Brothers at War

What brought Leonardo back down to Florence was the death of his uncle Francesco in early 1507; or more precisely it was the matter of Uncle Francesco’s will. As we saw, the will had been drawn up in 1504, shortly after the death of Ser Piero. It named Leonardo as sole heir, almost certainly in response to his exclusion from his father’s will. There had always been a closeness between Leonardo and Francesco, the easy-going, country-dwelling young uncle of his childhood. But the bequest contravened an earlier agreement that Francesco’s estate should be inherited by Ser Piero’s legitimate children, and they, led by the inevitable notary of the new generation, Ser Giuliano da Vinci, swiftly moved to challenge the will.²² Leonardo probably learned of this in June 1507, for on 5 July one of his garzoni, probably Lorenzo, wrote a letter home to his mother, in which he says he will be returning soon to Florence, with the maestro, but that he won’t be there long because they have to get back to Milan ‘subito’. Meanwhile, he asks, ‘Remember me to Dianira, and give her a hug so she won’t say I’ve forgotten her’ – for a moment we look in on the life of Leonardo’s apprentice: a young man a long way from home.²³

In the event Leonardo did not leave Milan until at least the middle of August. In the interim, on 26 July, he secured the first of his trump cards in the case against the brothers – a letter to the Signoria, signed by the French king, asking them to intervene in Leonardo’s favour. In this letter Leonardo is called ‘nostre peintre et ingeneur ordinaire’ – ‘painter and engineer in ordinary’ to the King (‘ordinary’ in the courtly sense meaning a permanent official position, as opposed to ‘extraordinary’ or temporary). This is the first documentation of his status at the French court. A further letter to the Signoria, this time from Charles d’Amboise, is dated 15 August. It announces Leonardo’s imminent return to Florence ‘to conclude certain differences that have arisen between him and some of his brothers’, and asks the Signoria to expedite the matter as swiftly as possible.²⁴ Leonardo’s permission to leave has been granted ‘with the greatest reluctance’, because he is working on a ‘painting very dear to the King’. This is presumably one of ‘the two Madonnas of different sizes, done for our most Christian king’ which Leonardo mentions in a letter of early 1508 – works apparently lost – though it is just possible it refers to the equally chimerical Leda, which was later catalogued in the French collection.

From Florence, on 18 September, Leonardo wrote a letter to Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, brother of Isabella, from which we learn some details of the case.²⁵ Leonardo’s ‘cause is being argued’ before a member of the Signoria, Ser Rafaello Hieronimo, who has been specifically assigned by Gonfalonier Soderini to adjudicate the case, and ‘to decide and conclude it before the festival of All Saints’, i.e. 1 November 1507. Ser Rafaello, it appears, is known to Ippolito d’Este – he is perhaps one of the numerous d’Este ‘agents’ in Florence. Hence the letter, which asks Ippolito ‘to write to the said Ser Rafaello, in that dextrous and persuasive manner which Your Lordship has, recommending to him Leonardo Vincio, your most devoted servant, as I am and always will be, and requesting and pressing him not only to do me justice, but to do it with as little delay as possible’.

This document is in one sense unique: it is the only letter we know that Leonardo sent; all his other letters survive only in draft, among his papers, but this one sits visibly and tangibly in the Estense archives in Modena. Unfortunately neither the text nor the signature – ‘Leonardus Vincius pictor’ – is in Leonardo’s hand. As in other formal documents (e.g. the letter of introduction to Ludovico Sforza), he has availed himself of someone with better handwriting – in this case Machiavelli’s assistant Agostino di Vespucci, who had earlier written up that summary of the Battle of Anghiari. The only physical touch of Leonardo on the paper is on the verso: the wax seal, showing a head in profile, is probably an impression of a signet ring on Leonardo’s hand.

Another draft letter reveals the acid relations between Leonardo and his fratellastri or half-brothers, who are said to have ‘wished the utmost evil’ to Francesco during his lifetime, and to have treated Leonardo ‘not as a brother but as a complete stranger’. Part of the dispute concerned the property called Il Botro which Francesco had bequeathed him. Leonardo writes, ‘You do not wish to repay his heir the money he lent for Il Botro’, which implies that he had lent Uncle Francesco money to purchase or improve the property. There is a reference to ‘la valuta del botro’ (‘the value of Il Botro’) in a memo list in the Codex Arundel. In neither case is botro capitalized, so it could also be translated as ‘ditch’ or ‘ravine’ – perhaps a quarry or lime-pit. Leonardo refers to experiments done at his ‘pit’ (bucha) in the Codex Leicester, which he began around this time.²⁶

In his letter to Ippolito d’Este Leonardo spoke of the case being resolved by November 1507, but it was not, and in early 1508 he wrote to Charles d’Amboise, ‘I am almost at an end of the litigation with my brothers, and believe I will be with you this Easter.’²⁷In 1508 Easter Sunday was 23 April. It is probable that he was back in Milan around then, though whether the lawsuit was wrapped up is another matter, as a further letter on the subject is in Melzi’s hand, and was therefore written after Leonardo’s return to Milan.

Giovanni Rustici’s St John, at the Baptistery in Florence.

While in Florence, Leonardo and Salai (and probably Lorenzo) stayed in the house of a wealthy intellectual and art patron, Piero di Braccio Martelli. He was a noted mathematician and linguist, and a friend of Bernardo Rucellai, and the uncongenial business of the lawsuit was at least partly counterbalanced by the free-and-easy atmosphere of the Palazzo Martelli.²⁸ The house stood on Via Larga; it was later swallowed up by the church and convent of San Giovannino, built in the 1550s. Among Leonardo’s fellow guests or lodgers there was the sculptor Giovanni Francesco Rustici, of whom he seems to have been fond. Rustici was about thirty, little more than half Leonardo’s age. Vasari gives a colourful account of him. As well as being a talented sculptor he was an ‘amateur alchemist and occasional necromancer’, which makes him sound like Zoroastro. Among his associates was the young Andrea del Sarto, a fine painter with a strong tinge of Leonardismo; del Sarto was later Vasari’s master, which suggests that Vasari’s information on Rustici is likely to be good. He says of Rustici’s studio that it ‘looked like Noah’s ark… It contained an eagle, a crow who could speak like a man, snakes and a porcupine trained like a dog which had an annoying habit of pricking people’s legs under the table’.²⁹I cannot resist an image of Leonardo inclining confidentially towards this crow – a mynah bird? – that ‘could speak like a man’. How much he wishes to ask it.

According to Vasari, the tangible product of Leonardo’s friendship with Rustici was the sculptural group St John Preaching to a Levite and a Pharisee, which stands above the north door of the Baptistery opposite the Duomo. ‘All the time he [Rustici] was working on this group he would let no one come near him except Leonardo, right up to the casting stage.’ The left-hand figure has been compared to the pensive old man of the Adoration; the St John, though executed in the workmanlike style of Rustici, has the trademark hand pointing heavenwards.

Here in the Palazzo Martelli, in the long intermissions of the lawsuit, Leonardo set about organizing his manuscripts, as recorded on the first folio of the Arundel Codex:

Begun at Florence, in the house of Pietro di Braccio Martelli, on 22 March 1508. This will be a collection without order, made up of numerous sheets that I have copied up, hoping later to put them in order, in their proper places, according to the subjects which they treat.

The Codex Arundel is not itself the ‘collection’: in its present state – probably put together in the 1590s by Pompeo Leoni – it is highly miscellaneous. Only the first thirty folios belong with this initial statement: consistent in paper, ink, handwriting and subject-matter – mainly physics and mechanics – they were probably written up at precisely this time in spring 1508. But even as he begins, this task of organizing and classifying his manuscripts seems suddenly daunting:

I fear that before I have completed this I shall have repeated the same thing several times, for which do not blame me, reader, because the subjects are many, and the memory cannot retain them and say, This I will not write because I have already written it. And to avoid this it would be necessary, with every passage I wanted to copy, to read through everything I had already done so as not to replicate it.³⁰

The sheer unwieldiness of his writings is borne in on him. He has retrieved them from the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova, where he had stored them on his departure in 1506; they are piled up on his desk at the Palazzo Martelli; one glimpses what they looked like in Filippino Lippi’s beautiful depiction of stacked scholarly manuscripts in the Vision of St Bernard (Badia, Florence). A precious resource, but also a chaos. Another note reminds us of their vulnerability to loss and damage: ‘Look over all these subjects tomorrow and copy them, and then cross through the originals and leave them in Florence, so that if you lose those you carry with you, the invention will not be lost.’³¹

He feels an impending exhaustion from this great swirl of subjects (or, as he calls them, casi – ‘cases’), the fruit of more than twenty years’ study. But he will not have to tackle them alone: he has a helping hand in this Herculean task of classification and transcription – or at least he will have when he gets back to Milan. And so he tells young Melzi, in that bitter-sweet letter of reproach written at precisely this time, ‘by God I’ll make you write so much you’ll be sorry.’

Also at this time he was compiling the densely written pages of the Codex Leicester (named after its eighteenth-century owner Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, and now owned by Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates).³² It is the most unified of Leonardo’s notebooks, and though the outer dates of composition are c. 1507–10, it has a look of consistency, even doggedness. The handwriting is small and regular, the drawings are cramped into the margin, but the myopic look of the pages belies the vastness of their scope. The Codex Leicester is concerned with what we today call geophysics: it investigates the fundamental physical structure of the world, anatomizes the macrocosmic body, dismantles the moving parts of the terrestrial machine. This leads into areas of pure physics – gravity, impetus, percussion – and into closely argued discussion of fossils (imperiously countering the orthodox view that they were relics of the biblical deluge). But the particular emphasis is on water: its forms and powers, its tides and currents, and their effects – atmospheric, erosive, geological – on the face of the earth, a preoccupation poetically distilled into that famous landscape in the Mona Lisa. This brief synopsis does not include the marvellous pages concerning the sun and moon. Leonardo wonders about the luminescence of the moon – does it mean that the moon is composed of some bright reflective material like crystal or porphyry, or is its surface covered with rippling water? And why, if the phases of the moon are caused by the shadow of the earth, is the rest of the moon sometimes dimly seen during the crescent phase? (In the latter case he correctly deduced that this secondary light is reflected from the earth, pre-dating by several decades the findings of Kepler’s teacher Michael Mastlin.) ³³

The Codex Leicester is not a ground-breaking work of modern science: its cosmology is essentially medieval, as is its search for microcosmic correspondences and underlying geometrical symmetries. Its most famous passage is a sustained poetic analogy between the earth and the body of man:

We may say that the earth has a spirit of growth, and that its flesh is the soil, its bones are the successive strata of rock, its cartilage is the tufa, its blood the veins of its waters. The lake of the blood that lies around the heart is the ocean. Its breathing is by the increase and decrease of the blood in its pulses, and even so in the earth is the ebb and flow of the sea.³⁴

In these respects the codex is more a philosophical than a scientific text, but the philosophy is under constant scrutiny. There is always that typically Leonardian modulation between the visionary and the practical: a dialogue between them. He tussles with the cosmological theories of the ancients, putting them to the test of ‘experience’. He studies the surface tensions of dewdrops on the leaves of a plant so that he can learn more about that ‘universal watery sphere’ in which, according to Aristotle, the universe is enclosed. He builds a tank with glass sides so he can observe miniature water-flows and earth-deposits. A discussion of atmospheric effects draws on his own observations from the Alpine peaks of Monte Rosa: ‘as I myself have seen’.

Some of his experiments can be tied closely to these months in Florence. Two drawings illustrating water-currents are captioned ‘at Ponte Rubaconte’, another name for the Ponte alle Grazie downriver from the Ponte Vecchio. And in a contemporary passage in the Atlanticus he notes, ‘Write of swimming underwater and you will have the flight of a bird through the air. There is a good place at the spot where the mills discharge into the Arno, by the falls of Ponte Rubaconte.’³⁵ These ‘falls’ are the weir: it is shown on the 1472 ‘Chain Map’ of Florence, with boatmen and fishermen, and it is still there today. These vividly place Leonardo’s researches on and indeed in the Arno, ‘swimming under water’ to understand more about the movement of a bird through the invisible currents of the air.

But the codex has also that note of impending dizziness on the subject of organization. He breaks off from a description of ripple-effects, saying:

I will not consider the demonstrations here because I will reserve them for the ordered work. My concern now is to find subjects and inventions, gathering them as they occur to me; later I will put them in order, putting together those of the same kind. So, reader, you need not wonder, nor laugh at me, if here we jump from one subject to another.³⁶

And on the following page comes the same disclaimer: ‘Here I shall discourse a little more about finding waters even though it seems somewhat out of place; when I come to compile the work I will put everything in order.’ The manuscripts are infused with clarity, with what Giorgio Nicodemi has called Leonardo’s ‘serene and accurate habits of thought’,³⁷ yet they have this literal lack of definition, this unfinished, procrastinated quality. Everything he writes is provisional, a rough draft for that perfect ‘ordered work’ he would never write.