Leonardo’s decision to leave for France must surely have been made by the summer of 1516, since he well knew the difficulties of crossing the Alps after autumn. No summons or supplication survives: no diplomatic communiqué; no curlicued laissez-passer. The meeting with the King in Bologna and the death of Giuliano de’ Medici are the prelude, and then one day the decision is made, and sometime in August or September, at the age of sixty-four, Leonardo embarks on the longest journey of his life.
He probably stopped at Milan on the way; Salai remained there, attending to the house in the vineyard which had become his province, and which would be formally ceded to him in Leonardo’s will.66 From Milan, escorted perhaps by emissaries from the King, accompanied by Melzi and a Milanese servant named Battista de Vilanis, Leonardo heads north into the mountains. A note in the Codex Atlanticus was probably written along the way: ‘River Arna at Ginevra, a quarter of a mile into Savoia where the fair is held.’67
By the end of the year he is settled in the Loire valley, by the royal stronghold of Amboise, in the service of the French king, with a handsome pension of 1,000 scudi per annum. An authorization or record of two years’ payment is in the Archive Nationale in Paris: ‘A Maistre Lyenard de Vince, paintre ytalien, la somme de 2000 écus soleil, pour sa pension di celles deux années.’68 In the same document Leonardo is formally styled ‘paintre du Roy’ – ‘the King’s painter’.
François I of France, c. 1515–20.
The manor-house at Cloux (now Clos Lucé).
His relationship with François was rich. The young king was awestruck, fascinated and very generous. Many years later the Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini had these recollections from François himself, whom he too served:
Because he was a man of such plentiful and great talents, and had some knowledge of Latin and Greek, King François was completely besotted [innamorato gagliardissimamente] with those great virtues of Leonardo’s, and took such pleasure in hearing him discourse that there were few days in the year when he was parted from him, which was one of the reasons why Leonardo did not manage to pursue to the end his miraculous studies, done with such discipline. I cannot resist repeating the words which I heard the King say of him. He said he could never believe there was another man born in this world who knew as much as Leonardo, and not only of sculpture, painting and architecture, and that he was truly a great philosopher.69
Perhaps the most important of the King’s gifts was not the generous salary but a place to live. Leonardo’s last address was the handsome manor-house of Cloux (now Clos Lucé) half a mile south of the great chateau of Amboise. It was then quite new, built in the late fifteenth century by Estienne Leloup, bailiff to King Louis XI. Among those who had lived there was the Count Ligny whom Leonardo had known in Milan in 1499. The house is of red brick and grey tufa. It stands on gently sloping ground, behind a long protective wall in which a watch-tower and a small gun-emplacement remain from its days as a fortified manor-house. On the inside of the defensive wall is a long upper gallery forming a kind of loggia. To the north of the house an L-shaped range of stables and workshops forms a courtyard closed on three sides. On the fourth side, to the west, the land drops away sharply. Here are the kitchen gardens and, lower, a green-mantled pool.
The house was smaller then than it is now – the rooms to the west of the spired central tower are eighteenth century – but the layout of the central part is probably unchanged since Leonardo’s day. The main front door, south-facing, leads in next to a little chapel, built for Anne de Bretagne, wife of Charles VIII.70 Downstairs there is the large hall, where the household ate and visitors were received, and next to it the kitchen, with its terracotta floor, its cooking-range, and iron rings in the cross-beam for hanging meat and game. To the right of the front door is a wide staircase. The top landing gives on to two large rooms. The one above the dining-hall is said to have been Leonardo’s studio. The windows face north-west, giving a distant view of the turrets and spires of the chateau, and trees, and a sense of space where the river is – the same view can be seen in a delicate black-chalk drawing at Windsor, probably by Melzi.71 The upper room above the kitchen is said to have been Leonardo’s bedroom, and is probably the room where he died.
The house has a mellow, well-appointed, comfortable feel. It is pleasantly spacious rather than grand and formal. Even its spires have a slightly playful air, mimicking in miniature the chateau down the road. The large fireplaces, the oak beams, the soft Touraine light at the windows, the faint aura of old wood-smoke – one is persuaded that Leonardo felt rested and tranquil in these twilight years. With the house, probably, came the housekeeper or cook Mathurine. In the only reference to her, in Leonardo’s will, she is called Maturina: but the will survives in an Italian copy, in which other French names are Italianized, and she is more likely to be local than Italian (unless, of course, La Cremona had become with age La Maturina). In French books about Leonardo – of which there is a long and honourable tradition – she is invariably Mathurine, and the cuisine of Leonardo’s last years unimpeachably French.
Here he sets once more to organizing his manuscripts and drawings, and to producing more of each, though Beatis tells us he no longer painted. As ever, there are books he wants – in Melzi’s hand: ‘Egidius Romanus, De informatione corporis humani in utero matris [On the Formation of the Human Body in the Womb]’, which had been published in Paris in 1515, and ‘Rugieri Bacon in a printed edition’72 – the great English scholiast Roger Bacon, a Leonardian figure of thirteenth-century Oxford, who discoursed on the possibility of human flight. On fine days he can be seen in the town, or down on the river, sketching the courses of the Loire – or, as he writes it, the ‘Era’ – as it ‘passes through Anbosa’.73 His spellings are unacclimatized. The expatriate, it is said, is a foreigner in two countries: the one he lives in and the one he has left behind.