Sometime before his temporary return to Florence in the summer of 1507 Leonardo met a young Milanese aristocrat named Francesco Melzi. Melzi was perhaps taken on as a pupil – and he was later an excellent draughtsman and painter – but his chief purpose in the entourage soon became scribal rather than artistic. He became Leonardo’s secretary or amanuensis – one might even say his intellectual confidant – and, after Leonardo’s death, his literary executor: the guardian of the flame. His elegant italic script is found scattered throughout Leonardo’s papers – in texts copied for or dictated by Leonardo; in annotations, captions and collation marks – and more than anyone else it is Melzi we must thank for the survival of so many of Leonardo’s manuscripts.
Giovanni Francesco Melzi16 was well bred and well educated, but his family was not rich. His father, Girolamo Melzi, served as a captain in the Milanese militia under Louis XII; much later he was involved as an engineer in the reconstruction and expansion of the city walls (this in the early 1530s, after the restoration of the Sforza) – a country gent with skills: a type Leonardo knew in his bones. The family seat was at Vaprio, a picturesque old villa perched above the Adda river. On a drawing in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, dated 14 August 1510, Melzi signs himself ‘Francescho de Melzo di anni 17’, in which case he was born in 1492 or ’93 and was about fourteen when he entered Leonardo’s ambit.17 This drawing, a fine profile in red chalk of an elderly bald man, is the earliest known work by Melzi. He was evidently by then a practising member of Leonardo’s studio. (Some discern an influence of Bramantino in his drawing style, and he may have studied under that fine painter before joining Leonardo.) His punctilious skills are shown in some closely worked copies of Leonardo drawings at Windsor. The beautiful red-chalk portrait of Leonardo in profile is almost certainly by Melzi: there are two versions, at Windsor and the Ambrosiana, the former retouched by the master.
Vasari met the aged Melzi during a visit to Milan in 1566, and added the following passage to the 1568 edition of the Lives:
Many of Leonardo’s manuscripts on human anatomy are in the possession of Messer Francesco Melzi, gentleman of Milan, who in the time of Leonardo was a very beautiful boy, and much loved by him, just as today he is a handsome and courteous old man. He cherishes and preserves these writings as if they were relics, as well as the portrait which is a happy memory of Leonardo.
Vasari’s phrasing – that Melzi had been a ‘bellissimo fanciullo’, and ‘molto amato da’ Leonardo – echoes the language he uses of Salai and carries the same assumption of ‘Socratic’ love. This did not necessarily mean actively homosexual love, though one suspects that in Leonardo’s case Vasari thought that it did mean that. However, Melzi had a notably heterosexual life after Leonardo’s death, marrying the nobly descended Angiola Landriani, who was said to be one of the most beautiful women in Milan, and fathering eight children. We don’t know – but we can guess – what Salai thought of this young interloper, this ‘very beautiful boy’ whose charming manners and educated hand whispered privilege. Melzi had the class that Salai could never have (though to say that Salai was ‘common’ is to identify one of the things that Leonardo loved about him). Salai is snazzy, brittle, a bit of a wide boy; he is good with money – usually someone else’s.
What the ‘bellissimo’ Melzi actually looked like is uncertain – there is no good reason for saying (as Bramly and others do) that a painting in the Ambrosiana showing a round-faced young man in a hat is a portrait of him by Boltraffio. It is likely that Leonardo drew him, but though there are various young men in the later sketchbooks, there is no clue as to which might be Melzi – none of them becomes a regular, indeed habitual, subject as Salai did. It is argued by Pietro Marani that Melzi’s own Portrait of a Young Man with a Parrot, though probably a late work of the 1550s, is a portrait of himself when young; it has a melancholic, nostalgic air.18
The earliest reference to Francesco Melzi in Leonardo’s papers is a draft of a letter to him, in Leonardo’s hand, written in Florence in early 1508.19 There are two drafts on the sheet. The first is briefer, and strikes a personal note which Leonardo then thinks better of:
Good day, Master Francesco,
Why in God’s name have you not answered a single one of all the letters I’ve sent you. You just wait till I get there and by God I’ll make you write so much you’ll be sorry.
The tone is fond, joshing, but not perhaps without a genuine hint of hurt that the young man has not, as it appears, bothered to reply to him. There is also a strong suggestion that Melzi’s role as secretary or scribe is already established (‘I’ll make you write so much you’ll be sorry’) if not yet formalized.
Francesco Melzi’s Young man with a Parrot, possibly a self-portrait.
From this point on Melzi is an indispensable part of the Leonardo retinue. He is doubtless the ‘Cecho’ and ‘Cechino’ (diminutives of Francesco) in name-lists of c. 1509–10, in which he appears alongside Salai, Lorenzo and others.20 He travels with Leonardo to Rome in 1513, and then to France, where he is more and more essential to the ageing maestro, and where he is distinguished in the French accounts as ‘Francisque de Melce, the Italian gentleman who is with the said Maistre Lyenard’, and receives a handsome salary of 400 écus a year – as opposed to Salai, who is merely ‘servant to Maistre Lyenard’ on 100 écus a year.21 He is a happy presence in Leonardo’s household: discreet, efficient, talented, devoted – the perfect amanuensis (or, as we would now say, personal assistant). He is an intellectual companion for the solitary Leonardo: more learned and less complex than the troublesome Salai.