Biographies & Memoirs

Chez Melzi

The death of Marcantonio della Torre in 1511 was an intellectual and perhaps a personal loss, and it was not the only one. On 10 March 1511 Charles d’Amboise died – not yet forty years old – and with him went something of Leonardo’s precious security. Charles had been a personal patron, and though his successor as governor, the elegant young chevalier Gaston de Foix, continued to favour Leonardo, he was not a Maecenas. Leonardo was still on a stipend, paid from the King’s coffers: in 1511 he received 400 lire, the same as in the previous year, but no longer bolstered by other largesses from d’Amboise.105 He also had his income of canal dues, the ‘twelve ounces of water’ granted by the King in 1507. What paintings were issuing from his studio we don’t know: perhaps some copies and variations of the Leda and the St Anne; perhaps some decorous Madonnas for French courtiers. The Trivulzio monument continues to occupy his sketchbook, but there is no evidence of any contract or payment. There is a new tenant at his house in the vineyard, but the arrangements are handled by Salai, whose purse opens only one way. These are dribs and drabs: a period of liberality has passed.

For some of the year, Leonardo was out of the city, once more among the rivers and mountains which fed his soul. His precise brief is not clear, but it probably had a military overtone. This was a time of renewed military tension. The bellicose Pope Julius II, having allied with the French in the subjection of Venice, had now turned against them: the foreigner must be chased out of Italy. In Rome he plotted his Lega Santa or Holy League: a strengthened bloc of Italian states, allied to Spain and the Habsburg empire. In Innsbruck, at the court of Maximilian, a new generation of Sforza waited in the wings.

During this period Leonardo dedicated himself to a series of fluvial studies found in Paris MS G and the Codex Atlanticus. If initially motivated by military requirements (relief-mapping, fortifications, etc.), they were soon transformed into a wide-ranging study of Lombard water-courses, particularly in the river-basins of the Adda and the Martesana. He produced nothing to match the great bird’s-eye maps of Tuscany done for Cesare Borgia, but once again the collection of strategic military data is a spur to other achievements. This is a pattern with Leonardo: the alarming expansion of view from the specific to the panoramic, the mental movement equivalent to soaring.

Judging from his notes and drawings, Leonardo was in the area known as La Brianza, north-east of Milan, in 1511. He remarks on the prodigious timber of the region (I preserve his toponyms, which have the quality of a timbre or tone of voice): ‘At Santa Maria a O [Hoe] in the valley of Ranvagnan [Rovagnate] in the mountains of Brigantia [Brianza] there are chestnut poles of 9 braccia and of 14 braccia; you can buy a hundred of 9 braccia for 5 lir.’106 Rovagnate is in the southern part of the Brianza region, on the old ore-trail known as the Carraia del Ferro. Moody studies of snow-capped mountains done in red chalk on red prepared paper, with highlights in white, are from this time. Some are based on views from the Carraia del Ferro. Above one of them are some vivid notes:

Here the gravel-stones are whiter than the water except when the water foams, and the lustre of water where it is lit tends to the blue of the air, and in the shadows it tends to green, and sometimes to dark blue. The low grass which spreads across the gravel-plains has different colours according to the richness or thinness of the terrain, and so is sometimes brownish, sometimes yellow, and sometimes tending to green or greenish-yellow.107

These austere upland colours are found in his late landscapes – in the Louvre Virgin and Child with St Anne and in the Bacchic St John. In the foothills of Monviso he sees marble ‘flawless, as hard as porphyry’.

By the end of 1511 Swiss soldiers in the service of the Holy League were menacing the northern approaches to Milan. On 16 December they fired Desio, less than 10 miles from the city walls. The conflagration was seen and recorded by Leonardo in a dramatic drawing again on brick-red prepared paper. His note is very faded, and was already so in the sixteenth century, when Melzi felt it necessary to copy it out: ‘On the 16th day of December, at the fifteenth hour [10.30 a.m.] fires were set. On the 18th day of December 1511 at the fifteenth hour this second fire was set by the Swiss near Milan at the place called Dexe [Desio].’108

In the early spring of 1512 came the showdown between the French and the Holy League at Ravenna. In the battle on Easter Day, 11 April, Gaston de Foix, governor of Milan, was killed. The French claimed the victory, but their dominion of Lombardy hung in the balance, and by the end of the year Milan was once more the city of the Sforza. The triumphal re-entry of 29 December 1512 was headed by Massimiliano Sforza, Ludovico’s legitimate son, and his half-brother Cesare, son of Cecilia Gallerani. The Moor himself had died four years earlier in his prison at Loches, but his broad powerful features are discernible in these younger scions.

Amid these revolutions Leonardo is nowhere to be seen: he has slipped away, as so often. Not a single dated note or record survives from the year 1512. Between the second firing of Desio on 18 December 1511 and a sectional study of an ox’s heart dated 9 January 1513 the Leonardo calendar is blank. For much of this time he was holed up at the Villa Melzi, the country-house of Girolamo Melzi, father of Francesco: a handsome foursquare villa (though probably pretty basic in its amenities) perched on a bluff above a wide curve of the Adda river near the village of Vaprio d’Adda, or as Leonardo – a great one for vernacular forms – writes it, ‘Vavrio’. Here the illustrious house-guest finds peaceful refuge from the upheavals and rivalries and importunate commissions of the city. The villa is only about 20 miles from Milan, so we need not assume he was in complete seclusion, but there is no record of him in the city before March 1513, and it seems that this was indeed a period of rural retreat.

Here with Francesco or Cecco Melzi, now nearly twenty, he embarks on a programme of writing and sketching. There is a series of late anatomical sheets, some of them probably a working-up of notes and drawings done at speed during lectures and dissections at Pavia, and some the product of animal dissections done there at the villa. The structure and activity of the heart is a constant theme. There are water studies on the Adda. A note reads, ‘Flux and reflux of water as demonstrated at the mill of Vaprio.’109 A beautiful drawing of a small ferry-boat can still be identified with a particular stretch of the river between Vaprio and Canonica, though the ferry itself has been replaced by a bridge. The turbulent currents of the water are carefully observed, but the power of the drawing is in its snapshot of particulars: the landing-stage, the little stone bridges, the oxen standing on the deck of the raft-like traghetto, and one of them left lowing on the shore.110

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Ferry-boat on the Adda, c. 1512.

While at the Villa Melzi Leonardo projected various home-improvements. A rough ground-plan shows parts of the interior and exterior of the villa; notes refer to the ‘garden passage’, and there are sketches of a terraced garden overlooking the river. Another folio toys with a design proposing cupolas over the corner towers and an arcaded retaining wall on the river frontage.111 The dated anatomical drawing of 9 January 1513 has also a sketch-plan of the villa, and a note reading ‘chamera della Torre da Vaveri’ (‘the room in the tower at Vaprio’). Perhaps the room was his studio. On the left-hand side of the page is a sketch of a fortress on the bend of a river, with several artillery positions firing around it. This little drawing turns out to be another piece of reportage, like the fires of Desio. It shows the castle of Trezzo a few miles from Vaprio, which was bombarded by the Venetians on 5 January 1513, just four days before the date at the top of the page.112 Thus the war laps around Leonardo’s country retreat, and thus coolly he notes it down in visual shorthand in a corner of the page.

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