The country boy learns the shapes and contours of the land. He knows the trails that lead in and up and around: the hilly paths and the disregarded corners. He knows ‘a certain spot, somewhat steep, where a beautiful bit of woodland ends above a rocky track’ – a location found in one of Leonardo’s fables, in which a ‘rolling stone’ laments the restlessness that caused it to leave that charming spot.53 The moral of the fable is that those who ‘leave a life of solitary contemplation to come and live in the city’ will regret it. As Leonardo sits in Milan writing these words, that image of a rocky track winding through the woods carries a touch of personal nostalgia. It sums up for him the country life which he too has left behind.
Leonardo’s love of the countryside can be seen throughout his work – in the luminous, mysterious landscapes of his paintings; in his superbly detailed drawings of plants and trees and woodlands. It is found also in his notebooks, which display a deep knowledge – botanical, agricultural, folkloric – of the natural world. They contain references to over 100 species of plant and 40 different trees. They have something to say about puffballs and truffles, mulberries and nutmegs, nettles and thistles, wolfbane and wormwood.54This detailed botanical knowledge adds a dimension of scientific exactitude to the poetic depiction of nature in his paintings.
In the Trattato della pittura he stresses the importance of the painter getting out into the country, experiencing it at first hand (by no means a universal practice among Renaissance artists). It is presented like a pilgrimage: you must ‘quit your home in town, and leave your family and friends, and go over the mountains and valleys into the country’. You must ‘expose yourself to the fierce heat of the sun’. It would be easier, he says, to get everything second-hand, from other artists’ paintings or from some poetic description in a book – ‘Wouldn’t that be more convenient, and less tiring, since you can stay in a cool place without moving about and exposing yourself to illness?’ But, if you did only that, your soul could not experience, through the ‘window’ of the eye, the inspiring beauties of the countryside: ‘It could not receive the reflections of bright places; it could not see the shady valleys.’55 The proper way to experience nature, he insists, is alone. ‘While you are alone you are entirely your own; and if you have but one companion you are but half your own.’ The painter should ‘withdraw apart, the better to study the forms of natural objects’. He should ’remain solitary, especially when he is intent on studying and considering those things which continually appear before his eyes, and which furnish material to be carefully stored up in the memory’. This desire for solitude, Leonardo warns, will not be understood by others: ‘I tell you, you will be thought crazy.’56
The ‘mnemonic icon’. Left to right: detail from Leonardo’s landscape drawing, 1473; detail from his map of Tuscany, c. 1503; Monsummano viewed from near Montevettolini.
These words were written in about 1490; they are reprised on a page of the Codex Atlanticus written twenty-five years later, in a short text headed ‘Vita del pictore filosofo ne paesi’ – ‘The life of the painter-philosopher in the country’. Again he stresses that the painter should ‘deprive himself of companions’. And he gives this beautiful synopsis of the receptiveness that the artist must cultivate: ‘His brain must be changeable according to the variations of the objects that present themselves in front of it, and it must be free from all cares… Above all his mind should be like the surface of a mirror, which takes on all the diverse colours of the objects placed before it.’ 57
As with his deep attachment to animals, I see Leonardo’s habit of solitary rambling as something embedded in his country childhood. The mind free of cares, the senses alert, the brain as receptive to impressions as the surface of a mirror – it is almost explicitly a childlike state of mental openness that the painter is striving to recreate.
It has been argued that part of the power of Leonardo’s painted landscapes is precisely that they contain a poetic memory of the landscapes of his childhood. According to his French biographer Serge Bramly, what we see in the backgrounds of his paintings is ‘Leonardo’s private landscape’: a recreation of the rougher, upland topography of Vinci, ‘the rocks, mountain streams and escarpments of his childhood… magnified by the double lens of art and memory’.58 Leonardo himself seems to touch on this idea in theTrattato della pittura, where he says that looking at a painted landscape can trigger off memories of other, real landscapes ‘in which you once took pleasure’. In that fictive landscape ‘you can see yourself again, a lover with your beloved, in the flowering meadows or under the soft shadows of the green trees.’ The lover and his (female) sweetheart add a decorative touch, but the core idea is of landscape encoding and evoking a memory: ‘tu possi rivedere tu’.59
This link between landscape and memory is to be found most precisely in Leonardo’s earliest dated work, which is indeed a landscape, drawn in pen and ink, now in the Uffizi (Plate 2). It is a physically small drawing – it measures 7½ х 11 inches, just a little less than a sheet of A4 paper – but as a composition it is wonderfully dramatic and spacious. It shows a panoramic view of precipitous craggy hills and wide waterlogged flatlands stretching away to further hills on the horizon. The drawing has the look of a sketch donein situ: the penwork is rapid, suggestive, impressionistic, sometimes almost abstract – the trees on the right-hand side of the drawing, for instance – yet for all its sweep and swirl the landscape is punctuated with arresting detail: a castle bristling on a promontory, tiny boats in the wetlands, a waterfall. These in turn lead the eye on through the landscape, to what seems to be the focal point of the vista – a distant, conical, tower-topped hill rising suddenly from the haze of the plain. This feature also serves to identify the landscape: the conical hill is quite unmistakably that of Monsummano (or Monsomano, as Leonardo writes it on one of his maps).60 This lies north-west of Vinci, about 8 miles away as the crow flies, a couple of hours’ walk via the road that winds down through Lamporecchio and Larciano. We are, quite specifically, in the landscape of Leonardo’s childhood.
If the tump is Monsummano other features of the landscape are deducible: the flatlands are the Padule di Fucecchio lying south-west of Monsummano; the mountains beyond are those of the Val di Nievole; the lower rounded hills to their left suggest Montecarlo; and so on. These are ingredients in the landscape, but as soon as one tries to relate them to a map of the area – or to actual views from actual hills – the drawing promptly recedes back into mystery. The distinctive form of Monsummano is visible from many vantage-points in the Mont’ Albano, but no one has yet found the particular spot which provides this particular vista.61 My own belief, having tracked the area in search of it, is that no such spot exists. The castle or fortified village in the left foreground is a particular problem: none of the candidates suggested – Montevettolini, Larciano, Papiano – can be found in that sort of spatial relationship with Monsummano. Another difficulty is that to look across the padule to Monsummano you would have to be somewhere up in the Pisan hills, but if you were, Monsummano itself would not have the shape it has in the drawing. In short, the drawing is an imagined or idealized view of the landscape around Vinci. It incorporates real places, vividly and beautifully sketched, but is not a real view. What it shows cannot be found and photographed, though it could perhaps be re-created, loosely, by a cunning collage of photos. Or perhaps it could be re-created by flying above the land in a hang-glider (I confess I have not tried this), for the viewpoint most powerfully suggested is an aerial one. It is a bird’s-eye view: the imagination soars above the land, and this is what it sees. One recalls a phrase in the Turin Codex on the flight of birds: ‘The movement of the bird’ – in other words the ‘big bird’ or flying-machine – ‘must always be higher than the clouds, so that the wings don’t get wet, and so that one can see more of the land.’ ‘Per iscoprire più paese’: precisely what is achieved, thirty years earlier, in the high-gliding viewpoint of the Uffizi drawing.62
In the upper left-hand corner of the drawing, in the earliest known example of his handwriting, Leonardo wrote, ‘Di di santa Maria della neve addi 5 daghossto 1473’ (‘On the day of the Madonna of the Snow, 5 August 1473’). This tells us that he made the drawing at the age of twenty-one, after he had been living and working in Florence for some years. The drawing may be connected with the landscape background of Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, which was commissioned in about 1473 and which is known to contain additions by Leonardo. The precise date of the drawing also has some bearing on the landscape itself, for the Madonna of the Snow was particularly venerated at a little chapel outside the fortified village of Montevettolini. This chapel, now called the Oratorio della Madonna della Neve, stands just a mile or so from the southern foot of Monsummano. The foundations of the chapel date from the late thirteenth century: it was a modest ‘tabernacle’ or shrine, smaller than it is today, but important enough to house a rather fine fresco of the Madonna and Child flanked by four saints, whose style has been compared to the Quaranesi altarpiece (1425) by Gentile da Fabriano.
The story of the Madonna of the Snow began as a legend about the founding of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. According to the story, the site of the church was dictated by a miraculous fall of summer snow on the hill. The church was founded in the fourth century, but the legend does not appear until the medieval period. The Madonna of the Snow was one of various cultish images of the Virgin Mary which spread through Italy at this time. They were associated with special powers, and their shrines were often, as at Montevettolini, built outside the confines of a town or village. A fifteenth-century diarist, Luca Landucci, refers to the healing powers of another image of the Madonna ‘in a tabernacle about a bow-shot from Bibbona’.63
The festa of the Madonna of the Snow on 5 August has been celebrated at the Montevettolini chapel for centuries, and it is celebrated there still, though the old ladies sitting out in the evening sun will tell you in chorus that it is no longer what it was, when the village was thronged with visitors (invitati – guests – was their word). This diminution is blamed on the youth of today, who are sempre in giro, always out and about, and have no time for such traditions. Nothing seems to be happening at all until around sunset, when the little piazza outside the chapel suddenly begins to fill. A group of men in white short-sleeved shirts assembles: the village marching-band. An old red van extrudes an awning and becomes a snack-bar. The priest arrives with his vestments folded over his arm. The image of the Madonna – neither very old nor noticeably snow-related – is carried out into the porch of the chapel, shrouded in a curtain of pale-blue taffeta. A mass is held, and then the procession begins, winding up from the chapel on a circling route around the base of the village walls – the tump of Monsummano looming huge to the north – then in through the old Porta Barbacci. The priest intones prayers through a push-button megaphone; the image of the Madonna sways aloft, borne on her sedan chair by four thickset men. This twilight walk on a warm August evening is wonderful and slightly surreal. The lights twinkle in the lowlands below, and the andante accompaniment of the band seems, even at its most solemn, to betray traces of jauntiness.
The landscape, the date, the once-thronged local festa to which both seem to lead: how do these all fit together?
To arrive at some kind of answer we must first pose another question: where was Leonardo da Vinci on 5 August 1473? Taking this piece of paper at face value, the implication is that he was sitting with his sketchbook on a hillside somewhere near Vinci making this marvellous drawing. Some would argue there is further evidence of this on the reverse of the drawing. Here one sees another sketch of a landscape – unfinished, minimal – and a cryptic scribbled phrase which reads, ‘Io morando dant sono chontento.’ The worddant can be taken as a contraction of d’Antonio, but the overall meaning of the phrase is elusive. Bramly translates it to mean, ‘I, staying with Antonio, am happy.’ He further reasons that as the Antonio cannot be Leonardo’s grandfather, who had died some years previously, it must be his stepfather, Antonio Buti, a.k.a. Accattabriga. This suggests that the drawing was done during a visit to Vinci, while staying with his mother and her family at Campo Zeppi and feeling ‘happy’. The escape from the city in August – where else would he be but back in Vinci? But this interpretation is speculative. Carlo Pedretti interprets the phrase as merely a detached doodle reproducing or rehearsing the opening words of some contract: ‘I, Morando d’Antonio, agree to…’ If this is right, the words contain no personal meaning, and offer no evidence of Leonardo’s presence at Vinci.64 He might as easily have been in Florence, in which case the keynotes of the drawing are imagination and memory: it is a Vincian vista conjured up in the mind’s eye, a memory of walking over the hills to the summer fair at Montevettolini. This is how Pedretti characterizes the drawing: as a ‘rapporto scenico’ – a visual drama, a piece of theatre – centred on the ‘mnemonic icon’ of Monsummano.65
Landscape with wing. Detail from Leonardo’s Annunciation, c. 1470–72.
My search for the ‘real’ landscape of this drawing proved fruitless, but I did find one view which I think might be significant. That ‘mnemonic’ sight of Monsummano is visible not only from high points around Vinci. It can also be seen looming up straight ahead of you (though several miles distant) on the road that runs between Vinci and San Pantaleone – the road, in other words, which Leonardo would have known so well as a child walking to and from his mother’s house at Campo Zeppi. Its ‘mnemonic’ power may thus have been imprinted on Leonardo’s eye and mind very early on, perhaps in association with his mother. I also note that the iconic features of the Uffizi drawing are echoed in the landscape of Leonardo’s Annunciation, a work dating from the early 1470s and thus broadly contemporary with the drawing. The same conical hill with nipple-like protuberance can be discerned (more clearly since the restoration of 1999). It is on the horizon immediately to the left of the announcing angel; on the picture surface it lies within the crook of the angel’s wing. Closer to us, again echoing the drawing, is a tall cluster of rocks whose sheer verticals counterpoint the feminine curves of the tump; and beyond stretch those long hazy expanses of commingled land and water suggestive of the marshypadule below Vinci. The repetition of this motif adds to one’s sense of its rootedness in Leonardo’s psyche, and the apposition of the breast-shaped hill and the bird-like wing takes us back once more to that ‘first memory’ of the kite, which Freud interprets as a memory of feeding at his mother’s breast.