The French seemed genuinely keen to exploit those talents which Leonardo himself enjoyed, and as in the Sforza years there were masques and entertainments – feste, which one might now call fêtes. Among those who witnessed these shows was the young physician Paolo Giovio, who later wrote in his biography of Leonardo, ‘He was the marvellous inventor and arbiter of all elegance and of all theatrical delights.’
In the Arundel Codex are rapid sketches of a stage-set featuring a range of rugged, Leonardesque mountains, which opens to reveal a large hemispherical chamber or cavern. A diagram shows the mechanism of pulleys and counterweights that would operate this set behind the scenes. Notes explain the theatrical effect: ‘a mountain which opens… and Pluto is discovered in his residence’. This theatrical cavern is the ‘residence’ of the king of Hades: a glimpse of hell, furnished with devils and furies, and Cerberus, and ‘many naked children weeping’.72 These are almost certainly designs for a performance of Agnolo Poliziano’s operetta Orfeo. Leonardo had probably been involved in an earlier production, in Mantua in 1490, starring his protégé Atalante Migliorotti, and now reprises it for the court of Charles d’Amboise. The play retells in sprightly Florentine verse the old story of Orpheus’s journey to the underworld to rescue his wife, Eurydice, from the clutches of Pluto, with appropriate musical accompaniment for each – contrabass viols for Orpheus, treble viols for Eurydice, trombones for Pluto, and guitars for Charon, ferryman of the dead. A sheet at Windsor has some costume studies and a profile of a youth with curly hair which may be a portrait of the actor playing Orpheus.73
Another relic of this production, probably, is a pen-and-ink sketch showing ‘Orpheus being attacked by the Furies’. This surfaced in 1998 among a collection of prints and drawings by Stefano della Bella, but was reported in 2001 as having been damaged during a botched restoration. It is done in a greenish ink, which Leonardo used in other documents and drawings of this time such as the estimate for the Trivulzio monument.74
These fugitive fragments are all that remain of Leonardo’s Milanese production of Orfeo, itself a text with elements of nostalgia – for the Florence of Poliziano, for the beautiful Atalante – and perhaps with certain echoes and undertones reminiscent of his own early text about the ‘cavern’ and the ‘fear and desire’ he felt as he looked into it.
Another Leonardo production was the victory pageant of 1 July 1509, staged in honour of Louis XII as he returned to Milan at the head of his troops after the decisive defeat of the Venetians at Agnadello in mid-May. There was an allegoric representation of a battle between a dragon (France) and a lion (Venice) – another of Leonardo’s lion themes, though in this allegory the lion was no doubt expediently defeated – while in the Piazza del Castello was exhibited ‘a horse of immense size, in relief’ with the image of the King on it. We learn of this from a contemporary chronicle, and from G. P. Lomazzo, who gives an account which he seems to have heard at first hand from Francesco Melzi.75
A tight-lipped note in the Codex Atlanticus has a rather different angle on these Italian wars and their futile wastage: ‘The Venetians have boasted of spending 36 million gold ducats in ten years of war against the Empire, the Church and the kings of Spain and France. This works out at 300,000 ducats a month.’76
Obstinate rigour. Design for an emblem, c. 1508–9.
These spectacles show Leonardo once more in that role of court artist he had assayed in the Sforza years. In a similar vein are some imprese or emblems he drew at this time. The heyday of the Renaissance emblem has not yet come: one of its chief exponents would be Leonardo’s admirer Paolo Giovio, whose emblem-books were known to Shakespeare via the translation of Samuel Daniel.77 Andrea Alciato, author of the famous Emblematum liber (1531), defined an emblem as an image ‘drawn from history or nature’ which ‘elegantly signifies something’. The true emblem consists of a corpo or body, which is its visual pictorial form, and an anima or spirit, which is the verbal motto that accompanies it. The motto should not declare the ‘sentiment’, or meaning, of the emblem too readily: this is for cultivated men and women to contemplate and ponder for themselves.78 Its effect lay precisely in its poetic suggestiveness, its bodying forth of metaphysical ideas through apparent simplicity and brevity of expression. Like a Japanese haiku, the Renaissance emblem is a lapidary art-form which blossoms into complex, personally interpreted ideas.
A Windsor sheet has three finished emblems.79 The first shows a plough, with the motto hostinato rigore (obstinate rigour). This motto has been held to sum up a side of Leonardo’s character – his rigorously experimental, investigative temper – though in so far as a plough moves in a straight line it is not so characteristic: Leonardo’s furrows are tangential, labyrinthine, like the knot-patterns of the fantasie dei vinci. The second shows a compass turned by a water-wheel, and a star above, with the motto destinato rigore– literally ‘destined rigour’, but more loosely translated as ‘an unwavering course’. A note beside this reads, ‘Non a revoluzione chi a tale stella e fisso’ – ‘He who is fixed to such a star will not revolve’ (hence not be subject to vicissitudes). The presence of tiny fleurs-de-lis within the star shows that it represents the French king.80 The third emblem shows a lamp with a candle inside it, and winds blowing around it from all points of the compass. There is no motto, but a similar device is found in another notebook, with bellows producing the winds and the motto ‘Tal el mal che non mi noce quale il bene che non mi giova’ – ‘As the evil which does not harm me so the good which does not profit me.’81 Inside the lamp the flame is protected both from the strong wind which would put it out and from the gentle wind which would fan it. This protection one would associate once more with the King, the fixed star of the previous emblem, though if so it comes with an idea that royal patronage is double-edged: it shelters the artist from the buffetings of fortune, but also isolates him from the ‘good’ gentle winds (of experience? of Nature?).
Another series from the same time, though merely rough sketches, shows an emblem featuring a flower (Iris florentina) with a scroll enclosed in a circle. Leonardo tries out various mottos – ‘Prima morte che stanchezza’, ‘Non mi satio di servire’, etc. – on a theme of unswerving service. But a marginal note, like a theatrical ‘aside’ to the audience, suggests an element of scepticism about such devotion: ‘Hands into which the ducats and precious stones fall like snow never grow tired of serving, but such service is only for its usefulness, and is not for one’s own benefit.’82 The verso of the sheet has some vivid sketches, reminiscent of the Pain/Pleasure allegories of the mid-1480s. They show masks held in front of faces, being melted by the sun’s rays. The basic key reads:
Truth: the sun
Falsehood: a mask.
Again he tries out different mottos, such as ‘Nulla occulta sotto il sole’ – ‘Nothing is hidden under the sun.’83
Are these emblems Leonardo’s own expressions of service to King Louis, or are they done on behalf of someone who wishes to express such sentiments – his old friend Galeazzo Sanseverino, perhaps, the former son-in-law of the Moor, who had adroitly and somewhat cynically switched allegiance to the French and later became superintendent of the King’s stables at Blois?
Musical shows, victory parades, courtly emblems: these are some of the more minor accomplishments required of the King’s ‘painter and engineer in ordinary’, to be fitted in among such other duties as painting Madonnas, designing summer villas, and rerouting canals. We have some details of the financial rewards that Leonardo reaped from all this. A list of payments from the royal treasurer shows that he received a total of 390 scudi between July 1508 and April 1509 – a good sum, though there is a faintly ominous downward tendency in the payments: 100, 100, 70, 50, 50, 20.84 The larger payments of late summer 1508 are perhaps connected with the Orfeo. A separate account, written on the inside cover of MS F, reads, ‘On the [blank] day of October 1508 I received 30 scudi.’ Of this sum, he notes, he lent 13 to Salai ‘to make up the dowry of his sister’.85