed from one of the walls. (Who whitewashed it in the first place, and for what discernible reason, is not known.) Under the direction of Luca Beltrami (then superintendent of works at the castle) the decor was restored, and the Sala was reopened to the public in 1902. The restoration has been roundly condemned ever since – ‘in some ways almost an act of vandalism’ – because of what seem to be excessive interpolations and additions.140 The obvious interventions were removed in a later restoration (in 1954), but the relationship between what we now see and what Leonardo put there remains veiled.
One area that escaped the overzealous restorer is a patch of the north-eastern wall, near the window which looks out on to the back of the Salette Negre. It is a monochrome section of under-painting, apparently unfinished. Beltrami thought it a later addition, and had it covered up with a wooden panel, but it is now considered to be the work of an assistant executing a conception direct from the maestro. It shows the roots of a giant tree wrapped powerfully through strata of stone, which seem to be the foundations of an ancient ruined building. One is reminded of Leonardo’s fable about the nut which lodges itself in the crannies of a wall, and germinates, ‘and as the twisted roots grew thicker they began to thrust the walls apart, and force the ancient stones from their places. And then the wall, too late and in vain, bewailed the cause of its destruction.’141
If this was meant to suggest the rooted strength of the Sforza, events would swiftly give it another meaning. The dynasty celebrated so gorgeously in the spreading foliage of the Sala delle Asse was about to topple and fall, and with it the fortunes of many others, including Leonardo. There had been a note of contentment – the Last Supper completed and acclaimed, the camaraderie of the academy, the quiet pleasures of his garden. The features of that careworn philosopher in the Bramante fresco seem to have lightened a little. But this respite now proves to be brief, as in early 1499 news reaches Milan that the French are mustering an invasion-force under their new king, Louis XII – the former Duc d’Orléans, whose claim to the duchy of Milan Ludovico had unwisely laughed off five years previously.