As the French troops mass on the frontiers of Italy, Leonardo begins to wind up his affairs. On 1 April 1499 he disburses money:
Salai 20 lire
For Fazio 2 lire
Bartolomeo 4 lire
Arigo 15 lire 142
Of these, Fazio is probably Fazio Cardano, father of the mathematician Girolamo Cardano: he perhaps appears here as a creditor. The others are assistants: Salai, now nineteen; Bartolomeo, who may be Bramantino; and a certain Arigo, a new name, probably a German like Giulio. (‘Arrigo’ is essentially Harry, from Heinrich; one remembers Leonardo’s German godfather, Arrigo di Giovanni Tedesco.) The name appears again on a list of Leonardo’s dated c. 1506–8.
On the same sheet, Leonardo grosses up the money in his cash-box, in various coinages – ducats, florins, grossoni, etc. It comes to a total of 1,280 lire. He then wraps the money up in paper packets, some white, some blue. He distributes them around the studio – one near the box where he keeps nails, others at either end of a ‘long shelf’, while in the cash-box itself he places only some ‘handfuls of ambrosini’, Milanese small change, wrapped in a cloth. This is vivid: the maestro arranging a little treasure-hunt; his placing of the coloured packages, just so. He is imagining the robbers or looters – they will be here soon enough. They will find the cash-box, of course, but not the packets casually concealed among the clutter. A cunning plan, though not without elements of that Freudian tic of ‘perseveration’, the disguising or deflecting of stress in fussy repetitive actions.
In May the French enter Italy; by late July, they have taken Asti and are at the fortress of Arazzo, menacing the edge of the dukedom. Then comes the surprise defection of Gianfrancesco Sanseverino, brother of Galeazzo, at whose house Leonardo’s production ofJupiter and Danae had been performed. A note perhaps belongs to this time of military tension: ‘In the park of the Duke of Milan I saw a 700 pound cannon-ball shot from a height of one braccio. It bounced 28 times, the length of each bounce having the same proportion to the previous one as the height of each bounce had to the next.’143
‘On the first day of August 1499’ – Leonardo calmly writes on a sheet in the Codex Atlanticus – ‘I wrote here on movement and weight.’ The page is indeed filled with notes on this subject: studies connected with the mechanical investigations of Madrid I and the physics (‘scientia de ponderibus’) of the Forster notebooks. On the same sheet are sketches and notes for the ‘bath-house of the Duchess’, and in a contemporary notebook, under the heading ‘Bath-house’, he notes, ‘To heat the water for the stove of the Duchess add three parts of hot water to four parts of cold water.’144 The Duchess must be Isabella of Aragon, widow of Gian Galeazzo. She was a neighbour, quartered in another part of the Corte Vecchia, together with her sick son, Francesco, the ‘Duchino’. Perhaps Leonardo’s helpfulness on the matter of her hot-water supply has an overtone of expediency. She was no friend of the Moor, who had kept her a virtual prisoner and whom she suspected of having poisoned her husband; her son would be among the first to be ‘liberated’ after the French occupation. Leonardo was thus close to one who looked forward to the arrival of the invader.
The French advance continued. Valenza fell on 19 August; next Alessandria. On 30 August Milan was in chaos, as a popular uprising was fomented by the anti-Sforza faction, led by Giangiacomo Trivulzio. The Duke’s treasurer Antonio Landriani was killed. On 2 September, needing no astrologer now to read the signs, Ludovico Sforza fled Milan. He headed north, for Innsbruck, where he hoped to rally support from Emperor Maximilian. The keeper of the castle, Bernardino da Corte, surrendered his post, and on 6 September, with no resistance offered, Milan fell to the French. The following day, the chronicler Corio relates:
The mob gathered at the house of Ambrogio Curzio, and destroyed it completely, so that almost nothing of value could be found there; and the same was done to the garden of Bergonzio Botta, the Duke’s master of payments, and to the palazzo and stables of Galeazzo Sanseverino, and to the house of Mariolo, Ludovico’s chamberlain, recently built and not yet completed.145
Leonardo knew all these men and their families. He knew their houses – he was probably the architect of Mariolo’s, just round the corner from his vineyard. He knew each and every one of the terrified horses in Galeazzo’s stables.
On 6 October Louis XII entered the city in triumph. He remained there about six weeks – dangerous weeks of occupation, especially for those associated with the Moor. Did Leonardo deal with the French? Did he parlay? Almost certainly he did. There is the puzzling case of the ‘Ligny memorandum’, a sheet in the Codex Atlanticus on which he writes, ‘Find Ingil and tell him that you will wait for him at Amor and that you will go to him to Ilopan.’146 The first coded name – in so far as writing it backwards is a code – is ‘Ligni’, who is the French military leader Louis de Luxembourg, Comte de Ligny. It is possible that Leonardo had met him in 1494, when Ligny accompanied his cousin Charles VIII on that earlier, more diplomatic, French incursion into Milan. Now Leonardo wants to speak with him, and indeed to accompany him on some projected expedition to Naples (‘Ilopan’). On the same sheet he determines to ‘get from Jean de Paris the method of colouring a secco, and his method for making tinted paper’. Jean de Paris was the noted French painter Jean Perréal, who had accompanied the expedition. Elsewhere in the Atlanticus is a ‘Memoria a M[aest]ro Leonardo’, in another hand, which exhorts him ‘to produce as soon as possible the report [nota] on conditions in Florence, especially the manner and style in which the reverend father Friar Jeronimo [Savonarola] has organized the state of Florence’.147 This request for political information may belong to the same rapprochement with the French.
Two years later, back in Florence, Leonardo was painting the Madonna of the Yarnwinder for the French King’s favourite Florimond Robertet, and was turning down other commissions because of certain unspecified ‘obligations’ he had to the King himself. If these reflect personal contact with King Louis and with Robertet, that contact must have been made in Milan in 1499. He may also have met the charismatic Cesare Borgia, ‘Il Valentino’, currently in command of a French squadron, and later his employer in the theatre of war.
Leonardo remained in Milan until December. The sheet with the Ligny memorandum also contains a list of things to do as he prepares for departure:
Have 2 boxes made.
Muleteer’s blankets – or better, use the bedspreads. There are 3 of them, and you will leave one of them at Vinci.
Take the braziers from the Grazie.
Get the Theatre of Verona from Giovanni Lombardo.
Buy tablecloths and towels, caps and shoes, 4 pairs of hose, a chamois jerkin and skins to make others.
Alessandro’s lathe.
Sell what you cannot take with you.
On 14 December he transferred the sum of 600 florins to an account in Florence at the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova. His Milanese bankers were the Dino family; the money was transferred by two bills of exchange for 300 florins each; some weeks would pass before the money was safely deposited in Florence.148 His departure was probably precipitated by rumours of the Moor’s imminent return to Milan. The French leaders had somewhat complacently decamped – Louis XII and Ligny to France; the army under Stuart d’Aubigny and Borgia to Ferrara – and loyalist factions were bruiting the Duke’s return, boosted with Swiss mercenaries and imperial backing from Maximilian.
In the event the Moor’s comeback was brief and inglorious, but Leonardo did not wait around for it. He was one who had stayed during the French occupation, one who could be said to have ‘collaborated’ with the occupiers. He could not expect much sympathy from a reascendant Moor. It was thus as a fugitive from his former patron, as much as a refugee from circumstances, that Leonardo left Milan in the last days of 1499. The transfer of his savings on 14 December was probably his last act in Milan: the final reckoning, nearly eighteen years after his ambitious arrival with his sheaf of drawings and his custom-built lyre and his retinue of louche young Florentines. It is a different Leonardo who leaves now: forty-seven years old, his chamois jerkin buttoned up against the cold, quitting the uncertain accomplishments of the Sforza years for an even more uncertain future.