At the end of 1517 Leonardo attends François at Romorantin, upriver from Amboise, where he is ambitiously planning for the King a vast new palace complex, complete with a connecting network of canals between the Loire and the Saône. Designs for this are found in the Codex Atlanticus, a reprise of those utopian city-scapes sketched out thirty years earlier.80 The Romorantin project never left the drawing-board, though architectural historians point to the influence of Leonardo’s designs on the evolution of chateau-design in the Loire. He remained there until 16 January 1518: ‘On the eve of St Anthony’s I returned from Romorantino to Ambuosa.’ An official requisition of horses from the King’s stables – ‘pour envoyer à Maistre Lyonard florentin paintre du Roy pour les affers du dit seigneur’ – remains among his papers.81
With the spring comes the season of masques and pageants and parties, for which his ardour is quite undimmed. At Amboise on 3 May 1518 there is a double festivity with a Florentine overtone, celebrating the baptism of the King’s son, the Dauphin Henri, and the marriage of his niece, Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne. Her husband was Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, nephew of the Pope, and now Duke of Urbino (the dukedom so courteously refused by his late uncle Giuliano). Among the attendant Florentines were probably men who knew Leonardo, and many others who knew of him, and so the news of him would travel back to Florence. The marriage was brief: both partners were dead within a year, though not before producing a daughter, Caterina, who later became Queen of France – the infamous ‘Madame la Serpente’, Catherine de’ Medici.
The show put on by Leonardo is described in newsletters sent to the Gonzaga in Mantua: the Marchioness was still keeping a distant eye on Leonardo, the one who got away.82 In the square standing to the north of the chateau a triumphal arch was set up. On it stood a nude figure bearing lilies in one hand and an effigy of a dolphin (for the Dauphin) in the other. On one side of the arch was a salamander with the King’s motto, ‘Nutrisco et extinguo’; on the other was an ermine with the motto ‘Potius mori quam foedari’ (‘Better to die than be besmirched’) – an impresa of the Duke of Urbino, and for Leonardo a memory of Milanese days, and the captivating Cecilia Gallerani. One of the Gonzaga envoys writes of the tremendous esteem which Leonardo enjoys with King François. The King is anxious to employ more Italian painters, he reports; the name of Lorenzo Costa, court artist at Mantua, has been mentioned.
A couple of weeks later, on 15 May, there was another pageant, almost certainly organized by Leonardo. The siege and capture of a castle were represented, commemorating the Battle of Marignano three years previously. From its battlements, falconets fired up carnival missiles of rag and paper, while great booming mortars delighted the crowd by raining down ‘inflated balloons which bounce around when they land in the square, to the great delight of all and with no harm done to anyone: a new invention, beautifully done’.83 Leonardo’s great skill of surprise, his mastery of the theatrical moment, never deserted him.
Masquerader on horseback, and in the guise of a poor prisoner.
Some fine drawings of costumed masqueraders are among the last of Leonardo’s works, done in black chalk like the Pointing Lady – this is the favoured medium of his late drawings, the line precise and assured, yet tending also to a soft, cloudy gleam. We see a horseman in a raffish broad-brimmed hat; a young man with flowing gauzy sleeves and a hunting-horn at his waist; an elaborately coiffed woman whose muscular legs suggest she is actually a man – ludic figures that seem part Renaissance showbiz and part ethereal magic. The ragged, mendicant prisoner in shackles, with his food-bowl and his wild-man staff, is also an actor in costume rather than an actual prisoner.84 For a moment one sees – in the curls of the hair, in the face behind the small fluffy beard – a reminiscence of Salai. But how much Salai was part of the French household is uncertain. He is listed in the French accounts, which cover two years, 1517–18, as receiving 100 écus – a decent sum, but only an eighth of what was paid to Melzi; the disparity may well be explained by his absence for some of the time. He was certainly back in Milan in spring 1518: he is recorded there on 13 April, lending a sum of money.85 There is no mention of him among the witnesses of Leonardo’s will a year later.
19 June 1518: a big thank you to the King of France – a party in his honour, put on in Leonardo’s gardens at Cloux. All week the workmen have been busy constructing the tall wooden scaffolding. Over this is draped a canopy of blue cloth spangled with stars, creating a kind of pavilion or marquee. It covers an area 30 х 60 braccia (60 х 120 feet). Inside there is a raised dais for the royal guests. The columns of the scaffold are festooned with coloured cloths and wreaths of ivy. The lighting and the music and the scents of the midsummer evening one must imagine.
The show was a reprise of what was, as far as we know, Leonardo’s first production, the Paradiso, performed at the Castello Sforzesco in 1490 for the doomed young Duke of Milan and his bride, Isabella of Aragon. And by coincidence this last festa, almost thirty years later, was seen by another young Milanese, Galeazzo Visconti, and recounted by him in a letter to the news-hungry Gonzaga:
The whole courtyard was canopied in sheets of sky-blue cloth which had stars in gold in the likeness of the heavens, and then there were the principal planets, with the sun on one side and the moon on the other: it was a wonderful sight. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were there, in their proper order, and the twelve celestial signs… and there must have been four hundred torches burning, so that it seemed the night was chased away.86
The show finishes, the royal compliments are received, the revellers disperse. The gardens of Cloux are quiet once more. There is a scattering of festive debris, the smell of trampled grass, and what was for a few minutes a vision of paradise is now just a big blue tent which they will take down in the morning. This festa is the last identifiable work by Leonardo da Vinci, an ephemeron so fragile that soon no trace of it remained except in the memories of those who were there and saw with their own eyes the night ‘chased away’. ‘Pareva fusse cacciata la notte…’
A few days later Leonardo wrote the last of those little dated notes: miniature graffiti which say nothing more than here I am, on this day, in this place: ‘On the 24th day of June, St John’s Day 1518, in Amboise in the palace of Clu.’ A flagged moment, perhaps recalling the great St John’s Day parades and festivities in Florence. Around this time, in similarly nostalgic vein, he draws a brief sketch-plan and captions it, ‘The lion-house in Florence’.87 It is perhaps intended as an idea for Romorantin, but it remains on the page as the marker of an old man in exile, prey to the random offerings of memory. He remembered the lion he had seen there, stripping the skin off a lamb; perhaps it was the one he used for the lion in his painting of St Jerome. Leone… Leonardo. He had always been the lion, perhaps since childhood, and indeed it would not be a bad synopsis of the Turin self-portrait to say he looks there like a grizzled old lion, with his mane of grey hair and his fierce eyes: a lonely survivor.
And around this time he is sitting at a table, in his studio at Cloux, working on some geometry – another little theorem, another piece of the jigsaw – when he hears a voice calling him, and he knows he must put down his pen, and put aside his questions, because he must live with the rest of us in this material world of appetites and contingencies, represented at this moment, not at all unpleasantly, by a bowl of Mathurine’s hot vegetable soup, which is almost as good (though he would never tell her that ‘almost’) as a Tuscan minestrone.
So he writes on the page, ‘Etcetera, perche la minesstra si fredda’ – the ‘etcetera’ a mere formulaic squiggle, the glyph of non-completion.
The view from Clos Lucé, in a sketch attributed to Melzi.