FOUR
Beginning in 1490, the whole of Italy experienced several years of peace and political stability, during which its city-states accumulated great wealth. In Milan, palaces were renovated, streets paved, and gardens laid out. There were pageants, costumed tournaments, and a succession of performances in a new theater Ludovico had given the city.
Leonardo had become the Moor’s favorite court artist. He was given a large space for his workshop and living quarters in the Corte Vecchia, the old ducal palace next to the cathedral, where Ludovico housed important guests. He seemed to have had an entire wing at his disposal, where he designed sets and costumes for festivities, invented mechanical devices, carried out scientific experiments, prepared the molds for the gran cavallo he was creating, and tested his first flying machines. To satisfy the constant demands of the court, he employed several apprentices, assistants, and contracted workers in addition to maintaining a small household of domestic staff.1 The bottega di Leonardo was a very busy place indeed.
For Leonardo himself, the 1490s were a period of intense creative activity. With two major projects—the equestrian statue and The Last Supper—his artistic career was at its peak, he was consulted repeatedly as an expert on architectural design, and he embarked on extensive and systematic research in mathematics, optics, mechanics, and the theory of human flight.
NEW FOCUS ON MATHEMATICS
This phase of intense research was triggered by Leonardo’s introduction to the library of Pavia in the summer of 1490. Ludovico had sent him to Pavia, which belonged to the duchy of Milan, to inspect the work on the city’s cathedral together with the architect Francesco di Giorgio. For Leonardo, the journey was intellectually stimulating and personally rewarding in several ways. During the weeks they spent together, he formed a close friendship with Francesco, who was highly regarded as an architect and engineer and whose treatise on civil and military engineering would greatly influence Leonardo in the coming years.2
Even more important for Leonardo, however, was his discovery of the magnificent library in the city’s Visconti Castle. Pavia was the seat of one of Europe’s oldest universities and had become a major artistic and intellectual center. The great hall of its library, its walls lined with shelves of manuscripts, was famous among scholars all over Italy.3 Leonardo was overwhelmed at the sight of this immense intellectual treasure. Indeed, he did not return to Milan with Francesco when their work was completed, but stayed in Pavia for another six months to further explore the library.
While he was immersed in this research, he met Fazio Cardano, a professor of mathematics at the University of Pavia who was a specialist in the “science of perspective,” which in the Renaissance included geometry and geometrical optics.4 Leonardo’s discussions with Cardano and his studies in the library ignited a passion for mathematics, especially geometry, and fueled his subsequent research. Immediately after his return to Milan, he began two new Notebooks, now known as Manuscripts A and C, in which he applied his new knowledge of geometry to a systematic study of perspective and optics as well as to elementary problems involving weights, force, and movement—the branches of mechanics known today as statics, dynamics, and kinematics.
Leonardo’s research in statics and dynamics was concerned not only with the workings of machines but also, and even more important, with understanding the human body and its movements. For example, he investigated the body’s ability to generate various amounts of force in different positions. One of his key aims was to find out how a human pilot might generate enough force to lift a flying machine off the ground by flapping its mechanical wings.5
In his studies of machines during that period, Leonardo began to separate individual mechanisms—levers, gears, bearings, couplings, etc.—from the machines in which they were embedded. This conceptual separation did not arise again in engineering until the eighteenth century.6 In fact, Leonardo planned (and may even have written) a treatise on Elements of Machines, perhaps influenced by his discussions with Fazio Cardano of Euclid’s celebrated Elements of Geometry in Pavia.
Amazingly, in the midst of those years of intensive research, and while his workshop was fully occupied with a stream of orders from the Sforza court, Leonardo also continued his literary self-education. In 1493 he began to study Latin. In a special little Notebook, Manuscript H, he copied passages from a popular book of Latin grammar as well as Latin words from a contemporary vocabulary. It is very touching to see passages in which Leonardo, over forty years old and at the height of his powers and fame, wrote out the same basic conjugations—amo, amas, amat…—schoolboys have to memorize at age thirteen.
FRIENDSHIP AND BETRAYAL
In the midst of his studies and experimentation, and his final preparations for the casting of the giant bronze horse, Leonardo received the commission from Ludovico to paint The Last Supper—the masterpiece that most would argue stands at the climax of his career as a painter. It was to be a large fresco in the refectory of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. The monastery was the Moor’s favorite place of worship; the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples was a traditional subject for decorating convent refectories.
As always, Leonardo contemplated the subject carefully within its religious, artistic, and architectural context. He made numerous preparatory sketches and completed the painting within two or three years—a relatively short period considering that he had to divide his time between painting in the “Grazie” and working on il cavallo in the Corte Vecchia.
Leonardo’s Last Supper, generally considered the first painting of the High Renaissance (the period of Italian art between, approximately, 1495 and 1520), is dramatically different from earlier representations of the subject. Indeed, it became famous throughout Europe immediately after its completion and was copied innumerable times. The first highly imaginative feature one notices is the way Leonardo integrated the fresco into the architecture of the refectory. Demonstrating his mastery of geometry, Leonardo contrived a series of visual paradoxes to create an elaborate illusion—a complex perspective that made the room of the Last Supper look like an extension of the refectory itself, in which the monks ate their meals.7
One consequence of this complex perspective is that from every viewing position in the room, the spectator is drawn into the drama of the picture’s narrative with equal force. And dramatic it is. Whereas traditionally the Last Supper was pictured at the moment of communion, a moment of calm, individual meditation for each apostle, Leonardo chose the ominous moment when Jesus says, “One of you will betray me.”
The words of Christ have stirred up the solemn company, creating powerful waves of emotion. However, the effect is far from chaotic. The apostles are clearly organized into four groups of three figures, with Judas forming one of the groups together with Peter and John. This is another striking compositional innovation. Traditionally, Judas was pictured sitting on the other side of the table, facing the apostles, with his back to the spectator. Leonardo had no need to identify the traitor by isolating him in this way. By giving the apostles carefully chosen expressive gestures, which together cover a wide range of emotions, the artist made sure that we immediately recognize Judas, as he shrinks back into the dark of John’s shadow, nervously clutching his bag of silver. The depiction of the apostles as embodiments of individual emotional states and the integration of Judas into the dramatic narrative were so revolutionary that after Leonardo, no self-respecting artist could go back to the previous static configuration.
Throughout his career as a painter, Leonardo was famous for his ability to capture emotional subtleties—the “movements of the soul”—in facial expressions and eloquent gestures, and to weave them into complex compositional narratives. This exceptional ability was already apparent in his early Madonnas and reached its climax in The Last Supper and his other mature works.
The playwright and poet Giovanni Battista Giraldi, whose father knew Leonardo, provided a fascinating glimpse of the artist’s methods in achieving this singular mastery. “When Leonardo wished to paint a figure,” Giraldi wrote, “he first considered what social standing and what nature it was to represent; whether noble or plebeian, gay or severe, troubled or serene, old or young, irate or quiet, good or evil; and when he had made up his mind, he went to places where he knew that people of that kind assembled and observed their faces, their manners, dresses, and gestures; and when he found what fitted his purpose, he noted it in a little book which he was always carrying in his belt. After repeating this procedure many times, and being satisfied with the material thus collected for the figure which he wished to paint, he would proceed to give it shape.”8
During this period, while Leonardo painted The Last Supper and meditated on the nature of human frailty and betrayal, his personal life was enriched by an encounter that would turn into a lasting friendship. In 1496 the Franciscan monk and well-known mathematician Luca Pacioli came to teach in Milan. Fra Luca had established his reputation as a mathematician with a vast treatise, a kind of mathematical textbook, titled Summa de aritmetica geometrica proportioni et proportionalità (Summary of Arithmetic, Geometry of Proportion, and Proportionality). Written in Italian rather than in the customary scholarly Latin, it contained synopses of the works of many great mathematicians, past and present. Leonardo, who had been keenly interested in mathematics since his studies at the library of Pavia, was fascinated by Pacioli’s treatise and immediately attracted to its author.
Fra Luca was a few years older than Leonardo and a fellow Tuscan, which may have helped them establish an easy rapport that soon turned into friendship. This friendship gave Leonardo a unique opportunity to deepen his mathematical studies. Pacioli not only helped him understand various portions of his own treatise, but guided him in a thorough study of the Latin edition of Euclid’s Elements. With the help of his friend, Leonardo systematically worked through all thirteen volumes of Euclid’s foundational exposition and filled two Notebooks with mathematical notes.9
Soon after they began their study sessions, Leonardo and Fra Luca decided to collaborate on a book, titled De divina proportione, to be written by Pacioli and illustrated by Leonardo. The book, presented to Ludovico as a lavish manuscript and eventually published in Venice, contains an extensive review of the role of proportion in architecture and anatomy—and in particular of the golden section, or “divine proportion”—as well as detailed discussions of the five regular polyhedra known as the Platonic solids.10 It features over sixty illustrations by Leonardo, including superb drawings of the Platonic solids in both solid and skeletal forms, testimony to his exceptional ability to visualize abstract geometric forms. What further distinguishes this work is that it is the only collection of drawings by Leonardo published during his lifetime.11
While Leonardo drew the illustrations for Pacioli’s book, he also continued work on The Last Supper. Progress was steady but slow, as the artist worked on in his typical thoughtful and meditative way. He spent considerable time roaming the streets of Milan looking for suitable models for the faces of the apostles.12 By 1497 the only part left to complete was the head of Judas.13 At that point, the prior of the convent became so impatient with Leonardo’s slowness that he complained to the duke, who summoned the artist to hear his reasons for the delay. According to Vasari, Leonardo explained to the Moor that he was working on The Last Supper at least two hours a day, but that most of this work took place in his mind. He went on, slyly, to say that, if he did not find an appropriate model for Judas, he would give the villain the features of the petulant prior. Ludovico was so amused by Leonardo’s reply that he instructed the prior to be patient and let Leonardo finish his work undisturbed.
A few months later The Last Supper was completed. Unfortunately, it soon began to deteriorate. The painting is not a fresco, strictly speaking; it was not painted al fresco with water-based pigment on damp, fresh plaster. The fresco technique resulted in lasting murals but required fast execution, which was incompatible with Leonardo’s way of painting. Instead, the artist experimented with a mixture of egg tempera and oil. Because the wall was damp, the painting soon began to suffer. Tragically, subsequent attempts to halt or reverse its deterioration have been unsuccessful. Over the centuries there have been countless restorations of The Last Supper, many involving questionable techniques and often without exact records being kept. As Kenneth Clark wrote in 1939, “It is hard to resist the conclusion that what we now see on the wall of the Grazie is largely the work of restorers.”14
The last effort to restore Leonardo’s masterpiece, completed in 2000 under the direction of Pinin Brambilla Barcilon, was by far the most elaborate and sophisticated, taking more than twenty years.15 The restorer and her team removed almost all the traces of earlier restorations in order to expose as much of Leonardo’s paint as could be found. Instead of concealing the damage, they reconstructed the original contours and filled the empty spaces between the existing fragments with watercolor of the same general hue. What the spectator now sees from a close distance are clear distinctions between the original paint and the empty spaces, while from farther back these distinctions disappear, giving way to the impression of seeing a faded version of the original painting.
In spite of the fact that very little is now left of Leonardo’s original masterpiece, the restored work does show the eloquence and power of the protagonists’ gestures, and even a hint of the luminosity that is so characteristic of Leonardo’s paintings. “We still catch sight of the superhuman forms of the original,” writes Kenneth Clark, “and from the drama of their interplay we can appreciate some of the qualities which made The Last Supper the keystone of European art.”16
POLITICAL TURMOIL
When Leonardo finished The Last Supper in 1498, he did not know that his position at the Sforza court and his stay in Milan would come to an abrupt end two years later. His study and research program continued unabated. He kept up his mathematical studies with Fra Luca, worked on the theory of human flight, and experimented with various flying machines. In addition, he painted a portrait of Ludovico’s new mistress, Lucrezia Crivelli,17 and after the tragic death of the duke’s wife Beatrice, Ludovico entrusted him with the decoration of the Sala delle Asse in her memory.18
In those last two years at the Sforza court, Leonardo also made several journeys within northern Italy. In 1498 he accompanied the Moor on a visit to Genoa, and on another occasion he made a trip to the Alps. There, he climbed the Monte Rosa,19 Europe’s second-highest mountain, a huge glacier-covered massif at the Swiss-Italian border with ten major peaks, most of them higher than 4,000 meters (13,000 feet). Even today, ascending any one of these peaks is very strenuous, although technically not difficult, involving five to ten hours of climbing up steep grades, and walking long stretches on glaciers. One has to be in good physical condition, accustomed to high altitude. In Leonardo’s time, such an ascent must have been extraordinary.
Several of his contemporaries describe Leonardo as being very athletic in his youth;20 clearly, he still had the necessary strength to climb mountains in his forties. In his notes he describes the deep blue of the sky “almost above the clouds,” and the silvery threads of rivers in the valleys below. The view from that height, several hundred years before the age of industrial pollution, must have been spectacular indeed. He could see the “four rivers that water Europe”—the Rhine, the Rhône, the Danube, and the Po.21
While Leonardo enjoyed the clear view of the valleys and rivers from Monte Rosa, political clouds threatening the peace were gathering. In 1494 the king of France, Charles VIII, crossed the Alps at the head of a large army; Ludovico sacrificed the bronze retained for the casting of Leonardo’sgran cavallo in order to defend Milan.22 During the subsequent years, the French steadily advanced through Italy. In 1498, after Charles VIII died in an accident, the new French king, Louis XII, declared himself duke of Milan and prepared to conquer the city.
In the summer of 1499, Louis formed a secret alliance with Venice and invaded Lombardy to attack its capital, Milan, while the Venetians attacked from the east. Ludovico, in panic, fled to Innsbruck, Austria, with his family to seek the protection of his relative, Emperor Maximilian. In September, Milan capitulated without a shot being fired.23 Leonardo, apparently quite oblivious to the political turmoil around him, calmly recorded some new observations on “movement and weight” in his Notebooks.24
In October, Louis XII entered Milan in triumph. Apparently, he offered Leonardo a position as military engineer. Louis was so enchanted by The Last Supper that he inquired whether it could be removed from the wall of the Grazie and taken to France.25Leonardo, however, turned down the king’s offer, perhaps because he had witnessed widespread looting and killing by the French troops. When a detachment of archers used the clay model of his cavallo for target practice, he realized it was time for him to leave the city. He put his affairs in order, sent his savings to his bank at Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, and before the year was out, he and his friend Fra Luca left Milan.
RETURN TO FLORENCE
Luca Pacioli traveled directly to Florence; Leonardo made a long detour via Mantua and Venice and joined his friend a few months later. When he returned to Florence, where he would spend the next six years, Leonardo, now forty-eight, was at the beginning of what was then considered old age. However, his artistic and scientific creativity continued undiminished. Over the next fifteen years he would paint several more masterpieces and produce his most substantial scientific work. He was now famous as an artist and engineer throughout Italy. And it was well known by his contemporaries that he dedicated much of his time to scientific and mathematical studies. The fact that hardly anyone knew what those studies were about only enhanced his image as an enigmatic genius.
Leonardo was in great demand as a consultant in architecture and military engineering as well as for lucrative commissions for paintings. Having been paid handsomely by Ludovico Sforza for the past decade, he had enough financial security that he did not have to curry favor with the powerful and wealthy, even though steady and lucrative employment was his preference. However, he continued to be utterly aloof from politics, and showed little loyalty to any state or political ruler.
Many of Leonardo’s consulting assignments, especially those in military engineering, required him to travel to other cities in northern Italy, and his second period in Florence was punctuated by frequent journeys. But his travels seemed to inspire him to ever more intense work. In addition to examining military fortifications and producing numerous drawings with suggestions for improvements, he studied the flora and geological formations of the areas he visited, drew beautiful, detailed maps that showed distances and elevations, and visited renowned libraries to continue his theoretical studies.
Leonardo’s maps from that period show geographical details with a degree of accuracy far beyond anything attempted by the cartographers of his time.26 He used washes of different intensities to follow the contours of mountain chains, different shades representing different elevations, and he pictured the rivers, valleys, and settlements in such a realistic manner that one has the eerie feeling of looking at the landscape from an airplane (see Fig. 7-7 on Chapter 7). In most of his maps, Leonardo focused specifically on the network of rivers and lakes. In some views of stretches of the river Arno (Fig. 4-1), he uses blue wash of varying hues to produce a striking resemblance between the flow of the river’s watercourses and the flow of blood in the body’s veins (Fig. 4-2)—an exquisitely beautiful and moving testimony of how Leonardo saw water as the veins of the living Earth.
Leonardo also continued to create great artistic works (including the Madonna and Child with the Yarnwinder, various sketches for the Madonna and Child with Saint Anne, and two different compositions for Leda and the Swan), many of which exerted considerable influence on contemporary painters, including Raphael and Michelangelo.27 “Surprisingly,” writes Martin Kemp, “this period is marked by an astonishing richness of artistic activity, in which more than a dozen significant compositions were conceived and taken to various stages of completion by Leonardo himself or his assistants.”28
Figure 4-1: The water veins of the Earth, river Arno, c. 1504, Drawings and Miscellaneous Papers, Vol. IV, folio 444r
In February 1500, soon after leaving Milan, Leonardo spent a few weeks in Mantua at the invitation of Isabella d’Este, the elder sister of Ludovico’s late wife Beatrice. Beautiful and sophisticated, Isabella was a renowned art collector and generous patron of the arts, if temperamental and tyrannical.29 She was mainly interested in paintings that praised her merits and would often dictate their composition, even the colors to be used. It was well known how she had harassed Giovanni Bellini, taking him to court to obtain exactly the picture she wanted, and how she had written no fewer than fifty-three imperious letters to Perugino, pressing him to finish an allegory she had designed.
Figure 4-2: Blood veins in the left arm, c. 1507–8, Anatomical Studies, folio 69r
Isabella had met Leonardo often at the Sforza court and had always beseeched him to paint her portrait. In Mantua, the artist seemed to obey. He drew her in profile in black and red chalk and probably also offered her a copy, implying that he would keep the original in order to transfer it to a panel and paint it later.30 However, in spite of many subsequent entreaties by Isabella’s emissaries, Leonardo never painted the full portrait. Apparently, he had no desire to subject himself to Isabella’s whims. Beneath his exquisite courtesy and charm, he always remained fiercely independent when his artistic integrity was at stake.
From Mantua, Leonardo journeyed to Venice, where the Senate was in urgent need of a military engineer with his talents. The Venetians had just suffered a defeat in a naval battle against the Turks. And the Ottoman army was encamped in the Friuli region on the banks of the river Isonzo, threatening an invasion from the republic’s northeastern borders. Leonardo went to Friuli, studied the topography of the land, and came back to the Senate with a plan to build a movable lock on the Isonzo. He argued that this could be used to dam up a large body of water, which could be released to drown the Turkish armies when they crossed the river.31 Ingenious as the plan was, the Venetian Senate rejected it.
The Venetians were also concerned about a possible attack by the Turkish navy. Leonardo responded to this challenge with designs of diving apparatus, invisible from the surface, to be used in marine warfare—small submarines that could be sent out “to sink a fleet of ships” divers equipped with airbags, goggles, and special devices to bore holes into the planks of ships; frogmen with flippers, and the like. The modern look of these designs is quite astonishing.32 Leonardo was well aware of the conflict between his work as a military engineer and his pacifist nature.33 “I do not describe my method for remaining under water for as long as I can remain without food,” he wrote in the Codex Leicester. “This I do not publish or divulge because of the evil nature of men, who might practice assassinations at the bottom of the seas by breaking the ships in their lowest parts and sinking them together with the crews who are in them.”34
Leonardo was also asked to examine the Venetian canal system for possible improvements. In the course of this work, he invented a beveled lock gate that played a part in the evolution of canal design.35 In view of all these interesting projects in civil and military engineering, it is surprising that Leonardo did not stay in Venice for more than a few weeks. Yet, by April 1500, he was back in his native Tuscany.
The most likely explanation for his quick return to Florence is that Luca Pacioli had, in the meantime, been awarded the chair of mathematics at the University of Florence. Leonardo must have seen it as an ideal opportunity for him to continue his studies with Fra Luca, and to meet leading Florentine intellectuals. Besides, he was also likely looking forward to being appreciated as an artist in the city that had nurtured his genius in his formative years.
Leonardo’s expectations of a warm welcome in Florence were amply met. Soon after his arrival in the city, he was invited to paint an altarpiece for the Servite convent of the Santissima Annunziata. To make the commission more attractive, the friars provided spacious lodgings for Leonardo and his household in the convent’s guest quarters.36 Leonardo gladly accepted the commission and took up residence in the Annunziata, although he kept them waiting a long time before starting the commission. Instead of painting, he calmly pursued his mathematical studies with Pacioli and continued his experiments on weight, force, and movement.
“Finally,” Vasari writes, “he did a cartoon showing Our Lady with Saint Anne and the infant Christ. This work not only won the astonished admiration of all the artists but, when finished, for two days it attracted to the room where it was exhibited a crowd of men and women, young and old, who flocked there, as if they were attending a great festival, to gaze in amazement at the marvels he had created.” Leonardo could not have wished for a more enthusiastic reception by the city to which he had at last returned.
In the Madonna and Child with Saint Anne, as the painting is called today, Leonardo had again broken new ground with both his composition and the theological interpretation of a traditional religious theme.37 Rather than presenting Mary and her mother, Saint Anne, in a static configuration—seated next to each other with Jesus in Mary’s arms between them, or with Saint Anne seated higher in a majestic, hierarchical composition—Leonardo upset tradition by adding a lamb as a fourth figure. Jesus, having slipped to the ground, reaches for the lamb as Mary tries to restrain him, and Saint Anne seems to hold her back.
Figure 4-3: Madonna and Child with Saint Anne, c. 1508 onward, Musée du Louvre, Paris
The theological message embodied in Leonardo’s highly original composition can be seen as a continuation of his long meditation on the destiny of Christ, which he had begun with the Virgin of the Rocks. Mary, in an anxious gesture, attempts to pull her son away from the lamb, the symbol of the Passion, while Saint Anne, representing the Mother Church, knows that Mary’s gesture is futile—the Passion is Christ’s destiny and cannot be avoided.
The completion of the painting took Leonardo more than a decade, during which he made numerous drawings with variations on compositional and theological themes. After the original cartoon, which is now lost, he produced a larger one, now in the National Gallery in London, in which Mary and Saint Anne are seated side by side and the lamb is replaced by Saint John the Baptist. But eventually he returned to his original idea. The final painting (Fig. 4-3), now in the Louvre, is a complex and masterful synthesis of his previous variations. The figures almost blend into each other in their rhythmic balance, with Leonardo’s dreamy mountains, foreshadowing the landscape of the Mona Lisa, in the background.
TRAVELS IN CENTRAL ITALY
When Leonardo arrived in Florence, he found a city that was quite different from the one he had left eighteen years earlier. In 1494 the French king, Charles VIII, at that time still in alliance with Ludovico Sforza, had expelled the Medici and returned Florence to a republic. In the ensuing confusion, the city fell under the spell of the fanatical teachings of the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola, who managed to transform the republic into a fundamentalist theocracy.38 For the next four years, Savonarola ruled as a virtual dictator until he was excommunicated by the pope, tried for heresy, and burned at the stake.
In the meantime, Pope Alexander VI had enlisted his son, the young military commander Cesare Borgia, to help him build a papal empire in central Italy. Intelligent, cruel, and ruthlessly opportunistic, Cesare subdued one city after another for the papacy, from Piombino on the west coast to Rimini on the Adriatic. He was well aware, however, that unless his new conquests were systematically fortified, they were vulnerable to attack from hostile neighbors. To protect them, Cesare turned to the military engineer with the greatest reputation, Leonardo da Vinci.
In 1502, Leonardo was hired by Cesare to travel throughout central Italy, inspect the ramparts, canals, and other fortifications of the newly conquered cities, and make suggestions for their improvements. To confirm his appointment, Cesare provided him with a passport that gave him complete freedom of movement, encouraged him to take any initiative he deemed appropriate, and allowed him to travel in comfort with his entourage. For Leonardo, this appointment must have sounded like a tremendous opportunity, and he took full advantage of it, even though he must have known that the conflict between Borgia’s cruel and violent nature and his own compassion and pacifism would eventually become unbearable.
During the next six to eight months, Leonardo traveled extensively in Tuscany and the adjacent Romagna—Piombino, Siena, Arezzo, Cesena, Pesaro, Rimini—making exquisite maps of various regions, working at schemes to build canals and drain marshes, studying the movements of waves and tides, and filling his Notebooks with drawings of ingenious new fortifications designed to withstand the impact of cannonballs that were now being fired at increased velocities.39 During those months he kept a fairly detailed account of his movements and projects in a pocket-sized notebook, now known as Manuscript L.
In October, Leonardo joined Cesare Borgia in Imola, where the troops had taken up winter quarters. He spent the rest of the year designing new fortifications for the citadel and drawing a highly original and very beautiful circular map of the town. In Imola he also met the famous politician and writer Niccolò Machiavelli, one of the most figures of the Renaissance. Born in Florence, Machiavelli had entered the political service of the republic as a diplomat and rapidly risen in importance. He was sent on many prominent missions in Italy and France, during which he shrewdly observed the fine details of power politics, which he later described and analyzed in his bestknown work, The Prince. His “ideal” Renaissance prince was an amoral and cunning tyrant, apparently modeled on Cesare Borgia.
A brilliant intellectual, Machiavelli was also a renowned poet and playwright; Leonardo was likely fascinated by him, and they remained on friendly terms for many years. When they met in Imola, Machiavelli had been sent to Romagna as an envoy of the Florentine republic, probably to keep an eye on the devious Borgia, in whose company he remained for the whole winter. There is no record of the many conversations this extraordinary trio—Cesare Borgia, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Leonardo da Vinci—must have had during their long winter evenings at Imola. However, it seems that they brought Leonardo face-to-face with the numerous crimes that had accompanied Borgia’s rise to power.
Until then, Leonardo had always traveled independently of the army, working mostly on defensive systems without ever witnessing a battle. But in the extended company of both Borgia and Machiavelli, he must have heard firsthand accounts of Cesare’s many massacres and murders. Perhaps he was so repelled by them that he felt he had to leave Borgia’s employ. In his Notebooks, Leonardo mentions neither when he left Cesare, nor why, but by February 1503 he was back in Florence, and he withdrew money from his account, possibly because he had left Borgia abruptly, without being paid.
Leonardo did not have to wait long for a new appointment. Florence was at war with Pisa and had laid siege to the town, which was of great strategic importance because of its port. After several months of siege the Pisans still refused to surrender. The Florentine Signoria (the city’s government) asked Leonardo to come up with a military solution. In June he visited the region and, as in Friuli three years earlier, drew a detailed map of its topography before devising a strategic plan.40
When he returned to Florence, he proposed to divert the Arno away from Pisa, which would deprive the town of its water supply and also provide Florence with a pathway to the sea. He argued that this strategy would end the siege quickly and without bloodshed. Leonardo’s plan had the enthusiastic support of Machiavelli. It was accepted by the city fathers, and work on the project began in August. However, during the subsequent months it encountered many difficulties, from a shortage of manpower and military protection to unexpected floods. After half a year, the scheme was abandoned.
FLIGHTS OF FANCY
Leonardo used his study of the Arno valley to revive his old dream of creating a navigable waterway between Florence and Pisa. He drew numerous beautifully colored maps, showing how the proposed canal would avoid the steep hills west of Florence and instead run in a large arc past Prato and Pistoia, and cut through the heights of Serravalle before rejoining the Arno east of Pisa. He imagined that this waterway would provide irrigation for parched land as well as energy for numerous mills that could produce silk and paper, drive potters’ wheels, saw wood, and sharpen metal.41It was his hope that the multiple benefits of such an “industrial” canal would bring peace and prosperity to the warring cities. Leonardo’s dream of peace through technology was never realized, but he would probably have been pleased to know that five hundred years later the autostradalinking Florence with Lucca and Pisa would follow exactly the route he proposed for his waterway.
While he drew his maps of the Arno watershed, Leonardo studied the smooth and turbulent flows of water in rivers, the erosion of rocks, and the deposits of gravel and sand. On a larger scale, he speculated about the formation of the earth out of the waters of the sea and the movement of the “watery humors” through the macrocosm. He studied strata of rock formations and their fossil contents, which he recognized as telltale signs of life in the distant geological past. He saw mountain lakes as cutoff portions of the primeval sea, and pictured in his maps and paintings how they gradually found their way back to the oceans through narrow gorges.
In October 1503, while the war with Pisa dragged on, Leonardo received the tremendously prestigious commission for The Battle of Anghiari, the large fresco to be painted for the Signoria in its new council chamber at the Palazzo Vecchio. The artist accepted immediately. He registered his name once more with the painters’ guild of San Luca and was given sumptuous premises for himself and his household in the convent of Santa Maria Novella, including the spacious Sala del Papa (Hall of the Pope), which he used as his studio.
The following summer, Leonardo recorded the death of his father in a brief and rather formal statement: “On the 9th day of July 1504, on a Wednesday at seven o’clock, died Ser Piero da Vinci, notary to the Palazzo del Podestà, my father…. He was 80 years old and left tensons and two daughters.”42 From all we know, Leonardo was never close to his father, an ambitious man who was mostly interested in his own career. Nevertheless, it is surprising that he did not add any personal reflections to this entry in his private notebook. The distant tone of the note is reinforced by the unusual fact that it is not written in Leonardo’s customary mirror writing, but rather is written from left to right, as if it were a draft for a public statement.
Leonardo worked on the large cartoon for the fresco and on painting its central portion, The Struggle for the Standard, for about three years. But with the horrors of Cesare Borgia’s massacres still fresh in his mind, his Battle of Anghiari would not be a celebration of the military glory of Florence, as the city fathers expected. Instead, it would stand for all the world to see as his definitive condemnation of that pazzia bestialissima, the madness of war.43
During these years, Leonardo continued to reflect on the basic characteristics of the flow of water. In so doing, he realized that Euclidean geometry was insufficient to describe the shapes of waves and eddies. Around 1505 he began a new Notebook, now known as Codex Forster I, with the words “A book entitled ‘On Transformation,’ that is, of one body into another without diminution or increase of matter.”44 In forty folios of this Notebook he discussed and drew a great variety of transformations of geometrical shapes into one another—half circles into crescents, cubes into pyramids, spheres into cubes, and others. These pages were the beginning of his long fascination with a new type of geometry, a geometry of forms and transformations known today as topology.45
During the same years, Leonardo pursued with great intensity two engineering projects that excited his imagination. One was his long-contemplated plan for a waterway between Florence and Pisa; the other was his work on flying machines, which he took up with renewed vigor while he was also exploring the geometry of transformations and painting his battle scene in the Palazzo Vecchio.
Figure 4-4: Codex on the Flight of Birds, folio 8r; 1505, Biblioteca Reale, Turin
When he had built flying machines in Milan and tested them in his workshop in the Corte Vecchia, Leonardo’s main concern had been to find out how a human pilot could flap mechanical wings with enough force and velocity to compress the air underneath and be lifted up. For these tests he had designed various types of wings modeled after those of birds, bats, and flying fish. Now, ten years later, he embarked on careful and methodical observations of the flight of birds. He spent hours in the hills surrounding Florence, near Fiesole, observing the behavior of birds in flight, and he filled several Notebooks with drawings and comments that analyzed the birds’ turning maneuvers, their ability to maintain their equilibrium in the wind, and the detailed mechanisms of active flight. His aim was to design a flying machine that would be able, like a bird, to maneuver with agility, keep its balance in the wind, and move its wings with enough force to allow it to fly.46
Leonardo summarized his observations and analyses in a small Notebook called Codice sul volo degli uccelli (Codex on the Flight of Birds), which is full of gorgeous drawings of birds in flight as well as of complex mechanisms designed to mimic their precise movements (see Fig. 4-4). His observations and analyses led him to the conclusion that human flight with mechanical wings might not be possible because of the limitations of our anatomy. Birds, he observed, have powerful pectoral muscles to move their wings with a force humans cannot summon. However, he speculated that “soaring flight,” or gliding, might be possible. He would return to his research on human flight once more during the last phase of his life, combining the study of natural flight with theoretical studies of wind and air in an attempt to outline a comprehensive “science of the winds.”47
Leonardo continued to work on The Battle of Anghiari throughout 1505. However, because of defective materials, the painting suffered (the colors could not be fixed and began to run), and he was unable to repair the damage.48 At the same time, the French king, Louis XII, who was a great admirer of the artist, requested Leonardo’s presence at his court in Milan from the Signoria. The Florentines resisted, arguing that they had spent large sums of money for the fresco in their council chamber and needed it to be finished. A diplomatic tussle ensued that lasted several months, but eventually the Signoria was forced to relent. In May 1506, abandoning his fresco, Leonardo left once more for an extended sojourn in Milan.
A STAGE OF MATURITY
King Louis XII was represented at his court in Milan by his lieutenant, Charles d’Amboise, whom Louis had appointed as its governor. Charles was a powerful ruler, but convivial and keenly interested in promoting the arts. And, like his king, he was a great admirer of Leonardo. He received the artist warmly at the French court and treated him royally. Leonardo was given a generous allowance that was not tied to specific commissions, was consulted on all kinds of artistic and technical projects, and his company and service were eagerly sought by every important person at court. Leonardo was delighted to be back in Milan, the city where he had achieved great fame fifteen years earlier, and he easily fell back into the lifestyle of the court artist and engineer that he knew so well from his days at the Sforza court.
Once more there were plenty of masques and pageants for which he was asked to design splendid sets and costumes. As he had done before, Leonardo also worked on improving the locks and dams of some of the Lombard canals, and to show his gratitude to Charles d’Amboise, he designed a villa with luxurious gardens for the governor. According to the surviving notes, his garden designs were quite extraordinary. They included scented groves of oranges and lemons, a large aviary covered by a copper net to keep exotic birds inside while letting them fly around freely, a fan of revolving sails to create a pleasant breeze in the hot summers, a table with running water to cool wine, automatic musical instruments powered by water, and so on.49
At age fifty-five, Leonardo’s appearance must have approached that of the archetypal sage in his famous Turin self-portrait.50 Although his eyesight had weakened (he had worn glasses for a few years), his energies, artistic creativity, and intellectual drive continued undiminished. The sympathetic understanding and generosity of Charles d’Amboise gave him the freedom to dedicate as much time as he desired to his studies and to pursue them in any direction he wished. This unprecedented freedom, combined with his mature age, brought forth a period of broad systemic reflection, of revision and synthesis, allowing him to map out comprehensive treatises on many of his favorite subjects: the flow of water, the geometry of transformations, the movement of the human body, the growth of plants, and the science of painting.
The six years Leonardo spent at the French court in Milan marked a stage of maturity both in his science and his art. During those years the artist slowly developed and refined three of his mature master paintings: the Madonna and Child with Saint Anne, theLeda, and his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa. In these masterworks, Leonardo perfected the characteristics that established his uniqueness as a painter—the serpentine forms that brought movement and grace into his figures, the delicate smiles and gestures that mirrored the “movements of the soul,” and the subtle melting of shades, or sfumato, that became a unifying principle of his compositions. In all three of these works, Leonardo used his extensive knowledge of geology, botany, and human anatomy to explore the mystery of the procreative power of life, in the macrocosm as well as in the female body. As he continued to work on them year after year, he turned each painting into a meditation on the origin of life.51
In 1507, Leonardo met a young man, Francesco Melzi, who became his pupil, personal assistant, and inseparable companion. Melzi was the son of a Lombard aristocrat who owned a large estate at Vaprio, near Milan. When they met, Francesco was around fifteen and, according to Vasari, abellissimo fanciullo (“a very beautiful boy”), who showed considerable talent as a painter. The adolescent boy and the elderly artist were immediately attracted to each other, and soon after their first meeting, Francesco announced to his parents that he wished to join Leonardo’s household. For an aristocratic family, such a move was highly unusual, but surprisingly they did not object. Persuaded perhaps by Leonardo’s fame or his personal charisma, they not only allowed their son to join him, but invited the master and his entourage to stay at their spacious villa for almost two years after he left Milan. From that point on, Melzi never left Leonardo’s side. He took care of the master’s affairs, wrote entries in the Notebooks from his dictation, nursed him when he was ill, and eventually was entrusted with Leonardo’s legacy.
Toward the end of 1507, Leonardo’s beloved uncle Francesco died in Vinci and left his entire estate to his favorite nephew. But the family, led by Ser Piero’s youngest son, challenged the will, and Leonardo had to go to Florence to plead his case. He was obliged to stay there for several months, until judgment was finally reached in his favor.52 During these months, Leonardo was the guest of the wealthy Florentine patron Piero di Braccio Martelli, an accomplished mathematician, who was also extending his hospitality to the sculptor Giovan Francesco Rustici.
According to Vasari, Leonardo was very fond of Rustici, who had been his fellow apprentice in Verrocchio’s workshop. Rustici, Vasari tells us, was not only an excellent sculptor but also a delightful eccentric who loved to host fanciful feasts and play elaborate pranks. He kept a large menagerie in his studio that included an eagle, a raven, numerous snakes, and a porcupine trained like a dog, which would occasionally rub its pricks against people’s legs under the table. Leonardo, who loved animals and was himself used to playing practical jokes, felt very much at home in the relaxed and playful ambience of the Casa Martelli and gladly participated in Rustici’s spirited entertainments. According to Vasari, he also helped the sculptor model a group of bronze statues for the Baptistery of St. John in Florence during that time.53
Leonardo’s main activity in Martelli’s house, however, was of a far more serious nature. He used his ample free time to bring some order into his vast collection of notes, dating from the previous twenty years. He threw himself into this enormous task with great energy, systematically reviewing the contents of all his Notebooks. But he soon realized that rearranging the entire collection was too ambitious a job. He decided, therefore, to limit himself to a more manageable task, assembling a few selections on his favorite subjects—water, anatomy, painting, and botany—about which he would write comprehensive treatises. “Begun in Florence, in the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli, on the 22nd of March 1508,” he wrote on the opening page of a new codex, now known as Codex Arundel. “This will be a collection without any order, made up of numerous sheets that I have copied here in the hope of later putting them in order in their proper places, according to the subjects they treat.”54 Over the following years, Leonardo mapped out the structure of his treatises in some detail and began to compose them. He may have finished some, although no full treatises are extant among the existing Notebooks today.
While reviewing his notes in Martelli’s house in Florence, Leonardo decided that human anatomy was an area he needed to revisit thoroughly. During the next four years he performed more dissections than ever before, and his anatomical drawings reached their highest degree of accuracy. He planned to publish a formal treatise on anatomy, and outlined it in great detail. During his first phase of anatomical studies, twenty years earlier, he had been concerned with the physiology of vision, the pathways of the nerves, and the “seat of the soul.” Now he concentrated on the grand theme of the human body in motion.
In his outline, Leonardo described in meticulous detail how he would demonstrate “in 120 books” the combined actions of nerves, muscles, tendons, and bones. “My configuration of the human body will be demonstrated to you just as if you had the natural man before you,” he announced, and he explained why this would require numerous dissections.
You must understand that such knowledge will not leave you satisfied on account of the very great confusion that results from the mix-up of membranes with veins, arteries, nerves, tendons, muscles, bones, and blood….
Therefore it is necessary to perform more dissections, of which you need 3 to have full knowledge of the veins and arteries, destroying with the utmost diligence all the rest; and another 3 to have knowledge of the membranes; and 3 for the tendons, muscles, and ligaments; 3 for the bones and cartilages; and 3 for the anatomy of the bones which have to be sawn through to demonstrate which is hollow and which is not….
Through my plan…there will be placed before you 3 or 4 demonstrations of each part from different aspects in such a way that you will retain a true and full knowledge of what you want to know about the human body.55
We do not know how many of the 120 chapters (or “books”) of his treatise Leonardo composed. However, the superb drawings that survived, which are now in the Windsor Collection, make it evident that his promises were not exaggerated.
In his Anatomical Studies, Leonardo gives a vivid description of the dreadful conditions under which he had to work. As there were no chemicals to preserve the cadavers, they would begin to decompose before he had time to examine and draw them properly. To avoid accusations of heresy, he worked at night, lighting his dissection room by candles, which must have made the experience even more macabre. “You will perhaps be impeded by your stomach,” he writes, addressing an imaginary apprentice, “and if this does not impede you, you will perhaps be impeded by the fear of living through the night hours in the company of these corpses, quartered and flayed and frightening to behold.”
It is evident that Leonardo needed a steely will to overcome his own aversion, but he persevered and carried out his dissections with the most delicate care and attention to detail, “taking away in its minutest particles all the flesh” to expose blood vessels, muscles, or bones until the corpse’s state of decay was too advanced to continue. “One single body was not sufficient for enough time,” he explains, “so it was necessary to proceed little by little with as many bodies as would render the complete knowledge. This I repeated twice in order to observe the differences.”56
While he was still in Florence going through his notes and planning his treatises, Leonardo was able to perform a postmortem on an old man he met by chance at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, where he had done his earlier anatomical studies, and who died in his presence. This dissection became a milestone in his anatomical work and led him to some of his most important medical discoveries. The story itself is highly significant and very moving. It shows how Leonardo was capable of performing his most precise dissections and scientific analyses without losing sight of human dignity:
And this old man, a few hours before his death, told me that he was over a hundred years old and that he felt nothing wrong with his body other than weakness. And thus, while sitting on a bed in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, without any movement or other sign of any mishap, he passed out of this life.—And I made an anatomy of him in order to see the cause of so sweet a death.57
Based on this anatomy, he brilliantly diagnosed that the old man had died from a thickening and narrowing of his blood vessels, the condition that became known as arteriosclerosis more than three hundred years after Leonardo discovered it.58
LAST YEARS IN MILAN
Upon his return to Milan, Leonardo continued his anatomical studies. He also began to assemble his numerous notes and instructions on painting into a sizable collection, known as Libro A (it has since been lost). From this collection, Francesco Melzi compiled the famous Trattato della pittura (Treatise on Painting) after Leonardo’s death.59 Among the many subjects in the Trattato are extensive observations on the forms and visual appearance of plants and trees. Most of these observations, which became known as Leonardo’s “botany for painters,” originated in Milan during the years 1508–12, when he devoted considerable time to botanical thought and drawings. Carlo Pedretti concluded that Melzi must have copied the botanical chapters of the Trattato from an entire lost manuscript on botany written by Leonardo.60
At the same time that he was working on his notes on anatomy, botany, and painting, and continuing work on the Leda and the Mona Lisa, Leonardo was asked by one of the king’s principal generals, Marshal Trivulzio, to design for him a tomb with a life-size equestrian statue.61 And so for the second time, almost fifteen years after abandoning the casting of il cavallo, Leonardo embarked on making extensive studies and designs for an equestrian statue in bronze. It was a project he would develop for three years, during which work on building the chapel for the Trivulzio monument had begun. But once again, external circumstances intervened. Political turmoil would soon engulf the city, and the bronze statue would never be cast.
In 1510, Leonardo had the good fortune to meet a brilliant young anatomist, Marcantonio della Torre, who had recently been appointed professor of medicine at the University of Pavia. Leonardo engaged Marcantonio in extensive discussions on anatomy, much as he had done with Luca Pacioli on geometry fifteen years earlier. Just as Pacioli had introduced him to the Latin editions of Euclid, the Greek authority on geometry, so della Torre likely introduced him to the Latin editions of Galen, the Greek authority on anatomy and medicine.62
Unfortunately, their discussions were short-lived. In the following year, della Torre died of the plague in Riva, where he had gone to treat victims of an epidemic. Nevertheless, this short association had a significant influence on Leonardo’s understanding of anatomy. His dissections took on a new level of sophistication, and he expanded his research far beyond the areas involved in the movement of the human body. He dissected various animals to compare their anatomies to human anatomy. And he began to delve further into the body to study the functions of the internal organs, respiration, and the flow of blood.
During this time the political landscape of Italy shifted again, and war broke out. In 1509, Louis XII, in alliance with the Vatican, had achieved a brilliant victory over the Venetians. But in 1510, Pope Julius II made peace with Venice and persuaded several European rulers to form a Holy League in order to drive the French “barbarians” from Italy. The French troops resisted for a while, but in December 1511 the League, using Swiss mercenaries to do the fighting, stormed Milan, expelled the French, and nominally installed Maximiliano Sforza, the young son of Ludovico, on the ducal throne his father had occupied.
Leonardo, finding himself once again unwelcome in the city that had treated him so well, retired to the Melzi estate in Vaprio on the river Adda, some twenty miles distant. Thanks to the generosity of the Melzi family, he and his entourage resided there comfortably for almost two years. While the political constellations in Italy continued to change, Leonardo calmly went about his research, dissecting animals, studying the turbulent waters of the Adda, and making a series of exquisite small-scale drawings of the surrounding regions. He also carried out extensive botanical studies in the spacious gardens of the estate and the surrounding areas. In exchange for the family’s hospitality, Leonardo produced splendid designs for the enlargement of the Villa Melzi, and for landscaping the gardens, some of which were realized in later years.63
FRUSTRATION IN ROME
Although Leonardo was comfortable in Vaprio, it was clear that he could not stay there indefinitely. Sooner or later he would have to find another patron who could provide him with the financial means to support himself, his household, and his continuing scientific research. Fortunately, such an opportunity soon presented itself. In February of 1513, Pope Julius II died in Rome, and Giovanni de’ Medici, the younger son of Lorenzo il Magnifico, was elected to the papacy under the name of Leo X. His brother Giuliano became commander in chief of the papal troops. With their support, the Medici, after an absence of almost twenty years, were able to reestablish themselves as the rulers of Florence.
Soon after his brother ascended to the papacy, Giuliano de’ Medici invited Leonardo to the papal court in Rome. The two had likely met at the court in Milan, and Giuliano was well aware of Leonardo’s reputation as a military engineer. Giuliano de’ Medici was also an eager student of natural philosophy. Leonardo could not have hoped for a more powerful and sympathetic patron, and when invited was only too glad to join the papal court.
In September 1513 he embarked on the journey to Rome with several of his pupils, including Francesco Melzi, and with numerous chests and trunks containing his personal belongings—his painting materials, probably some tools and scientific instruments, his voluminous Notebooks, and several paintings in various stages of completion, including the Leda, the Mona Lisa, and the Saint Anne. After traveling many weeks, the caravan reached Rome sometime in November or December.
Giuliano de’ Medici had prepared spacious quarters in the Belvedere, a luxurious villa near the papal palace inside the Vatican. Leonardo’s suite included several bedrooms, a kitchen, and a large studio and workshop where he could paint and conduct experiments. He was treated with deference and respect, and given everything he needed, including a regular allowance, without specific obligations. And yet, for Leonardo, this was not a happy time.
At sixty-one, he was now an old man. His long beard was white, his eyesight was failing. And though he was well respected—even venerated—as a great sage, he was no longer in fashion as an artist. His reputation as a painter had been eclipsed by younger rivals like Michelangelo and Raphael, who were both at the height of their fame. Both had painted magnificent frescoes in the Vatican—Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel and Raphael in the so-called Stanze (Rooms), the private apartments of Pope Julius II. The new pope, Leo X, attracted scores of young artists to Rome and handed out lavish commissions, but none of them went to the old master from Florence. Although Leonardo once again was living in great comfort at court, he was no longer the center of the court’s attention. He felt lonely and depressed. It was during this time of uncertainty and discontent that he drew his celebrated self-portrait.64
Nonetheless, Leonardo continued his scientific studies with undiminished energy. Having been occupied with multiple projects for the past thirty years, working in this way had become second nature to him. His age may have slowed him down, but it certainly did not restrict or diminish his mental processes. After settling into his new home, he began extensive botanical studies in the sumptuous gardens of the Belvedere. He continued to explore the geometry of transformations, and designed a large parabolic mirror for capturing solar energy to boil water, which he thought could be useful to the dyers of textiles. And, he invented a machine for making rope, and a rolling mill for producing metal strips from which coins could be minted.65
He also continued his dissections, probably at the hospital of Santo Spirito, which was in the immediate vicinity of the Vatican. These dissections marked the last phase of his anatomical research, in which he concentrated on the processes of reproduction and the development of the embryo. Leonardo’s studies included highly original speculations about the origin of the embryo’s cognitive processes or, in his terminology, of the embryo’s soul.66 Unfortunately, these speculations contradicted the official Church doctrine about the divine nature of the human soul and were thus considered heretical by Pope Leo X. As a result, Leonardo was banned from conducting further autopsies or human dissections.67
Thus, in addition to being eclipsed as an artist, Leonardo now found himself prevented from continuing his research in embryology, his most advanced anatomical work. He may also have suffered from an illness in 1514.68 At any rate, he was given to morbid thoughts, filling his Notebooks with apocalyptic tales of floods and other terrifying catastrophes. However, simply writing about storms and floods was not enough for Leonardo. He also had to draw them and analyze them scientifically. The result was a series of a dozen extraordinary drawings in somber black chalk known as the “deluge drawings,” which are now a part of the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle and are accompanied by Leonardo’s powerful narrative of his apocalyptic visions. The narrative is strongly reminiscent of Leonardo’s description of how to paint a battle, composed twenty years earlier.69Several pages long, it is full of horror, drama, and violence; there are highly emotional passages interspersed with detached, analytical ones, with precise descriptions of cascades and water and air currents, and detailed instructions on how to paint optical effects generated by storm clouds and falling rain. The overwhelming impression evoked by Leonardo’s narrative is that of despair, of the futility and frailty of human beings confronting the cataclysmic forces of the deluge. He writes in one passage:
One will see the dark gloomy air beaten by the rush of different and convoluting winds, which are mingled with the weight of the continuous rain, and which are carrying helter-skelter an infinite number of branches torn from the trees, entangled with countless autumn leaves. The ancient trees will be seen uprooted and torn to pieces by the fury of the winds…. Oh how many will you see closing their ears with their hands to shut out the tremendous noises made in the darkened air by the raging of the winds…. Others, with gestures of hopelessness, took their own lives, despairing of being able to endure such suffering; and of these, some flung themselves from high rocks, others strangled themselves with their own hands…. 70
Figure 4-5: Deluge Study, c. 1515, Windsor Collection, Landscapes, Plants, and Water Studies, folio 59r
The drawings that illustrate his apocalyptic narrative are dark, violent, menacing, and disturbing. Nonetheless, they are astonishingly accurate in their renderings of water and air turbulence. Throughout his life, Leonardo had carefully studied the forms of waves, eddies, waterfalls, vortices, and air currents. Here, in old age, he summed up his knowledge of turbulence. Beyond their expressive emotional power, the deluge drawings can be seen as sophisticated mathematical diagrams, presenting a visual catalog of turbulent flows that would not look out of place in a modern textbook on fluid dynamics (see Fig. 4-5).
In Rome, Leonardo finished the three masterpieces he had brought with him from Milan—the Saint Anne, the Mona Lisa, and the Leda.71 And he painted Saint John the Baptist, his last and perhaps most intriguing work. Like all of Leonardo’s great paintings,Saint John the Baptist is unique in several ways. Bereft of all religious symbolism, the saint is neither the traditional child nor the ascetic of the desert, but is shown as a graceful young man whose charming face and naked torso display a seductive, sensuous beauty. Not surprisingly, the painting has often been seen as incongruous, sometimes even blasphemous.
From an artistic point of view, the picture exemplifies several of the painter’s original contributions to Renaissance art—a dramatic use of chiaroscuro to make the figure stand out against a strikingly dark background, a subtle and intriguing spiral movement of the body, and the full use of sfumato to create a pervading sense of mystery. But Leonardo’s “manifesto on the art of painting,” as David Arasse calls it,72 goes beyond mere technical achievements. About ten years earlier Leonardo had written a famous passage in his Treatise on Painting about the artist’s power to inflame the viewer to love:
The painter…seduces the spirits of men to fall in love with and to love a painting that does not represent a living woman. It has happened to me that I have painted a picture with a religious theme, bought by a lover who wanted to remove the attributes of divinity from it so that he could kiss it without guilt; but in the end, his conscience overcame his sighs and desires, and he had to remove the picture from his house.73
In Saint John the Baptist, Leonardo demonstrates this power to inflame the viewer once again. And this time the subject is not a woman, but an angelic, mysterious, and sensuous young man. The saint’s alluring smile and enigmatic gesture—the index finger pointing heaven-ward—draw viewers in emotionally with a magnetism that many have found disturbing, probably because of its androgynous nature. However, it is also quite captivating and moving. Having kept his sexual feelings private throughout his life, Leonardo, it seems to me, finally declares himself to the world in his last painting. Saint John the Baptist is his personal genius and embodies his desire, which is fully revealed in its androgynous haunting beauty, grace, and transcendence.
LAST JOURNEYS
During his years in Rome, Leonardo was consulted by his patron Giuliano de’ Medici and by other members of the Medici family about various architectural and engineering projects, which involved making trips to Civitavecchia, the port of Rome, as well as longer journeys to Parma, Piacenza, Florence, and Milan. That he could manage to travel that much at his advanced age, when such journeys were arduous and long, in addition to continuing his extensive scientific studies and his painting, is nothing short of miraculous.
While Leonardo patiently brushed fine layers of oil on his panels to perfect the magical luminosities of his last paintings, political events once again intervened in his life, changing it decisively for the last time. In January 1515 the French king Louis XII died. He was succeeded by his cousin François I. The young king—not yet twenty when he ascended the throne—aspired to be a noble warrior in the mold of the French chivalric knights. He enthusiastically went into battle in the front lines of his troops. Yet he also loved poetry, classical literature, and philosophy as well as music, dancing, and other courtly pleasures.
Soon after he was crowned king, François crossed the Alps with his troops to reconquer Lombardy. The French army swept aside the Italian troops and Swiss mercenaries, and in July, François I captured Maximiliano Sforza and entered Milan in triumph. But in a magnanimous gesture, he did not throw Maximiliano into prison but welcomed him at his court as a cousin.74 The pope had initially allied himself with the Milanese to fight the French troops. But when François emerged victorious, he realized the power of the new king and proposed peace talks, which were held in October in Bologna.
Leonardo may well have accompanied Pope Leo X to Bologna, although there is no clear documentation of his presence in the papal suite. If he did make the journey, however, he would have met the young king; and soon François would become his last and most generous patron. What we know from the historical record is that Giuliano de’ Medici asked Leonardo to create an unusual entertainment for the event. Although Leonardo had very little time for the project, he produced a unique piece of art and technology—a mechanical lion. As Vasari described it, “After making a few steps, [the lion] opened its breast to reveal a cluster of lilies.”
Powered by springs and a system of wheels, the lion was a masterpiece of Leonardo’s stagecraft, and its symbolism was ideal for the peace talks being conducted between the French king and the pope. The lion alluded to the name of the pope, Leo; the stylized lily (or fleur de lis) was the symbol of French royalty, and also of Florence. By revealing the lilies in its heart, Leonardo’s lion offered, with a grand flourish, a powerful symbol of the union between France and Florence, and between the French king and the Medici pope. The automaton, which has since disappeared, greatly impressed the assembled statesmen. It was mentioned repeatedly and with great enthusiasm by commentators even a hundred years later.75
François I clearly was enchanted and flattered by Leonardo’s mechanical lion. If the artist was indeed present, the king may have personally offered him the position of peintre du Roy (royal painter) at his court in France. In any event, offer it he did. But Leonardo did not accept the king’s offer immediately. However, when Giuliano de’ Medici died a few months later, he no longer hesitated. He knew that he could not find a more generous and understanding patron than the young French ruler.
Sometime toward the end of 1516, Leonardo put his affairs in order and prepared to make the move across the Alps. He packed his trunks with everything he owned, including all of his Notebooks and his now-completed master paintings, knowing that he was not likely to return to his native lands. He set off on the long journey on horseback with the faithful Melzi and a couple of servants, his chests and trunks carried by several mules. From Rome the caravan took the familiar route north to Florence and Milan, the cities in which Leonardo had spent most of his life. From Milan, the travelers proceeded to Turin, crossed the Alps to Grenoble, and reached the Rhône valley at Lyon. There they probably continued westward until they reached the river Cher and followed it to the Loire, ending up at Amboise, near Tours, after a journey of about three months.76
THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE KING
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the mild climate and natural beauty of the Loire valley attracted successive generations of French royalty and nobility, who built splendid castles and elegant mansions along the river. The Château d’Amboise was the home of French kings and queens for over 150 years. François I had spent his childhood and youth there, and used it as his principal residence.
The king received Leonardo at Amboise with boundless generosity. He installed the artist and his entourage in the spacious manor of Cloux, known today as Clos-Lucé, adjacent to the château. The manor house had comfortable rooms with high-vaulted ceilings, including a studio, a library, a sitting room, and several bedrooms. The property included elegant gardens, a vineyard, meadows and trees, and a stream for fishing.77 The manor’s gardener was Italian, as were several members of the court, allowing Leonardo to speak in his native tongue.
François also granted his famous guest a generous income. In return, he asked nothing but the pleasure of his company, which he enjoyed almost every day. There was a secret underground tunnel between Cloux and the royal castle, which allowed the king to visit Leonardo easily for long conversations whenever he wished to do so. Just as Alexander the Great, another young warrior-king, had been tutored by Aristotle, the great philosopher of antiquity, so François I was now tutored by Leonardo da Vinci, the great sage and genius of the Renaissance. He never tired of hearing Leonardo explain to him the subtleties of his science of living forms—the complexities of turbulent water and air, the formation of rocks and the origin of fossils, the intricacies of human movement and the flight of birds, the nature of light and perspective, the canons of beauty and proportion, the pathways of the senses and the vital spirits that sustain our life, and the origin of human will and power in the seat of the soul.
The king treasured his conversations with Leonardo, as we know from the firsthand account of the Florentine goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, who worked at the court of François I twenty years after Leonardo’s death. Cellini wrote,
I cannot resist repeating the words which I heard the King say about him, in the presence of the Cardinal of Ferrara and the Cardinal of Lorraine and the King of Navarre; he said that he did not believe that a man had ever been born who knew as much as Leonardo, not only in the spheres of painting, sculpture and architecture, but that he was also a very great philosopher.78
Leonardo, who had always been famous as an artist and engineer, was deeply appreciated and acclaimed by the king of France for his intellectual achievements as a philosopher, or, as we would say today, a scientist.
One of the few documents about Leonardo’s final years at Amboise is the travel diary of Antonio de Beatis, secretary to the Cardinal of Aragon, who visited the artist with the cardinal in October 1517. Beatis wrote that Leonardo appeared to be “over 70 years old” (in reality he was 65) and that he could no longer work in color, “for he is paralyzed in the right arm,” but that he could still draw, and was assisted by a pupil (no doubt Francesco Melzi) who “worked to excellent effect” under the master’s supervision.79 Art historians surmise that Leonardo’s paralysis, probably as a result of a stroke, did not prevent him from writing and drawing, which he did with his left hand. But it would have affected the nuanced painting he was famous for, which would have required the freedom to move both arms. For Leonardo, this handicap, combined with his failing eyesight, must have been deeply depressing.
Beatis reported that Leonardo showed the cardinal three master paintings—“the portrait of a certain Florentine lady” (the Mona Lisa), Saint John the Baptist, and the Madonna and Child with Saint Anne. The cardinal and his secretary were amazed by Leonardo’s anatomical drawings as well as his writings on other subjects.80 Then he added: “All these books, written in Italian, will be a source of pleasure and profit when they appear.”81 This leaves one with the impression that Leonardo discussed with the cardinal his plans to publish the Notebooks.
Indeed, Leonardo spent most of his working time at Cloux systematically reorganizing his Notebooks, most likely in view of future publication. In spite of his diminished health, he did so with characteristic enthusiasm and intellectual vigor, making plans for at least half a dozen new treatises or discourses.82 From the titles he listed, it is clear that he was reviewing his entire life’s work—his science of the “qualities of forms”83—trying to summarize it in a few representative treatises.
Leonardo began his list with the planned Treatise on Painting as well as a Treatise on Light and Shade. He decided to lay out, at least in principle, the mathematical foundations of his science, and to do so, planned to write two mathematical treatises. The first, aBook on Perspective, would deal with the laws of perspective and geometrical optics that needed to be mastered in order to understand vision, the representation of solid objects, and the rendering of light and shade. The second, a Treatise on Continuous Quantitywith a companion volume titled De ludo geometrico (On the Game of Geometry), would discuss the geometry of transformations, which Leonardo considered to be the appropriate mathematics for describing the qualities of living forms.84 He had explored this new type of geometry for over ten years and continued to do so at Cloux. With regard to anatomy, Leonardo proposed to write a Discourse on the nerves, muscles, tendons, membranes, and ligaments as well as a Special book on the muscles and movements of the limbs. Together, these two books were to represent the author’s definitive treatment of the human body in motion.
Since historians do not know how many treatises were contained in Leonardo’s lost Notebooks, it is difficult to judge to what extent the plan he outlined at Cloux would have allowed him to publish the results of his lifelong scientific research as an integrated body of knowledge. However, it is evident that the treatises he proposed, together with those that were well advanced and have been preserved, would have gone a long way toward accomplishing such a goal. In Leonardo’s mind, his science of living forms was certainly an integrated whole. At the end of his life, his problems were no longer conceptual; they were simply the limitations of time and energy. As he wrote several years before his death, “I have been impeded neither by avarice nor by negligence, but only by time.”85 And yet, Leonardo never gave up. In June 1518 he wrote what may have been the last entry in his Notebooks: “I shall go on.”86
During his time at Amboise, Leonardo also advised the king on various architectural and engineering projects, in which he revived his conception of buildings and cities as “open systems” (to use our modern term), in which people, material goods, food, water, and waste need to move and flow easily for the system to remain healthy.87 He produced designs for rebuilding the royal château, including water closets connected by flushing channels within the walls and ventilating shafts that reached all the way up to the roof.88In December 1517 he accompanied the king to Romorantin, some fifty miles from Amboise, where François I wanted to build a new capital and royal residence. Leonardo stayed in Romorantin for several weeks, working on plans for a splendid palace and for an ideal “healthy” city, based on the revolutionary designs he had developed in Milan more than thirty years earlier.89
Like most Renaissance courts, that of François I indulged in lavish pageants and dazzling spectacles, perhaps even more so than other courts because of the energetic and convivial nature of its young king. Leonardo contributed to these festivities, creating spectacular performances, designing costumes and royal emblems, and showing off his stage magic. To do so, he had recourse to the large repertoire of designs and inventions he had produced during his years at the Sforza court. This included his most famous creation, the “Masque of the Planets,” which was performed at Amboise in a new production in May 1518.
But in the midst of the gaiety and pomp, Leonardo’s physical strength continued to decline. His conversations with the king, however, went on. Nor was he perturbed by contemplating his approaching death. “Just as a well-spent day brings a happy sleep,” he had written thirty years earlier, “so a well-employed life brings a happy death.”90 In April 1519, shortly after his sixty-seventh birthday, Leonardo went to see a notary and carefully recorded his last will and testament. He set out in great detail the customary arrangements for his burial, left the savings remaining in his account at Santa Maria Nuova to his half brothers, and made various bequests to his servants.91 To Francesco Melzi, whom he named as executor of his estate, he left all his personal belongings as well as his entire artistic and intellectual legacy, including his paintings and the complete collection of his Notebooks.
A few days after completing his will, on May 2, 1519, Leonardo da Vinci died in the manor of Cloux—according to legend, in the arms of the king of France.
THE FATE OF THE NOTEBOOKS
After Leonardo’s death, Francesco Melzi stayed at Amboise for several months to take care of Leonardo’s affairs. He first notified Leonardo’s family, conveying his grief to them in a moving letter:
He was like the best of fathers to me, and the grief that I felt at his death seems to me impossible to express. As long as there is breath in my body, I shall feel the eternal sadness it caused and with true reason, for he gave me every day proof of a passionate and ardent affection. Each of us must mourn the loss of a man that nature is powerless to recreate.92
Before returning to Milan, Melzi entrusted to the king the paintings his master had brought to France; and there they remained, eventually ending up at the Louvre. The Notebooks, by contrast, were scattered all over Europe. Some of them were disassembled, cut into pieces arbitrarily, and reassembled into various collections. In the process, over the centuries more than half of the manuscripts disappeared. The dispersion of Leonardo’s Notebooks is convoluted and distressing, and like his biography, it has been documented by scholars only fairly recently, with a great deal of detective work.93
When Melzi returned to Lombardy, he set aside a special room in his villa at Vaprio to exhibit his master’s Notebooks. Over the years he proudly showed them to visitors, including the artists and writers Vasari and Giovanni Lomazzo. Francesco hired two scribes to help him classify Leonardo’s notes and compile the anthology known today as Trattato della pittura (Treatise on Painting). The work, even though incomplete, was acquired by the duke of Urbino and then by the Vatican, where it was cataloged as Codex Urbinas and eventually published in 1651.
After Melzi’s death in 1570, his son Orazio, who did not share his father’s reverence for the great Leonardo, carelessly stuffed the Notebooks into several chests in the villa’s attic. When it became known that batches of Leonardo’s exquisite drawings could easily be obtained from Orazio, souvenir hunters turned up at Vaprio; they were allowed to take whatever they wanted. Pompeo Leoni of Arezzo, sculptor at the court of Madrid, obtained close to fifty bound volumes in addition to about two thousand single sheets, which he took to Spain in 1590. Thus, at the turn of the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, Spain had the largest concentration of Leonardo’s writings and drawings.
Leoni sorted and rearranged the manuscripts according to his own tastes, cutting them up, throwing away what he deemed uninteresting, and pasting what he liked on large folios, which he bound into two volumes. The first, known as Codex Atlanticus because of its large, atlassize folios, changed hands a couple of times after Leoni’s death before ending up at the Ambrosiana Library in Milan. The second volume was bought from Leoni’s heirs by the British art collector Lord Arundel, who donated it to the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, where the pages were detached and mounted individually. Lord Arundel also bought another large collection of manuscripts in Spain, which now bears his name, Codex Arundel, and is housed in the British Library.
Leoni also sold several complete Notebooks. Twelve of those were eventually given to the Ambrosiana Library; others disappeared. Pages were torn from some and ended up in various European libraries and museums. One collection, acquired in 1750 by Prince Trivulzio and known as Codex Trivulzianus, is now in the Trivulziana Library in Milan, which bears the name of the prince’s family.
By the eighteenth century, Leonardo’s manuscripts were in great demand, especially among English art collectors. Lord Lytton purchased three bound Notebooks and later sold them to a certain John Forster, who in turn bequeathed them to the Victoria and Albert Museum. They are now known as Codices Forster I, II, and III. Another complete Notebook, which had been obtained directly from Orazio Melzi, passed through the hands of a succession of Italian artists before it was bought by the Earl of Leicester, and thus acquired the name Codex Leicester.
When Napoleon Bonaparte entered Milan in 1796 at the height of his Italian campaign, he ordered, with an imperial gesture, the transfer of all the Notebooks from the Ambrosiana Library to Paris. The Codex Atlanticus was later returned to the Ambrosiana, but the twelve complete Notebooks remained at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where they have been designated by the initials A–M (excluding J).
In the mid-nineteenth century, Guglielmo Libri, professor of mathematics and historian of science, stole several folios from Manuscripts A and B at the Bibliothèque Nationale. He also removed the small Codice sul volo degli uccelli (Codex on the Flight of Birds), which had been attached to Manuscript B. After the theft, Libri fled to England where he assembled the single folios into two collections and sold them to Lord Ashburnham. Eventually they were returned to Paris and reattached to Manuscripts A and B. Nonetheless, they are still known today as Ashburnham I and II. The Codex sul volo was disassembled by Libri. Its pieces passed through several hands, including those of the Russian prince Theodore Sabachnikoff, who donated the pieces to the Royal Library in Turin, where the entire codex was finally reassembled.
In 1980 the Codex Leicester was sold at auction by the heirs of the earl. It was bought by the American petroleum magnate and collector Armand Hammer, who renamed it Codex Hammer. After Hammer’s death, the codex was auctioned again and was bought by the software billionaire Bill Gates. Gates restored the original name, Codex Leicester, but then proceeded to cut up the Notebook into individual pieces in the fashion of Leoni and other wealthy art collectors.
The Codex Leicester is the only Notebook remaining in private possession today. The other manuscripts—Notebooks in their original bound forms of various sizes, the large artificial collections, torn pages, and isolated folios—are all housed in libraries and museums. More than half of the original manuscripts have been lost, although some may still exist, gathering dust unseen in private European libraries. Indeed, two complete Notebooks were discovered in the labyrinth of the stacks in the National Library in Madrid as recently as 1965. Designated Codices Madrid I and II, they brought to light many previously unknown aspects of Leonardo’s works, including studies in mathematics, mechanical and hydraulic engineering, optics, and perspective, as well as inventories of Leonardo’s personal library.94
While Leonardo’s paintings have been admired by countless art lovers during his lifetime and throughout the centuries, his Notebooks came fully to light only in the late nineteenth century, when they were finally transcribed and published. Today the writings of this brilliant pioneer of modern science are available to scholars in excellent facsimile editions and clear transcriptions. His scientific and technical drawings are frequently exhibited today, sometimes supplemented by wooden models of the machines he designed. Nevertheless, more than five hundred years after his birth, the science of Leonardo is still not widely known, and is often misunderstood.