Part Eight
Observe the flame of a candle and consider its beauty. Blink your eye and look at it again. What you see now was not there before, and what was there before is not there now. Who is it who rekindles this flame which is always dying?
Paris MS F, fol. 49v.
Leonardo was briefly in Milan in early 1513: a tentative appearance, perhaps, uncertain how the new duke, Massimiliano, would view one who had collaborated so thoroughly with his father’s enemies. On 25 March he is mentioned, in a register at the Duomo, as living or lodging with one Prevostino Viola.1 Around this time he notes down the name of Barbara Stampa, the daughter of Filippo Stampa and the wife of Carlo Atellani (or della Tela), both of whom were loyal Sforza servants and now much in favour. She ran a lively salon at the luxurious Atellani house near the Grazie, later frescoed by Bernardino Luini. Their back garden shared a boundary with Leonardo’s vineyard: prosperous, cultivated neighbours. Another family of Sforza loyalists were the Crivelli: ‘Ask the wife of Biagino Crivelli why the capon nurtures and hatches the eggs of the hen if he is made drunk.’2 For the disciple of experience no question is too small. But of any activities in Milan we know nothing, and it is probable he was mostly at Vaprio.
Giuliano de’ Medici in a portrait by or after Raphael.
News, meanwhile, filtered up from Florence, where the pendulum of political fortunes had swung back to the Medici, represented by the new generation – Giovanni and Giuliano, the two surviving sons of Lorenzo, and their cousin Giulio. In the summer of 1512, after eighteen years in exile, they returned to govern Florence: a bloodless coup, though backed by the presence of troops in Prato. On 1 September, Gonfalonier Soderini left by one of the city’s gates, on his way to exile on the Dalmatian coast, and Giuliano de’ Medici entered by another. He came in on foot, with no military escort, dressed in the traditional Florentine lucco or gown. He went neither to the Palazzo Vecchio, nor to the Palazzo Medici, but to the house of one the Medici supporters within the government, Antonfrancesco degli Albizzi. It was a masterpiece of political understatement: the modest return of a Florentine citizen by the consensus of his fellow citizens. The arrival of the head of the family, Giuliano’s elder brother, the obese, scholarly, politically acute Giovanni, now a powerful cardinal in Rome and already tipped as the next pope, was less modest – he entered the city with a troop of 1,500 soldiers, looking every inch a magnifico. But there were no executions, no expropriations; power was transferred with quiet efficiency, like a bill of exchange at the Medici bank.
The demise of Pope Julius II completed the Medici game-plan, and Giovanni hastened back down to Rome, where on 11 March 1513 the conclave of cardinals duly elected him Pope Leo X. Giuliano was left in charge of Florence, but the new Pope, doubting his capricious brother’s capacity to deal with the Florentine factions, decided to replace him with their malleable young nephew Lorenzo di Piero. Recalled to Rome, Giuliano was loaded with new titles to assuage any resentment he might feel. He became Prince of Parma, Piacenza and Modena, but declined the dukedom of Urbino, recognizing the legitimacy of Francesco della Rovere, nephew of the late Pope, who had been a friend to him in his exile. He was also named gonfalonier to the papal army (as Cesare Borgia had been during the papacy of Alexander VI), a position which obliged him to be based permanently in Rome.
And now from Giuliano de’ Medici in Rome, sometime in the summer of 1513, comes an invitation to Leonardo to join him there, in this new Medicean court in the Eternal City.
On the opening page of a new notebook, Paris MS E, Leonardo writes, ‘I left Milan for Rome on 24 September 1513, in the company of Giovan, Francesco de Melzi, Salai, Lorenzo and Il Fanfoia.’ The first and last names have caused puzzlement. ‘Giovan’ could be either Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio or Giampietrino, though there is no evidence that either went to Rome; or he could be an unknown garzone; or it could be (since there are no commas in the original) that he is not a separate person at all, and that Leonardo has, unusually, used both of Melzi’s forenames, Giovanni Francesco. ‘Il Fanfoia’, found nowhere else in Leonardo’s papers, remains mysterious. There is a known forename, Fanfulla, of which it may be a dialect variation; or perhaps it is a descriptive nickname. ‘Fanfoia’ is not a word in its own right, but is suggestive of fanfano, a babbling; fanfaro, a musical march (whence ‘fanfare’); and indeed fanfarone, a braggart – a group of words connoting noise and showiness. Could it possibly be another nickname of the many-monikered Tommaso Masini, a.k.a. Gallozzolo, Zoroastro, Alabastro, Indovino, et al?
The date, at least, is precise. Leonardo and his entourage left Milan on 24 September 1513, more than seven years after he had arrived from Florence with the intention of staying three months – a statistic which speaks volumes about his deep attachment to the city (and to its seriously wealthy dukes and governors): he spent, in all, more than a third of his life there. The landscapes of his paintings, imprinted with reminiscence of the Tuscan hill-country of his youth, are bathed in the more northerly and subtle light of Lombardy, which at his departure in September is already beginning to soften, as the grapes ripen in his vineyard and the evening comes in a little earlier than expected.
They journeyed south-east down the Via Emilia – through Lodi, Piacenza, Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena and Bologna, and thence south through the Apennine mountains. He probably did not stay long in Florence. A note of expenses reads, ‘13 ducats for 500 pounds from here [Milan] to Rome’ – this is the carriage fee for his luggage all the way to Rome.3 This quarter-ton of personal effects would include the Mona Lisa, the Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Leda, the portfolios of drawings and sketches, the majority of the great anatomical folios, all of the notebooks we know and a great many we do not, the 116 books of the Madrid list (minus a few dispersed, plus some acquired since), as well as such pieces of studio equipment, scientific instrumentation, furniture, clothing and personal mementoes that escaped, for reasons of value or sentiment, the injunction to ‘sell what you cannot take with you’.
He may have stopped long enough to see a few friends, and to attend to matters listed in a memorandum in the Codex Atlanticus.4 Among unidentified names – a shoemaker called Francesco, a stationer called Giorgio – is a query: ‘whether the priest Alessandro Amadori is still living’. This is an old acquaintance: the brother of Leonardo’s first stepmother, Albiera. He is mentioned twice in the list: Leonardo is keen to see him. He must have known him from childhood; they had met again in 1506, when the priest brought him a letter from Isabella d’Este. Albiera was herself only sixteen years older than Leonardo, so Alessandro may have been quite close to him in age. As noted earlier, he may well be the ‘uncle’ who owned Leonardo’s lost cartoon of Adam and Eve, an early Florentine work. Vasari, writing in the 1540s, says this uncle had ‘not long ago’ presented the cartoon to Ottaviano de’ Medici. If this is Alessandro, we can be glad to note that the answer to Leonardo’s query of 1513 is – yes.
Among those he did not meet in Florence was Niccolò Machiavelli. Too closely associated with the Soderini government, Machiavelli was dismissed from his secretarial posts in November 1512. The following February he was implicated in an anti-Medici plot fomented by Pietro Paolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi, whom he very nearly followed to the execution block. Imprisoned and tortured in the Bargello, he was exiled to his small estates at Sant’Andrea in Percussina, where he took somewhat reluctantly to the life of an impoverished country squire, and between coppicing woodlands, snaring thrushes and playing backgammon in the local inn, sat down to write his famous study of power-politics, The Prince (or, to give it its correct title, Dei principati – Of Principalities), first conceived ten years earlier during those fraught missions to the Borgia and now distilled and concentrated by the bitterness of more recent experiences. He intended to dedicate it to Giuliano de’ Medici, hoping that the gesture would revive his shipwrecked fortunes – a hope perhaps encouraged by news that his former friend Leonardo da Vinci was now entering Giuliano’s service.5
Leonardo was probably in Rome by the end of October 1513. If he accomplished all the tasks on the memo-list mentioned above, he arrived with a pair of ‘blue spectacles’. I am tempted to say he arrived wearing a pair of blue spectacles – a marvellous image: Leonardo in shades – though they were probably more in the nature of goggles, intended for use in the strange metallurgical experiments which are one of the features of the Roman sojourn.
Handsome, feckless, somewhat mystically inclined, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici had inherited his father’s personal charms but none of his political dynamism. Born in 1479, he was named after his assassinated uncle. We see him at the age of about five in the beautiful fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio in Santa Maria Novella: a small brown-haired boy turning to look at the painter, he is standing next to the gaunt and slightly dishevelled figure of Agnolo Poliziano, the poet of Orfeo, who was tutor to Lorenzo’s children. Behind him is his brother Giovanni, seen in the fresco as a round-faced boy with lank blondish hair, the features already heralding those of the jowly pontiff painted by Raphael some thirty-five years later.
Giuliano was fifteen when the tide turned against the Medici in 1494. In exile he was a guest of the Duke of Urbino and the Marquess of Mantua. As we have seen, it is possible he met Leonardo in Venice in 1500, and possible he admired the unfinished portrait of Isabella d’Este which Leonardo was working on, and possible he asked him to paint a similar portrait of Lisa Gherardini, whom he had known and fancied in Florence. A lot of possibles, but they would explain why Leonardo, standing in front of the Mona Lisa in France in 1517, described it as a portrait of a ‘certain Florentine lady, done from life at the instigation of the late Magnifico Giuliano de’ Medici’. The alternative explanation is that it was ‘instigated’ by Giuliano when Leonardo was with him in Rome, and that it portrays one of his mistresses of the period, but none of these later pretenders to the seat on the loggia is at all convincing. Nevertheless the painting was physically there in Rome, and has no doubt its Roman phase of retouchings and recoatings as it slowly metamorphoses into the Louvre icon. And it is perhaps at this time, within the ambit of Giuliano’s patronage, that the painting’s flighty cousin – the so-called ‘Nude Gioconda’ – makes her appearance in Leonardo’s studio.
Giuliano is among the interlocutors in Castiglione’s The Courtier, nominally based on conversations at a gathering of ‘noble and talented persons’ at the castle of Urbino in March 1507. The book was written after the death of the Duke, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, the following year, and was fastidiously polished and redrafted until its publication in 1528, becoming in the process a nostalgic vision of the perfect Renaissance house-party. Also included in the conversations are Pietro Bembo, son of Ginevra de’ Benci’s courtly lover Bernardo, and Dom Miguel da Silva, the Portuguese prelate who was later one of Zoroastro’s patrons in Rome. Castiglione dedicated the book to da Silva, recalling some members of the Urbino circle who had since died, among them Giuliano de’ Medici, ‘whose goodness, nobility and courtesy the world deserved to enjoy longer’. It is likely that da Silva and Giuliano were friends in the Rome of Leo X, where da Silva was for many years Portuguese ambassador, and it may be through this connection that Zoroastro gained his patronage.
No one has anything worse to say of Giuliano than that he was a bit of a dreamer. As commander of the papal troops he was ineffectual. He was a courtier more than a soldier, and a dilettante scholar more than a courtier. Vasari describes him as ‘a great student of natural philosophy, and especially of alchemy’ – the latter brings Zoroastro to mind again, and has a bearing on some of Leonardo’s experiments undertaken in Rome. Raphael’s portrait of him, mentioned by Vasari, was painted around this time; the version in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, is either the original or a contemporary copy of it. A similar image of him is from the workshop – or indeed Medici image-factory – of Agnolo Bronzino, done in the late 1550s. Both works show Giuliano much as he was when Leonardo entered his service in late 1513: a dark, bearded man in his mid-thirties, handsome in a slightly decadent way, a man of scholarly refinement and precarious health, not entirely fitted for the new mantles of power now thrust upon him.
This new or renewed link with Giuliano brings Leonardo back into the Medici fold, healing whatever resentments he might have harboured from his dealings with Lorenzo de’ Medici thirty years previously. According to the contemporary testimony of Benedetto Varchi, Giuliano treated Leonardo ‘piu tosto da fratello che da compagno’ – ‘more like a brother than a friend’.6
An emblem of Giuliano’s recorded by Paolo Giovio may be a Leonardo invention. It is a version of the broncone mediceo or Medici stump, which shows a cut trunk of laurel growing new shoots, but the enigmatic motto – ‘GLOVIS’ – is not found in other versions. Read backwards it suggests ‘si volge’, meaning one makes a turn, a change of direction, which recalls another Leonardo emblem-motto, ‘Thoughts turn towards hope.’7 An apt motto for the reascendant Medici of 1513, and perhaps for Leonardo in Rome, in a mood of optimism: another fresh start.