Autumn in the Loire valley, the perfect time to visit, and at Amboise in early October 1517 arrives a party of distinguished Italian sightseers. Cardinal Luigi of Aragon was a grandson of the King of Naples and a cousin of Isabella of Aragon, Leonardo’s former neighbour at the Corte Vecchia in Milan. He was a thin-faced man in his early forties: a probable portrait of him by Raphael is in the Prado in Madrid. He had jockeyed for the papacy after the death of Julius II in 1513, and, though defeated in this hope by the election of Leo X, he remained close to Leo – mostly in the encouraged belief that the Pope would create him King of Naples. Leonardo may have met him in Rome, where he was known for his lavish hospitality and his beautiful mistress, the courtesan Giulia Campana, by whom he had a daughter, Tullia.
There hung over him a graver charge: that he had ordered the murder of his brother-in-law Antonio da Bologna, and possibly even that of his sister Giovanna, Duchess of Amalfi, who mysteriously disappeared in early 1513. It is not impossible that Leonardo knew something of this as well, as Antonio da Bologna was in Milan in 1512, and was murdered there the following year. The story is famously recounted in John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, in which Luigi appears (‘The Cardinal’) in a sinister role; Webster based his play on an English version of a novella by Matteo Bandello, the young boy who had watched Leonardo at work on the Last Supper.74
The Cardinal was on the homeward leg of a protracted European journey, partly to distance himself from a conspiracy against Pope Leo the previous year, and partly to meet the new King of Spain, Charles V; he did so at Middelburg, on the coast of Holland. English agents there kept a wary eye and reported back to Cardinal Wolsey about Aragon’s ostentatious arrival at Charles’s court, with his retinue of forty horsemen, and his cloak draped carelessly about his shoulders and his sword strapped to his side: ‘Your Grace may conjecture what manner of man he is… The said Cardinal’s profession is rather of a temporal lord than spiritual.’75 Thereafter the Cardinal descended south through France. Among his travelling party was his chaplain and secretary, Antonio de Beatis, whose chatty travel diary is the source of what follows.76
Raphael’s Portrait of a Cardinal, probably a portrait of Luigi of Aragon.
On 9 October they were at Tours (‘Turso’), and from there, after an early lunch, they went on to Amboise, ‘a distance of seven leagues’. Beatis finds it ‘a small well-kept town in a fine position’; they are put up in the chateau, on its ‘little hill’; it is ‘not strongly fortified, but the rooms are comfortable, and the view is lovely’. The following day, 10 October, they went to ‘one of the suburbs’ of the town, ‘to see messer Lunardo Vinci the Florentine’. We have a slight sense that Leonardo is another tourist attraction to be ‘done’ by the Cardinal.
Beatis’s brief but vividly specific account of their visit to Clos Lucé is our last snapshot of Leonardo. It begins with an error: Leonardo is described as ‘an old man of over seventy’, which again might seem faintly touristic – an exaggeration which makes him even more picturesquely venerable – though it can also be taken as an eyewitness statement that Leonardo looked some years old than he really was (sixty-five). The account continues:
He showed His Lordship three pictures, one of a certain Florentine lady, done from life at the instigation of the late Magnifico Giuliano de’ Medici, another of the young St John the Baptist, and another of the Madonna and Child placed on the lap of St Anne: all quite perfect [perfettissimo, which might also mean ‘completely finished’]. However, we cannot expect any more great work from him, since he is now somewhat paralysed in his right hand. He has trained up a Milanese pupil who works well. And while Master Leonardo can no longer colour with such sweetness as he used to, he is none the less able to do drawings and to teach others. This gentleman has written a great deal about anatomy, with many illustrations of the parts of the body, such as the muscles, nerves, veins and the coilings of intestines, and this makes it possible to understand the bodies of both men and women in a way that has never been done by anyone before. All this we saw with our own eyes, and he told us he had already dissected more than thirty bodies, both men and women, of all ages. He has also written, as he himself put it, an infinity of volumes on the nature of waters, on various machines, and on other things, all in the vernacular, and if these were to be brought to light they would be both useful and delightful. Besides his expenses and lodgings, he receives from the King of France a pension of 1,000 scudi a year, and his pupil gets three hundred.
One pores over this page, as if with a magnifying-glass, trying to capture its traces of documentary reality, its frissons of presence. Just the other side of this text are these people who are physically there with him – ‘All this we saw with our own eyes’:oculatamente.
After cordialities in the salon downstairs, the refreshments provided by Mathurine, and a brief holy interlude in the little chapel – for these very worldly visitors are men of the cloth – they have been conducted up the stairs to the inner sanctum of Leonardo’s studio, where the autumnal light is augmented by candles, and now they are listening to him as he describes and explains, with what one discerns as a mix of innate courtesy and magisterial brusqueness. As they look at the Mona Lisa he tells them something, but not a lot. She is a Florentine lady; he painted her at the request – no, the urging: instantia – of the late Magnifico Giuliano. They look at the soft-toned Virgin and Child with St Anne and the sultry St John, and then come out the great folios of anatomical drawings, the pages turned by the indispensable Melzi, and for a moment they feel a shiver at their proximity to this gentle-looking old man whose hands have dismembered corpses and unravelled intestines – ‘more than thirty bodies, both men and women, of all ages’: a moment of volubility. These feats of anatomy are given special prominence by Beatis as something unique, ‘never… done by anyone before’, and perhaps this is a valuation expressed or anyway implied by Leonardo himself as he spoke to his guests.
There are other books – on water, on machinery. Beatis notes that these are in the ‘vernacular’, and should be ‘brought to light’ – by which he presumably means published – but he does not mention the oddest feature about them. This is a curious omission: Leonardo’s mirror-writing was not something widely known and therefore not worth mentioning, so one has to wonder if Beatis actually saw any of it.77 The visitors were probably shown particular sheets and pages: properly worked-up drawings. Leonardo is an old hand: he has received these studio visits a hundred times. He affects a certain nonchalance, but shows people just exactly what he wants them to see, and the rest is a kind of hinterland of wonders, to be indicated with a vague magisterial wave of his good hand: the manuscripts and notebooks, libri and libricini, heaped around on the desks and shelves of his studio – ‘as he himself put it, an infinity of volumes’. One hears the disarming mix of self-pride and self-mockery, the phrase arrived at, savoured for its ironies, almost a punchline, as he contemplates the tonnage of paper and ink he has created, the intractable multiplicity of his investigations, the impossible distances that the mind must fly to encompass it all.
‘An infinity of volumes…’
And young Melzi, whose love of Leonardo will be expressed by a curatorial career stretching on over more than half a century, smiles ruefully at these words.
The visitors take their leave, well pleased, and the punctilious Beatis writes up his journal that evening (or so one assumes: the manuscript that survives is a fair copy or digest, done sometime after the date of the last entry, 31 August 1521). The following day they proceed to another royal castle, Blois [‘Bles’], and see ‘a portrait in oils of a certain lady of Lombardy, done from life; she is rather beautiful, but in my opinion not as beautiful as Signora Gualanda’. This painting was plausibly Leonardo’s portrait of Lucrezia Crivelli, which today hangs in the Louvre; it may well have been removed to Louis XII’s chateau at Blois some time after the French takeover of Milan in 1499; it would not yet have acquired its misleading title of La Belle Ferronnière. Isabella Gualanda was the noted Neapolitan beauty and friend of the poetess Costanza d’Avalos; she is not the ‘true’ subject of the Mona Lisa, otherwise Beatis would have said so when he saw the painting the previous day.
Of course one wants to shake Antonio by the shoulders to get some more out of him: all that he saw and felt and knew but failed to mention. Was Leonardo tall still, or shrunken? Was his voice – the voice that once sang so beautifully to the tune of a lira – sonorous or quavery? One wants to ask why the ‘somewhat paralysed’ right hand should have meant that the left-handed maestro was unlikely to do any more painting. Is there a more general diminution suggested in the next sentence – he cannot ‘colour with such sweetness as he used to’ – implying a loss of technique more than a physical handicap?
What Beatis fails to mention can in part be supplied by looking once more at the famous self-portrait in red chalk at the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, which must show Leonardo at around this time – a man in his mid-sixties, but looking, just as Beatis says he did, like ‘an old man of over seventy’. In the popular imagination it is the definitive self-portrait of Leonardo, and has fixed him in this druidic mode within our minds. There are doubts among some art-historians, who feel that the style and the medium suggest an earlier date. Is it perhaps a portrait of his father, not long before Ser Piero’s death in 1504; or some antique god or philosopher from the time of the Leda studies; or simply some old man ‘of striking appearance’, one of those faces which fascinated him and which, according to Vasari, ‘he would follow all day long to draw’? Even the Italian inscription below the drawing is controversial, faded to the point of illegibility: does it describe it as a ‘portrait of himself in old age’ or merely as a drawing ‘done by him in old age’? But like many others, I continue to believe in it as a potent and unflinching portrait of himself at the end of his life – the ‘conventional’ view: like the view that the Mona Lisa really does show Mona Lisa. The sheet is unusually long and thin, and the drawing may well have been cropped at the sides, almost losing the shape of the shoulders.78 In fact they are just visible, in angled horizontal lines at either side of the head, almost at the level of the mouth, and seeing them one realizes that the iconic image of the Turin drawing is not the erect, commanding figure he now seems but an old man hunched and bent beneath the weight of the years: venerable still, but also vulnerable. He has almost become that stooped decrepit figure drawn at the Villa Melzi some five years earlier, sitting on a rock, watching the play of the river as it journeys on past him.
Contemporary with the Turin self-portrait is the haunting black-chalk drawing at Windsor known as the Pointing Lady (page 501), sometimes associated with Matelda in Dante’s Purgatorio – a soft, romantic, windswept figure on a riverbank, surrounded by tall flowers. Martin Kemp calls it an ‘emotional pendant to the Deluge drawings’, promising ‘transition into a world of ineffable tranquillity rather than immersion in a world of physical destruction’.79 She turns back towards the spectator – turns, in Dante’s words, ‘like a woman who’s dancing’ – but her left hand points away from us, into the depths of the picture, signalling something we cannot see.