The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence

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The Young Leonardo Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence Leonardo da Vinci is often presented as the “Transcendent Genius,” removed from or ahead of his time. This book, however, attempts to understand him in the context of Renaissance Florence. Larry J. Feinberg explores Leonardo’s origins and the beginning of his career as an artist. While celebrating his many artistic achievements, the book illuminates his debt to other artists’ works and his struggles to gain and retain patronage, as well as his career and personal difficulties. Feinberg examines the range of Leonardo’s interests – including aerodynamics, anatomy, astronomy, botany, geology, hydraulics, optics, and warfare technology – to clarify how the artist’s broad intellectual curiosity informed his art. Situating the artist within the political, social, cultural, and artistic context of mid- and late-fifteenth-century Florence, Feinberg shows how this environment influenced Leonardo’s artistic output and laid the groundwork for the achievements of his mature works. Larry J. Feinberg is the Director and CEO of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He is the editor of two reference volumes on the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Italian Paintings before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago and French and English Paintings from 1600 to 1800 in the Art Institute of Chicago. He has also been the co-organizer and catalog author for several major exhibitions, including The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence; Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream; and From Studio to Studiolo: Florentine Draftsmanship under the First Medici Grand Dukes.

The Young Leonardo Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence LARRY J. FEINBERG

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107002395  C Larry J. Feinberg 2011

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Feinberg, Larry J. The young Leonardo : art and life in fifteenth-century Florence / Larry J. Feinberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-00239-5 (hardback) 1. Leonardo, da Vinci, 1452–1519. 2. Artists – Italy – Biography. 3. Florence (Italy) – Civilization. 4. Florence (Italy) – History – 1421–1737. I. Title. n6923.l33f45 2011 709.2–dc22 [B] 2011011501 isbn 978-1-107-00239-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Figures Acknowledgments

page vii xi

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1. Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2. Florence and Cosimo the Elder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 3. The Cultural Climate of Florence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 4. First Years in Florence and the Verrocchio Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 5. First Works in Florence and the Artistic Milieu . . . . . . . . . 33 6. Early Pursuits in Engineering – Hydraulics and the Movement of Water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 7. The Bust of a Warrior and Leonardo’s Creative Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 8. Early Participation in the Medici Court . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 9. Leonardo’s Personality and Place in Florentine Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 10. Important Productions and Collaborations in the Verrocchio Shop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 11. Leonardo’s Colleagues in the Workshop. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 12. Leonardo’s Madonna of the Carnation and the Exploration of Optics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

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13. The Benois Madonna and Continued Meditations on the Theme of Sight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 14. The Madonna of the Cat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 15. Leonardo, the Medici, and Public Executions . . . . . . . . . . . 99 16. Leonardo and Ginevra de’ Benci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 17. Leonardo as Portraitist and Master of the Visual Pun . . . 113 18. The Young Sculptor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 19. The Madonna Litta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 20. The Adoration of the Magi and Invention of the High Renaissance Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 21. The Adoration and Leonardo’s Military Interests . . . . . . . . 139 22. Leonardo and Allegorical Conceits for the Medici Court . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 23. Early Ideas for the Last Supper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 24. Leonardo and the Saint Sebastian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 25. Saint Jerome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 26. First Thoughts for the Virgin of the Rocks and the Invention of the Mary Magdalene-Courtesan Genre . . . 171 27. Milan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 28. Leonardo and the Sforza Court . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Bibliography with Endnotes

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Index

201

Figures

1 View of the town of Vinci page 4 2 Filippo Lippi, Adoration of the Christ Child 19 3 Leonardo da Vinci, Study of the Virgin Nursing with St. John the Baptist, Figure and Head Studies, Heads of a Lion and Dragon 21 4 Leonardo da Vinci, Optical Studies and Resting Dog 31 5 Workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio (including Leonardo da Vinci), Tobias and the Angel 35 6 Leonardo da Vinci, View of the Arno Valley 36 7 Leonardo da Vinci, Devices for Raising Water (including the Archimedes’ Screw) and Other Studies 41 8 Leonardo da Vinci, Devices for a Diver, for Walking on Water, and Various Studies for Machines 43 9 Leonardo da Vinci, Cross-Section of a Man’s Head, Showing Three Chambers for Reception, Processing, and Storage (Memory) of Sensory Impressions 44 10 Leonardo da Vinci, Bust of a Warrior in Profile 48 11 After Andrea del Verrocchio, Darius 48 12 Leonardo da Vinci, Bust of a Man 49 13 Leonardo da Vinci, Bust of a Man 50 14 Leonardo da Vinci, Head of an Old Man 51 15 Workshop of Verrocchio, Portrait of Tom´as Vald´ez 52 16 Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci, Study for a Joust Standard for Giuliano de’ Medici 57 17 Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle and Phyllis 61 18 Francesco Melzi (?), Profile Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci 62 19 Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of an Old Man 63 20 Leonardo da Vinci, St. John the Baptist 68 vii

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Figures

21 Lorenzo di Credi, Virgin and Child with Saints John and Donato 22 Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci, Baptism of Christ 23 Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo, Shooting of Saint Sebastian 24 Leonardo da Vinci, Annunciation 25 Leonardo da Vinci, Drapery Study 26 Leonardo da Vinci, Study of a Female Head 27 Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child with a Carnation 28 Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child with Flowers (Benois Madonna) 29 Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child, Profile Studies, Technical Sketches, and Schematic Studies of Eyes with Visual Rays 30 Detail of Schematic Studies of Eyes with Visual Rays in fig. 29 31 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Machines (verso of fig. 32) 32 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Heads and Machines 33 Leonardo da Vinci, Sketches of a Child Holding and Playing with a Cat 34 Andrea del Verrocchio, Boy with Dolphin 35 Leonardo da Vinci, Study for a Virgin and Child with a Cat 36 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies for a Virgin and Child with a Cat 37 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies for a Virgin and Child with a Cat 38 Leonardo da Vinci, Study for a Virgin and Child with a Cat 39 Leonardo da Vinci, Study for a Virgin and Child with a Cat (verso of fig. 38) 40 Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child with a Cat 41 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of the Hanged Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli 42 Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci 43 Reverse of Ginevra de’ Benci, fig. 42 44 Lorenzo di Credi (attributed to), Portrait of a Lady (Ginevra de’ Benci?) 45 Leonardo da Vinci, Study of a Lady with a Unicorn

69 70 71 75 76 77 81 84

85 86 87 88 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 101 106 107 109 111

Figures

46 Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with an Ermine) 47 Leonardo da Vinci, Rebuses 48 Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Yarnwinder 49 Detail of “Yarnwinder” rebus at upper left of fig. 47 (reversed for legibility) 50 Leonardo da Vinci (attributed to), Bust of the Young Christ 51 Andrea del Verrocchio, Detail of Head of Christ in Crucifixion 52 Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the Head of the Virgin 53 Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (with Leonardo da Vinci), Nursing Virgin with Goldfinch (Madonna Litta) 54 Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi 55 Detail of Figures to the Right of the Virgin and Child in the Adoration of the Magi, fig. 54 56 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies for the Adoration of the Magi 57 Leonardo da Vinci, Figure Studies for the Adoration of the Magi 58 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Hands for the Adoration of the Magi 59 Leonardo da Vinci, Perspective Study for Background of the Adoration of the Magi 60 Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi 61 Leonardo da Vinci, Design for a Colossal Crossbow 62 Leonardo da Vinci, Allegory with Fortune and Death 63 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Figures of Fortune and Fame, Shields around a Flaming Tree Stump 64 Leonardo da Vinci, Study for an Adoration of the Christ Child 65 Leonardo da Vinci, Designs for an Adoration of the Christ Child 66 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Four Male Figures, Half-Length Studies of Christ and St. John, Studies of Figures in Conversation at a Table 67 Leonardo da Vinci, Head of Judas 68 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies for the Last Supper 69 Leonardo da Vinci, St. Sebastian 70 Leonardo da Vinci, St. Sebastian Tied to a Tree

ix

114 115 116 117 122 123 126 126 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 141 146 147 152 153

154 155 156 160 161

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Figures

71 Leonardo da Vinci, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness 72 Workshop Assistant, after Leonardo da Vinci, Study of a Studio Model for Saint Jerome 73 Leonardo da Vinci, Detail of Sheet of Sketches with a Nativity 74 Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks 75 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Saint Mary Magdalene 76 Francesco Melzi, Flora

165 168 172 173 175 177

Acknowledgments

The origin of this book lies in the engaging lectures delivered by Professor Olan A. Rand, Jr., at Northwestern University in the mid1970s. In those, Mr. Rand, as he preferred to be called, insightfully pointed out how Leonardo’s powers of observation and keen curiosity were manifest even in his earliest Madonnas. From Professors Sydney J. Freedberg and Konrad Oberhuber, at Harvard University, I gained an understanding of Leonardo’s formal innovations and the ways in which such elements of style profoundly contributed to expression and meaning in his works. In effect, the teachings of these three scholars provided both the grounding and impetus for my research into the works of Leonardo and into Renaissance art in general. I am greatly indebted to them. Several colleagues were kind enough to read through my manuscript and offer astute suggestions and useful criticisms. I am most grateful, above all, to Patricia C. Bruckmann, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Toronto; scholar and author Steven Naifeh; psychoanalyst Dr. John E. Gedo; Michael Hall, former Editor in Chief of Apollo Magazine; and Gloria Groom, curator of European Painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, for their thoughtful advice. At the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, fellow staff members have helped me to obtain images and reproduction rights for this book and assisted with the preparation of the manuscript; I am most grateful to Tracy Owens, Joseph Price, Michelle Sullivan, and Patricia Lee for their valuable and uncomplaining aid. Cambridge University Press deftly and sensitively edited my manuscript and has provided expert guidance throughout the publication process. I wish to thank Publishing

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Acknowledgments

Director Beatrice Rehl as well as project managers Brigitte Coulton and Barbara Walthall of Aptara, Inc. Finally and foremost, I am grateful to my wife, Starr Siegele, for her unstinting and sustaining support. It is to her that I dedicate this book.

Introduction

S

ince his own time and for the next five hundred years the name Leonardo da Vinci has been synonymous with “genius.” Others who have shared that title – Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, for example – usually excelled in one particular field or area of science. Leonardo has seemed to loom above them all in his range of interests and apparent expertise, which included art, aerodynamics, anatomy, astronomy, botany, geology, hydraulics, optics, physics, and numerous technologies of warfare. However, our admiration for this omnivorous curiosity has led to some misconceptions about his legacy. The truth of the matter is that Leonardo’s scientific contributions, unlike those of Darwin and Einstein, were negligible, and many of his inventions, although clever and even prophetic, could not have actually functioned. Of his many scientific and industrial interests, he appears to have mastered only certain, basic aspects of engineering, and only in the practice of art did he exceed the accomplishments of most of his contemporaries. Only in art was he truly a successful innovator. In pointing out this reality, our intention is not to “explode” the “mythology of Leonardo” – certainly, his brilliance and inspiring creativity should not and cannot be diminished. Rather, we are attempting to reconcile traditional accounts of the “Transcendent Genius,” who purportedly received his ideas from on high, with the life of a man who had more than his share of struggles with his world, his family, and, occasionally, with himself. Leonardo’s genius rested primarily in his powers of observation, in his ability to discern the subtle complexities of nature and to study with keen comprehension the works of others, making instant and optimal use of their contributions. More often than not, his artistic and mechanical inventions were reactions – to 1

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The Young Leonardo

natural phenomena that he found particularly inexplicable and intriguing or to those paintings and sculptures that he considered to be novel in some respect. Generally speaking, he responded much better to challenges than he did to contractual obligations and timetables. He rarely displayed the patient attitude and methodical approach of a scientist; it has been noted that he hardly ever devoted more than a page or two in his notebooks to the investigation of any particular problem or question. Although Leonardo did little to advance the scientific fields in which he was engaged, the knowledge he gained through his research profoundly informed his artworks. His investigations into light and optics resulted in his creation of the evocative, smoky pictorial effect called sfumato. His study of the movement of water not only lent authenticity to his landscapes but also invigorated his renderings of hair, garments, and flora. His investigations of the cardiovascular system contributed to the physiological accuracy of his portrayals of human emotion. Often exaggerating for expressive effect, he applied the underlying processes he perceived in nature to the world that he portrayed in microcosm in his art. There, rocky outcroppings seem to form, expand, and erode before our eyes. So exquisitely sensitive are his renderings of sky and skin that Leonardo suggests their molecular excitation. Such aesthetic manipulation also produced the controlled dynamism of his groundbreaking Adoration of the Magi and the timeless suspension of the Mona Lisa. Centuries before Darwin, Leonardo presented a natural world in evolution. And, believing in the divine design of that world, he sought, long before Einstein, a Renaissance equivalent to the modern, unified-field concept – the ultimate reconciliation of all contrasting forces and ideas. Leonardo tirelessly (and literally) drew analogies between the seemingly disparate phenomena of the visible realm. In Florence, under the rule of the shrewd, mercantile Medici family, the young Leonardo found a life much at odds with the idealized existence that he imagined and painted. Then as now, politics tended to trump talent, and so the youth’s obvious gifts did not guarantee a career or survival. Fortunately, his father’s respected position as a Medici notary compensated to some degree for Leonardo’s illegitimate birth and, consequently, inferior social status, and there are reasons to believe that he always enjoyed the support and encouragement

Introduction

of his father as well as of his extended family and stepfamily. Although some of his early homosexual activities created problems for him in his adopted town, with time, Leonardo seems to have developed close, enduring relationships that sustained him. Even in the most civilized of Renaissance cities, daily life was brutal and precarious. Violence and disease were ubiquitous. Power and allegiances continually shifted. The rurally raised Leonardo must have learned a few lessons of diplomacy and politics during his first period in Florence, but not enough to sustain a career or, more to the point, to ingratiate himself sufficiently with the Medici clan. His intellect, sharp wit, and charm only carried him so far. For him, those years were marked by valuable experience and training, small personal triumphs, and continual frustrations. Yet for his contemporaries, those years provided, in Leonardo’s paintings and drawings, the germs of the exalted High Renaissance style and tenors of expression completely new to art. For us, his early years produced myriad beautiful artworks, which offer insight into a singularly fertile mind and the culture it would forever transform.

3

Figure 1. View of the town of Vinci. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

1.

Childhood

F

ew knew and fewer cared to know about the boy’s birth in a farmhouse in the tiny hamlet of Anchiano. The mother, an unwed rural girl, bore the oddly sentient child on a quiet Tuscan night in the spring of 1452 and then vanished into obscurity. Little more than her name, Caterina, has survived the centuries, part of the curious and marvelous legacy of her gifted son, Leonardo. Unlettered daughter of a nameless tenant farmer, vestige of medieval feudalism, she gave life to the most salient intellect of the Renaissance. What instincts or grace she imparted to him one cannot say. It is reasonable to believe, however, that she, as much as his notary father, Ser Piero di Antonio, was responsible for his naturally buoyant and restless spirit. Because of the circumstances, the boy was not given a patronymic or traditional family name. Instead, Ser Piero seems to have named him in honor of Saint Leo, a fifth-century pope venerated for his repulse of Attila the Hun and for his potent sermons. Leo’s feast day happened to be celebrated during the week of Leonardo’s birth. Caterina probably nursed the infant for many months, because her social stature – and Leonardo’s – would not have merited a wet nurse. Any joy shared between mother and child was short-lived, however. She soon relinquished him to Ser Piero, who, in the next year, married Albiera di Giovanni Amadori, a young lady of adequate public standing, and established a proper family. To mitigate the scandal of the illegitimate baby, Ser Piero’s parents seem to have arranged, within a year of the birth, for Caterina to wed another peasant, a farmhand and kiln worker of good repute. Issues of love and compatibility never entered into such affairs. However, in accord with contemporary mores, Leonardo’s honorable family would have provided her with a sufficient dowry. 5

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The Young Leonardo

As was customary, the newlyweds, Ser Piero and Albiera, moved into the household of Ser Piero’s elderly father and mother, Antonio di Ser Piero and Monna Lucia, in their native town of Vinci; five years later, Antonio, who had organized a baptism for Leonardo, would still claim his grandson as a dependent – a bocca or mouth to feed – on his taxes. Thus, Leonardo’s earliest years were spent under the comfortable protection of the typical extended, rural family, with at least three generations of relatives, including an octogenarian grandfather and a teenaged uncle, Francesco, ensconced in the various pleasures of country life. Somewhat isolated among the hills and not especially wealthy, the family could not offer the child a fine tutor or other advantages of civic life, but it could provide him with nearly constant attention and a warm appreciation for the rich botanical life of Tuscany’s gently rolling landscape. He may have been given some responsibilities in the family’s modest fields of wheat, buckwheat, and grapes. He also could have played, explored, and fished with local children and, occasionally, his maternal half-sisters, who were not much younger than he and lived with his mother in a nearby village. Leonardo appears never to have forgotten these early experiences, and even as he moved from one grand court to a loftier one, he seemed to have carried with him – and expressed in his art – a nostalgia for those intimate, mysterious aspects of nature that intrigued him as a child. Despite its rural setting and mainly agricultural activities, Vinci had political, mercantile, and cultural connections to nearby cosmopolitan Florence. Dominating the town was the early-eleventh-century castle of the feudal Counts Guidi, which had fallen under the control of the Florentines in the mid-thirteenth century. From a distance, the long, horizontal building, with its stark, massive tower at one end, looked like a flexing, muscular arm. At closer range, the structure, one of many erected by the Guidi throughout Tuscany, appeared somewhat nautical, with the tower resembling the mast of a sailing vessel. This aspect inspired the name Castello della nave or “Ship’s Castle.” Crowding around the castello was a flotilla of much smaller buildings, including the church of Santa Croce, built of similar stone but in various shapes and orientations, the entire constellation remote and adrift in the endless terrain of hills, olive groves, and plowed and terraced fields. Once catering to the needs of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa through the Guidi family, in Leonardo’s time, the castle served primarily as the

1. Childhood

office of the town’s chief magistrate (podest`a) and a government center to coordinate and benefit Vinci’s and Florentine commercial interests. Leonardo seems to have profited as well from this exchange and proximity to Florence. Reportedly, when still a boy, Leonardo painted on a shield an elaborate image of a monster, a composite of many creatures, for a local peasant. Ready-mixed paint is a modern invention, and there were probably no artist workshops or well-stocked apothecaries (which, in the Renaissance, sold pigments) in Vinci from which Leonardo could have obtained his colors. If the shield story is true, we must probably assume that a supportive grandfather, father, or uncle purchased the relatively expensive materials in Florence while there on business and that one of them, or someone else in Leonardo’s family, showed the youngster how to make tempera paint from eggs. The picture that emerges is of a privileged – even pampered – only child, whose talents had already become obvious. Nevertheless, the young Leonardo perhaps always felt an emotional sting from his illegitimacy, not simply because of societal disapproval, but because of his early separation from his mother. Paternal affection for Leonardo, however great, could not nullify the social barriers imposed by illegitimacy, which probably prevented him from pursuing the family’s traditional, notarial career. The stigma of Leonardo’s birth may have caused Ser Piero to leave the boy behind in Vinci when he and Albiera moved to Florence at an unspecified date. The father evidently decided to wait (apparently for a number of years) until he attained sufficient status and employment in his adopted city before owning up to his bastard son. It also may have been that Albiera, unsuccessful in bearing children herself, did not wish to have Leonardo, her husband’s transgression, live with them. Social customs were such that had Leonardo been born a girl, the child, if not immediately put to death, would have been forever left in Vinci, in the family of her mother or placed in a nearby convent. Even a boy, under most circumstances, was relegated to second-class citizenry, without opportunity to hold public office, and was socially and professionally disadvantaged. Similarly, an illegitimate child’s parents found their lives dishonored and disrupted. For this reason and perhaps because Leonardo may have helped to care for his elderly grandparents, the young man remained in Vinci until he had almost reached his teens. It is possible that Antonio and Monna Lucia insisted on keeping Leonardo with them, not only for practical

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The Young Leonardo

reasons but also because of the remarkable, rejuvenating effect a baby or young child can have on an older couple. Only around the age of twelve, following the death in 1464 of his grandfather and of his stepmother, Albiera, in childbirth, did Leonardo finally leave his pastoral existence for Florence, where his father had successfully established himself as a notary. In the Renaissance, this profession required expertise in contracts. A notary was roughly equivalent to a modern corporate and estate attorney. Ser Piero had, in fact, landed himself a rather prestigious and lucrative position; his employer, the respected Cosimo de’ Medici, called Il Vecchio (“the Elder”), was the patriarch of what eventually would become the most powerful family in all of Tuscany. Arguably the most astute member of the entire Medici clan, Cosimo had extended the international banking empire that his father, Giovanni de’ Bicci, had built through loan-sharking. With the pernicious stealth of a modern financial institution, Cosimo’s enterprise amassed profits more from transaction and exchange fees than from interest. His banking and commercial conglomerate stretched across the continent to England and was forever in need of competent notaries, like Ser Piero, to secure monetary transactions and business deals. Cosimo managed to accrue political power as well through a brilliant strategy that involved elaborate cronyism and subtle manipulation of the Florentine voting system. Such power was necessary for self-preservation; a wealthy man who did not take a role in government could soon find himself and his family taxed into oblivion. A low-key and unpretentious man of the people, Cosimo had relatively few rivals and many friends; his open, genial attitude would likely have brought him into frequent contact with Ser Piero and, occasionally, with his family. Unfortunately, unlike the young Michelangelo, who was virtually adopted by the Medici and shared their tutors, Leonardo never gained such special favor. He seems to have been largely an autodidact, with minimal formal schooling. His education probably commenced around the age of seven, when he entered the stage of life called pueritia. His father and grandparents would have inculcated basic literacy through the repeated reading of scripture and other religious books in the vernacular. Home-schooling manuals, with a broader curriculum, began to appear in Florence and its environs only in the sixteenth century – fifty years too late for Leonardo.

1. Childhood

He would struggle with rudimentary Latin throughout his life and, so far as we know, had no facility in Greek. This despite the fact that, under the Medici, the University of Florence became widely regarded as the best institution in Europe to learn the Hellenic language and writings of the ancient philosophers Aristotle and Plato. His poor Latin indicates that after his arrival in Florence, the twelve-year-old Leonardo received only a truncated, vernacular education. Usually, the sons of notaries and other professionals, such as lawyers and physicians, attended a Latin school. Given Leonardo’s relatively advanced age, however, Ser Piero evidently opted for what had become a common alternative for young Florentine men aged eleven to fourteen, especially those destined for an apprenticeship with an artist or artisan: two years of vernacular reading and writing and, concurrently, two years of abbaco, that is, commercial mathematics. This was in keeping with the influential I libri della famiglia (Books on the Family), written in Florence in the 1430s by the art theorist and practical philosopher Leon Battista Alberti. Illegitimate himself, Alberti strongly advocated that fathers ensure their sons learned mathematics and geometry. Once in Florence, Leonardo had only a brief time to prepare for his chosen vocation in art, because young men normally began their apprenticeship at age twelve or thirteen. He may have had less than the requisite two years of formal education. Supplementing Leonardo’s home-schooling in Vinci, the Florentine vernacular curriculum would have acquainted him primarily with standard religious texts, including the Fior di virt`u (Flowers of Virtue). This medieval book illustrated virtues and vices through engaging stories about biblical and classical heroes and various legends of animals. He would also have read the Epistole e Evangeli (extracts from the Epistles and Gospels read daily at mass) and the thirteenth-century Legenda aurea (Golden Legend) of Jacobus da Voragine, a popular compendium of saints’ lives. He would have encountered nothing very scholarly or esoteric. However, he would have found in the Golden Legend’s biography of the sixth-century Saint Leonardo a fanciful etymology of his name, which was bound to have struck a chord. It also proved prophetic; Jacobus claimed that a source for “Leonardo” was the Latin legens ardus, or “he who chooses that which is difficult.” As we shall see, the artist did precisely this, taking a painstaking approach to any project before him, reveling in intricacies and intellectual problems. Where written expression was concerned, however, Leonardo

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The Young Leonardo

cleverly chose what was easier. In some classes, he would have been offered opportunity and guidance to refine his writing skills. But his reversed, mirror-image penmanship was his own invention, a way for a left-handed person to write – and draw – quickly, hand preceding quill, without smearing the ink. His abbaco classes would have entailed training not only in accounting and bookkeeping but also in advanced algebra and geometry, which would have been of practical necessity for a young man entering a late-fifteenth-century Florentine artist’s workshop, where knowledge of perspective and some engineering skills had become de rigueur. It is also possible that Ser Piero determined this course of study for his son for reasons of prudence; should a career in the arts not pan out, Leonardo would possess sufficient mathematical skills to find other employment in the robust economy of Medicean Florence. As it turned out, the rigorous mathematical education came in handy for Leonardo’s various endeavors, particularly as a designer of military and other machinery; these sometimes required long columns of calculations. A reference in one of his manuscripts to a Benedetto de l’abbaco suggests that he may have consulted with his former instructors when he needed assistance with his math. Throughout his life, Leonardo was rather defensive about his limited schooling. He confessed in one notebook: I am fully aware that the fact of my not being a man of letters may cause certain arrogant persons to think that they may with reason censure me, alleging that I am a man ignorant of book learning. Foolish folk! Do they not know that I may retort by saying, as did [the ancient Roman general] Marius to the Roman patricians: “They who themselves go about adorned in the labor of others will not permit me my own?” They will say that because of my lack of book learning I cannot properly express what I desire to expound upon. Do they not know that my subjects require for their exposition experience rather than the words of others?

In another place, he reiterates, somewhat angrily: if indeed I have no power to quote from authors as they have, it is a far bigger and more worthy thing to read by the light of experience, which is the instructress of their

1. Childhood

masters. They strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned not with their own labors but with those of others, and they will not even allow me my own. And if they despise me who am an inventor how much more should blame be given to themselves, who are not inventors but trumpeters and reciters of the works of others?

We do not know how Leonardo may also have suffered because of the presumed moral inferiority of left-handed people in Renaissance Italy.

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2.

Florence and Cosimo the Elder

I

n the mid-fifteenth century, the medici were not members of the highest social class. Shrewd Cosimo’s success would have inspired myriad ambitious bumpkins like Ser Piero from little Vinci. Indeed, Ser Piero lived in the first period of history in which there was some secular class mobility – so long as one could find a place in the familial, political patronage system that Cosimo had founded and his progeny perfected. In Della famiglia, Alberti confidently declared that “men are themselves the source of their own fortune and misfortune.” In those heady, optimistic days, self-proclaimed poets recited in the street verses that celebrated the self-made man who ascends from the lower ranks to aristocracy, loudly voicing the prevalent humanist view that knowledge and virtue conferred nobility beyond that of inherited wealth. Cosimo cleverly exploited this aspirant, bourgeois notion. He frequently hired humble individuals from rural villages such as Vinci, knowing that he would receive fierce loyalty and gratitude in return. Moreover, such dislocated people were less likely to have connections with his rivals in the city, the Pazzi family and other, old-money gentry. His namesake, the equally tough-minded and calculating Cosimo I, continued this effective strategy in the next century and became the first Grand Duke of Tuscany. Conscientiously following in the profession of his father and his ancestors, Ser Piero would have regarded old Cosimo as a fine model for his personal virtues, traditional values, and comportment. Cosimo eschewed ostentation; generously supported civic organizations, avant-garde philosophers, and artists, like the skillful, if lascivious, painter and Carmelite friar Filippo Lippi; and was, above all, deeply devoted to his family. He went so far as to commission a translation of (Pseudo-) Aristotle’s Oeconomica (fourth century b.c.), a 13

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The Young Leonardo

treatise that praised family life and dispensed tips on effective household management. More tellingly, on the death of his second son in 1463, Cosimo wrote poignantly, paraphrasing Euripides, “This, which we call life, is death, and that is the true life which is everlasting –. For what is my power now worth? What worth has it ever had?” On a happier occasion, he interrupted a serious meeting with visiting ambassadors to make a whistle for one of his grandsons. When afterward his guests voiced their irritation, he responded “lucky for you he didn’t ask me to play it, since I’d have done that, too.” Although this sort of behavior would have endeared him to Ser Piero and to many Florentines, more important for Leonardo was Cosimo’s almost paternalistic support of gifted individuals and his tolerance for wideranging intellectual discourse and for the eccentric, irreverent, and sometimes immoral behavior of extremely talented people. This attitude, perpetuated by his descendants, fostered a culture of creativity in Florence for more than two centuries – and offered Leonardo necessary encouragement and wide latitude. Beyond that, Florence was a city of endless possibilities. The money from the Medici’s banks permitted them to become major purveyors of commodities, everything from alum (used in glassmaking and leather tanning), wool, and olive oil to gold, silver, and jewels. They could obtain for those favored customers with extravagant tastes almost anything they desired, including exotic spices, giraffes, and slaves – for 50 florins each, approximately three times the price of an average horse or ox. Despite this last abomination, Cosimo was a sincere populist, who believed in Dante’s notion of il bene del popolo, the public good. He underwrote much of the entertainment for the countless pageants staged in Florence throughout the year and supported many of the lay confraternities that participated in them. This fare was often far more sophisticated than the festivals and processions Ser Piero and his family had witnessed in Vinci. A higher class of diversion was required for the discriminating Florentine populace, who distinguished themselves from the masses of other European cities and towns. Florentines were extraordinarily literate, even in the lower echelons of stonemasons, wool dyers, and street vendors. Consequently, they were avid and, as today, very critical consumers of culture – quick to praise, quicker to condemn. Renaissance Florentines elaborately amplified the traditional holiday celebrations, including the ancient religious festival of the Magi,

2. Florence and Cosimo the Elder

for which the whole city was transformed into a New Jerusalem. Various districts were decorated to recollect, and sometimes creatively to reenact, biblical events. For wedding festivals and jousts, triumphal, allegorical cars or floats were constructed, their passengers in spectacular costumes or holding standards and parade shields that made classical and chivalric allusions. Eventually, explanatory programs or published descriptions were required to sort out all the learned references and characters from ancient Greek and Roman history and mythology, such as the emperors Julius Caesar and Titus; the horrific, serpent-haired Medusa; and the stately Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom. Few citizens were better read or more cultivated than Cosimo himself. His modest, everyman demeanor belied a voracious curiosity and fierce intellect. He amassed a substantial library for his time, containing not only the writings of the best contemporary poets and philosophers but also works from antiquity, many acquired on expeditions he sponsored to Constantinople, Egypt, and Syria. The majority of his holdings, which he bequeathed to San Marco, were religious books and manuscripts. In addition to these, he owned the modern contributions of Dante, the lyrical poet Petrarch, ribald storyteller Boccaccio, and esoteric philosopher Marsilio Ficino. These complemented the classical texts of Plato, Livy, and Cicero in the elder Medici’s study. To Ficino, for whom his patron had provided education and houses, Cosimo assigned the arduous task of translating ancient volumes of Plato from Greek. As was then the custom, Cosimo often asked the intense, melancholic poet to read aloud to him from these books. One imagines that, intermittently, the two men would break into discussion, debating the practical application of the great philosopher’s pronouncements. Cosimo was interested, most of all, in moral philosophy, instruction on how to live in the quotidian world. He owned more than one translated copy of Aristotle’s Ethics and Cicero’s Letters to His Friends (Epistolae ad familiares), full of humane wisdom. The Medici padrone was especially venerated for his blunt pragmatism and dry sense of humor, a gift that, skipping a generation, was passed on to his grandchildren, particularly to Lorenzo. Florentines delighted in recounting Cosimo’s jokes, especially his one-liners, like his pithy “you can’t govern a state with paternosters” (prayers beginning “Our Father”), a rebuke to wishful thinkers and clerics. An enthusiastic supporter of humanist writers and a closet scholar himself,

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The Young Leonardo

Cosimo did not suffer fools, especially those of ostensibly grander lineage who tried to feign intellectual sophistication by associating with the learned. He once commented that Franco Sacchetti, a member of the old Florentine elite and host of literary gatherings, was “like the kidney, surrounded with fat and always lean,” implying that the patrician never seemed to absorb much knowledge from those around him. For years afterward, Cosimo continued to refer to this betterborn poseur as “the Kidney.” With time, Leonardo would assimilate this puncturing wit, so typical of the worldly Florentines.

3.

The Cultural Climate of Florence

C

osimo’s patronage of the visual arts was no less impressive than his support of humanist scholars and literature. Under his bullish, benevolent reign, Filippo Brunelleschi created the vast dome of the cathedral, an architectural miracle, and the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti realized the sumptuous gilt bronze Gates of Paradise for the Baptistery portal nearby. While Brunelleschi built for Cosimo what would become the principal Medici church, San Lorenzo, the dependable architect Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, at Cosimo’s request, renovated the church and convent of San Marco (where Cosimo maintained a penitential cell), constructed a grand new palace for the Medici on the via Larga, and renovated villas for them in the sylvan backwaters of Cafaggiolo, Careggi, and Trebbio. From his favorite artist, the sculptor Donatello, Cosimo commissioned several important works, including the controversial, sensuous bronze David, a rakish interpretation of the biblical hero, with more sashay than swagger. Cosimo kept busy the rambunctious Fra Filippo Lippi, seducer of ladies and nuns alike, and all of the other major painters as well; Lippi supplied a number of pictures for the new Palazzo Medici, and Fra Angelico and Paolo Uccello painted altarpieces and frescoes for the churches of San Marco and Santa Maria Novella. Some of Lippi’s pictures, such as his Annunciation (c. 1439) in San Lorenzo, followed what were the latest, progressive, “scientific” trends in art. He defined the space of the painting through a strict, if vertiginous, onepoint perspective system – a striking application of mathematics and geometry – and he rendered the foreground glass vase with impressive, optical precision. Other of Lippi’s works, among them the Adoration of the Christ Child that he created for Cosimo’s personal chapel in the Medici palace 17

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The Young Leonardo

(and a very similar picture for the private retreat of his profoundly religious and cultured daughter-in-law, Lucrezia Tornabuoni), perpetuated a mystical strain in Florentine painting (fig. 2). That darkly suggestive work presents a visionary experience. The holy personages are lost in contemplation; individual blossoms and natural elements have an acutely alive and symbolic presence; the feral, rocky landscape and heavens less a setting than an enveloping cloak, hermetically sealing off the back of the work. Lippi has re-created a mystical revelation of the twelfth-century saint Bernard of Clairvaux, shown in the background of the palace painting (now in Berlin), who, according to legend, had a vision of the Nativity when he was a child. Significantly, Leonardo seems to have found this introspective, artistic trend, with its strange remoteness, as compelling as the new “rational” and mathematic mode of Florentine painting. Although much of this creative activity had been completed by the time Leonardo and his father had reached Florence, the young boy would have seen ongoing projects instigated by Cosimo’s son, Piero the Gouty, and, later, his grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent (Il Magnifico). Upon his arrival, Leonardo would have been dazzled by the opulent marble and porphyry tomb for Cosimo that his future master Andrea del Verrocchio created and later erected in 1465 in San Lorenzo and by Benozzo Gozzoli’s majestic fresco of the Procession of the Magi, full of wondrous natural detail, in the Palazzo Medici – both projects commissioned by the sickly and short-lived Piero. During adolescence, Leonardo witnessed the execution and public installation of several of the sculptures that Verrocchio fashioned for Lorenzo, including the tombs for Piero and his brother Giovanni de’ Medici. Years later, Leonardo would still recall with awe Verrocchio’s engineering feat in fabricating and mounting the famous copper orb on the lantern of the dome of Florence Cathedral in 1471. The entire city marveled, the merchant Benedetto Dei thereafter calling the artist “Verrocchio of the Ball” (della Palla). The versatile master’s accomplishment may have stimulated Leonardo’s own engineering interests; several of the young man’s drawings from that period either record or were inspired by the hoist and crane used to install the Duomo sphere. Not only would Leonardo have admired the technological equipment; but also, as one who dreamed of human flight, he must have enviously imagined the view from atop that soaring perch, by far the highest point in the city.

3. The Cultural Climate of Florence

19

Figure 2. Filippo Lippi, Adoration of the Christ Child, c. 1459, oil on panel, formerly at the chapel in the Medici Palace, now in Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Gem¨aldegalerie. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Leonardo also saw the ascent, under Piero and Lorenzo, of the major painters Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo, and Luca Signorelli. Piero ordered or purchased important works by several of these innovative artists, among them three large paintings by Antonio Pollaiuolo of the mythological Labors of Hercules for the Medici palace on the via Larga (lost but known through small, autograph replicas). Whereas the perpetually ill and eczema-ridden Piero felt the need to display these unsubtle symbols of power and military prowess, his sagacious wife, Lucrezia, adhering to Cosimo’s strategy of humility, kept a relatively low profile, retaining the unpretentious “Tornabuoni” as her family name rather than reverting to her family’s original, noble appellation, Tornaquinci. She understood the danger of appearing too aristocratic in republican Florence.

20

The Young Leonardo

Their son, Lorenzo, preferred writing poetry and collecting gems and other small objets d’art to the acquisition of paintings. Nonetheless, he did commission portraits and an altarpiece from Botticelli, frescoes from Ghirlandaio, and obtained some pictures in oil by esteemed Flemish masters. In his relatively accessible, ground-floor bedroom in the palace hung Uccello’s paintings of the mythological Judgment of Paris and a scene of lions fighting dragons (these were joined, in 1484, by Uccello’s famous tri-paneled Battle of San Romano). The precocious Leonardo would have especially enjoyed the lion-and-dragon combat when he was permitted to examine these paintings from time to time. During his early apprenticeship with Verrocchio, Leonardo drew the snarling heads of a lion and a dragon in confrontation – beasts for which he seems to have had an enduring fondness (fig. 3). (Reportedly, much later, for French king Francis I, he made a grand image of a dragon fighting a lion, distorted in extreme perspective, or anamorphosis.) By the later 1470s, the young artist managed to gain entrance into Lorenzo’s famed garden beside San Marco, where Lorenzo kept part of his sculpture collection and allowed a lucky few to study and work. Despite this privilege, there is no evidence to suggest that Leonardo was admitted into the meetings of the “Platonic Academy,” the name an informal group of intellectuals at the Medici court invented for themselves in the 1460s. The “academicians,” who often gathered at Lorenzo’s refurbished villa at Carreggi, included Ficino, the famous Greek scholar Johannes Argyropouos, whom Cosimo had brought to Florence, the erudite young poets Angelo Poliziano and Cristoforo Landino (a commentator on the works of Virgil, Horace, and Dante), and the architect, art theorist, and writer Leon Battista Alberti, who gloried in the role of venerable counselor and was, until his death in 1472, probably Leonardo’s most direct connection to the group. The Neoplatonists, as they came to be called, discussed not only arcane subjects, such as Plato’s views on the immortality of the soul and the nature of God, but also the relative merits of the active life versus the contemplative life and what personal qualities or accomplishments determined “nobility.” Although these issues were not central or pressing for Leonardo, whose investigations were more pragmatic and Aristotelian, concerning the observable, natural world, his exclusion from the academy’s conversations may account for the anger he occasionally expressed.

3. The Cultural Climate of Florence

21

Figure 3. Leonardo da Vinci, Study of the Virgin Nursing with St. John the Baptist, Figure and Head Studies, Heads of a Lion and Dragon, c. 1480, pen and ink, Windsor Castle, Royal Library (12276r). The Royal C 2010 Collection  Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

(Ficino sometimes referred to intellectuals who, like Leonardo, were not proficient in the classical languages, as levissimi, Latin for “lightweights.”) Notwithstanding his lack of scholarly credentials, Leonardo was probably permitted, once in a while, to attend lectures given by Alberti, Argyropoulos (an authority on Aristotle’s writings), and other members. Lorenzo seems occasionally to have made the Medici library available to the artist. This contained at least six works of Aristotle and some scientific and medical tracts, such as Cornelius Celsus’ first-century On Medicine (De medicina), Pliny the Elder’s first-century Natural History, Theophrastus’ On Botany

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The Young Leonardo

(third century b.c.) and Flavius Vegetius Renatus’ fourth-century veterinary manual De mulomedicina, along with many volumes of poetry and historical and religious texts. Meanwhile, Leonardo’s father performed well enough as a notary to attain, by 1469, a job at the Palazzo del Podest`a (the present-day Bargello), the seat of the highest law officer and main criminal court in Florence. In the next year, he moved to the via delle Prestanze (later called the via dei Gondi), in the neighborhood of the Palazzo della Signoria, the city hall, into what would have been an upscale house with airy rooms appointed, in the Florentine manner, with small assemblies of painted furniture, set against mainly bare walls. The relative austerity of the interior d´ecor reflected the frugal way in which the typical Florentine household was run. The forty-three-year-old Ser Piero brought to the new casa a second wife, Francesca di Ser Giuliano Lanfredi, and hopes for many children. Unfortunately, his wishes were delayed. His first legitimate heir, Antonio, arrived seven years later, born to his third wife, Margherita, in 1476. He quickly went on to have another son with Margherita, however, and seven more sons and two daughters with a fourth spouse, Lucrezia. Because of the Renaissance’s high mortality rate of women in childbirth, it was not unusual for a man to marry a few times and to change residences, as his family evolved and grew. Leonardo, by far the oldest of Ser Piero’s brood (by almost twenty-four years), would have lived, as was customary for workshop assistants, mainly at Verrocchio’s house and shop in the via dell’Agnolo, near the church of S. Ambrogio. We know nothing of Leonardo’s relationships with his stepmothers in Florence, but one of Leonardo’s biological analogies may offer a clue. Observing how trees give abundant sap to grafted limbs, the artist asserted that fathers and mothers “bestow much more attention upon their stepchildren than upon their own children.” Ser Piero’s elevated status and the many important connections he made in his new position – with Verrocchio, the sculptor Andrea della Robbia, and other artists and potential patrons – may have helped solidify Leonardo’s place in Verrocchio’s workshop and sometime later, by 1472, secure his membership in the painters’ confraternity or professional club, the Compagnia di S. Luca (Company of Saint Luke). Through his contacts and clients, Ser Piero seems to have worked continuously to advance Leonardo’s career. No record has been found, however, to indicate that the artist’s father ever took steps to

3. The Cultural Climate of Florence

“legitimate” him, a legal process involving the approval of Florence’s governing councils. This would have made Leonardo eligible to inherit property and, more important, would have removed some of the stain of dishonor. This is a curious fact, given Ser Piero’s profession and status and – what must have been a great and growing concern – his failure, during twenty-three years of marriage, to produce a legitimate heir.

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First Years in Florence and the Verrocchio Workshop 4.

D

espite a certain confidence born of his many gifts, the newly arrived, adolescent Leonardo must have found the urban congestion of Florence and the desperate squalor of so many who lived there a bit intimidating. From the airy public squares spanned countless, winding streets and blind passages, many made almost impassible by vendors’ stalls and filthy shacks. As in most European cities, the poor, rural e´ migr´es, and itinerant workers – altogether, roughly half of Florence’s population – mainly hunkered down in makeshift housing, crude wooden structures and lean-tos, braced against churches and other masonry buildings. Agricultural life was then much more intrusive and obtrusive than it is today. Horses, donkeys, cattle, and other livestock were everywhere led through the narrow streets. Piles of hay and manure were ubiquitous. Carts and mule trains, loaded with wool, raw silk, leather, and produce, angled their way past these obstacles and large open-pit quarries of pietra forte, the stone from which most of the palaces and houses were built. Animal parts that could not be used by butchers or leather makers were freely discarded in the streets, usually at the spots where the livestock had been slaughtered. Carcasses floated in the Arno as well, along with massive debris and chemical residues generated by the wool workers and dyers, who labored under lofty wooden sheds (tiratoi) and pavilions along the river. A perpetual source of flood and the city’s main sewer, the Arno was considered by most to be, in Dante’s words, a “cursed and unlucky ditch” (Purgatory, XIV, 51). In January 1465, probably just a year or so after Leonardo’s arrival in Florence, the river flooded all the way to the Canto a Monteloro (now the corner of via degli Alfani and Borgo Pinti), causing lay benches to float there from the church of Santa Croce, and filling the ground 25

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The Young Leonardo

floors of the Podest`a (later, Ser Piero’s workplace) and nearby apothecaries with water and waste. Needless to say, rodents were always a problem, as was disease, which the populace attributed to the putrid smells of the city rather than to the true source, rat-borne fleas. After the Black Death had wiped out half of the Florentine citizenry in the mid-fourteenth century, plagues came cyclically, nearly every few years, throughout the fifteenth. Fortunately, nature also intruded into the city in more benevolent ways. Many people owned fine horses and kept hounds, songbirds, and other pets. Some of the more affluent had gardens, with flowers both native and imported from afar, such as exotic varieties of jasmine. Most convents and monasteries maintained their own private gardens and small orchards. At that time, there were also many small, unpaved, and untended open spaces, where grasses and shrubs grew wildly and trees provided shelter and shade. These were not parks in the modern sense, but neglected places that offered respite or, in the case of one lightly wooded, if ragged, tract of land near the church of SS. Annunziata, opportunity for sketching. Not far from the city’s center, on the part of the Arno far to the east of the Ponte Vecchio (upstream from the wool industry), waterbirds thrived and fisherman armed with poles and huge nets hauled in bounties of carp, cod, and trout. On the outskirts of Florence, there were pastures and the lush, flowery meadows from which the city had derived its name. Thus, Leonardo found in and around the city at least some semblance of his former life and surroundings. When, perhaps in 1465 or 1466, he entered Verrocchio’s large bottega or shop, which produced marble and bronze sculptures as well as paintings and frames, it had an extensive crew and well-established, if alternating, divisions of labor. Of an inherently sensitive nature, Leonardo was probably initially overwhelmed by the din of stonechipping and metal-clanging and by the visible air, choked with marble dust, sulphur, and the pungent odor of spilt wine. At that time, he may have seen some craftsmen on their knees polishing the large bell, years later affectionately called La Piagnona, the “great weeping lady.” The bell was so-named because it summoned to the church of San Marco the piagnoni, the “weeping” followers of the controversial Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola, burned at the stake for heresy in 1498. Leonardo possibly observed in another part of the studio

4. First Years in Florence and the Verrocchio Workshop

Verrocchio himself, adding the finishing touches to his marble bust of the Florentine patrician Francesco Sassetti (c. 1464–65). The master, undoubtedly, would have taken him across town to see the holy-water basin (lavamano) that he, when an assistant, had years earlier created with the sculptor Antonio Rossellino for the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo. Unusually versatile, Verrocchio was one of the few sculptors of his time to work in both bronze and marble and one of the rare sculptors who also painted. The contemporary Florentine writer and civic booster Ugolino Verino praised Verrocchio as comparable to the ancient sculptor Phidias, noting that he even “surpasses the Greek in one respect, for he both casts and paints.” In fifteenth-century Florence, only Verrocchio, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Antonio Pollaiuolo combined those skills. Verrocchio was reportedly a competent musician as well. Although born (between 1434 and 1437) to an artisan family that was not especially wealthy, Verrocchio was very literate and cultured, with a small library of classical and humanist texts, including the first-century Heroides of Ovid and the fourteenth-century Triumphs of Petrarch. He devoted himself to the study of antique art. He probably knew more about ancient Greek and Roman sculpture than anyone of his generation. Although such pieces informed his works, he rarely chose – or was given the opportunity – to tackle classical subject matter in his art. Nonetheless, his knowledge and talents profoundly impressed the Medici, who gave him as many commissions as he could handle; his earliest surviving sculptures, the lavamano and La Piagnona, were created for Medici churches, and Sassetti, of whom he carved an arresting bust, was the Medici’s banker. After Verrocchio completed those works, the family assigned him a range of projects in various media – a bronze sculpture of David (c. 1465), the marble and porphyry tombs for Cosimo, Piero, and Giovanni de’ Medici (c. 1465–67 and c. 1469–73), a polychromed terracotta relief of the Resurrection (c. 1470) and a bronze Putto with Dolphin (c. 1470–early 1480s) for the Medici villa at Careggi, and an altarpiece, depicting the Virgin and Child with saints, for the cathedral in Pistoia (c. 1475). Always accommodating, Verrocchio and his assistants also produced painted-canvas standards for Medici jousts (1469 and 1475) and elaborate festival decorations for the state visit of

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The Young Leonardo

the Duke of Milan in 1471. Through him, Leonardo gained a useful understanding of the Medici’s tastes and interests. Apparently, however, Verrocchio never mastered the fresco technique and so was not able to teach it to Leonardo and other shop assistants. This partly explains why Leonardo chose unconventional means when he was later assigned to create large murals, such as his Last Supper for the Milanese church of S. Maria delle Grazie and Battle of Anghiari for the Florentine Palazzo della Signoria. In both cases, he employed highly experimental media and consequently watched his works begin to decay almost as soon as he laid them on the wall. As we shall see, Leonardo probably lacked the desire and patience to learn the laborious fresco technique from skilled practitioners in other ateliers. He seems also to have inherited certain unfortunate work habits from Verrocchio’s shop, specifically the tendency, shared by modern building contractors, to move on to a new project before completing the one at hand. Two major paintings produced by the shop (on which Leonardo collaborated), the Pistoia Madonna della Piazza (fig. 21) and the Baptism of Christ (fig. 22), were both completed years after they were begun, with long periods during which the works were left to gather dust. Later, the famous sixteenth-century biographer of artists, Giorgio Vasari, lamented Verrocchio’s inability to finish pictures, a failing that he would retain until the end of his life, as evidenced by the incomplete quadro grande (large picture) and other works listed in his estate. Normally, a young man apprenticed to an artist spent his days grinding colors, preparing gesso, and fulfilling numerous other duties until the master deemed him worthy to participate in the actual execution of works. Given the varied activities of Verrocchio’s enterprise and Leonardo’s great capacity to learn, his novitiate would have involved an increasingly – and unusually – wide range of experiences, perhaps as much in the applied and technical arts of casting bronze and hoisting blocks of stone as in the fine art of draftsmanship. Highly stimulated by the bustle and exchange of professional secrets, Leonardo nevertheless would have spent many tedious hours employed in the lowly tasks of the creato (literally, “creature,” as such assistants were called) before his master, Verrocchio, assured of his abilities with pen and brush, allowed him to assist on paintings.

4. First Years in Florence and the Verrocchio Workshop

Leonardo would have received a bare subsistence wage, probably supplemented with funds from Ser Piero, who initially paid for his son’s internship with the master. The young man’s starting annual salary might have been as low as 6 or 8 florins and would have risen, by the time he was seventeen (the earliest age at which assistants became independent masters), to perhaps 18 or 20 florins. We know that a shop assistant to the contemporary Florentine painter Neri di Bicci received the annual sum of 15 florins, along with “a pair of hose.” The pay of the creato was even less than it seems on face, for an illiterate, low-level servant would have been paid perhaps 8 florins per year, an unskilled laborer could have expected to receive 30 to 40 florins, a druggist 50, a civil servant 70, and a senior municipal official as much as 300 florins annually. Moreover, a workshop member was, like a servant, at the master’s constant beck and call, obliged to be available for work at all hours of the day and night and even on holidays if necessary. To cast the situation in a somewhat happier light, one might say that Leonardo had joined a professional “family,” in which his life was entwined with the master’s and in which notions of individual privacy (then as now in Italy) hardly existed. After Leonardo had demonstrated his considerable painterly talents, he still would have been rather restricted in how he could apply them. Understandably, products from Verrocchio’s shop were required to follow the master’s design and style closely, despite the many contributing hands. For this reason, the principal figures in paintings, even those touched by Leonardo, adhered to strict prototypes, often generated from cartoons (full-sized preparatory drawings) that the master produced. Assistants normally could assert their individuality in a shop piece only in less prominent details, such as a distant landscape or other minor, natural elements. Tales of Leonardo’s juvenile inclinations and adventures suggest that he was always drawn to the natural world and was, no doubt, happy to be anointed as the one primarily responsible for the natural elements in Verrocchio workshop pictures. In light of its specificity of detail, there may well be some truth to the aforementioned story, related by Giorgio Vasari, that the inventive, young Leonardo painted on a buckler, or shield, a “monster of poisonous breath, belching – fire from its eyes and smoke from its nostrils,” a pastiche of various parts of lizards, insects, and other, repulsive creatures he had collected. Later,

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The Young Leonardo

according to Vasari, Leonardo prepared for the Medici a tapestry cartoon representing Adam and Eve in a verdant landscape with animals and much vegetation, including accomplished depictions of a palm, a fig tree, and “a meadow with an infinite variety of herbs.” That composition is lost, along with a painting of the Head of Medusa, undoubtedly a tour de force demonstration of Leonardo’s snakerendering skills, once kept in the Medici storage vault, the guardaroba. Leonardo’s ingenuity and zoological knowledge would not have escaped the attention of Verrocchio, who, as a former goldsmith, had himself created a “cup full of [that is, decorated with] animals” and other “bizarre fancies.” Some reports of Leonardo’s concern for animals sometimes sound almost like passages from a hagiography of Francis of Assisi, such as the claim that the artist sometimes bought songbirds from their sellers only to release them to freedom. Yet, seemingly corroborating this story, Leonardo once wrote that “the goldfinch will carry spurge [a deadly poison] to its little ones imprisoned in a cage – death rather than loss of liberty.” It is known that, later in life, Leonardo kept many horses. (This was an unusual luxury in that most artists could only afford to rent horses or to own mules.) He apparently also loved dogs. Every now and then, he would pause from his work to sketch a canine companion in the margin of the page before him. On a sheet of Leonardo’s optical illustrations in the manuscript known as the “Codice Atlantico” (in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan), there is one such study of a dog, evidently content simply to sit quietly beside its inattentive master, the animal well accustomed to his interminable periods of drawing and writing (fig. 4). The hound may have been the lone, welcome guest in his studio; he advised artists to work in solitude, allowing the presence of colleagues only if absolutely necessary. Throughout his life, Leonardo conducted research in comparative anatomy and drew a wide range of animals, both real and imaginary; the only, unfortunate, omission from his pictorial bestiary, because of his absence from Florence, was the beloved, doomed giraffe, given to Lorenzo de’ Medici as a gift by the sultan of Egypt in 1487, which died after striking its head on a beam in the Medici palace. In fact, the artist’s fascination with nature intersected with that of Lorenzo, one of several interests that the two young men shared, which may have formed the basis for a respectful and cordial

4. First Years in Florence and the Verrocchio Workshop

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Figure 4. Leonardo da Vinci, Optical Studies and Resting Dog, c. 1492– 95?, pen and ink, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codice Atlantico (599r). Finsiel/Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

relationship. Lorenzo, who assembled a famed menagerie, enthusiastically bred fine horses (for which Leonardo designed stables), cattle, pigs, hounds, and rabbits. His poetry, mainly pastoral, teemed with animal and landscape imagery: cranes and falcons, deer and oxen, ilex trees and olive groves, and rushing streams. Just three years Leonardo’s senior, the high-spirited Lorenzo also would have appreciated the artist’s musical abilities and irreverent sense of humor, about which I will later comment at length. Il Magnifico composed and sang hunting and love songs and was notorious for telling funny, often ribald,

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The Young Leonardo

stories. His carpe diem attitude is revealed in the jaunty, carnival song he wrote in 1470: How lovely is youth – Yet it slips away; If you can be happy, be so. For there is no certainty about tomorrow.

Some allowances should be made for the clich´es, refrained in subsequent verses; the lyricist was barely out of his teens.

First Works in Florence and the Artistic Milieu 5.

T

he earliest surviving traces of Leonardo’s hand – and affection for animals – would seem to be found in the Tobias and the Angel (c. 1472–73), now in the National Gallery, London (fig. 5), a collaborative picture from the Verrocchio shop. The participation of two hands in the work’s execution has long been apparent, in light of the stylistic contrast between the sculptural rigidity of the anatomy and costumes of the figures and the more freely rendered dog and fish. The wavelike patterns of the dog’s unruly fur compare closely to the many sketches of the movement of water and hair that soon after streamed from Leonardo’s pen. The dead-eyed helplessness and glistening scales of the carp (or tinca), gasping for breath, suggest the touch of someone who studied aquatic life closely. Famously able to survive for long periods out of water, the common river fish would have provided a live (and fresh-smelling) model for hours before becoming a meal. An appreciative Verrocchio may have permitted Leonardo’s brush to delineate as well the lively, luminescent curls of Tobias’s hair and the intricate, knotted and fluttering belts and hems of the figures’ garments. Leonardo no doubt distinguished himself in the studio in such subtle application of highlights and in the other remarkable effects of illumination he could attain in the mixed media of tempera and oil paint, then relatively new to Florence. Consequently, he became the person called on to add those last, gilt-edged details, the final polish, before the works left the shop. The novel medium of oil paint, which Botticelli and others were also beginning to employ, would have much intrigued Leonardo. With it he knew that he could achieve qualities of translucency and transparency that far surpassed the capabilities of tempera and fresco as well 33

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as tenors of expression that the literal-minded Flemish, originators of the technique, had just barely explored. He had found a vehicle not only for success but also for investigation; his experimentation with media would continue for more than thirty years, with either sublime or disastrous results. A respectful homage to a painting of the same theme by the brothers Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo, the Verrocchio-workshop Tobias and the Angel was meant, nevertheless, to eclipse it. From the time of the major competition for the Baptistery doors project at the dawn of the fifteenth century, artistic rivalries were enthusiastically encouraged and pursued in Florence. Confident in the skills of his gifted student, Verrocchio must have felt he could compete well with the Pollaiuolo brothers and would have welcomed the opportunity to make a reduced variant of their painting, then on display in the church of Orsanmichele. The commission probably came to Verrocchio from someone with cataracts or other eye troubles (or who had a family member with poor vision), because the subject of the picture, from the apocryphal Book of Tobit, recalls how the young Tobit, guided by an angel, cured his father’s blindness with the entrails of a fish. This charming, popular story of filial piety was appended to the Old Testament in many, early vernacular Bibles. As we shall see, the vision-related theme would have much appealed to Leonardo, and the implicit, painterly competition would have begun to prepare him for a far more public and overt guerra (or war), as such artistic contests were called, some three decades later, when he would compete with Michelangelo in the grand salon of the city hall. For a young artist in the Verrocchio crew, who may have felt that he was devoting an inordinate amount of time to making studies for pictorial gowns and dresses (a particular strength and specialty of the shop), the works of the Pollaiuolo brothers, masters of the nude figure in action, must have seemed exciting. Celebrated for their deliberately ungraceful, painted and bronze figures of Hercules and other sinewy nudes in violent engagement, the Pollaiuolo boys offered a macho, avant-garde alternative to the conservative, luxury-goods industry of Verrocchio. They had a well-earned reputation for artistic boldness. Not since antiquity had classical subjects, the Labors of Hercules, been treated on such a colossal scale – one much grander than most religious pictures of the period. The Pollaiuoli’s large trio of canvasses in the Medici Palace, with their stunning male nudes, must have had a public

5. First Works in Florence and the Artistic Milieu

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Figure 5. Workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio (including Leonardo da Vinci), Tobias and the Angel, c. 1472–73, oil on panel, London, National C National Gallery.  Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

impact akin to that of the 1819 Paris unveiling of Theodore Gericault’s painting the Raft of the Medusa, in which a sensational, contemporary event was rendered on a monumental scale previously reserved for high-minded, history paintings. Leonardo furtively cast an eye on the Pollaiuoli’s heroic productions throughout his first period in Florence and, on occasion, discreetly borrowed from “the competition” for some of his major compositions. The workshop of the brothers Pollaiuolo (so nicknamed because their father was a poultry seller) was centrally located on via Vacchereccia, opposite the Palazzo della Signoria, and therefore a convenient stop for Leonardo, whose father lived nearby, and for other curious artists from Verrocchio’s shop. Probably in direct response to the famous

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Figure 6. Leonardo da Vinci, View of the Arno Valley, 1473, pen and ink, Florence, Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe. Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attivit`a culturali/Art Resource, NY.

engraving of a Battle of Nudes (c. 1471–73) by his rivals, Verrocchio created his own ostentatious, “display” drawing of the subject, long lost. However, he never managed, in most minds, to pose a serious challenge to Pollaiuolo preeminence in the mastery of the unclothed male figure. Possibly in the same year that he assisted with the Tobias, Leonardo rendered his earliest known, dated drawing – not surprisingly, a landscape – presumably made on the spot (fig. 6). The vibrant sketch captures, with familiarity, a view of the Arno River valley with the town of Montalbano, northwest of Florence near Vinci, in the left distance. The sheet is inscribed in his usual left-handed, backward manner, “[feast] of Holy Mary of the Snow, day of August the 5th, 1473,” in reference to the anniversary of a miraculous snowfall, and to a shrine in the area that commemorated it. His pen enlivens as it records, evoking not only a spectacular, somewhat exaggerated topography of breathtaking chasms and infinite plains but also the natural forces of wind, heat, and geological erosion. It is clear that Leonardo, still in his early twenties, had already spent considerable time contemplating the processes of geological formation and the cycling of water.

5. First Works in Florence and the Artistic Milieu

He meticulously differentiates the layers of stratified rock that comprise the cliff’s face and traces or implies the flow of water from hilltop, down waterfall, to valley stream, to town and verdant, saturated fields. Whether the artist was able to translate his dramatic landscape into paint and insert it into the background of one of the Verrocchio shop pictures, the likely purpose of the study, cannot be determined; the view does not reappear in any of Verrocchio’s or Leonardo’s extant paintings. He may well have been following the lead of Piero Pollaiuolo, perhaps the first Florentine painter to include in his pictures recognizable views of the Arno valley below the city, as in his Annunciation of c. 1470, now in Berlin. Whatever its intended use, Leonardo’s drawing is especially interesting in that it reveals how, even in his youth and when making a dated “record,” he tended to idealize, almost automatically, the subject before him.

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Early Pursuits in Engineering – Hydraulics and the Movement of Water 6.

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erhaps in the early 1470s, and certainly by the end of the decade, Leonardo became very interested in the movement of water through man-made, technical means. Vasari states that Leonardo, when “still a youth,” was the first to suggest reducing the unpredictable river Arno to a navigable canal from Pisa to Florence. The earliest pages (c. 1478–80) of Leonardo’s Codice Atlantico are covered with devices for raising large quantities of water or directing its flow. Some sheets credibly illustrate systems of weirs and locks on canals; others have studies of contraptions with gears, weights, and hydraulic cylinders, such as the so-called Archimedes’ screw, based on the ancient Greek mathematician’s famous invention, which supposedly employed a large revolving spiral to pull water upward (fig. 7). Although Leonardo’s writings indicate that he sometimes consulted treatises on water in Lorenzo the Magnificent’s possession, the latter seems not to have kept in his library any books by Archimedes or Heron of Alexandria, the two standard, classical sources on hydrostatics and pneumatics. However, Leonardo probably saw a copy of the Italian humanist Roberto Valturio’s De re militari (1472), an anthology of ancient military science, which illustrated the hydroscrew and other devices for the conveyance of water. The artist would eventually obtain his own version of this text. Leonardo may have received important early encouragement in his engineering interests from the multitalented Francesco di Giorgio Martini, a Sienese painter, manuscript illuminator, sculptor, architect, and military engineer. In 1472, Martini’s appointment as Siena’s operaio dei bottini, that is, civil engineer for (water) conduits, was terminated, and he was freer to travel and to pursue his career as a painter. Circumstantial evidence indicates that he probably spent extended periods in 39

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Florence between 1472 and 1474. Rather tentative in style and execution, his pictures from around (and after) that time show the strong influence of the progressive, Florentine artists Alesso Baldovinetti, Botticelli, Lippi, and, especially, Verrocchio – Martini’s attempts to give his provincial works a veneer of modernity. His Coronation of the Virgin, painted around 1472–74 (now at the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena), owes much to Verrocchio, and some of his sculptures from that time have been mistakenly attributed to either Verrocchio or the young Leonardo. More highly regarded for his designs for maritime projects and for military machines and fortifications, Martini would have been able to offer to the twenty- or twenty-one-yearold Leonardo instruction in large-scale engineering projects – and a professional role model – that Verrocchio could not. His machine drawings of the 1470s represent many of the same sorts of devices that the young Leonardo would try to design: hoists, pumps, hydraulic lifts, and mechanical maritime structures. After his time in Florence, the Sienese inventor may have intermittently kept in touch with Leonardo for a number of years, because his many projects kept him traveling constantly, occasionally through Tuscany. One should also bear in mind that, during those periods that he was based in his native Siena, he could journey to Florence in a day (or Leonardo to Siena), from dawn to dusk, on a good horse. Eventually, he and the young man from Vinci would have reconnected in Milan, after Leonardo moved there; and we know that, in 1490, the two men were together in the nearby town of Pavia, advising on structural matters concerning the cathedral. They agreed on many architectural principles, advocating that the ideal church design should have a central plan (that is, entirely symmetrical with longitudinal [nave and choir] and latitudinal [transept] structures of equal length), and they shared a strong Aristotelian bias for “organic” proportions, derived from natural forms. At some point, Leonardo came to possess some of Martini’s important manuscripts on architecture and engineering. These manuals were of immense value to him, because, over the course of his career, he would support himself more through defense and public-works projects than through his artwork. Leonardo’s own, eloquent mechanical illustrations were indebted to Martini’s, which offered examples of exploded or cutaway views and depicted how machinery moved and operated in three-dimensional space. These were immediately

6. Early Pursuits in Engineering – Hydraulics and the Movement of Water

comprehensible and credible images for which written commentary was almost unnecessary. The young Leonardo concerned himself not only with macroengineering schemes, with how the flow of water could be diverted, controlled, and its power harnessed, but also with how people could travel over and under it. He was probably familiar with Lorenzo de’ Medici’s copy of Flavius Vegetius Renatus’ De re militari (On Matters Military), a fourth-century treatise that emphasized the need for Roman soldiers to know how to swim. On one sheet (fig. 8), the artist drew, in succession at upper left, prototypes for a snorkel with a long breathing hose (perhaps for clandestine military activities), swimming goggles (which Leonardo says were used, along with breathing tubes, by pearl fishers in the Indian Ocean), and water “shoes” – small, rounded boards attached to the feet – and water-shoe poles. The obvious impracticality of this last invention leads one to suspect that it was based solely on imagination and not experimentation. Like so many of Leonardo’s inventions, the water-walkers and poles could function only on paper; he seems often to have appreciated an idea or theory for its beauty, its delightfulness, without concern for

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Figure 7. Leonardo da Vinci, Devices for Raising Water (including the Archimedes’ Screw) and Other Studies, c. 1480, pen and ink, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codice Atlantico (1069r). Art Resource, NY.

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its efficacy or validity. However, another aquatic design he produced at that time, for a lightweight, portable bridge for military excursions, would appear to operate in the real world. Later, he would develop and advocate the breathing tube as a built-in component of a plausible, flotation outfit, a lifesaving device for soldiers and other shipwreck victims: it is necessary to have a coat made of leather with a double hem over the breast which is the width of a finger, and double also from the girdle to the knee, and let the leather of which it is made be quite air-tight. And when you are obliged to jump into the sea, blow out the lappets of the coat through the hems of the breast, and then jump into the sea. And let yourself be carried by the waves, if there is no shore near at hand and you do not know the sea. And always keep in your mouth the end of the tube through which the air passes into the garment; and if once or twice it should become necessary for you to take a breath when the foam prevents you, draw it through the mouth of the tube from the air within the coat.

When Leonardo investigated a natural phenomenon, such as a violent, tossing wave or an optical illusion, he did so with relentless diligence. Often, his inquiry was prompted by an observation that he found particularly intriguing or inexplicable. He wondered, as we might today when looking into the rearview mirror of an automobile, “why something seen in a mirror appears smaller than it [really] is?” Then, he would ask, “what sort of a mirror would show the thing exactly the right size?” On another day, he might ponder why “a dead woman floats face downward in the water, and a man the opposite way [?]” When faced with such conundrums, his immediate response was to try to make comparisons with other natural phenomena he had observed and to draw analogies, be it the reflection of the moon in a pond or the drifting orientations of inanimate objects on a river. Given time and opportunity, he would consult “authorities” – Aristotle, Euclid, or Pliny – to see whether they provided answers, in the scant books and manuscripts available to him through the Medici, friends, or even the kindness of bibliophile strangers, such as those secondhand acquaintances he describes as “the nephew of Gian Angelo the painter [who has] a book about water that belonged to his father” and “the brother of Sant’ Agosta in Rome – who lives in Sardinia.”

6. Early Pursuits in Engineering – Hydraulics and the Movement of Water

In the end, even if he could not completely comprehend or explain what he saw, he at least attempted to address it in practical terms; he would try to invent a nondistorting mirror or create an apparatus to prevent drowning. This is not to say that Leonardo would not permit himself, on occasion, to indulge in some “useless” abstract thought or theory, as in his brain-twisting and nihilistic little romp: Among the greatest things that are found among us, the existence of Nothing is the greatest of all. This dwells in time, and stretches its limbs into the past and the future, and with these takes to itself all works that are past and those that are to come, both of nature and of the animals, and possesses nothing of the individual present. It does, however, extend to the essence of anything.

Leonardo’s tendency, seen already in his View of the Arno, to idealize or to “correct,” to bring what he observed into accord with preconceived notions or theory, profoundly affected almost every project and investigation he undertook throughout his life.

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Figure 8. Leonardo da Vinci, Devices for a Diver, for Walking on Water, and Various Studies for Machines, c. 1480, pen and ink, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codice Atlantico (26r). Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana.

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Figure 9. Leonardo da Vinci, Cross-Section of a Man’s Head, Showing Three Chambers for Reception, Processing, and Storage (Memory) of Sensory Impressions, c. 1493–95, pen and ink, Windsor Castle, Royal Library (12603r). The Royal C 2010 Collection  Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Hyperinquisitive as he was, he was never a scientist in the modern sense – methodically setting up controlled trials and accurately measuring and recording the results, a modus operandi developed in the late seventeenth century. His fascination with water had much to do with the fact that he held the ancient (and contemporary) view that it was one of the four basic elements, along with air, earth, and fire and constituted the most vital fluid of what he described, in his famous personification, as the “Body of the Earth.” Like all of us, when confronted with evidence that contradicted theory, he tended to cling to the latter, going so far as to disbelieve – and reconfigure in his drawings – what was placed directly before his eyes. For example, he had the opportunity to examine closely a human brain (and those of many animals), and yet, when he drew the organ in cross-section, he delineated an imaginative, three-chambered cognitive system (fig. 9), based on the capricious speculations of medieval

6. Early Pursuits in Engineering – Hydraulics and the Movement of Water

scholars interpreting the ancient writings of Aristotle, particularly his treatise On the Soul (De anima). To put it another way, Leonardo acted as if what he observed in many instances – if it departed from accepted notions – constituted an anomaly. In his startling, cross-section view of a couple copulating (Windsor Castle, Royal Library), Leonardo traced the origin of the sperm, back through a quirky, reproductive plumbing system, not to the testicles, but, again following Aristotle (and Hippocrates), to the spinal column and ultimately to the base of the brain. The artist inventively drew a long duct that directly connected penis to spine. Leonardo would have known not only Aristotle’s faulty biological scheme but also Diogenes Laertius’ memorable aphorism, “semen is a drop of the brain.” Lorenzo de’ Medici had a copy of the Greek biographer’s third-century Lives of the Philosophers translated into the vernacular. Similarly, because of his generally mechanistic approach, when Leonardo later made a detailed study of the human heart, during a dissection, he could not resist adjusting his illustration slightly, regularizing the geometry, to bring it into conformity with ideal, mathematical, and engineering principles.

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The Bust of a Warrior and Leonardo’s Creative Method 7.

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he young painter’s consuming interest in nature and zoomorphic forms manifested itself in another drawing from the same period as the View of the Arno, one dependent on Verrocchio workshop productions – his fearsome Bust of a Warrior in Profile (fig. 10), incongruously scratched in the delicate medium of metalpoint. This study, preserved in the British Museum, is based on Verrocchio’s lost, fanciful profile relief of the ancient Persian king, Darius, crudely reproduced in surviving glazed terracotta facsimiles. Lorenzo de’ Medici sent the original metal sculpture, along with a similar portrait of Alexander the Great, to King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary as a gift – from whose possession it disappeared without a trace (likely destroyed in the second or third decade of the sixteenth century, during the Turkish invasion and occupation). Verrocchio probably loosely modeled his reliefs on antique cameos in Lorenzo’s collection, such as the lost profile Bust of Athena (known from documents and a reproductive illustration of 1483), in which the Greek goddess wore comparable, fantastic armor. Lorenzo might have pointed out this pedigree-by-association in an accompanying letter to Corvinus. If those contemporary clay copies that have come down to us retain the basic features of Verrocchio’s lost Darius (fig. 11), then we may surmise that Leonardo, again, invigorated and elaborated on what he saw. On the chest of Leonardo’s warrior, a growling lion’s head has been altered to look up, deferentially, to the fiercer visage of the soldier. Very different from the aquiline profile of a classical hero (as seen in the terracottas), the brutish face of the sketch, one suspects, either pays homage to a tough, local bravo, a soldier of fortune, or represents some other, thuggish-looking acquaintance of Leonardo. 47

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Figure 10. Leonardo da Vinci, Bust of a Warrior in Profile, c. 1473–74, metalpoint, London, British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings.  C The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 11. After Andrea del Verrocchio, Darius, mid-1470s?, glazed terracotta, Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga. Courtesy of the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga.

The Young Leonardo

7. The Bust of a Warrior and Leonardo’s Creative Method

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Figure 12. Leonardo da Vinci, Bust of a Man, c. 1480–82, red chalk, Windsor Castle, Royal Library (12502). The Royal C 2010 Collection  Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Sometimes called a “nutcracker man,” in reference to the powerful jaw and prominent nose and chin that almost meet (strongly caricatured in certain drawings), the head clearly belonged to a real person. Indeed, the man appears to me to be the same intimidating model, subsequently drawn full-face with comparable horizontal furrows above the bridge of his nose and a similar lion decoration on his shoulder, that Leonardo employed frequently in the early 1480s and after he returned to Florence from Milan in 1500 (fig. 12). The artist seems to have taken perverse pleasure in recording, in a series of strictly frontal and profile “mug shots,” the effects of aging, particularly the man’s increasingly sagging features and thinning hair (fig. 13). A drawing in the Louvre (fig. 14) appears to show him at an advanced age, at least in his seventies; although his cheeks have sunken and his neck thinned and fallen in folds, he can still be recognized by his distinctive, cleft and bulbous nose, downturned mouth, and piercing eyes. Leonardo

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Figure 13. Leonardo da Vinci, Bust of a Man, c. 1502, red chalk, Windsor Castle, Royal Library (12503). The Royal Collection  C 2010 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

perhaps made this last, parting study of the man in 1515, when the artist, then based in Rome, accompanied his employer Giuliano de’ Medici (son of Lorenzo the Magnificent and brother of Pope Leo X) to Florence as part of a papal entourage. On one early, informal, portrait drawing of the same man (fig. 15) by a Verrocchio assistant (mixed in with Leonardo head studies at Windsor Castle), there is an inscription identifying him as an otherwise obscure Spaniard – Tom´as Vald´ez or Vald´es from Salamanca (scrawled, Tomaso vald´ez/ s.[ign]or salaman[ca]). He may have been chosen as a military model not only for his fierce looks, but also because, in late-fifteenth-century Europe, the prowess of the undefeated Spanish infantry and artillery was legendary, partly because of their sheer numbers. By 1475, the kingdom of Castile-Aragon had an army twice as large as that of any other region or country. Given the close correspondence of his features to those of Verrocchio’s sitter for his equestrian monument to the deceased, mercenary general

7. The Bust of a Warrior and Leonardo’s Creative Method

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Figure 14. Leonardo da Vinci, Head of an Old Man, c. 1515?, red chalk, Paris, Louvre (2249). R´eunion des Mus´ees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

Bartolomeo Colleoni (designed c. 1480–88), whose own face was not used for that idealized sculpture, one wonders if the older master hired the same rugged model. In addition to reworking (or replacing) the face of Verrocchio’s Darius, Leonardo has transformed the bird’s wing on the original helmet into that of a dragon – the dragon’s wing, like the lion’s head, deriving from similar features on the Rossellino/Verrocchio lavamano. He has also given the ornate acanthus and tendrils a quality of writhing, tenacious growth. Leonardo would come to make a habit of rethinking traditional types and symbols – looking at the people who surrounded him, finding those who best represented a particular characteristic, and then, in his art, reinforcing that telling physiognomy or

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Figure 15. Workshop of Verrocchio, Portrait of Tom´as Vald´ez, c. 1473–75, pen and ink, Windsor Castle, Royal Library (12484). The Royal C 2010 Collection  Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

personality with inventive attributes or props. Vasari tells of how the artist would sometimes stalk a person with an interesting face for an entire day, just to make good sketches of their features from different angles. Florence, in the fifteenth century, was not the international commercial center that Venice was, and so Leonardo had to hunt assiduously among the homogeneity of facial types he found there. Given his own origins, the coarse visages of country folk in town, captured in the paintings of Andrea Castagno, would not have intrigued him. However, he must have regarded as interesting models those from foreign lands – not just Spain, but North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, from which many of the local slaves came. He could quickly study the exotic faces of those non-Christian Algerians, Circassians, Russians, Tartars, and Turks when they emerged occasionally and briefly from patrician households. Leonardo suggested an aide-m´emoire for times when unwitting models had escaped: “when you [have to] draw a face from memory take with you a little book wherein you have [already] noted down similar features, and when you have glanced at the face of a person you wish to portray, look then at the [facial] parts [in the book], which nose or mouth is like his, and make a little mark to recognize it, and then later, at home, put it together.” Despite this typological approach, Leonardo seems not to have adhered to the strict orthodoxy of the Renaissance physiognomists, who believed that each individual has

7. The Bust of a Warrior and Leonardo’s Creative Method

facial traits associated with one of the four temperaments or personality types – sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic – supposedly determined by the relative proportions of the four humors or fluids (blood, phlegm, white bile, and black bile) in the body. According to that classification system, a choleric person, for example, would normally have a round face, prominent forehead and eyebrows, and deep-set eyes, among other attributes. Eschewing such generalities, Leonardo preferred to examine a face more carefully, watching the changing features and expressions for the individual temperament and for a hint of the discreet soul. In this approach, he aligned himself with Alberti, who, in Della famiglia, had expressed doubts about the four-humor theory, suggesting that a person’s disposition is largely a product of environment – highly responsive to parental teaching and conditioned by experience and habit.

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Early Participation in the Medici Court 8.

I

n the winter of 1474–75, probably between december and January, Leonardo assisted Verrocchio with the design of a standard for a magnificent joust sponsored by Giuliano de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s tall and athletic younger brother (fig. 16). Ostensibly, the event celebrated a defensive treaty negotiated between Florence, Venice, and Milan – reconfirming their nonaggression pact of 1454– 55. However, such jousts (mock duels on horseback), not to be confused with tournaments (mock wars on horseback), took place annually in Florence, as a regular part of carnival and as a rite of passage for aristocratic and prominent young men, whose participation signaled that they had reached the qualifying age for public office. Held on 29 January 1475, Giuliano’s joust, meant to rival one alla franciosa organized by Lorenzo in 1469, had all the pageantry and chivalric splendor of a medieval French romance – part of a long, anachronistic tradition of “knight errantry” in Florence. Having designed a standard for Lorenzo’s contest, Verrocchio knew exactly what was required for Giulio’s. Now preserved in the Uffizi, the standard drawing was apparently begun by Verrocchio, who established the positions of the figures in black chalk, and finished by Leonardo, who reinforced the master’s lines with pen and ink and then added plants at left, shading them with his distinctive left-handed, backward-slanting, hatching. Fitted into the long, triangular format of a standard, the two figures represent the winged, love god Cupid (or Amor), and a young woman, either a terrestrial Venus or a maiden nymph, in an untenable, recumbent posture; when Leonardo took over the execution of the drawing, he seems to have misinterpreted the placement of the large rock, which 55

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likely was intended to support her (proper) right arm. Verrocchio appears to have reused the pose he had invented for a terracotta Sleeping Youth (now in Berlin). The mythological subject was almost certainly prescribed by one of the Florentine Neoplatonists, possibly Marsilio Ficino, the selfappointed leader of the group, who advanced the notion of an Earthly Venus or Aphrodite (as she was called by the Greeks) – a mundane goddess of love. In his arcane Commentary on Plato’s Symposium of 1469, the celibate Ficino expanded on the ancient Greek philosopher’s distinctions between divine love and earthly love, for which he had posited two Venuses, a nude goddess, who rules over matters pertaining to the divine and heaven, and a clothed, earthly or “natural” deity, who represents both the beauty found in the material world and the procreative principle. Human love and desire, subthemes of Giuliano’s joust, fall within the realm of visible, terrestrial beauty and, therefore, the domain of the Natural Venus (amor vulgaris). On the other hand, the glamorous lady in the standard drawing could be a Sleeping Nymph, a leitmotif for many contemporary writers, such as the Medici courtier Luca Pulci. His epic, pastoral poem, Il driadeo d’amore (The Wood Nymph of Love), written between 1464 and 1465, is laden with both dozing and frolicking ninfe. Among those verses (XXXVIII–L), Pulci describes at length a romantic encounter between Cupid and a sleeping nymph named Pietra, or “Rock,” who “loved with a perfect [that is, chaste Platonic] love.” Thus, the stone in the Verrocchio drawing, more prominent before Leonardo’s alterations, may have been intended as an identifying attribute. Leonardo, at some point, came to own a copy of Pulci’s poem. Whoever she is, the comely woman in the drawing appears to be lightly daydreaming, after having gathered a bouquet of flowers, which she cradles with left hand in the folds of her dress – significantly, close to her abdomen. Cupid does not prepare to pierce her with one of his arrows, as is his habit, but gently tries to wake her from her reverie, touching her heart, so that he may lead her, with a prominent spear (cum jousting lance, an uncharacteristic weapon for him), into romantic adventure, suggested by the lush and fertile vegetation at left. The artists have thus combined and cast themes of medieval chivalry – knightly and amorous quest – in ancient Greek terms: the armed, antique god of love stirs the desires of an unsuspecting maiden nymph or Earthly Venus, dressed in a classically inspired gown.

8. Early Participation in the Medici Court

The particular shape of the standard was derived, ultimately, from the labarum or flag of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, whose pennant was well known from the carved medallions on his triumphal arch in Rome. Botticelli provided Giuliano with a similar banner (also lost), featuring the goddess Pallas Athena. Grasping a lance and the shield of Medusa, she stood in a white gown before a flowery meadow, with a restrained Cupid nearby, bound by golden cords. All of this we learn from a poem by Poliziano, which also notes that Pallas Athena was shown trampling the flames of love before they could kindle the olive branches at her feet, presumably a reference to her unassailable purity. Known only to the poet and the patron, the full meaning of Botticelli’s standard, like Verrocchio’s, was intentionally made elusive, poetic secrets for Giuliano to savor. Handsome as they were, the standards must have been almost lost among the fancy costumes, some encrusted with twenty pounds of pearls and fitted with billowing capes, damascened armor, and caparisoned horses in the Piazza Santa Croce, and in the hoopla of the twenty-two-year-old Giuliano’s predetermined victory, for which he was awarded an ornate helmet designed by Verrocchio. He rode triumphantly at the end of a long procession of gallant cavalrymen and footmen, as a sharp fanfare of horns embroidered the air. The more important prize eluded him, however; he could only watch

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Figure 16. Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci, Study for a Joust Standard for Giuliano de’ Medici, 1474–75, pen and ink over black chalk, Florence, Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe. Art Resource.

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from a distance as the woman he desired, Simonetta Cattaneo, the consumptive, dying young wife of Marco Vespucci, was honored in the festivities as the “Queen of Beauty.” Hopelessly unattainable, she was the perfect, chivalric object of unrequited love. Verrocchio and Leonardo, of insufficient social stature to partake in the ceremonies, could only have observed the ritualized, poignant drama from the sidelines. Despite its contrivance, this play of manners, performed long before opera, would have just as effectively brought the spectators to tears. Thus, like Lorenzo’s joust of 1469, held in honor of his bride-tobe Clarice Orsini, Giuliano’s event was mainly a pretext for courtship and magnificent self-indulgence. So that there would be no confusion about the former motive, Botticelli’s standard was inscribed in gold Gothic letters with the French motto la sans par, “the lady without peer,” in reference to Simonetta, and the figure of Pallas Athena markedly resembled her. A couple of years before, in 1473, with similarly amorous intentions, a certain young Florentine named Bartolomeo Benci, accompanied by a retinue of eight colleagues and thirty attendants, had serenaded his lady, Marietta, and then had organized a joust beneath her balcony (as she pretended to be besieged in a castle). His associates later provided the same entertainments for their girlfriends, who were probably impressed as well by the car their minions led. This represented the Triumph of Love, a theme borrowed from Petrarch, and featured mechanical, flying cupids and a bleeding heart surrounded by flames. Although Giuliano’s own extravagant production did not – could not – win him the spectrally beautiful Simonetta, he lived long enough to see his mistress, Fioretta Gorini, bear him a healthy son, Giulio, the future Pope Clement VII.

Leonardo’s Personality and Place in Florentine Society 9.

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eonardo’s musings about romance, and about human qualities, behavior, and failings, appear to have led to his unusual drawing of Phyllis Astride Aristotle (c. 1475–78), a scene of such awkward folly that it anticipates the antiheroics of Shakespeare and Rembrandt (fig. 17). The specific impetus for the study was probably either a contemporary Florentine engraving or one of many circulating Northern European prints of the subject. According to legend, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, of steely mind but evidently weak knees, allowed his beautiful young mistress, Phyllis, to ride on his back in exchange for her favors. In a cramped sketch of ungainly postures and forced perspective (the furniture recedes too rapidly in space), Leonardo gently pokes fun at his supreme intellectual mentor, who, on all fours, looks back imploringly and shamefully at his dominatrix, in the general direction of the bed that awaits them. For the good-humored Leonardo the contrast between the realms of the intellect and the flesh made for fine parody – a telling counterpoint to Michelangelo’s self-flaying paintings and poems devoted to related themes of base carnality. Leonardo’s bemused attitude toward heterosexual conduct is apparent in a remark he later jotted in one of his notebooks: “the act of procreation and everything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if there were no pretty faces and sensuous dispositions.” Coincidentally, some of Leonardo’s own sexual peccadilloes were revealed in the same period in which he sketched the compromised Aristotle. In 1476, while still employed in Verrocchio’s shop, Leonardo and three of his colleagues were accused, anonymously, of committing sodomy with a certain seventeen-year-old youth named Jacopo 59

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Saltarelli, an obliging apprentice in a goldsmith’s shop. If the alleged acts had not been consensual, the Verrocchio gang would have been indicted for a corporal or capital offense. Such charges are credible, given the generally boisterous and promiscuous atmosphere of large ateliers at that time and what we know of Leonardo’s later erotic proclivities. Homosexuality was regarded as an activity rather than an identity in the Renaissance and for centuries thereafter, and the sexual preference of many was, to say the least, fluid. Leonardo, however, appears to have been fairly fixed in his desires; the relationship he later formed with a young prot´eg´e, Gian Giacomo Caprotti, called Salai, endured for decades. In any event, he and his coworkers seem not to have suffered dire consequences for their behavior. Apparently, there was no legal follow-up to the denunciations of the Verrocchio shop hands, and, at that time, much greater dishonor fell on the person – probably Saltarelli – who assumed the more passive role in such sexual escapades. Leonardo remained in Verrocchio’s e´quipe and continued his role of favored collaborator for at least another two years. One suspects that Leonardo’s disarming charm, as much as his artistic talents, preserved his job and earned him the position of informal ringleader of the shop. Contemporary biographers say that he was charismatic, with the graceful, unassuming manner of one to whom all things come naturally and easily. His colleagues idolized him for his leonine beauty, athletic physique and prowess, musical talents (he sang and played the lira da braccio or “arm lyre”), and wit; and he seems to have had no trouble in attracting younger, male companions. We know that during his first period in Florence, he had a close relationship with a gentleman named Fioravante di Domenico, whom Leonardo described in 1478 as his “most cherished” friend. Word of his beauty and romantic preferences has caused a few scholars to speculate that Leonardo may have had an intimate attachment to Verrocchio, a lifelong bachelor. Some have further theorized that the master modeled the lovely face of his bronze adolescent David (created in the mid-1460s and now in the Bargello Museum, Florence) on that of his attractive assistant. The exact nature of the two men’s relationship will likely remain forever unknown. One should not draw any conclusions from the fact that Leonardo resided for a period in Verrocchio’s house because, as noted earlier, such master–assistant living arrangements were not only common but typical. There is not,

9. Leonardo’s Personality and Place in Florentine Society

to my mind, an especially close correspondence between the David’s profile and Leonardo’s, recorded in a red-chalk drawing at a more advanced stage of life (fig. 18). Verrocchio had many suitable young models from which to choose. That profile study of Leonardo (now in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle), probably created by his Milanese follower Francesco Melzi, reveals how distinguished the master appeared in full maturity, with refined, almost delicate, features and well-groomed beard. Leonardo was no less fastidious in dress and was, perhaps, a little vain. We learn that he frequently wore a dashing, rose-colored tunic, cut to the knee, although longer garments were then in vogue. Although immodestly revealing his strong, well-turned limbs, the shorter dress, more significantly, was associated with princely courts. Leonardo was almost certainly familiar with Diogenes Laertius’ then well-known description of Aristotle, in the Lives of the Philosophers, as someone who “indulged in very conspicuous dress” and who “used to groom his hair carefully.” From the artist’s “shopping lists,” we know that he kept his companion Salai nattily dressed as well – in silver cloth with green velvet trim.

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Figure 17. Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle and Phyllis, c. 1475–78, pen and ink on blue paper, Hamburg, Kunsthalle. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 18. Francesco Melzi (?), Profile Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1510–12?, red chalk, Windsor Castle, Royal Library (12726). The Royal C 2010 Collection  Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Leonardo envisioned the genteel “ideal life” of a painter thus: “the painter sits in front of his work at perfect ease. He is well dressed and wields a very light brush dipped in delicate color. He adorns himself with the clothes that he fancies; his home is clean and filled with delightful pictures.” Socially disadvantaged by the illegitimacy and geography of his birth, Leonardo would have dressed impeccably and “fashion-forward” not only to fit into court life but also to compensate for his plebeian background. In a general way, the stressed tidiness – one could almost say “daintiness” – of his archetypal painter was meant to play down the messy, physical aspects of his vocation, to present the artist less as a craftsman in the mechanical arts (ars mechanica), a laborer who works with his hands, and more as a thinker-designer, engaged in the liberal arts (ars liberalis). The disheveled fellow with unruly hair and

9. Leonardo’s Personality and Place in Florentine Society

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Figure 19. Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of an Old Man, c. 1495–1505?, red chalk, Turin, Biblioteca Reale (15571). Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

large, coarse features portrayed in the famous, presumed Self-Portrait in Turin (fig. 19) and in other Leonardo drawings is obviously another man. Leonardo’s jocular, often self-deprecating attitude made it virtually impossible for those he surpassed, which was practically everyone, to envy or begrudge him. He seems to have heeded Aristotle’s advice that “ironic persons who depreciate their own merits give an impression of superior refinement.” No doubt, such charm also allowed the artist to dodge deadlines and responsibilities and, time and time again, escape stern reproach. A tireless conjurer of riddles and, as we shall see,

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chronic punster, Leonardo could have diffused almost any difficult situation with a clever remark or joke. Examples of his jests, concerning painting and reincarnation, can be found in his manuscripts: A painter was asked why he had made his children so ugly, when his painted figures, which were dead things [inanimate], he had made so beautiful. His reply was that he made his pictures by day and his children at night. A man wishing to prove on the authority of [the ancient Greek philosopher] Pythagoras that he had been in the world on a former occasion, and another not allowing him to conclude his argument, the first man said to the second: “And as proof that I was here on a former occasion, I remember that you were a miller.” The other, who felt provoked by his words, agreed that it was true, for he said he remembered the speaker had been the ass that had carried flour for him.

On other pages, Leonardo offers tongue-in-cheek, apocalyptic “prophecies” (profetie) of what were, actually, ordinary situations: O cities of the sea, I behold in your citizens, women as well as men, tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will have no understanding of our speech; and you will only be able to give vent to your grief and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentation one to another; for those who bind you will not have understanding of your speech nor will you understand them.

Leonardo refers, in this riddle, to infants wrapped in swaddling bands. The high walls of mighty cities shall be seen inverted, in their trenches

that is, the city walls are reflected in surrounding moats. He seems to have possessed, in his small library, a copy of the Liber Facetiarum, or Book of Jests (1451), by the Tuscan humanist Poggio Bracciolini, which contained hundreds of funny anecdotes, puns, and jokes, many of them off-color, and some that we, today, would term “bathroom humor” – episodes of gentlefolk and clerics engaging in

9. Leonardo’s Personality and Place in Florentine Society

various sexual acts or irreverently passing wind. Like those of Poggio (and Lorenzo the Magnificent), Leonardo’s jokes could occasionally be lewd: a woman crossing a treacherous and muddy place lifts up her dress both in front and in back. Therefore, as she touches both anus and vagina, she tells the truth three times when she says “This is a difficult passage.”

Overinterpreted and overblown by Sigmund Freud, Leonardo’s famous, reputed, youthful dream, in which a kite, a kind of hawk (Freud called it a “vulture”), repeatedly thrust its tail into his mouth, also may have been no more than a crude, private joke on the artist’s part. Psychoanalysts now realize that a memory recounted from childhood is likely to be a legend. A claim to remember a childhood dream, made by a very complex adult, would probably be a manipulation, or even a perverse jest, rather than a straight story. Memories are altered ineluctably each time they are recalled. The remnants of an early dream (if it actually occurred) would have been wholly transformed over the years. Written on a sheet devoted to the aerodynamics of birds (specifically, their descent), the strange remark, alternatively, may have been a not-so-veiled, hostile reference to his father, because, according to the Fior di virt`u and Leonardo’s own rough draft for a bestiary, the kite brutally attacks its own children out of envy and “keeps them without food.” It would be easy, but irresponsible, for us to speculate further on Leonardo’s relationship with his father; given the circumstances of the artist’s birth, his sexual activities, and, as we shall see, his erratic work habits, there was certainly potential for familial conflict – potential, yet no clear evidence of it. That said, readings of the purported dream as “homosexual fantasy” (Freud) or, more recently, “homosexual anxiety” should also be considered with skepticism.

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Important Productions and Collaborations in the Verrocchio Shop 10.

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robably in those free-spirited days as a member of the Verrocchio crew, Leonardo drew in metalpoint on blue paper the elegant, if disturbingly fetching, nude figure of John the Baptist pointing – the first of his many enigmatic and increasingly androgynous or homoerotic portrayals of the saint (fig. 20). Beyond any imposition of personal tastes onto his subject, Leonardo, in feminizing John – and other male saints and angels – probably intended to suggest that in divine beings, genders are combined and transcended. The refined study may have been Leonardo’s contribution to the design of an altarpiece called the “Madonna di Piazza,” representing the Virgin and Child with Saints John and Donato, commissioned by the Medici around 1475 from Verrocchio’s shop for an oratory chapel in Pistoia Cathedral (fig. 21). Eventually, another assistant, Lorenzo di Credi, was entrusted, it seems, with the entire execution of the altarpiece, but he probably availed himself of Leonardo’s gracile drawing in conceiving the figure of the Baptist. By the mid-fifteenth century, the pointing pose of the saint had become canonical in art; he was also frequently depicted holding or wearing a banner with the words, Ecce Agnus Dei (Behold the Lamb of God), his proclamation of Christ’s divinity and sacrificial nature, reported in the Gospel of John (1:36). However, the Baptist, a patron saint of Florence, usually appears in art either as a very young boy or as an unattractively weathered ascetic, grasping a slender reed cross. Here, Leonardo seems to delight in conveying the sensuous anatomy of his adolescent model, whose holiness appears questionable and whose pointing gesture lacks conviction. The painter may have found justification – and even the idea – for his depiction in Donatello’s 67

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Figure 20. Leonardo da Vinci, St. John the Baptist, c. 1475–76, silverpoint on blue prepared paper, Windsor Castle, Royal Library (12572). The C Royal Collection  2010 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

marble, pubescent Saint John of the 1440s or, more likely, Benedetto da Maiano’s sculpture of a lanky, teenaged Baptist (c. 1476–78), either in progress or recently completed, for the niche over the door of the Sala dei Gigli in the Palazzo della Signoria. Yet Leonardo’s saint lacks the youthful awkwardness and innocent piety of those Saint Johns. Not one to conspire in trend setting, Credi prudently aged the figure when he translated it into paint. Although the touch of Leonardo’s brush cannot be discerned in the Pistoia altarpiece, his participation, perhaps at the same moment, in the execution of Verrocchio’s beautiful Baptism of Christ (begun c. 1468–69, resumed and finished c. 1475–76) for the monastic church of S. Salvi has been well observed and for centuries extolled (fig. 22). Prone to embellish and mythologize, Vasari related that Leonardo was responsible for painting the angel in profile at left – a

10. Important Productions and Collaborations in the Verrocchio Shop

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Figure 21. Lorenzo di Credi, Virgin and Child with Saints John and Donato, c. 1475–76 oil on panel, Pistoia Cathedral. Niccol`o Orsi Battaglini/Alinari Archives, Florence.

figure, the writer gushed, so gloriously rendered and superior that an embarrassed Verrocchio, who executed the lion’s share of the picture, decided thereafter to turn his attention exclusively to sculpture. It is difficult to determine the exact division of labor in the painting, but Leonardo’s intervention would seem to extend well beyond the crouching angel to many of the landscape details and to the figure of Christ. Evidently, the young artist had by this time risen to the position of full-fledged collaborator. It should be recalled that he had enjoyed the official status of an established painter since 1472, when he was admitted to the painter’s professional confraternity. Leonardo’s involvement is unmistakable in the handling of the baptismal river’s banks and flowing water, which finds its source in his familiar, distant mountains and meanders gradually through the entire landscape, carving its way toward the viewer. This depth-defining motif may have been inspired by similar features in the backgrounds of a few paintings by the Pollaiuoli, such as Antonio’s bold Hercules and the Hydra for the Medici palace and the Shooting of Saint Sebastian (c. 1475;

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Figure 22. Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci, Baptism of Christ, c. 1468–69 and c. 1475–76, oil on panel, for S. Salvi, now Florence, Uffizi. Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attivit`a culturali/Art Resource, NY.

fig. 23) by both Antonio and Piero, a picture that Leonardo would have admired in the Pucci family oratory beside the Florentine church of SS. Annunziata. Leonardo carried the river idea much further, however, needing to unify spatially a work created sporadically by two hands over a period of six years or more. He rendered his more pervasive body of water with a geological awareness, exaggerating the erosive effect of the river on the surrounding topography. With utmost confidence, Leonardo apparently took it upon himself as well to create or revise the central figure of the Savior. To unify the luminosity of the picture, Leonardo painted or repainted, in oil, Christ’s flesh with soft, gray tonalities that are in keeping with the shadowy background. In later pictures, Leonardo would much exaggerate this sooty, gray quality, which tends to blur the edges of figures and objects, to obtain an atmospheric effect that would come

10. Important Productions and Collaborations in the Verrocchio Shop

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Figure 23. Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo, Shooting of Saint Sebastian, c. 1475, oil on panel, London, National Gallery.  C National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

to be called sfumato (“in smoke”), one of his most admired innovations. Yet even here, the vibrancy of this surface treatment works successfully to meld Christ’s head and torso with the misty background and surrounding air. Consequently, the figure, which recalls in its lean muscularity Leonardo’s metalpoint Saint John the Baptist, contrasts sharply with Verrocchio’s more dryly delineated and roughhewn saint. Above them, still more incongruous, an old-fashioned feature has been added for the conservative, pious monks of S. Salvi: the disembodied hands of God the Father release the dove of the Holy Spirit, a detail probably quoted from the mystical Adoration of the Christ

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Child that Filippo Lippi painted for Piero de’ Medici’s wife, Lucrezia, more than a decade earlier. Since its day, Leonardo’s angel has been admired for the vitality and complexity of its pose and lustrous “waterfall” of hair. These features suggest or heighten the momentary quality of the stance of the divine figure, waiting like a dutiful altar boy to offer Christ a robe following baptism. With Saint John’s cross and the rocky outcropping nearby, the cloth is also intended to invoke Christ’s burial shroud – perhaps accounting for the particularly solemn and apprehensive expression of the companion angel. In keeping with Vasari’s story, that disturbed face has occasionally been read autobiographically as conveying Verrocchio’s dismay with the comparative excellence of Leonardo’s shimmering angel. Such an interpretation is highly doubtful, but nevertheless appealing when one examines closely the fresh, evanescent head of Leonardo’s celestial valet. The painter has indicated not only the transient sheen of the angel’s hair, but also the watery glint and transparency of the orbs of its eyes, to which he has deliberately juxtaposed the spherical crystals on its collar. Leonardo’s proclamation on talent and maturation, reportedly first said to his math tutor, seems apt here: “Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.”

Leonardo’s Colleagues in the Workshop 11.

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nitially trained as a goldsmith, the stocky, durable Verrocchio considered himself a sculptor first and then a painter. His decisive, midcareer transition from painting to sculpture was probably a preference and not, as Vasari suggested, a retreat. Certainly, his contemporaries admired him foremost as a sculptor, an unrivalled metal caster and engineer. Only in his late twenties, but industrious and diligent, when he opened his independent business, he proved to be an excellent foreman, coordinating the activities of a self-contained shop in accord with time-tested, old-fashioned modes of operation. For sculpture (even relatively small works), he employed the centuriesold assemblage technique, in which many separate pieces were cast and then welded together – every major project involving the contributions of numerous hands. The collaborative atmosphere and multitasking demands of his shop benefited scores of artists who passed through it, including Perugino and the sculptor Francesco di Simone Ferrucci. Leonardo and Lorenzo di Credi may have been the only assistants who remained for a decade or more; many other workers probably came and left on an “as needed” basis. Leonardo, no doubt, thrived in this environment and would have been galvanized by the challenge of learning so many diverse skills. However, the detailed, sometimes factory-like approach could be a bit stultifying for some, such as Lorenzo di Credi, who, like many Florentine artists, had first apprenticed with a goldsmith. As a painter, he excelled in the small parts but could never quite grasp the whole. Even the generally respectful Vasari had to admit that the well-intentioned Credi was punctilious to a fault. A great admirer of Leonardo and probably five years his junior, the tractable Credi imitated his drawings as much as he did those of the 73

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master and managed to achieve a competent and ingratiating artistic manner. In a large, busy shop, there was always room for the effective and dependable plodder. Verrocchio, trusting Credi for his conservative bent and fastidious ways, would put him in charge of the shop when he was elsewhere on business. He also knew that he could count on Credi, his favorite pupil, to execute meticulously straightforward, conventional pictures, such as the Pistoia altarpiece, with its simple grouping of fairly static figures. Although, as previously noted, there has been speculation that Leonardo may have been Verrocchio’s lover, the master had a much closer personal relationship with Credi, who was eventually named executor of his will and inherited all of Verrocchio’s furniture and clothing, as well as the bronze, tin, and porphyry left in the workshop at his death. Of a temperament similar to Credi’s, Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci, better known as Perugino, gained much in the Verrocchio workshop as well. Nearly an exact contemporary of Leonardo, Perugino probably came to Florence a half-dozen years after him, around 1470, from desperate conditions in his native town of Perugia. Accustomed to dire poverty, Perugino reportedly slept in a “miserable chest” for the first several months after he arrived in the city. Vasari postulated that it was Perugino’s experience of extreme economic distress and hunger that drove him to study and work incessantly, in the Verrocchio shop and throughout his life. Such motivation also spurred him to fast-track his independent career, and by 1475, when Leonardo was still a rowdy workshop member, Perugino was already fulfilling important commissions in Perugia and surrounding Umbria, notably the Adoration of the Magi for the church of the Servites in Colle Landone. Whether for reasons of jealousy, personality clashes, or differing views, the two artists, Vasari reports, became rivals. One can imagine that Leonardo disdained Perugino’s unadventurous approach to painting, his inclination constantly to repeat figure types and stock poses that had proven popular and lucrative. According to Vasari, Perugino’s contemporaries often taunted him for reusing figures “either through avarice or to save time.” Perhaps with Perugino in mind, Leonardo wrote that the “greatest fault of painters” was “to repeat the same movements, the same faces, and the same style of drapery in one and the same narrative painting.” And, as someone who declared that “poor is the man who desires many things,” Leonardo would have

11. Leonardo’s Colleagues in the Workshop

abhorred the unbridled venality of Perugino, about whom Vasari said, “he would have sold his soul for money.” While in the Verrocchio workshop, Leonardo produced some paintings completely of his own design and execution, including an Annunciation (c. 1473–76) for the monks of San Bartolomeo di Monteoliveto (outside Florence), now in the Uffizi (fig. 24). The commission, acknowledging Leonardo’s full professional status, was either passed to him by Verrocchio or steered to him by his notary father, who counted that religious institution among his monastic clients. Created by a still-immature youngster, scarcely past twenty, the stiff picture was accepted, despite its flaws, by the provincial monastic clergy, who would have delighted in the brilliant passages of natural detail and landscape. He spread before them a rich, millefleur tapestry of flowers within a walled garden, a reference to the hortus conclusus (enclosed garden) of the biblical Song of Songs (4:12), a popular source for Marian imagery – and metaphors for her virginity – in the Renaissance. His angel, although splendidly garbed, assumes an unnaturally rigid, hieroglyphic posture. Likewise, the Virgin appears rather wooden, a fantoccio, an artist’s lay figure or mannequin, whose arms and hands have been adjusted into position. Such inadequacies may have resulted from Leonardo’s dependence on clay models when working out the figures’ poses; he perhaps had neither Verrocchio’s permission nor the funds to employ living, studio models for an extended period of time. Compensating for some of these shortcomings, Leonardo used

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Figure 24. Leonardo da Vinci, Annunciation, c. 1473– 76, oil on panel, for San Bartolomeo di Monteoliveto (outside of Florence), now Florence, Uffizi. Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attivit`a culturali/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 25. Leonardo da Vinci, Drapery Study, c. 1473–76, pen, brush and gray tempera with white heightening on gray prepared linen, Paris, Louvre (2255). R´eunion des Mus´ees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

the opportunity to demonstrate everything he had seen and learned in the Verrocchio shop, from the master’s one-point perspective system, to the Virgin’s obtrusive lectern, based on the master’s tomb for Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici, to her abundant drapery, conceived through the Verrocchio studio practice of drawing after pieces of linen that had been dipped in wet plaster and then carefully arranged. Fortunately, several of these beautiful drawings of drapery, landscapes in themselves, survive, including the brush-and-wash studies, now in the Louvre and Uffizi, that served as the models for the dresses of the annunciate Virgin and angel (fig. 25). These sheets, together with a detailed study of the angel’s sprig of lilies, foster the impression of an artist who worked assiduously, but piecemeal – assembling his composition from well-considered yet disparate parts (the way in which Verrocchio created his sculptures). The overall effect of the picture would seem to confirm this; the

11. Leonardo’s Colleagues in the Workshop

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Figure 26. Leonardo da Vinci, Study of a Female Head, c. 1474–76, pen and ink with washes, Florence, Uffizi (428E). Scala/Art Resource, NY.

isolated figures, decorative rather than interactive, seem as immobile as the stone lectern and background trees. Only the distant mountains, gloriously evocative in their atmospheric shroud, hint at Leonardo’s inventiveness and ambitions, scientific as well as artistic. Although still finding his own way artistically, Leonardo was apparently more than happy to nurture his friend Lorenzo di Credi’s creativity and career – behavior auspicious of the generous and sure guidance he would one day provide to the young artists who worked for him. In addition to offering a drawing to Credi for the Baptist of the Pistoia Madonna di Piazza, he allowed his colleague to peruse his portfolio of studies when Credi needed to design the predella, the lower register of scenes, for that altarpiece. With good reason, Credi must have become particularly enamored with Leonardo’s exotically elegant Study of a Female Head (now Uffizi – fig. 26). The jeweled brooch and wing motif of the headband indicate that Leonardo conceived her

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either as an angel or as some sort of allegorical or mythological being. Credi, however, decided that the bowed head and demurely downcast eyes would very well suit the Annunciate Virgin in his predella panel, now in the Louvre. The transformation was made with only minor adjustments to the headgear and coiffure. Unashamedly, Credi also appropriated the profile pose of the angel and organization of his picture from Leonardo’s recently finished Annunciation. Later, according to Vasari, Credi replicated a Leonardo Madonna and sent his copy to the king of Spain.

Leonardo’s Madonna of the Carnation and the Exploration of Optics 12.

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ossibly executed not long after his ANNUNCIATION, and featuring some of the same faux-alpine topography, Leonardo’s delightfully curious Virgin and Child with a Carnation of c. 1476–78 (fig. 27), now in Munich, reveals his inclination to move beyond studio conventions and to probe with a keener eye the workings of human anatomy and the properties of light. In the panoramic landscape, glimpsed through windows, Leonardo shows that he could achieve the atmospheric-perspective effects of the finest Flemish paintings, for which Lorenzo the Magnificent had a special enthusiasm; precious masterpieces by Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus, and other Northern masters graced his palace. With a general concern for Medici approval, Leonardo no doubt derived some of his imaginative landscape elements, as well as the background window motif, from such pictures. His rugged landscape would have had an inviting familiarity for a northern European viewer. To Leonardo’s audience, however, the mountain ranges must have seemed a forbidding wilderness and, in the context of his painting, suggestive of a primordial, ancient world now in recession, with the advent of Christ. Also much intrigued by Flemish art around that time, but less interested in natural topography, Sandro Botticelli chose to introduce a more sanguine, northern European townscape into the background of his Shooting of Saint Sebastian of 1474, painted for the Florentine church of S. Maria Maggiore. The generally presumed date of the Munich picture coincides with the infancy of Leonardo’s half-brother, the long-awaited Antonio (born 1476), who may have served as a model. For the unusually young Christ, Leonardo obviously had studied a baby firsthand, recording but not fully understanding the visual problems experienced in the first months of life. In the Munich picture, the Christ Child, eyes 79

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straying and unfocused, reaches almost blindly for the Virgin’s carnation. Ungraceful though this gesture may be, Leonardo renders it with a fascinated precision, as he does the baby’s doughy flesh. Although hindered by his ungainly body and underdeveloped vision, the holy child instinctively wishes to seize the flower, a traditional symbol of the Passion, specifically the Crucifixion, because of its nail-like buds. In portraying the truth of what he observed, Leonardo characteristically reveled in its complexity. A simple exchange between a mother and child has become, in his hands, a subtle matrix of physiological mechanics and religious meaning. Vision and optical effects can almost be considered subtexts of the Munich picture. In it, Leonardo demonstrates not only his ability to reproduce bright, outdoor light and soft, ambient interior illumination but also shows, in the Flemish-inspired, crystalline vase, the small, glass balls attached to the cushion, and the Virgin’s conspicuous, emerald brooch that he can imitate the appearance of rays of light which are refracted, filtered, and reflected. Since the Middle Ages, the emerald had been viewed as a badge of purity, as the stone was said to splinter when a virgin was violated. But placed so near to the baby’s eyes, in the center of Leonardo’s composition, the prominent green stone probably had additional significance. From ancient times through the Renaissance, emeralds were believed to aid eyesight. Aristotle’s successor, the fourth-century b.c. philosopher Theophrastus, confidently asserted that emeralds were good for the eyes, pointing out that some people carried emerald seals with them for intermittent, salutary viewing. Pliny’s first-century Natural History, the basic encyclopedia of animals, vegetables, and minerals in the Renaissance, reported that strained eyes could be restored to their “normal state by looking at a ‘smaragdus’ (emerald).” Ficino, at the Medici court, declared that not just emeralds but all smooth, green materials held therapeutic value for the eyes. This belief persisted well into the seventeenth century. In his poem “A Lover’s Complaint” (1609), Shakespeare noted: “the deepe greene Emrald in whose fresh regard, weak sights their sickly radiance do amend.” Precious and semiprecious stones and jewels were a frequent topic of conversation in Lorenzo the Magnificent’s circle, for he owned a significant number of gems, cameos, and various objects, such as vases and tazze (cups), carved from carnelians, chalcedony, jasper, and sardonyx-agate. Leonardo’s later manuscripts indicate that, like Lorenzo, he came to

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Figure 27. Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child with a Carnation, c. 1476–78, oil on panel, Munich, Alte Pinakothek. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

possess Pliny’s opus and specialized books or treatises on precious stones (lapidari), perhaps by Theophrastus and the German theologian Albertus Magnus. In Leonardo’s time, interest in precious and semiprecious stones was far more pervasive and topical than it is today. This had partly to do with the fact that, as with the emerald, many precious stones and metals were valued almost as much for their supposed medicinal (or magically curative) properties as for their aesthetic qualities. The diamond was thought to be an antidote for poison and to protect against plague, the ruby a remedy for flatulence, and the sapphire effective against eye

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disease. The sparkling, violet amethyst was considered to be a cure for drunkenness and purportedly made the wearer more nimble-minded and shrewd in business matters. Ficino and members of the Medici court and family, notably Francesco I in the later sixteenth century, consumed significant amounts of powdered lapis lazuli, an expensive stone used as an artist’s pigment, as well as the “elixir of life,” a form of potable gold. Properly and regularly ingested, these materials were believed to counteract excess black bile in the body and consequently alleviate melancholy. Despite the original observations and considerable thought that Leonardo invested in the Virgin and Child with a Carnation, he made certain that it would still be recognized as a Verrocchio workshop product. The Virgin’s features conform closely to the master’s facial types, widely admired, then as now, for the gentle affection they exude. Very similar faces and capricious hairstyles are found in several Verrocchio and Verrocchio-shop drawings, notably two well-known studies of female heads (one possibly for the lady in the joust-standard design) in the collections of the British Museum and Louvre. The need for “branding” aside, Leonardo also emulated his mentor’s idealized countenances and intricate coiffures because, as Vasari noted, he clearly much appreciated their inventiveness. It is interesting to note, however, that when the impressionable and loyal Credi painted his tiny Madonna of the Pomegranate in these years (c. 1476–78), his primary model was Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with the Carnation, and only secondarily did he look to Verrocchio’s works.

The Benois Madonna and Continued Meditations on the Theme of Sight 13.

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any of the same themes and inquiries concerning vision continued to preoccupy Leonardo when he executed another, better-known painting of the Virgin and Child not long afterward, the so-called Benois Madonna (c. 1478–80), named for its last private owner (Leon Benois), and now in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (fig. 28). In what can be regarded almost as a further elaboration on the actions of the Munich infant, Leonardo portrayed the older, and rather immense, child in the Benois Madonna as gamely trying to focus his eyes on a sprig of cruciform-shaped flowers. The painter would have had a largely erroneous idea about the nature of the child’s struggle, because he did not know of the existence of lenses in the eyes. Instead, following the eminent Florentine theorist Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo, at least into the 1490s, ascribed to the fallacious, Platonic “theory of emission” in the operations of sight – that is, the belief that the eyes emit rays that extend to the object seen. In his widely read treatise On Painting of 1435, Alberti had applied the geometric elaboration of Euclid’s Optics (c. 300 b.c.) to the visual rays (opseis) that Plato described in his fourth-century dialogue, the Timaeus. There, Plato spoke of such fictive rays as an ocular “fire” mixing in sympathy with external light. With great authority, Alberti explained how an infinite number of these rays issued from the eyes, the most powerful being the central one or “centric ray,” which, he believed, played “the largest part in the determination of sight.” Exactly contrary to the true nature of vision, which involves intromission, the reception of light from an object into the eyes, Leonardo nevertheless wrote about and drew diagrams of this imaginary phenomenon. In fact, along the margins of one of his preliminary studies 83

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Figure 28. Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child with Flowers (Benois Madonna), c. 1478–80, oil on wood panel, transferred to canvas, St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

for the Benois Madonna, he made three tiny “technical” sketches that show, from right to left, parallel centric rays emitted from a pair of eyes looking forward, intersecting rays from eyes turned slightly inward, and, last, rays intersecting from eyes turned markedly inward (figs. 29 and 30). The final diagram is in keeping with the eyes of the Christ Child in the Benois Madonna, who assertively guides the hand of his mother, so that the flowers will be brought into the crossing of his ocular rays. Leonardo would go on to devote much of his life to investigations of optics, binocular vision, and perception and eventually would come to an uneasy reconciliation of the theories of emission and intromission. Thus, although he made some subtle and astute observations,

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Figure 29. Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child, Profile Studies, Technical Sketches, and Schematic Studies of Eyes with Visual Rays, c. 1478–80, silverpoint, leadpoint, pen and ink, London, British Museum (1860C The 6-16-100r).  Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY.

he did not get very far. A full knowledge of the function of the eyes’ lenses would only be attained in the mid-nineteenth century, and only in the late twentieth would a fundamental understanding be realized of the neurology of visual perception, which, in the case of an infant, depends not only on the operation of the lenses but on the progressive chemical sheathing (called “myelination”) of nerve tracks between the retina and vision-related areas of the cerebral cortex. As in the Munich Virgin and Child with the Carnation, Leonardo’s attention to the mechanics of vision in the Hermitage picture has interesting implications. Leonardo’s artistic contemporaries, such as Botticelli and Raphael, often treated the theme of divine foreknowledge of the Passion in their Madonnas. The Christ Child is typically

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Figure 30. Detail of Schematic Studies of Eyes with Visual Rays in fig. 29. Art Resource, NY.

shown recoiling from, or willingly embracing, a goldfinch or some other traditional symbol of Christ’s Passion (according to medieval lore, a goldfinch plucked a thorn from Christ’s crown when he was on the way to Calvary and was splashed with a drop of his blood – hence, the characteristic red mark on the bird’s neck). In his two Madonnas, Leonardo, the empiricist, sought to break down and analyze the physiology of vision and perception, the mysterious connections between sight and insight. The Munich child is virtually blind, yet seems aware of the symbolic carnation. The child of the Benois Madonna has still not responded to the distinctly cruciform shape of the flower (probably an artistically modified jasmine or wallflower), because he cannot see it clearly. Once that happens, the child’s hazy curiosity could, presumably, lead to foresight of his sacrifice. By adding explicit reference to the act of seeing, Leonardo has protracted and compounded the tension inherent in portrayals of the Christ Child apprehending his death. Attuned to Leonardo’s works and interests, Lorenzo di Credi, in imitation, similarly portrayed babies with underdeveloped vision in several of his own paintings and drawings. In contrast to its serious subtext, the Hermitage picture presents what may be the most joyous and youthful depiction of Mary in

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Renaissance art. Unconventionally, she seems to be speaking or laughing, playfully engaged with her child, her radiant vitality accentuated through Leonardo’s deliberate complications of posture and drapery. Able to observe on a regular basis the interactions between his half-siblings Antonio and Giuliomo (born in 1479) and stepmother, Leonardo made a number of sketches that capture the awkward and unpredictable actions of an infant: wrestling with a cat, snatching a piece of fruit from a bowl, poking his fingers into his mother’s face. Drawings executed for the Benois Madonna and for a related work, depicting the Virgin and Child with a Cat (figs. 38 and 39), indicate the artist’s desire to make the compositions as dynamic and intricate as possible – a major advance from the more staid, frontal stance of the Munich Madonna, which, as we have seen, was based on a Verrocchio prototype. Leonardo had attempted, tactfully and minimally, to distinguish his Virgin and Child with the Carnation from the standard Verrocchio shop piece by including beautiful, if improbable, flourishes – the impossibly complex silhouette of the Virgin’s veil, the watery and convoluted cascades of her dress and shawl. In the Benois

Figure 31. Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Machines (verso of fig. 32), 1478, pen and ink, Florence, Uffizi (446E). Polo Museale.

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Figure 32. Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Heads and Machines, 1478, pen and ink, Florence, Uffizi (446E). Polo Museale.

Madonna, this sort of virtuoso demonstration of twisting form in space is more credibly and profoundly integrated, with a helix serving as the core and organizing armature of the entire composition. One may fairly associate this interest in structures unfolding in space with Leonardo’s concurrent fascination with gyrating machinery and the use of sprockets, gears, and conveyor belts to transfer motion from one plane to another. On both sides of a fragmentary sheet of sketches, dated to 1478 and now in the Uffizi, are various mechanisms in which Leonardo explored how forces and tensions could be conducted and controlled in three dimensions (figs. 31 and 32). He conceived the Benois Madonna, with its curving, stepped projections of arms and legs, its stacked arrangement of revolving forces and counterforces, as a similarly contained system – a small engine or clockwork universe of energies in equilibrium.

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The Madonna of the Cat

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ketched beside some of the machines on the ragged but important Uffizi sheet of 1478 is another kind of counterbalance, a contrast between two typologies that would become a fixation for Leonardo: the wizened, contemplative face of an old man and the fresh, inquisitive visage of a youth – an embodiment of Aristotle’s decree that “each thing may be better known through its opposite” (fig. 32). Eventually, as we shall see, this juxtaposition would carry religious and spiritual connotations in certain of Leonardo’s works, notably his representations of the Adoration of the Magi and Last Supper. However, we might rather assume that, at this relatively early stage of his career, his musings had something to do with his family situation. The grandfather, Antonio, would have been a constant, possibly doting, presence in the young Leonardo’s life until the old man passed away in 1464 at age 92. With a father who was mainly absent, engaged in business in Florence, an estranged mother (who had moved with her husband to another village), and a stepmother who died prematurely, Leonardo likely felt a special closeness to his grandparents, with whom he lived for nearly a dozen years. In the countless drawings of the aged that he made over the course of his career, one often senses a certain reverence and intimacy. Aside from any personal meaning they may have had, Leonardo’s ubiquitous pairs of contrasting heads, as noted earlier, also reflect his belief, based on Aristotelian principle, of the elucidating power of opposition – through which, in some cases, a better understanding of each of the antipodes may be gained and, in others, a “just mean” or balance achieved. The skeptical artist continually sought to present or expose contradictions, and he loved irony. Ultimately, though, as a Christian philosopher who believed in the profound interrelation 89

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Figure 33. Leonardo da Vinci, Sketches of a Child Holding and Playing with a Cat, c. 1478– 80, pen and ink, London, British Museum (1857-1-10-1).  C The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY.

of phenomena in a divinely designed world, he desired a Renaissance version of the modern, unified-field concept, a reconciliation of all contrasting ideas and forces. Near the pair of heads on the Uffizi sheet, Leonardo left the enigmatic inscription: “ – 1478, I began the two Virgin Marys.” One of these was presumably the Benois Madonna, the other, perhaps, a Virgin and Child with Cat, for which, as previously mentioned, numerous preparatory studies survive, some closely related in composition to the former work (figs. 33, 35–40). This series of stream of consciousness drawings is instructive for what it reveals of Leonardo’s rather manic

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Figure 34. Andrea del Verrocchio, Boy with Dolphin, late 1470s, bronze, for the Medici villa at Carreggi, now Florence, Palazzo Vecchio. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

and circuitous, creative process. He took full advantage of the quick, weightless movement of the quill pen, which, as many a draftsman has noted, can seem almost to move of its own accord. Among the first of these studies may have been the frantic, exuberant sketches on both sides of a sheet preserved in the British Museum (fig. 33), where Leonardo captures, in blurred, stop-action frames, a young child’s good-natured abuse of a cat. He had an uncanny ability to illustrate swift and minute movements, such as nuances of feline reflex and exceedingly intricate and fleeting currents in water (the latter confirmed by modern high-speed photography). Either his eyesight was extraordinarily quick – and quasi-microscopic in power – or, after countless hours spent studying animals and bodies of water, he was just extremely good at speculating about those rapid movements and patterns in nature that are difficult to observe. Whichever the case, his loose, fluid penmanship owed much to the example of Verrocchio,

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Figure 35. Leonardo da Vinci, Study for a Virgin and Child with a Cat, c. 1478–80, pen and ink with wash, Florence, Uffizi (421E). Art Resource, NY.

whose manner of sketching was unprecedented in its spontaneity and vitality. In these vigorous child-and-cat drawings, the artist was also likely responding to Verrocchio’s recently completed bronze, Boy with a Dolphin (late 1470s; fig. 34), which Il Magnifico had just obtained for his villa at Carreggi, the seat of the Platonic academy of philosophers and so a prestigious and prominent venue. Verrocchio’s giddy, wriggling statue, with its ambitious spiraling effect, would have posed something of a challenge to Leonardo. The sketch at bottom left of the British Museum sheet (fig. 33) appears to be a first, direct reaction

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Figure 36. Leonardo da Vinci, Studies for a Virgin and Child with a Cat, c. 1478–80, pen and ink, London, British Museum (1860-6-1698). Polo Museale.

to the sculpture; Leonardo has the child grasp the animal in much the same manner, and some rough lines suggest that he even considered extending the boy’s proper right leg, like that of the Verrocchio bambino. Often regarded as a solitary genius who received ideas from on high, Leonardo, in reality and in almost every instance, responded in his art to the recent work of others, particularly to those objects that were novel in some way. In large part, his brilliance consisted in his ability to make instant and optimal use of the contributions of others – the isolated individual, who feels compelled to invent everything completely de novo, cannot himself become an innovator. So goaded, Leonardo continued to explore the subject of a boy with a cat, usually lashed together in a hopeless tangle and including a woman (the Virgin) as well, in at least five other sheets. At an early point in the design process, he considered placing the child, clutching the cat, on a cushion or platform beside the Virgin (figs. 35 and 36).

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Figure 37. Leonardo da Vinci, Studies for a Virgin and Child with a Cat, c. 1478–80, pen and ink, Bayonne, Mus´ee Bonnat (152).

Later, the composition evolved, momentarily, to one very similar to that of the Benois Madonna, with the three figures in a taut knot (figs. 37 and 38). He subsequently changed his mind again, tracing the design right through the sheet with a sharp stylus, reversing and then altering the poses in pen and wash (figs. 38 and 39). The study closest to the (planned) painting may be the smallest surviving sketch – the tender, tiny design now in a private collection, in which the heads of the three figures seem gently to touch (fig. 40). Although Leonardo would have found a squirming cat a more challenging prop than a dolphin, it is difficult to say exactly why he chose to place that particular animal in the baby’s arms. Of course, as

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Figure 38. Leonardo da Vinci, Study for a Virgin and Child with a Cat, c. 1478–80, pen and ink, London, British Museum (1856-6-21-1).  C The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY.

a common household member (perhaps in Ser Piero’s abode), the cat conveyed domesticity, as did, despite its foreboding symbolism, the goldfinch, a favorite pet of children in the Renaissance. One should recall that these small and intimate Madonnas were intended for the home, usually a bedroom. It is also possible that Leonardo’s choice of animal-actor was intended to perpetuate a charming, popular legend that a cat gave birth to a litter of kittens at the moment of Christ’s Nativity. Other than that, the cat has no Judeo-Christian significance (curiously, although worshipped in Egypt for millennia, cats are never mentioned in the canonical books of the Bible). In ancient Greek mythological texts,

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Figure 39. Leonardo da Vinci, Study for a Virgin and Child with a Cat (verso of fig.38), c. 1478–80, pen and ink, London, British Museum (18566-21-1). Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

however, the feline is said to be a proxy of Hecate, goddess of the dead and the underworld. Perhaps because of this tradition and, certainly, due to medieval stories of necromancy, the cat was sometimes regarded, like the goldfinch, as an omen of death. In Leonardo’s Tuscany, there was an old, folk superstition that the sudden appearance of a cat could portend someone’s passing. A black cat has ominous associations even today. Leonardo’s painting of the Virgin and Child with the Cat was either somehow lost or, in light of the fact that no replicas or variants survive, was, more likely, never fully realized, the fate of so many of his projects.

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Figure 40. Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child with a Cat, c. 1478–80, pen and ink with wash, New York, Private Collection.

It was also around this time, in January of 1478, that he received what is believed to have been his first independent commission, for an altarpiece (probably depicting the usual Virgin and Child with Saints) for the Chapel of San Bernardo in the Palazzo della Signoria, an important civic project that he failed to complete after having accepted an initial payment in good faith (ultimately returned). We can assume that the contract for the prestigious altarpiece had Ser Piero’s fingerprints all over it.

Leonardo, the Medici, and Public Executions 15.

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nquestionably, leonardo, always seeking new challenges, had trouble sustaining interest in many of the Florentine art industry’s stock-in-trade products – traditional church altarpieces and small Madonnas for domestic display. By the later 1470s, the Verrocchio shop was fast becoming a mere (sculptural) niche player in the “Madonna market.” Remembered today foremost for his mythologies, the Birth of Venus and Primavera (Spring), Botticelli was, by the early 1480s, the dominant madonnero, maker of painted Madonnas, in Florence, employing a large corps of assistants to replicate his designs. Leonardo may have felt some professional jealousy toward Botticelli, whose prosperity stemmed not only from his talents but also from the favor of Piero de’ Medici, who, years earlier, had invited the painter to live with him and his family in the Medici Palace. Rarely does Leonardo mention his very successful contemporary in his writings or reflect Botticelli’s works in his own. In fact, Botticelli’s Annunciation fresco of 1481, then in the loggia of the church of San Martino alla Scala (now in the Uffizi), is most likely the target of some of Leonardo’s harshest criticism: I recently saw an Annunciation in which the angel looked as if she wished to chase Our Lady out of the room, with movement of such violence that she might have been a hated enemy; and Our Lady seemed in such despair that she was about to throw herself out of the window.

He took another, unambiguous, swipe at Botticelli in his unpublished Treatise on Painting (Trattato della Pittura) when advocating that artists should throw sponges loaded with paint at walls and study the 99

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resulting abstract stains, which might suggest landscapes, battles, and other images that could stimulate the imagination: – Botticelli said that such study [of wall stains] was in vain. [But] it is really true that various invenzioni [inventions or ideas] are seen in such a stain. I say that a man should look into it and find heads of men, diverse animals, battles, rocks, seas, clouds, woods, and similar things, and note how like it is to the sound of bells, in which you can hear whatever you like. But although those stains will give you invenzioni they will not teach you to finish any detail. This painter of whom I have spoken makes very dull landscapes.

One also finds in Leonardo’s manuscripts the occasional, grumbling remark that seems to be part of a reticent, one-sided dialogue between him and Botticelli, comments that were probably rhetorical and never actually communicated but suggest that he had Botticelli on his mind. Apparently, for Leonardo, there was an emotional dynamic, or irritant, where his colleague was concerned. Even if a “healthy” rivalry with Botticelli did exist, Leonardo would have feared boredom much more than the competition. His greatest professional shortcoming was that once he had solved an artistic problem, in his drawings or in his mind, he wished to move on, lacking the patience to commit to it to paint or, in some cases, paralyzed by his own perfectionism. What had been a bad habit of leaving pictures unfinished in the Verrocchio’s shop seems to have become almost a pathology for Leonardo. He famously wrote with exasperation, probably self-inflicted, on more than one manuscript page, “Tell me if anything was ever done.” Although his brush sometimes faltered, his pen never ceased to convey the entire range of human experience and expression. In the same period that he celebrated those intimate, affectionate moments of familial life in his Madonna studies, he objectively recorded mankind’s public brutalities on other sheets. With dispassionate precision, he drew the hanged corpse of the savage Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli, one of the Pazzi family conspirators, who had murdered the young Giuliano de’ Medici at high mass in Florence cathedral in late April 1478 (fig. 41). The Pazzi – banking, business, and political archrivals of the Medici – had been incensed by Lorenzo’s efforts to curtail their power. Reportedly, Baroncelli delivered the first, probably fatal, blow

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Figure 41. Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of the Hanged Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli, 1479, pen and ink, Bayonne, Mus´ee Bonnat. R´eunion des Mus´ees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

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to Giuliano’s chest, and then buried a long knife in the stomach of the Medici bank manager Francesco Nori, killing him, when he moved to defend his boss, Lorenzo de’ Medici. Others tore at Giuliano with daggers. Lorenzo, the primary target of the plot, miraculously escaped with just a minor neck wound, after being attacked by two priests who were in on the scheme. The clerics were quickly caught, castrated, and hanged. The assassination attempt came after Lorenzo, more concerned with cultural matters than military affairs, had squandered much of the Medici reputation for toughness – and appeared to many to be weak himself. His habit of quickly surrendering “protection” money to any who threatened him or the city was seen as indicative of his vulnerability and general fearfulness. His constant struggle with gout, the “Medici disease,” as well as his high-pitched, nasal voice, often caused him to seem less than virile and commanding. To reassure the Florentine public of his survival, Lorenzo appeared several times after the assault in the windows of the Palazzo Medici. Wishing to reinforce that message, some of his relatives and supporters commissioned three wax effigies of him, two of which were placed in prominent places in the city (the third was sent to Assisi). Perhaps accompanied by Leonardo, Verrocchio oversaw the fabrication, by his friend, the wax-worker Orsino Benintendi, of these sculptures, painted with natural colors to appear as lifelike as possible. They portrayed Lorenzo bandaged and wounded, as he appeared hours after the attack, or wearing the apparel of the average Florentine citizen. We can assume that the effigies were rather convincing. Florence, and Orsino especially, were renowned for such figures and other wax simulacra. The assassin Baroncelli, a well-connected member of another old Florentine banking family, managed to escape to Constantinople, from where the Turkish Sultan finally agreed to extradite him in late 1479. Leonardo made his quick sketch at the end of December, when the murderer was hanged, together with his wife, from windows of the Palazzo del Capitano, on the same busy street as Ser Piero’s house. Although public executions were common in late-fifteenth-century Florence, occurring at a rate of more than one a week, they were usually performed in a designated field on the outskirts of the city, rather than in a central square, a venue reserved for high-profile criminals. Most of the offenders, as many as fifteen at a time, were

15. Leonardo, the Medici, and Public Executions

led out through the eastern part of the city, past the church of Santa Croce, to the gallows by way of the via de’ Malcontenti (Street of the Malcontents) – so-named because many individuals were sentenced to death for allegedly conspiring against aristocratic families. This frequent recourse to capital punishment necessitated special, communal heralds on horseback, who regularly announced captures, death sentences, and dates of execution. Such brutal and public spectacles hardly deterred the roiling lawlessness of the city. But they did afford drawing practice to Leonardo, who, according to the Milanese art theorist and painter Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, closely studied the gestures of the condemned, so that he could “delineate the tension in their brows, and the expressions of their eyes and whole appearance.” Leonardo’s sketch of the deceased Baroncelli includes a second, detailed rendering of the face and, alongside the body, a careful description of the colors of his clothes: “small tan-colored cap, black satin doublet, black-lined jerkin, blue coat lined with black and white velvet stripes – black hose.” The artist probably made these inscriptions to aid his memory if he were later assigned to create a painting of Baroncelli on the wall of the Podest`a (or Bargello), the city court and jail, on which effigies of the other principal conspirators had been rendered a year earlier. It was a Florentine tradition to paint such murals as posthumous defamations of offenders and as warnings to enemies, after the actual corpses had deteriorated or been hacked apart. In 1478, Botticelli had been hired by the Ottimati (the Florentine government’s council of eight “best men”) to paint several of the Pazzi conspirators as they dangled, upside-down, from the windows of the Podest`a, and Lorenzo himself had written verses to go underneath their heads. These images flanked others that Andrea del Castagno had created decades earlier, in 1440, when he was assigned to portray, also inverted, eight traitorous members of the old Florentine Albizzi family, who had been executed for joining forces with the Milanese at the Battle of Anghiari. Leonardo saw the faded remnants of all these effigies (erased only in 1494) every time he visited his father in his Podest`a office. It may have occurred to him that he could perhaps gain favor with the Medici by following in the footsteps of Castagno (known as Andreino degli Impicchati – Little Andy of the Hanged Men), who, as a farmer’s son from the Mugello region of Tuscany, rose from a similar, rural background to attain high status and fame.

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It appears, however, that, despite his preparations, Leonardo was never asked to add a nature morte of Baroncelli to the wall of shame. The de facto leader of the Florentine Republic and victim of the conspiracy, Lorenzo was not present to sanction it. As it happens, he was just then arriving in Naples, on a critical diplomatic mission that would last many months. Further, the Ottimati and Medici loyalists may have decided that they had in their hands a more effective tool for defamation; with the printing press, newly arrived and established by Bernardo Cennini in Florence in 1477, the writer Poliziano and others were able widely to disseminate accounts of the Pazzi plot and of the conspirators’ treachery. Although his act of artistic vengeance was never realized, Leonardo must have still taken some consolation in knowing that Giuliano had found pleasure in the joust standard he had helped create, which now rested unobserved, beside Botticelli’s mounted pennant, Verrocchio’s prize helmet, crested shields, and other souvenirs in the young man’s abandoned trophy room.

16.

Leonardo and Ginevra de’ Benci

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eonardo finally had the opportunity in this period to test his hand at portraiture – of a more benevolent kind – when he was engaged to paint a likeness of the lovely Ginevra de’ Benci, the sophisticated daughter of the wealthy banker, Amerigo de’ Benci, and an object of admiration for numerous poets (fig. 42). Leonardo’s father may have facilitated the commission; a longtime friend of the Benci family, he drafted many legal documents for them over the years. Although married in 1474 to Luigi di Bernardo Niccolini, the precocious, sharp-witted Ginevra attracted the fervid attention of the Venetian ambassador Bernardo Bembo, when he visited Florence later in the decade. The intellectual Bembo’s devotion to her reportedly took the form of a chaste “Platonic love,” a term coined at that time by Ficino. Openly and widely acknowledged, their relationship (and her beauty) became the subject of Petrarchan sonnets written by several poets at the Medici court, notably Cristoforo Landino, Alessandro Braccesi, and Il Magnifico himself. The device or impresa on the reverse of her portrait, Bembo’s heraldic laurel and palm, attests to the closeness of their bond – and very probably indicates that he was the patron (fig. 43). If Bembo commissioned the picture (with Benci approval) – as a gift to Ginevra or remembrance of her – he likely would have done so during his extended second sojourn in Florence, from July 1478 to May 1480, after he had known her for some time, rather than during his first mission there from January 1475 to April 1476; some stylistic aspects of the picture would seem to suggest this as well. If, as some have maintained, the portrait had been ordered by her husband, Luigi, she almost certainly would have been depicted wearing the ritual jewelry that he had bestowed on her, symbols of their union and of his wealth. 105

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Figure 42. Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, c. 1478–80, oil on panel, Washington, National Gallery of Art. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

This display of the groom’s “dowry” was of no small significance, for its magnitude determined the very plausibility and viability of a marriage in mercantile Florence. In the fifteenth century, one kept a large portion of one’s savings in jewelry and clothes (as well as in communal/municipal bonds) rather than in cash. Instead, her costume features no jewelry but a black scarf, which may have been a sign of affiliation with the Platonic academicians; Landino is represented wearing a similar, academic stole in a Ghirlandaio fresco. In its otherwise showy artifice, Leonardo’s portrayal of Ginevra, at the age of twenty or twenty-one, was probably intended to be the visual equivalent of metaphors employed by Medici poets. In one sonnet, Landino effusively describes her “hair of gold,” “ivory teeth, white as snow,” “swan’s neck,” and “golden nipples” on “snowy bosom.” Leonardo’s picture generally conforms to Landino’s metaphorical excesses, showing necessary decorum, however, as regards

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Figure 43. Reverse of Ginevra de’ Benci, fig. 42. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Ginevra’s mouth and chest, because a proper Florentine lady did not expose her teeth or breasts. We tend to associate this extremely literal use of visual metaphor with later Florentine art, such as portraits by the sixteenth-century painter-poet Agnolo Bronzino, with their hard, alabaster skin and gold-filament hair. However, through such aesthetic posturing, a collusive nod to the literati of the court, Leonardo may have sought admittance to the cultural and intellectual elite, despite his lack of much formal education. Moreover, the picture may have been Leonardo’s opening salvo in the long debate over the paragone, the comparative merits of painting and poetry, an issue popular in Italian Renaissance courts and a bone of contention for Leonardo throughout much of his life; he would participate in a discussion of the subject at Sforza Castle in Milan in 1498. At about the time that Columbus landed in the Americas (and in the year of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death), the artist was busy

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drafting arguments in favor of painting over poetry, preserved in his manuscripts: And if you, poet, claim to portray a story as if painting with your pen, the painter with his brush will more readily satisfy and will be understood less tediously. If you assert that painting is dumb poetry, then the painter may call poetry blind painting. – [the sense of] hearing [as concerns recited poetry or music] is less noble than sight, in that as it is born so it dies and its death is an swift as its birth. This does not apply to the sense of sight, because if you represent to the eye a beautiful human body composed of proportionally beautiful parts, this beauty will not be so mortal or so rapidly destroyed as music. Instead it has great permanence and remains to be seen and considered by you. Take the case of the poet describing the beauties of a lady to her lover and that of a painter who makes a portrait of her; you will see whither nature will more incline the enamored judge. Surely the proof of the matter ought to rest upon the verdict of experience!

The exercise of visual metaphor in the Ginevra was only one of Leonardo’s pointed demonstrations of the “literary” capabilities of painting. Almost certainly at the instigation of the patron, he employed other literary conceits in this work as well – namely, the motto on the reverse, Virtutem Forma Decorat (Form [or Beauty] Adorns Virtue), devised by Bembo, and the placement of a juniper (ginepro) behind the sitter, a play on her name. Among the great book collectors of the century, the humanist Bembo was extremely knowledgeable about ancient and modern encomium, and he fathered – and mentored – the famous poet, later cardinal, Pietro Bembo. An aspiring poet herself, Ginevra would have appreciated the laconically gracious Latin inscription and visual pun. Just as the various sonnets lauded Ginevra’s virtues and appearance in a lofty, grandiloquent manner, Leonardo has so idealized his subject that his work just barely qualifies as a portrait. The prominent, high forehead, extraordinarily wide-set, almond eyes, glowing white skin, and perfectly cylindrical neck seem to be so extensively

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Figure 44. Lorenzo di Credi (attributed to), Portrait of a Lady (Ginevra de’ Benci?), c. 1473–74, oil on panel, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image copyright  C Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.

reformed that it is difficult to assign an age to the sitter and causes one to wonder whether the image bears much likeness to the actual person. That being the case, it is not completely reckless to speculate that the very similar Portrait of a Lady (c. 1473–74), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 44), where it is convincingly attributed to Leonardo’s colleague, Lorenzo di Credi, could be an earlier depiction of Ginevra, created in honor of her engagement (sposalizio) or nuptials. Although old attributions of artist and sitter are notoriously fallible, it must be acknowledged that the New York painting is clearly inscribed in a contemporary fifteenth-century hand on the reverse, GINEVERA DE AM – BENCI. When executing this picture, its author, too, emended the sitter’s physiognomy; one discovers in the underlayers of paint, revealed by x-rays, that the shape of her face and her features were originally extremely close to those of Leonardo’s

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Ginevra. Moreover, Credi’s slimmer, younger woman – probably a teenager – holds a wedding ring, and stands before a comparable juniper and a flourishing, young tree. Her plain, dark dress does not necessarily indicate that she is a widow, as has sometimes been said. Rather, her austere costume is in keeping with recently reestablished (in 1472) sumptuary laws: the only jewelry she wears is a simple necklace, another ritual wedding present of the groom, and she has neither the typical, extravagantly embroidered sleeves of the period nor the pearl-adorned frenello, or hair bridle. It has long been assumed that Leonardo’s portrait, which has been severely cut down at bottom (Bembo’s device on the reverse is cropped at its base), at one time included the sitter’s arms and hands – resting in the graceful manner of those in the New York picture. A deservedly famous, beautiful drawing of hands, holding flower stems, in the Windsor Royal Library perhaps offers a good idea of how Leonardo placed Ginevra’s; in fact, it may have served, as some have suggested, as a preliminary study for the picture. If this supposition is correct, then Leonardo’s lady would have closely approximated in gesture and bearing certain sculptural portraits of Florentine matrons by Verrocchio, including a Lady with a Small Bouquet of Flowers in the Bargello. Although somewhat flat and relieflike in her truncated state, Leonardo’s Ginevra must have had considerably more volumetric presence, akin to Verrocchio’s bust, when she possessed her lower torso and arms. Compromised, too, are other spatial effects in the picture, due to the slight darkening, or “sinking,” with age of some of the pigments, particularly the greens of the juniper. However, careful scrutiny of the foliage reveals how complex and sophisticated Leonardo’s evocation of light and air still is. Here he has relied almost exclusively on subtle optical effects to generate space, as opposed to the underlying linear perspective of his Annunciation. Whereas Ginevra’s hair and other details have the Flemish precision of the Munich and Benois Madonnas, the deftly varied brushwork of the foliage and distant trees has a summarizing efficiency that is more suggestive than descriptive. Traces of his fingerprints reveal that Leonardo achieved some of these nuances of light and texture by gently touching and modeling the wet paint with his hands. Noteworthy, too, is the way in which Leonardo has set the luminous figure against the background. His light–dark juxtaposition is not merely a style, an aesthetic effect, but signals an emerging working method of complete originality

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Figure 45. Leonardo da Vinci, Study of a Lady with a Unicorn, c. 1478–80?, pen and ink, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum (1855 KPH 15). Courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

in which he will compose his pictures in a monochromatic, sepia pattern of light and dark, and then apply color almost as a finishing tint. This would become a standard procedure for him, as we shall see in his later depictions of the Adoration of the Magi, Saint Jerome, and the Virgin of the Rocks. All of these innovative and progressive techniques, so characteristic of Leonardo, support a date for the picture in the late 1470s, rather than to the period of the rigid Annunciation, as has sometimes been argued. The courtly ideal manifested in the portrait of Ginevra (the very name conjuring up its Arthurian equivalent: Guinevere) is expressed as well in a couple of Leonardo’s sketches for a Lady with a Unicorn, which, some believe, may have been intended for the image on the reverse of the painting, before the patron and artist decided to reproduce Bembo’s emblem (fig. 45). The broad head and neck of the lady

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in these drawings, particularly the Oxford sheet, resemble those of Ginevra, and the presence of the mythical unicorn, which was supposedly attracted only to maidens, would have underscored Ginevra’s purity. Other portrait paintings, and some portrait medals, of the period include similarly lovesick unicorns on their versos. Most closely associated today with French art, because of the culminating depictions of the Lady-and-Unicorn theme in the tapestry series at Cluny and in the Cloisters Museum of New York, the subject can actually be traced back to early Christian times; it is found in the second- to fourth-century Physiologus (The Naturalist or Scientist), an anonymous Greek compilation of descriptions and legends of animals that had been given Christian interpretation. The entertaining text and subject became popular across all of Europe, but particularly in France, from the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance. The widely read medieval Fior di virt`u also included a passage on the unicorn, reporting that the male animal had “such a taste” for the company of young maidens that “whenever he sees one he goes to her and falls asleep in her arms.” The creature was further popularized in late-fourteenthcentury Italy in illustrated editions of the poet Petrarch’s epic Triumphs (Trionfi), in which he described a series of imaginary processional cars, including a Trionfo della Pudicizia (Triumph of Chastity), surmounted by an allegorical, female figure of Chastity. Most of these manuscripts depicted the car or float as drawn by a pair of ornamented unicorns. By the fifteenth century, artists and artisans in Florence took up the triumphal Lady-and-Unicorn theme in prints and in the decoration of cassoni (wedding chests) and deschi da parto (trays painted to celebrate the birth of a child), where the imagery was connected with marriage and used to emphasize the bride’s unblemished devotion. Pudicizia, in this context, did not mean celibacy, but purity, modesty, and fidelity – that is, all of the wifely virtues. In presenting the unicorn with its muzzle in the lady’s lap, a drawing by Leonardo in the British Museum is especially close to cassone and print depictions of the theme. Leonardo’s Oxford study was thus likely a second take on the subject, as he shows the unicorn, no less smitten with his lovely captor but kept on a very short leash.

Leonardo as Portraitist and Master of the Visual Pun 17.

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lthough the GINEVRA DE’ BENCI commission probably gave Leonardo only limited access to the Medici court during his first period in Florence, the success of the work firmly established his credentials as a portraitist and led to equally important projects: the Mona Lisa or La Gioconda, a portrait of the wife of the wealthy Florentine silk merchant and civic leader Francesco del Giocondo, as well as an elegant portrait of the noble Milanese lady, Cecilia Gallerani (fig. 46). From Vasari, we know that Leonardo also drew (much later) a portrait of the famous merchant-explorer Amerigo Vespucci, for whom America was named. The artist’s relationship with Vespucci, who was portrayed, according to Vasari, at an advanced age, may have been long term. Both spent most of their youth and early adulthood in Florence. Vespucci (a cousin by marriage of the tragic beauty Simonetta) was only a year older than Leonardo, and his father, from a family of wine and silk merchants, was also a Medici notary. More significantly, the young men were kindred spirits – boldly inquisitive with strong interests in “natural philosophy” (science), geography, and cartography. Over time, they formed enough of a friendship that Vespucci gave Leonardo a book on geometry, a most extravagant present. The explorer would have imparted to the artist not only firsthand observations about the fauna and flora of the Old and (later) New World but also wonderful misinformation of the most sensational kind. He told of cannibals in America who had consumed hundreds of people, including women and children, and had salted human hams (prosciutti umani). Open-minded and somewhat hedonistic, Vespucci relished reporting the sexual customs of the native women, who, he said, offered themselves to any man and injected their partners’ penises 113

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Figure 46. Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with an Ermine), c. 1485, oil on panel, Cracow, Czartoryski Museum. Nimatallah/Art Resource, NY.

with toxins to make them swell to more satisfying proportions. With barely concealed admiration he concluded that “[among the natives] there is no private property; everything is owned in common. With neither king nor governor each man is his own master. They have as many sexual partners as they desire – . They have no temples, no religion, worship no idols. What else can I say? They live according to nature.” Leonardo would have listened to Vespucci’s words with rapt attention and, perhaps, a sense of affirmation for his own unconventional attitudes. Unfortunately, attempts to identify Vespucci’s face among the numerous heads Leonardo drew in his notebooks over the years have proved futile. Extant portraits of the explorer vary greatly in appearance, some showing a husky man, others a gaunt, elderly person in profile, with eyes set especially high on his face. Although the second type (seen in an oft-reproduced painting in the Uffizi and in

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Figure 47. Leonardo da Vinci, Rebuses, c. 1487–90, pen and ink, Windsor Castle, Royal Library. The Royal Collection  C 2010 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

engravings) might actually derive, ultimately, from Leonardo’s lost portrait, none of his drawings corresponds to it closely. So far as we know, the Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci was the first example of what became one of Leonardo’s more unusual “literary” pursuits. Some years later, in his Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (or Lady with an Ermine) fashioned at the behest of the Milanese Duke Ludovico Sforza, whose mistress she was, Leonardo again demonstrated his keen wit; that work, like the Ginevra with its juniper, contains a prominent visual pun. On one level, the tense ermine alludes to Cecilia’s politely restrained, kinetic intellect as well as to her purity; both the Fior di virt`u and Leonardo’s own bestiary celebrate the animal for its “nobility” and supposedly exceptional hygiene. However, Cecilia’s pet also makes punning reference to her last name; the Greek word for the animal is “gal´ee.” Similarly, the reticent smile of the Mona Lisa, coaxed or

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Figure 48. Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Yarnwinder, c. 1501, oil on panel, Drumlanrig Castle, Collection of the Duke of Buccleuch. Snark/Art Resource, NY.

invented by the artist, may have been meant as a pun; her name, “La Gioconda,” means the “jocund” or “cheerful” woman. Visual puns and rebuses – amusing puzzles that depend on the assonance of words that have different meanings (serial visual puns, really) – would become a hobby of sorts for Leonardo. A doublesided page (fig. 47), preserved at Windsor Castle, is completely covered with more than 130 tiny rebuses that Leonardo contrived, probably the lone surviving specimen of several such sheets; just a half-dozen small scraps remain from some of those missing pages. These quasicryptic pictographs were as close to a “code” as anything Leonardo

17. Leonardo as Portraitist and Master of the Visual Pun

would ever devise, as he challenged the sonnet writers and courtiers in their own arena of clever word games. Many of Leonardo’s rebuses are short, comprising only two or three images. A doodle of a sage plant (in Italian, salvia) next to the word “me” forms the imploring “salvi a me” or “save me!”; the sketch of a lion (leone) guarding some flames (signifying “burning” or “arde”) and two tables (deschi) creates the term “lionardeschi,” the name Leonardo’s followers were called; and a drawing of a holy or pious cat (pia gatta) with wings engenders the Italian sentence “pia gatta vola” – “pious cat flies” – or, when said quickly, the phrase “piang’ a tavola,” which can mean either “cry at the table” or “painted on panel.” Other of Leonardo’s rebuses were a little more ambitious and clever, such as the fishhook (amo, in Italian) he drew beside a musical score, with part of the vocal musical scale “ut re mi fa so la.” In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, this scale, or solmization, invented by a Tuscan, Guido da Arezzo, in the eleventh century, comprised only these six notes, and “ut” took the place of “do.” The artist’s word-image reads: l’amo re mi fa sol la [za] re, or l’amore mi fa sollazzare – “love gives me pleasure” or “love amuses me.” The second, more literal, translation would be in keeping with Leonardo’s playfully cynical attitude, evident in his aforementioned slur on romance and procreation. It seems that Leonardo even managed to integrate a rebus into at least one of his religious pictures. The eponymous prop of his Madonna of the Yarnwinder (c. 1501; fig. 48) appears to derive from one of the visual puns on the Windsor sheet. At the upper left of the page is a series of thumbnail sketches (fig. 49), with accompanying inscriptions, that represent from right to left: a pear tree (pero), a saddle (sella), a woman with a sail (fortuna – a personification of fortune), two notes on a musical stave (mi and fa), a fern (felce), the letters “tal,” a face (viso), and a black yarnwinder (aspo nero). When recited together, Leonardo’s

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Figure 49. Detail of “Yarnwinder” rebus at upper left of fig. 47. (Reversed for legibility) The Royal C 2010 Collection  Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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word-pictures form the whimsical sentence, “Pero se la fortuna mi fa felice tal viso asponer`o!” – “However, if fortune makes me happy, I will show such a face!” The words “aspo” and “nero” merge to make the exclamatory word/phrase “asponer`o” – “I will show.” Placed prominently in Leonardo’s painting, the word-image “asponer`o” has a special resonance. In the picture, the Christ Child not only eagerly seizes the instrument, but, with his left hand, emphatically points heavenward – a gesture, often associated with John the Baptist, that indicates “I will show” the way to redemption. Further, the bold motion of the child’s arm, proximate and parallel to the crosslike yarnwinder, suggests that this salvation will come through his sacrifice. The painting was intended for the esteemed French statesman and diplomat Florimond Robertet, a polyglot who much appreciated this sort of wordplay and owned other pictures with imbedded visual puns. One of his personal heraldic devices featured pruned, flowering branches or fleurs e´mondes, an allusion to his Christian name. It must have occurred to Leonardo that such nominal word combinations were not so different from the clever, bogus etymologies of saints’ names that he had read as a youth in the Golden Legend. Although Leonardo’s rebus in the Madonna of the Yarnwinder was perhaps unprecedented, it would not remain unique in sixteenthcentury European painting. The Lombard artist Lorenzo Lotto inserted in his Portrait of Lucina Brembati (c. 1518–20) the well-known rebus of a moon (luna) divided by the letters “ci”; and the German painter Hans Holbein’s French Ambassadors (1533) includes the famous anamorphically distorted skull, a momento mori, or reminder of death, which is also probably a pun on the artist’s name: hohl Bein, or hollow bone. By the third quarter of the sixteenth century, rebuses were common enough in Italian emblems (devices or coats-of-arms with mottos) that the writer Giovanni Andrea Palazzi, regarding them as low-minded and, possibly, as a French import, felt the need to disparage them in his Discorsi sopra l’imprese (Discourses on Devices). Any francophobia aside, Palazzi was probably right in assigning a French origin to the heraldic phenomenon. Visual puns and rebuses had been popular features in the imprese or devises of France for centuries. Since at least the time of King Louis Le Jeune, who, in the twelfth century, ordered for his son, Philip Augustus, a blue dalmatic sewn with gold fleurs-de-lys, a flower whose name – as Fleur de Loy – played on his own, visual puns were ubiquitous in

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French heraldry. Throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, similar puns appeared on countless French chivalric shields, called armes parlantes for their phonetic character, including those of Enguerrand de Cand´av`ene, a count of St. Pol in the late twelfth century, whose escutcheon bore a sheaf of oats (canne d’avoine), and Gui de Munois, a thirteenth-century monk of St. Germain d’Auxerre, whose clever seal featured a cowled ape in the sky, rubbing its back with both hands – a rebus that could be recited as “singe-air-main-dos-serre” (monkey [in the] air [with his] hand squeezes [his] back). Two centuries later, the Renaissance chronicler Jean Juvenal des Ursins reported that, in 1416, the dauphin Louis emblazoned his standard with a rebus comprising a golden letter “K,” a swan (le cygne), and a golden “L” to proclaim his romantic interest in a certain young woman of the Casinelle family, one of his mother’s ladies in waiting. Leonardo’s verbal punning and compilation of rebuses were thus not merely idle amusement but had practical application – and, for him, career-enhancing potential. He would find the French courtly pretensions of the Medici chivalric jousts and Florentine literati in the northern Italian city of Milan as well. There the tyrant Ludovico Sforza, with a consummate narcissism worthy of royalty, commissioned dizzyingly complex, literary conceits and pictorial allegories that honored him and his rule. Called Il Moro, or “The Moor,” after “Maurus,” his baptismal second name and dark complexion, Sforza elicited from Leonardo the sycophantic, only semiclever sentence: “O moro, io moro se con tua moralit`a non mi amori tanto il vivere m’´e amoro” (“O Moro, I shall die if with your goodness you will not love me, so bitter will my existence be”) – a literary display that employs five punning variations on “moro” in sixteen words. The artist also contrived visual puns for Sforza, featuring a mulberry tree (morus in Latin). Of course, such talents would have been no less appreciated when Leonardo, at the end of his life, secured employment in Robertet’s milieu, at the French court of King Francis I.

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The Young Sculptor

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n the period just before or after leonardo finished his portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, that is, the late 1470s or early 1480s, he may have turned his attention, for a brief time, to sculpture. A growing consensus of scholars believes that he was probably responsible for the pensive, terracotta Bust of the Young Christ in an Italian private collection (fig. 50). Although the attribution to Leonardo must remain tentative, because no other sculpture by him survives for comparison and the piece is completely undocumented, certain aspects of the work point to his hand. The facial type and handling of the hair suggest that the sculpture comes from someone trained in the Verrocchio shop; comparisons can be made to Verrocchio’s terracotta bust of Christ in a private collection in London and to the physiognomies of the master’s David (Bargello Museum), Christ and Saint Thomas, and, especially, in the pronounced asymmetry of the eyes and queerly bulging eyelids, his Christ of the Crucifixion (c. 1470–75; fig. 51), also in the Bargello. Yet, typical of Leonardo, the Young Christ has been invigorated in a novel way – the head is turned, breaking the usual symmetry of such busts (as Verrocchio would do in his terracotta portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici of c. 1478), and Christ’s expression has been “humanized,” made momentary and unquiet. With eyebrows raised and eyes lowered, he seems to be intellectually assimilating something he has just observed or mulling over a response to something that he has just heard, as if caught up short in his discussion with the elders in the temple, recounted in the Gospel of Luke (2:46–50). In his personal reflection on Christ, Leonardo, as one might expect, imagines him to be similarly thoughtful and questioning, as much the reasoning philosopher, the Old Testament teacher as Savior or healer. 121

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Figure 50. Leonardo da Vinci (attributed to), Bust of the Young Christ, c. 1478–80?, terracotta, Rome. Reproduced by kind permission of the Heirs of Luigi Gallandt and Sotheby’s.

The passage in Luke is the only biblical account of Jesus’ maturation, reporting that, in just three days, the twelve-year-old had remarkably increased in “wisdom and stature.” In this respect, Leonardo’s bust would have served as an appropriate coming-of-age present for a young man who had reached adulthood (like Renaissance paintings of Hercules at the Crossroads and the Dream of Scipio, which were intended to invoke an adolescent’s choice between a life of virtue versus vice, or duty over pleasure). The work may have had a special meaning for the artist. Around the time of its execution, he was probably about to separate from the Verrocchio shop and launch his independent career. The portrayal of Christ as an adolescent in a freestanding, sculptural bust is also unusual, but it would not be entirely unexpected for Leonardo, who pondered over religious subjects incessantly, often reinterpreting them, and who earlier, unconventionally, portrayed Saint John the Baptist at that stage of life. It has not been sufficiently noted that, despite occasional fits of irreverence, Leonardo was extremely devout – both God-fearing and God-admiring – as his writings, throughout his life, make abundantly clear: I obey thee, O Lord, first because of the love that I ought reasonably to bear thee; secondly, because thou knowest how to shorten or prolong the lives of men.

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Figure 51. Andrea del Verrocchio, Detail of Head of Christ in Crucifixion, c. 1470– 75, bronze, Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Polo Museale.

Fortune is powerless to help one who does not exert himself. That man becomes happy who follows Christ. Falsehood is so utterly vile that, though it might praise the great works of God, it offends against his Trinity. The Lord is the Light of all things –. The Creator does not make anything superfluous or defective. Rejoice that the Creator has ordained the intellect to such excellence of perception.

These thoughts, most of which he wrote only for himself, are at odds with Vasari’s assertion that Leonardo’s “heretical frame of mind – caused him not to adhere to any kind of religion, considering that it

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was perhaps better to be a philosopher than a Christian.” The only “heresy” of which we know is the artist’s deep skepticism with regard to the biblical Deluge, because of his knowledge of the behavior of natural bodies of water; “how,” he asked, “did the waters of so great a Flood depart if it is proved they had no power of motion?”

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The Madonna Litta

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rom leonardo’s passing mention about beginning “the two Virgin Marys” and his copious drawings that often include sketches for several projects on one sheet, one can fairly presume that he liked to work on several things at once. This may have been partly owed to his obsessive nature and been partly a habit he picked up from Verocchio, who, we know, enjoyed moving back and forth between concurrent projects. Along with the Benois Madonna, Virgin and Child with the Cat, Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, and, possibly, the Bust of Christ, Leonardo probably devoted some time in the very late 1470s, and more focused attention in the early 1480s, to the conception of a nursing Madonna in profile, known from a quick sketch on a sheet at Windsor (c. 1478–79), which shows Mary both full-face and in threequarter view (fig. 3); an exquisite, metalpoint study for the Virgin’s head (c. 1481; fig. 52); and a workshop picture, often attributed to his follower Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (fig. 53). The painting, referred to as the Madonna Litta (after the Milanese collector, Count Antonio Litta, from whom it passed to the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg), may have been started by Leonardo in 1481 and then put aside when he became too involved with the important commission for anAdoration of the Magi from the monks of S. Donato a Scopeto. Boltraffio or another shop assistant painted most of the work, all that is now visible, probably soon after Leonardo arrived in Milan in 1482. He mentions in the brief “inventory” he made in that year a “Madonna finished” (probably the Benois Madonna) and “another, almost finished (maybe an exaggeration or self-deception), which is in profile,” likely the Madonna Litta. Leonardo habitually carried paintings, often incomplete, on his travels. In some cases, he probably hoped to find spare time to finish them. In other cases, such 125

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Figure 52. Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the Head of the Virgin, c. 1481, metalpoint heightened with white on pale blue prepared paper, Paris, Louvre (2376). Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 53. Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (with Leonardo da Vinci), Nursing Virgin with Goldfinch (Madonna Litta), c. 1481–84, oil on panel, St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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19. The Madonna Litta

as the Mona Lisa, which he lugged to France and, probably, to Rome, he apparently used the works as “display samples,” to demonstrate his abilities to prospective clients. Over the years, Leonardo scholars have fiercely debated whether the Madonna Litta should be assigned to the master or his pupil. However, the uninspired essays in landscape and costume, as well as the evenly “licked” finish of the picture, surely betray an inferior hand. Whereas Leonardo’s shadows always appear to be gently wafted over the surfaces of flesh and fabric, here they are regularized and have the aspect of a stain. Despite this extensive intervention of an assistant, the general design of the picture and, especially, the complicated, twisting pose of the Christ Child must be attributed to the master. Leonardo also would have stipulated the inclusion of the symbolic goldfinch, cozily and ominously tucked into the breach between mother and child.

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The Adoration of the Magi and Invention of the High Renaissance Style 20.

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robably thanks to his father once again, leonardo obtained a commission in 1481 to paint an Adoration of the Magi for the monastic church of S. Donato a Scopeto, outside of Florence (fig. 54). Certainly, the odd financial circumstances of the project point to Ser Piero’s notarial involvement; a saddle manufacturer bequeathed to S. Donato an endowment for a painting for the high altar and at the same time left a dowry for his granddaughter. The scrupulous Ser Piero would have foolishly staked his good name and standing, as the official notary of the patrons, in recommending his brilliant but unreliable son for the job. Ser Piero’s tax records may be relevant. These indicate that he had moved with a new (fourth) wife to a house on the via Ghibellina and had stopped supporting Leonardo financially by 1480 – a reasonable decision in light of Leonardo’s age (twenty-seven or twentyeight) and the fact that Ser Piero had two other legitimate children to look after. Almost predictably, Leonardo’s work on the monumental panel was left incomplete; he never progressed beyond the underpaint stage. Nevertheless, even in its unfinished state, the picture must be considered a conceptual masterpiece, and the many extant studies for the work reveal the enormous amount of energy – in concentrated and original thought – that Leonardo devoted to the composition. Representing both the beginning and epitome of the High Renaissance style in Florence, the picture is painstakingly composed so that every element – every figure, every gesture, and every symbol – contributes dynamically to the meaning of the work. Leonardo believed that, as in nature, form must perfectly follow function: style should be exactly appropriate to content, no actor and no action unnecessary 129

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or redundant, each gesture the most compelling manifestation of an emotion. He once wrote: Every smallest detail has a function and must be rigorously explained in functional terms that are in accord with nature as opposed to the postulates of the ancients. Human ingenuity – will never discover any inventions more beautiful, more appropriate or more direct than nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.

Just as the Munich and Benois Madonnas concerned the themes of sight and insight, his carefully conceived Adoration of the Magi is spatially organized according to the perceptions of the actors and their degree of enlightenment. The three Magi, who recognize the infant as the Savior, form a compact triangle with the Virgin and Child on the surface, or picture plane, of the painting. Meanwhile, those actors that have an instinctive but unspecified awareness of the child’s divinity create a semicircle, excavating a shallow space, around the triangle. Some appear disoriented; others seem blindly to gaze, eyes shielded, into a bright light. The heroic figures at each corner of the composition search for answers to explain this mysterious spiritual presence: the older man or seer at far left, in deep contemplation, looks within – as those around him seek his wisdom; his counterpart, the young man at right, possessing less knowledge of the world, looks without – beyond even the universe of the picture. To the right of center, a man recoils, hand raised, as a young tree miraculously springs from age-old stone, a double allusion to the wooden cross on Golgotha and the new spiritual life on earth under Christ, rooted in the Old Testament bedrock of the Jews. Removed from the sacred knowledge and geometry of the lower half of the composition, the small, combative, background figures coexist within a discrete and mathematically generated, perspective space, unobservant and wholly ignorant of the historical event before them. The themes to which Leonardo alluded in his early Madonnas now serve, in a brilliant summation, to integrate the entire structure and narrative of the work. When such a lucid articulation and equilibrium are attained in a pictorial scheme, a painting is sometimes said to be “classical.” That is, the work recalls, in a general sense, the consummately calm sculptures of fifth-century (b.c.) Athens, such as Myron’s Discus Thrower or the

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metope reliefs of the Parthenon, in which difficult poses effortlessly find balance and opposing forces are resolved or suavely contained within a rational, geometric framework. However, Leonardo’s classicism is not a recollection but a parallel development – the result of similar intentions rather than imitation. For during his early years in Florence, his access to the vocabulary of antique art, like his access to Greek and Latin, was extremely limited. Whereas Lorenzo the Magnificent possessed a respectable collection of ancient coins and carved gems, he apparently had only about half a dozen significant antique sculptures. These works – the mythological figures of Marsyas and Priapus, a Boy with a Bird, marble busts of the Roman emperors Agrippa and Augustus, and a bronze Head of a Horse – were far different in spirit from “classical” fifth-century Greek sculpture and

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Figure 54. Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi, 1481, oil on panel, for S. Donato a Scopeto, now Florence, Uffizi. Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 55. Detail of Figures to the Right of the Virgin and Child in Adoration of the Magi, fig. 54. Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY.

provided, at any rate, only sparse and fragmentary examples for study. The serene poise and restrained energy of the ancient Greek masterpieces of Myron, Phidias, or Polykleitos, which Leonardo’s art evokes, were completely unknown to him. Although not obvious on first inspection, Leonardo’s point of departure for the Adoration was once again the Pollaiuoli Shooting of Saint Sebastian (fig. 23). From that picture, he derived the notion of dividing the painting into two realms of action: a triangle of figures in the foreground bounded by a dark semicircle and a distant panorama of horsemen linked, in their linear dispersal, to the horizon. Following the Pollaiuoli, Leonardo placed a tree at center, surrounded by figures that mirror one another’s poses (a much-renowned feature of the brothers’ picture), with grand classical ruins in the left distance, and a rocky outcropping in the background at right. However, as we have seen, he elaborated extensively on this framework, infusing each figure with an individual personality and motivation and creating an entirely new, compositional and symbolic cohesiveness.

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The profound thought that Leonardo devoted to each actor is evident not only in the two standing “prophets,” as they are sometimes called, on either side of the composition, but even in the more summarily realized figures of the inner circle. To the immediate right of the Christ Child, a trio of heads sensitively conveys a spectrum of emotions: quizzical irritation, fearfulness, and hesitant curiosity (fig. 55). Opposite them, a befuddled Saint Joseph cautiously peers from behind a rock over Mary’s (proper) right shoulder. He holds the lid to the jar given to Christ by the elder magus, Melchior, who kneels directly below, touching his face to the ground, as if weighted down, humbled, by his full knowledge of the child’s identity. Behind Joseph, two beautiful, vacuous youths who have just ridden in from the background (sitting, indecorously, in intimate tandem on their horse) inquire cavalierly about the foreground gathering; the man whom they consult points to the miraculous, robust tree that grows from solid rock. The three young men closest to the tree appear celebratory: the youth on the right indicates, with finger raised heavenward, that the newly sprouted tree is the work of God; beside him, another man places his cupped hands before the tree in a gesture denoting worship as much as surprise; the youth farthest to the left, stationed behind the Virgin

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Figure 56. Leonardo da Vinci, Studies for the Adoration of the Magi, 1481, pen and ink, Paris, Biblioth`eque de l’Ecole Nationale Sup´erieure des Beaux-Arts (424). Photo: Jean-Michel Lapelezie.

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Figure 57. Leonardo da Vinci, Figure Studies for the Adoration of the Magi, 1481, pen and ink, Cologne, WallrafRichartz Museum, Graphische Sammlung, no. Z 2003. Collection of Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Rheinisches Bildarchiv K¨oln.

and Child and directly in front of the distant palm, an ancient symbol of victory over death or of resurrection, looks knowingly toward the viewer. Leonardo’s many preliminary studies in pen and ink reveal how much he fretted over the expressions and gestures of all these figures. In sheets preserved in Paris and London, one can see how carefully he considered the attitude of the old “prophet” at left. On the Paris sheet (fig. 56), he drew the brooding figure, first as a young man both with and without a staff. He tried both possibilities again in his series of studies in London, arriving at a figure that approximates the old seer of the painting in gravity of stature and thought. Interspersed among

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Figure 58. Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Hands for the Adoration of the Magi, 1481, metalpoint, Windsor Castle, Royal Library (12616). The Royal Collection  C 2010 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

these sketches are his ideas for numerous other witnesses, generally more animated and upright than those he would choose to populate the foreground of the Uffizi picture – presumably deciding in the end that if the ancillary figures were too busy and prominent, they might distract from the principal drama. For those figures in the painting that bow and genuflect in wonder before the Holy Family, Leonardo looked to the varied studies he had made on two sheets now preserved in Cologne and the Louvre (fig. 57). The extensive repertoire of poses on these pages affords us a tantalizing glimpse of the obsequious choreography of Renaissance court manners. Leonardo also created a number of studies of elegantly expressive hands for the Adoration on a double-sided sheet at Windsor Castle (fig. 58). He would review these and make many more “talking-hand” drawings when, more than a dozen years later, he composed his Last Supper for Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. His fluency in the language of hands was, perhaps,

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Figure 59. Leonardo da Vinci, Perspective Study for Background of the Adoration of the Magi, 1481, metalpoint, pen and ink with wash, Florence, Uffizi (436E). Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

due in part to his scrutiny of the gestures of the deaf, a practice he recommended to other artists in his Treatise on Painting. As we have observed, Leonardo conceived the distant background figures of the Adoration of the Magi as inhabitants of an independent realm, with its own internal perspective or spatial logic and velocity of activity. To this end, he actually created a large, independent, compositional study for the background scene, rendered with a fastidious linear grid, which is still extant and in the Uffizi’s collection (fig. 59). Untouched by Christ’s grace and subject to mundane, physical laws, the figures of this separate, ancient world move about impulsively and frantically, compelled by their bestial nature – running, clashing, noisily blowing horns of alarm. As in the painting, they embody centuries past of spasmodic, pointless conflict. The stairs of their temple lead nowhere. Leonardo here seems to have improvised and expanded on the traditional ruins motif in Italian paintings of the Adoration and Nativity, in which the remnants of ancient buildings allude to the Old Dispensation of the Jews, on which Christ will build his church. This architectural symbolism was probably inspired by the biblical reference, in Isaiah (9:10), to the coming of the messiah: “the bricks have fallen, but we will build with dressed stones.” A few of the actors in Leonardo’s drawing try, unsuccessfully, to control frightened horses, a Platonic metaphor for restraint of the

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Figure 60. Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi, 1481, pen and ink over leadpoint, Paris, Louvre (RF 1978). Art Resource, NY.

passions or amore bestiale; in his dialogue, Phaedrus, Plato likened the soul to a spirited horse, reined in by horsemen or charioteers. These figures would become, in the painting, the cavalrymen who seem to be engaged in mock battle – perhaps Leonardo’s fond recollections of Lorenzo’s and Giuliano’s lavish jousts of 1469 and 1475, full of pomp and harmless fury. In portraying pagan antiquity, the artist appears to have consulted as a model an ancient bronze Head of a Horse in Lorenzo the Magnificent’s collection. Leonardo’s horses here, and in subsequent works, have that antique sculpture’s exceptionally thick neck, unnaturally rounded where it joins the crown of the head, and

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sometimes the distinctive tuft of hair, tied with a cord, at the front of the mane. Interestingly, another preliminary compositional drawing for the Adoration, now in the Louvre, reveals that, at one point in the design process, Leonardo considered depicting an ancient, sacrificial procession in the background (fig. 60). Although difficult to decipher, the parade of small figures moves toward an altar, where a (bovine?) carcass has been deposited and pierced with a lance – a scene possibly inspired by an antique Roman relief. Correspondingly, the Virgin, in the drawing as in the painting, serves as a central “altar” at which Christ is worshipped. Thus, the drawing directly associates the blood ritual of an ancient society with Christ’s sacrifice. On further consideration, Leonardo elected to revise the background subject, perhaps feeling that his unprecedented gloss made the theme of sacrifice too explicit, undermining what should be the generally joyous mood of an Adoration.

The Adoration and Leonardo’s Military Interests 21.

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he ultimate decision to represent sportive combat, rather than ritual sacrifice, in the Adoration of the Magi (fig. 54) also may have reflected the artist’s growing military interests. At virtually the same moment that he conceived the painting, he was devoting much time to the invention of machines of war and defense. On one page of the Codice Atlantico, he designed a mechanism for repelling ladders (of attacking soldiers) from a crenellated fortress wall, not unlike those that surrounded Florence in the Renaissance. On other sheets, Leonardo contrived huge catapults and colossal crossbows (fig. 61) – the sprightly, scattered figures that operate those weapons are similar to the cavalry of the Adoration. For these inventions, he probably would have studied any designs for war devices left to him by Martini, reviewed Valturio’s military tracts, and consulted the architectural treatises of the ancient writer Vitruvius and contemporary theorist Alberti, which included sections on fortifications and other defense systems. There is no evidence that any of these ideas ever left Leonardo’s drawing board. Further, in many instances, what appear to be plausible machines, conscientiously planned down to the specification of bolts and hinges, could not possibly have worked, due to the intrinsic properties – such as tensile strength and flexibility – of wood and the other materials involved. No doubt, Leonardo’s military drawings and research responded to the unease of Florence’s political situation at the end of the 1470s and early 1480s. Following the Pazzi conspiracy, the city and surrounding areas of Tuscany came to be threatened by the Duke of Calabria, who commanded the royal armies of Naples. Excommunicated by Pope Sixtus IV, a Medici foe, Lorenzo the Magnificent found that his allies, including the dukes of Ferrara and Milan, were reluctant to 139

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come to his aid. The condemnation had followed an earlier punishment: in 1476, when the Medici contract to control the papal alum monopoly expired, management of the mines in the town of Tolfa was turned over to a Roman company. Also in this period, England had begun to produce its own cloth and was sending less wool to Florence for processing. Consequently, the Florentine economy had weakened considerably. Lorenzo may have doubted that he had sufficient resources to field an effective army. An onslaught of plague further undermined manpower and productivity. When, in the winter of 1479–80, the Duke of Calabria’s soldiers advanced as far as Siena, where they hunkered down because of inclement weather, Lorenzo realized drastic action was required. He set off on a dangerous voyage to negotiate directly with King Ferrante of Naples, arriving in the southern Italian city around Christmas in 1479. In Naples, Lorenzo reverted to his usual tactic of spreading money around liberally – demonstrating his generosity by contributing dowries for numerous poor girls and buying the freedom of a hundred gallery slaves. He bought Florence’s continued liberty as well, paying an “indemnity” to the Duke of Calabria and ceding to Naples some valuable territories in southern Tuscany. During his two and a half months at the Neapolitan court, the articulate and witty Lorenzo seems thoroughly to have charmed the king. Although greeted as a hero upon his return to Florence in 1480, the relief of the populace was both premature and short-lived; before the year was over, a large contingent of the Turkish army would threaten the Italian peninsula – only the first of many threats that would come in waves. In the short term, the attack of the infidels was a boon to Florence, drawing the attention and armies of the Duke of Calabria and of the pope away from Tuscany. However, as many Florentines feared, Lorenzo’s openpurse diplomacy was not, in the long term, a sound policy, particularly with respect to much wealthier foreign powers, such as France, which was always able to enlist a formidable army. Within a dozen years, these concerns proved to be well founded. Lorenzo’s successor, his politically inept son Piero, would relinquish the valuable port of Pisa and other Florentine strongholds to the invading French forces of Charles VIII in 1494, and an enraged local populace consequently expelled the Medici. Perhaps already contemplating his own departure from Florence, in 1481 Leonardo put aside any trepidation he had and focused intensely,

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Figure 61. Leonardo da Vinci, Design for a Colossal Crossbow, c. 1481, pen and ink, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codice Atlantico (149r). Art Resource, NY.

for a time, on the Adoration of the Magi. Ingeniously, he was able to unify the epic range of activities – military as well as devotional – through the geometries he imposed on the dense composition as well as the comprehensive way in which he patterned it in light and dark. This was a decisive break from the traditional Florentine method of painting, which involved adding, coloring, and modeling in light and shadow each figure or element, one at a time. Leonardo’s novel

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approach here was to conceive the entire work as he would a large study in pen, brush, and wash, broadly determining the placement of the strongest lights and darks, and a few of the medium tones. By this means, indicative of the comprehensive manner in which his mind grasped the matter before it, he achieved an unprecedented coherence in Renaissance painting, in terms of both design and idea, emphasizing certain figures and symbols, suppressing others – an internal dialogue in black and white. In this working method, color became almost an afterthought, an embellishment on a rigorously intellectual scheme. Only after countless revisions to his composition would Leonardo introduce, as final touches, “superficially” attractive elements of color and dashes of spontaneity – just as, only after careful preparations and contributions by others, had he placed the finishing glint or sparkle on a Verrocchio-shop picture. This form-over-color approach was in accord with notions espoused by the Neoplatonists, particularly Ficino, who wrote in his treatise, “On the Immortality of the Soul,” that “sight cannot perceive colors unless it assumes [first] the forms of these colors.” That is, color has no reality independent of a solid object. Powerful as the Adoration of the Magi was in its unfinished state, Leonardo’s failure to consummate it must have displeased not only the patrons but also his supportive father. Eventually, the S. Donato monks were able to hire the painter Filippino Lippi, illegitimate son of Fra Filippo by the nun, Lucrezia Buti, to take over the commission, and he wisely availed himself of Leonardo’s drawings in creating his own altarpiece, completed in 1496. No doubt glad to be relieved of the long moribund project, Leonardo, then living in Milan, would have gratefully instructed his father to donate his designs to Lippi, who had earlier executed the altarpiece for the Palazzo della Signoria, when Leonardo did not follow through on that work. How Ser Piero, probably mortified, handled the S. Donato situation is not known. Leonardo, too, must have felt some embarrassment along with regret, for by that time his rival and former colleague, an artist of more limited talents, Perugino, had attained a sterling reputation and important patronage in Rome. He had executed a fresco for Pope Sixtus IV in Old Saint Peter’s basilica around 1479, and he was at work, at the pontiff ’s behest, on his monumental fresco, Christ Giving the Keys to Saint Peter (c. 1480–82), in the Sistine Chapel. Impressive in its spatial grandeur and narrative clarity, the work was, in truth, hardly

21. The Adoration and Leonardo’s Military Interests

more advanced than Leonardo’s juvenile Annunciation with respect to the individual figures, the bland, facial expressions and stilted poses of which were all too characteristic of Perugino’s conservative manner. Nevertheless, although he was one of the younger artists participating in the decoration, Perugino seems to have been authorized to devise, with Botticelli, the overall scheme of the room, the most prestigious project in Christendom at that time. Meanwhile, Leonardo’s abandoned Adoration languished in the house of his friend, Giovanni de’ Benci, the brother of Ginevra, and later passed to Giovanni’s son, Amerigo. The contract for the altarpiece had stated that the work was to be completed in twenty-four months, thirty at most – a stipulation that, in hindsight, Leonardo must have found infinitely amusing, both in light of his work habits and the S. Donato monks’ resources. Very tight with funds, the monks had asked Leonardo, contrary to custom, to spend his own money on materials, rather than giving him an advance, and their last payments to the artist had been in wine rather than cash.

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Leonardo and Allegorical Conceits for the Medici Court 22.

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n the reverse of a sheet of “old seer” studies for the Adoration, Leonardo furiously sketched an allegory that deserves careful attention for what it may disclose about his relationship with Lorenzo de’ Medici in the early 1480s. The design and theme, involving personifications of Fortune, Death, Envy, and Ingratitude – all clearly labeled – would seem to be the artist’s own inventions (fig. 62). As in most of Leonardo’s “left-handed” narratives, the electric action flows from right to left. At far right, Fortune (Fortuna), depicted as a woman with long, flowing hair, holds a child, who blows a trumpet to extinguish the torch of Death (Morte), intent on setting the branches of a tree on fire. Supporting Death on their shoulders are the surprised figures of Envy (Invidia) and Ingratitude (Ingratitudine). Roughly indicated at left, Ignorance (Ignoranza) and Pride (Superbia), apparently complicit in the attempted arson, watch in dismay as their plot is foiled. A recent suggestion that the allegory alludes to the failed assassination attempt on Lorenzo de’ Medici is intriguing. The drawing, related in style to the highly charged background of the Adoration, probably dates to the period of 1481–82, some time after Lorenzo had returned to Florence from his successful diplomatic meeting in Naples and after almost all of the prime conspirators in the Pazzi scheme, including Baroncelli, had been caught and executed. The ink sketch also may have followed the shocking revelation of yet another plot to murder Lorenzo in 1481. The tree, according to this line of speculation, would be a laurel, the hardy plant that Lorenzo took as his personal emblem and that subsequently became a symbol of Medici endurance and dynasty. When not writing about laurels and other natural elements in his poetry, Lorenzo often featured Fortuna as a 145

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Figure 62. Leonardo da Vinci, Allegory with Fortune and Death, c. 1481, metalpoint, pen and ink with wash on pink prepared paper, London, British Museum (1886-6-9-42).  C The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY.

principal theme. Therefore, Leonardo may have created the drawing to demonstrate his loyalty and to curry favor with the beleaguered Lorenzo, for whom he would have provided the captions (although written in reverse, easily read), a most atypical concession on the artist’s part. It is perhaps of some significance that the extinguished-flame motif recollects and transforms the theme that Sandro Botticelli employed six years earlier in his standard for Giuliano’s joust. In contriving the allegory, Leonardo may have felt that he was competing for attention with Botticelli, who, by that time, had probably already begun to consult with Medici court literati about the content of his mythological paintings of Primavera (Spring) and Pallas and the Centaur, commissioned by Lorenzo’s second cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco (both pictures now in the Uffizi). In Leonardo’s mind, the award to Botticelli of the contracts for those major works may have signaled that his colleague was solidifying his position as the Medici family’s painter of choice. The allegories were to serve as decorative centerpieces for the household the patron would soon establish with a new wife. More disconcerting still for Leonardo would have been the realization that Botticelli, a tanner’s son, was the favored artist for pictures

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Figure 63. Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Figures of Fortune and Fame, Shields around a Flaming Tree Stump, c. 1481, pen and ink with wash, London, British Museum (1895C The 9-15-482).  Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY.

of a highly intellectual and philosophical nature, such as the Primavera, layered with classical allusions and oblique marital references that the Neoplatonists of the court had provided. The general perception in Florence may have been that Botticelli was the best painter for erudite, classical subjects and Leonardo for scenes and details of natural beauty. As we previously noted, Verrocchio and his shop hardly ever tackled or developed much of a reputation for rendering antique subjects. Writing around 1488, one proud citizen of Florence, Ugolino Verino, compares Botticelli to the ancient Greek painter Apelles, known for his complex allegories, and Leonardo to the antique master Zeuxis, remembered for painting on a wall a bunch of grapes so lifelike that birds pecked at them. If this was the common view of the two artists, then Leonardo must have been further demoralized when he saw the

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finished Primavera, in which Botticelli showcased his skills in landscape and still-life, painting no fewer than thirty distinct species of plants and flowers. Botticelli’s influence again proved inescapable when, around the same time, Leonardo struggled to devise another allegory, perhaps related to his Fortune and Death sheet. On a drawing in the British Museum (fig. 63), marked by fits and starts, he developed a scenario featuring Fame and Fortune. As always, his “thinking on paper” spilled from right to left and from bottom to top. He began at lower right with the figure of Fortune, precariously balanced on toe-point, an unpredictable, shifting wind blowing her long hair forward and the gown from her chest. With what appears to be a round buckler, she extinguishes a fire that blazed through a pile of shields, war trophies assembled around a tree stump. Inspecting what he had drawn, Leonardo must have realized that the viewer would not easily grasp the meaning of the flaming shields – they probably stood for military fame – and that the conceit of the dropped dress was less than inspiring. Commencing again at top right, he quickly sketched Fortune in stylus and then started to retrace his lines in pen and ink. He advanced only as far as the head and shoulders when he suddenly had a minor inspiration (or misgiving) and decided to represent a personification of Fame, at left. Fame, he wisely concluded, albeit unoriginal, would be a more elegant surrogate for a smoking mound of battle souvenirs. Once committed to the figure of Fame, he let his pen and brush fly with abandon, realizing her in a painterly flourish of ink washes. In the process, Leonardo cannibalized the toe-point pose of (the lower) Fortune. Thus, if he wished to avoid monotony, he would have needed to find a different way to complete the figure he had begun at upper right. For whatever reason, he did not address the issue, and his ideas seem to have progressed no further. Unfortunately, he appears never to have translated into paint his glorious figure of Fame, which recalls certain Verrocchio angels and, more strongly, in pose and propulsion, those of Botticelli – a grudging tribute on Leonardo’s part. In their sweeping movements, the Fame and Fortune of the drawing also recollect the mingling women who enliven the background of his Adoration of the Magi. If Leonardo’s first allegory of Fortune referred to Lorenzo, then one logically may wonder whether the British Museum drawing was intended to honor his brother, Giuliano, because the only measure of

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fame the young man had achieved, before Fortune snuffed out his life, was based on his military prowess or, better to say, “aptitude.” His coatof-arms (impresa) was a broncone, a tree stump, with flames shooting out from where the branches had been cut off. Vasari describes it, in one place, as a troncon tagliato, or severed trunk. Discernable on Leonardo’s crested, trophy shields are a rampant-lion device and what might be a fleur-de-lys. Neither motif was specifically associated with Giuliano, but both were symbols of Florence – the lion a variation on the marzocco, the heraldic, leonine emblem of the city. Although Leonardo would later invent his own, imaginative allegorical language, at this point in his career, he was in no position to improvise extensively on established Medici imagery.

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Early Ideas for the Last Supper

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hile conceiving the ill-fated ADORATION OF THE MAGI, Leonardo, who always played out myriad variations on an idea or theme, also created numerous, vibrant drawings for an Adoration of the Shepherds, Nativity, and Virgin of Humility (a northern European convention in which Mary and the Infant Christ are shown seated on the ground) – that is, the whole range of traditional, artistic subjects that dealt with the first days after the Incarnation (fig. 64). The fluidity of his mind was such that the subjects probably evolved with the movement of his pen. This free flow of thought extended as well to the disposition of Saint Joseph, who in some studies has lost the sweet-natured puzzlement one usually sees in Renaissance portrayals, appearing, instead, severe and admonitory. In contrast, on other sheets, Leonardo joyfully imagined the attendant angels as the most nimble and daring of aerial acts and the Christ Child and Saint John as almost acrobatically inclined. Very comparable squirming babies, no doubt rendered at approximately the same time, appear in a remarkable series of studies by Leonardo representing the Virgin and Christ Child with St. John the Baptist, on a sheet now preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (fig. 65). Touchingly, he has carefully observed and recorded the movements of an infant who wishes to get off his back – struggling mightily with hands and feet flailing, or else reaching up to his mother in the hope that she will lift him. Although Leonardo appears never to have translated into paint any of these lively figural groups, he would revisit them years later when devising his majestic altarpiece known as the Virgin of the Rocks (Louvre) and a long-lost picture of the mythical Leda and the Swan, a mortal woman with the lascivious god Jupiter, in avian disguise, surrounded by their newly hatched brood. 151

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Figure 64. Leonardo da Vinci, Study for an Adoration of the Christ Child, c. 1481, pen and ink, Venice, Gallerie dell’ Accademia (256). Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY.

The seeds of another major painting were also sown among Leonardo’s studies for the Adoration of the Magi – two spirited, penand-ink sketches (c. 1481) for a Last Supper accompany Adoration drawings on a sheet preserved in the Louvre (fig. 66). Presumably made without a commission for a painting in hand or in mind, these Last Supper studies, together with those for the Adoration, can be regarded almost as a pictorial catalogue of various responses to divine revelation or pronouncement. Imprints of a brief and spontaneous, creative ferment, the drawings would nevertheless endure in use, serving Leonardo as stimuli or models for decades. At bottom left, he portrays an uncharacteristically agitated Christ, finger pointing and hand on heart, announcing at the Last Supper that one of the apostles will betray him. Just above, the apostle John, devastated by the news, buries his face in his hands. At right, a lively group of discussants sits around a table, prefiguring the dynamic interaction of the apostles in Leonardo’s subsequent Last Supper designs and painting. The artist’s decision to represent this most dramatic moment was not, contrary to much that has been written, an innovation on his part.

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Figure 65. Leonardo da Vinci, Designs for an Adoration of the Christ Child, c. 1481–82, metalpoint with pen and ink on pink prepared paper, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art (17.142.1). Image copyC Metropolitan right  Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.

Again, Leonardo followed Florentine precedent, notably the Last Suppers of Andrea del Castagno (1445–50) and Domenico Ghirlandaio (1480), created for the refectories of Sant’ Apollonio and Ognissanti, respectively. Indeed, Ghirlandaio’s recently completed picture may have been the catalyst for Leonardo’s flickering thoughts on the subject. However, he chose to make the actors’ gestures more emphatic and obvious than those of Ghirlandaio: as Leonardo would later advise, “figures must be done in such a way that the spectators are able with ease to recognize through their attitudes the thoughts of their minds.” Ultimately, when he painted his famous Last Supper (c. 1495–97) for the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, he chose not to show Christ in the act of speaking but in the immediate aftermath, just as Castagno and Ghirlandaio had done in their frescoes. Furthermore, like his predecessors, Leonardo portrayed Saint John in his early

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Figure 66. Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Four Male Figures, Half-Length Studies of Christ and St. John, Studies of Figures in Conversation at a Table, c. 1481, pen and ink over leadpoint, Paris, Louvre (2258). R´eunion des Mus´ees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

Louvre drawing and in later, preliminary studies for the mural, as overcome by emotion and collapsed on the table (but not in the painting itself, where John swoons to the left). John’s presence in the mural, never questioned until recently (in popular literature), was required not only by scripture but also by Leonardo’s need for dramatic, pictorial contrast, for the telling foil the wilting saint makes to the figure of Christ, a calm axis of resolve. By the time he worked on the Milan painting, Leonardo, through experience and better-honed powers of observation, had learned a good deal more about human anatomy, psychology, and physiological reactions. Now almost invisible in the poorly preserved mural, but

23. Early Ideas for the Last Supper

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Figure 67. Leonardo da Vinci, Head of Judas, c. 1493–95, red chalk on red-ochre prepared paper, Windsor Castle, Royal Library (12547). The Royal C 2010 Collection  Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

seen clearly in his preparatory drawings (figs. 67 and 68), is the subtle range of emotions he could capture, including his observations of voluntary and involuntary responses: the bulge of an artery in the neck or vein in the forehead of the traitor Judas, trying unsuccessfully to conceal his anxiety; the prominent Adam’s apple of James the Greater, conspicuously rising with his emotion; the faces of vulnerability and of denial, both conscious and unconscious. In shock, Matthew absentmindedly and pathetically busies himself with a fish on a plate; the hands of some apostles pointlessly clutch their garments or hang in desperation. Barely legible in the painting (more so in early reproductive prints) is the network of nervously crossed feet beneath the table. Leonardo’s perceptive and keen focus on veins and arteries in the preliminary drawings for the Last Supper is likely owed in part to his familiarity with the writings of Aristotle, who was one of the first to advance a psychophysical theory of emotions, connecting them to cardiovascular manifestations. For the Greek philosopher, unaware of the functions of the central nervous system, the brain had no

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Figure 68. Leonardo da Vinci, Studies for the Last Supper, c. 1493–95, red chalk, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia (254). Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

psychological significance; he believed that the heart was the center of the soul and of feelings, engendered by the warm blood that collected there. He and his cardio-centric followers thought that blood, literally, simmered in that organ when a person became angry. This became a commonly held notion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; even the folksy little Fior di virt`u quoted Aristotle in reporting that anger “is a disturbance of the soul caused by a vengeful afflux of blood to the heart.” According to similar reasoning, when an individual was afraid or surprised, the warm fluid would “flee” from the brain and the cooler, upper parts of the body to the heart, where it could induce palpitations. Although Leonardo knew of the nervous system and preferred to locate the soul in the brain, he nevertheless concurred with Aristotle’s estimation of the heart as the center for the blood and its “vital spirits.” Thus, in rendering the engorged veins in the heads of the upset apostles, Leonardo astutely noted the sudden movement of blood – he simply had its direction incorrect. Such misconceptions would also undermine the validity of his work when he attempted to “map out” the vascular system in his anatomical drawings of that period. He regarded it as an inverted branching tree, with sanguinary flow mainly

23. Early Ideas for the Last Supper

from top to bottom, rather than in a circulatory loop. Unfortunately for the artist, a true understanding of the circulatory system, and the functions of the heart, would not be attained until the seventeenth century, with the empirical research of the English physician William Harvey.

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Leonardo and the Saint Sebastian 24.

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losely related in style to the early LAST SUPPER and Adoration of the Magi studies and so, presumably, from the same period (c. 1480–81) are a couple of small but vital drawings that Leonardo made of Saint Sebastian, now preserved in Bayonne and Hamburg (figs. 69 and 70). The black chalk sketch in Bayonne would seem to be the earlier of the two studies; the frontal stance of the saint there is repeated faintly in leadpoint in the Hamburg sheet, where it serves as a starting point for further elaboration in wiry ink contours. Although his extant studies are few and no painted Sebastians by him survive, Leonardo seems to have become somewhat preoccupied with the saint during his first Florentine period. The list he drew up of his artistic possessions around 1482, shortly after settling in Milan, mentions eight drawings of the saint. According to legend, Sebastian was an officer of the Praetorian Guard under the Roman emperor Diocletian in the third century. He was ordered to be shot with arrows when he was discovered to be secretly Christian. The popular subject would have been especially attractive to Leonardo, as it was to other Renaissance artists, because it afforded the opportunity to portray a full-length, standing male, nearly nude. Images of Sebastian, who miraculously recovered from his wounds, were almost always in demand due to the centuries-old belief that he was a protector against plague, alleged in ancient times to be caused by the arrows of the Greek god Apollo. Leonardo’s designs may have been intended either for small-scale, private devotional paintings or for ex-votos, pictures made in gratitude for deliverance from the disease. Plague raged throughout Europe between 1478 and 1480, and in late 1479, there was a devastating outbreak in Florence, which 159

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Figure 69. Leonardo da Vinci, St. Sebastian, c. 1480–81, black chalk, Bayonne, Mus´ee Bonnat (1211). R´eunion des Mus´ees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

The Young Leonardo

24. Leonardo and the Saint Sebastian

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Figure 70. Leonardo da Vinci, St. Sebastian Tied to a Tree, c. 1480–81, pen and ink over leadpoint, Hamburg, Kunsthalle (21489). Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

closed down workshops and took the lives of more than 20,000 people, most buried in the cemetery of the hospital of San Martino della Scala, including Verrocchio’s onetime master and friend, the sculptor Antonio Rossellino and his two young sons.

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No doubt, when Leonardo made his sketches, the painted Saint Sebastians of the Pollaiuoli (fig. 23) and Botticelli (then in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore) were in the back of his mind. However, the tilted-back head and forked tree of Leonardo’s drawings suggest that, paying private homage, he may have consulted as well the marble Saint Sebastian (c. 1476–78) in the nearby town of Empoli by the respected Rossellino – a tiny man with grand talents. Perhaps Rossellino’s masterpiece, this life-sized Sebastian showed his prescient and profound assimilation of Hellenistic Greek sculpture, offering an authoritative model for those with similar ambitions. Whatever his immediate sources, Leonardo obviously found the usual, frontal pose of the saint wanting, and so experimented with at least three other positions, twisting the head and legs in opposition to the torso. In wishing to convey the saint’s struggle, the artist probably looked for ideas to Lorenzo the Magnificent’s two prized, antique sculptures of the satyr Marsyas bound to a tree. Although both sculptures are lost, we know from written descriptions, other versions of the works, sketches, and carved gems that one of these (inherited from Cosimo) was a “hanging” Marsyas type, with arms fastened high on a tree, and the other was “seated” – more leaning – against a tree trunk, with legs bent and swiveled together to one side, similar to those of the Hamburg Sebastian. Leonardo would have watched when Verrocchio, at the request of Lorenzo (who had acquired the piece himself), restored and completed the fragmentary “seated Marsyas,” carving and attaching new legs and arms, perhaps in 1477 or 1478. The stunning, repaired Marsyas, realized in “stone the color of blood” with natural white veins that simulated those of human flesh, must have made a powerful impression on the young artist. So inspired, Leonardo much enlivened his saint, arriving at the extreme, spiraling form of contrapposto, or counterpoise of limbs and weight, that would come to be ubiquitous in the next century and celebrated – or condemned – as the figura serpentinata, or serpentine figure.

25.

Saint Jerome

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hen leonardo, in the waning years of the plague, depicted another extremely popular male saint, the penitent Jerome in the wilderness (fig. 71), he employed what is sometimes called the “dark manner” of the Adoration of the Magi, where light forms emerge from a tenebrous background. His powerful painting of c. 1480–82, now in the Vatican, is probably contemporaneous with the Adoration and was left in a similarly unfinished state. The Saint Jerome may have been intended for the Benedictine church and religious complex of La Badia in Florence, another long-standing institutional client of Leonardo’s father. Perhaps not coincidentally, Filippino Lippi supplied the monks there with a painting of the subject in the later 1480s; Lippi, it should be recalled, had earlier fulfilled Leonardo’s abandoned commissions for the Palazzo della Signoria and S. Donato a Scopeto. At a certain point, Leonardo may have begun to recommend Lippi for projects that he was unable to complete. As his works attest, the younger artist well understood and sought to emulate the older master’s innovations. Lippi’s compositional drawings show his desire to achieve the intricate, comprehensive unity of Leonardo’s Adoration, and his Badia Saint Jerome is reminiscent of the Vatican work. Leonardo must have admired his abilities (and appreciated his imitation) and, perhaps, felt a special bond with an artist who was similarly defined by his illegitimate birth. Lippi, on at least one occasion, apparently tried to reciprocate Leonardo’s goodwill and generosity, when, in 1500, he asked him to take over a commission for an altarpiece for the church of SS. Annunziata, a double-sided panel with a Deposition from the Cross on the front and an Assumption of the Virgin on the back. (Reverting to the usual pattern, Leonardo, for unknown reasons, aborted the project, 163

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and several years later, Lippi executed the Deposition and Perugino the Assunta.) Aside from having coined the cautionary phrase “avoid like the plague,” Saint Jerome was not, like Sebastian, associated with the disease. Nevertheless, Leonardo’s painting of the nobly suffering Jerome would have offered some consolation and encouragement to febrile victims of the illness. According to his letters, as a young person, Jerome had retired for four years to the Syrian desert. There, after a while, the severe heat, asceticism, and deprivation caused him to experience vivid sexual hallucinations and intense lust, which he tried to dispel by beating his chest. In his strength of will and reason, he became an exemplar for the Benedictines and other monastic orders. The Golden Legend, the apocryphal compilation of saints’ lives, relates that during his retreat the compassionate, if crazed, Jerome also pulled a thorn from the paw of a lion, thereafter his devoted companion in the wilderness. Leonardo was faithful to the scene and conditions described in Jerome’s vivid letters: in that vast solitude which is scorched by the sun’s heat and affords a savage habitation for monks – whenever I saw some deep valley, some rugged mountain, some precipitous crags, it was this I made my place of prayer, my place of punishment for the wretched flesh. – My face was pale from fasting, and my mind was as hot with desire in a body cold as ice. Though my flesh, before its tenant, was already as good as dead, the fires of passion kept boiling within me.

Reacting to unseen powers, Leonardo’s lion roars as the emaciated saint strikes his chest with a rock to drive out his own bestial and carnal spirits. In one of his moralizing tracts on animals, Leonardo wrote that, at the sound of a lion’s roar, “Evil flees away, shunning those who are virtuous.” During the day, the artist would have observed and drawn the Florentine pride of lions (symbols and mascots of the city) stretching in their cages behind the Palazzo della Signoria. On most evenings, he would have heard their ferocious sounds when he visited his father’s house on the via Ghibellina. Situated in the most isolated and barren wilderness imaginable, the penitent Jerome beseeches God, to whom he bows in courtly fashion, to witness his act of contrition. The vantage point of the picture, which

25. Saint Jerome

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Figure 71. Leonardo da Vinci, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1480–82, oil on panel, Vatican, Musei e Gallerie Pontificie. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

implies that the viewer is on the ground before the self-humbled saint, is unprecedented, as is our direct access to his private meditation. At the same time, Leonardo establishes rapport, compositionally, between the saint and the lion through their complementary arabesques, as well as a visual analogy between the saint, seemingly excavated from stone rather than painted, and the background rocks, traditional symbols of endurance and faith. Although this latter connection is inadvertently reinforced by the monochromatic, incomplete state of the picture, it nonetheless points to Leonardo’s tendency to analogize, a way of

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thinking that caused him to associate cloth folds and hair growth with the movement of water, human veins with the root systems of plants, and human faces and temperaments with those of animals. Although out-of-doors, Jerome is oddly trapped within a confined space, bounded by stone formations, a metaphor for his emotional isolation and spiritual predicament. The looming rock arch behind him is crudely suggestive of a tomb, and the round structure to his immediate left vaguely resembles a well or baptismal font. (Somewhat counterintuitively, in the Bible, wells are commonly located in the wilderness, as in Genesis 16:14.) If the painting were finished, these features might less ambiguously allude to the themes of death, ablution, and rebirth, and the small church, just faintly sketched in the right distance, where the rocks open to the light, would more clearly indicate the path to redemption. The building, redolent of architectural designs by Alberti, also serves to remind the viewer of the intellectual Jerome’s divine calling, through Pope Damasus, to put “the offices of the Church in order,” as a church leader and administrator. He became one of the four fathers of the Western Church, settling in the year 386 in Bethlehem, where he translated the Bible into Latin. This is the version known as the “Vulgate,” which became the official Catholic text. In his geologically informed rendering of the rocky backdrop, Leonardo has built on a very old landscape tradition. He was likely measuring himself against, and perhaps in his own mind surpassing, many of Florence’s grand old masters, such as Giotto and Masaccio, who often painted massive stone formations in the backgrounds of their pictures – theatrical sounding-boards for their narratives. He saw those Florentine artists as commanding figures in the history of painting, who had advanced the discipline through their direct recourse to nature. He also considered the periods immediately succeeding them to be marked by decline, as subsequent painters, he believed, foolishly looked only to other art rather than to nature. Leonardo’s historical outline implies that he, a country boy like Giotto, was the leader of the third great wave of art’s resurgence through commitment to nature. In this way, he turned his provincial background into a virtue and advantage. He wrote: After these [artists] came Giotto the Florentine, and he – reared in mountain solitudes, inhabited only by goats and

25. Saint Jerome

such like beasts – turning straight from nature to his art, began to draw on the rocks the movements of the goats which he was tending, and so began to draw the figures of all the animals which were to be found in the country, in such a way that after much study he not only surpassed the masters of his own time but all those of many preceding centuries. After him art again declined, because all were imitating paintings already done; and so for centuries it continued to decline until such time as Tommaso the Florentine, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by perfection of his work how those who took as their standard anything other than nature, the supreme guide of all the masters, were wearying themselves in vain. Similarly I would say about these mathematical subjects [contemporary paintings heavily reliant on mathematical ratios and perspective constructions] that those who study only the authorities and not the works of nature are, in art, the grandsons and not the sons of nature, which is the supreme guide of the good authorities.

Leonardo’s views appear to have been influential, because the three watershed periods of art that he defines exactly coincide with those later identified by Vasari in his Lives of the Artists. There Giotto’s work replaced the maniera greca of Byzantine-influenced, Italian art; the painter Masaccio “swept away” the manner of Giotto (Ghiberti is seen as the pivotal figure in sculpture); and Leonardo is saluted as the creator of the “modern” style. Interestingly, the specific touchstone for Leonardo’s Saint Jerome was not, it seems, a renowned fresco or major altarpiece but, perhaps, a small, illuminated initial by Francesco d’Antonio del Cherico on a page in a mid-fifteenth-century manuscript version of Jerome’s Letters (Epistulae) in the Medici collection. The illuminator presented the saint, within the letter “D,” in much the same pose and before the customary, rocky outcropping. Only the position of the right leg and the hairstyle of the saint have been altered in Leonardo’s painting; he was given the typical, bald head of Verrocchio’s St. Jerome. Leonardo’s paraphrase would have flattered Lorenzo, the current owner of the manuscript (purchased by his father, Piero), in acknowledging the beauty and authority of the treasured work.

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Figure 72. Workshop Assistant, after Leonardo da Vinci, Study of a Studio Model for Saint Jerome, c. 1480–82?, silverpoint, heightened with white, on purple-gray prepared paper, Windsor Castle, Royal Library (12571). The Royal Collection  C 2010 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Leonardo’s probing exploration of Jerome’s muscle and bone structures reveal his growing interest in human anatomy and causes one to suspect that, by this time, he had had the opportunity to examine cadavers – perhaps some dissected by the brothers Pollaiuolo. It is unlikely that he performed the dissection of a corpse, himself, until two decades later, after he returned to Florence from Milan in the early sixteenth century, and conducted an autopsy on a gentleman said to have died a centenarian. Moreover, by imitating another of the Pollaiuloli’s famed workshop practices, Leonardo was able to achieve the very volumetric, sculptural quality of his figure of Jerome. That is, like the brothers, he drew a posed studio model from both front and back to understand better, one might say “stereometrically,” the structure of the body and its orientation in space. We know this because there exists a copy after a lost drawing by Leonardo (fig. 72) that shows his model for Jerome from behind, in basically the same pose as the painted saint except for the turn of the head. In Renaissance studio practice, the model used a pole to help him keep his left arm raised for long periods. Were it not for the right-handed slant of the hatching, the study, by an unidentified Leonardo assistant, could easily

25. Saint Jerome

be mistaken for the master’s – the drawing, otherwise, so scrupulously follows the style of original. Although Jerome’s facial type recalls Verrocchio-school depictions of the saint, and the Pollaiuoli no doubt provided inspiration and models, Leonardo’s penitent recalls most strongly, in spirit, the sculptures of Donatello. Above all, the Jerome finds its ancestry in Donatello’s cadaverous Saint Mary Magdalene (now in the Museum of the Duomo, Florence), a wooden sculpture of sublimely simulated decay. Leonardo similarly portrays spiritual release through denial of the flesh – fasting and abstinence – and, following Donatello, presents the saint as if he had been weathered by elemental forces, the same forces responsible for the ravaged landscape.

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First Thoughts for the Virgin of the Rocks and the Invention of the Mary Magdalene-Courtesan Genre 26.

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lthough the painting was never fully realized, saint Jerome’s densely compact pose attained an important status in Leonardo’s mind. The artist continued to improvise on the gesture in several future works, particularly his two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks, where it evolved (as can be easily traced in his drawings; see figs. 65 and 73) into the inclusive, sheltering pose of Mary and where Leonardo’s mysterious, geological formations reappeared as well (fig. 74). Infrared-light examination of the second Virgin of the Rocks (now in the National Gallery, London) reveals some relevant chalk or charcoal drawing on the panel, beneath the paint layers; these outlines indicate that, before picking up his brush, Leonardo briefly considered a pose for Mary that was very close to Jerome’s. Recycled from the Saint Jerome, the tall, cavernous stone formations in the Virgin of the Rocks would have taken on new meanings in their new context – metaphorical allusions, traditionally associated with Mary, from the biblical Song of Songs (2:14): My dove in the cleft of the rock, in the cavities of walls, reveal your countenance to me.

One suspects that the painting may also reflect, in its crepuscular moment, seemingly haunted by the vestiges of rain clouds, other lines from that passage: for lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come – until the day break and the shadows flee away, turn my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains –. (2:11–12 and 17) 171

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Figure 73. Leonardo da Vinci, Detail of Sheet of Sketches with a Nativity, c. 1481– 82, metalpoint with pen and ink on pale blue prepared paper, Windsor Castle, Royal Library (12560). The Royal C 2010 Collection  Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

In the spirit of these verses, Leonardo’s holy figures miraculously materialize in quiet isolation, as if the first life on earth, with the secret, sudden existence of lilies and deer. This is the time of day and climate that the artist recommended in his Treatise on Painting, saying in one place that “it is better to make [landscapes] when the sun is covered by clouds, for then the trees are lighted up by the general light of the sky and the general shadows of the earth”; and in another “you should make your portrait at the hour of the fall of the evening when it is cloudy or misty, for the light is then perfect.” In the Mona Lisa, this worked to sympathetic effect. In its muted twilight, the brooding

26. First Thoughts for the Virgin of the Rocks

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Figure 74. Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks, 1483–c. 1486, oil on panel, Paris, Louvre. R´eunion des Mus´ees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

Virgin of the Rocks harks back, beyond the Saint Jerome, to Filippo Lippi’s strange and obscure Adoration for the old Cosimo (fig. 2). Not long before leaving Florence for Milan, Leonardo seems to have begun to plan a painting of yet another single saint, a half-length

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portrayal of Mary Magdalene. Given his difficulties with completing time-bound, contractual commissions, one wonders whether he began to consider producing such small pictures on speculation. This was not a common practice in Florence at that time, but he was concerned about an income: as we previously noted, Ser Piero had cut off Leonardo’s “allowance” by 1480. He would not receive an inheritance for some twenty-seven years – only after the death of his uncle Francesco in 1507 and the resolution of an acrimonious lawsuit against his seven half-brothers over the estate. A notary half-brother managed to prevent Leonardo from receiving anything from his father, who died intestate in 1504, but failed to keep the artist from inheriting a farm and money from his uncle. That a possibly cash-strapped Leonardo would consider such a speculative sales strategy is corroborated by remarks he made later in a manuscript: But see now the foolish folk! They have not the sense to keep by them some specimens of their good work so that they may say, “this is at a high price, and that is at a moderate price and that is quite cheap,” and so show that they have work at all prices.

Probably around 1481–82, Leonardo made two rapid, pen-and-ink sketches (on a sheet now preserved in the Courtauld Institute Gallery, London) of the Magdalene holding or opening a jar of unguent – her traditional attribute, given that the Bible relates that she, among Christ’s closest Galilean followers, anointed his feet with oil (fig. 75). Although half-length pictures of her would become common throughout Italy in the sixteenth century, in the Quattrocento such representations were rare, confined almost exclusively to multipaneled triptychs or polyptychs in which she is only one of several holy figures. In fact, Leonardo’s idea, to present her in an independent, half-length, “portrait” format, may be without precedent. Although his studies are summary, one can discern that he wished to show the Magdalene not as a haggard penitent, as Donatello had done, but as the wealthy, promiscuous young woman turned prostitute, described in the Golden Legend. His Mary wears sumptuous layers of clothes, her hair is tousled, locks straying, and she grasps what looks to be an elaborate and expensive jar. Her kind expression, barely indicated, is that of the dulcis amica dei, the “sweet friend of God,” as the amorously inclined Petrarch described her. Undoubtedly, the affluent

26. First Thoughts for the Virgin of the Rocks

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Figure 75. Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Saint Mary Magdalene, c. 1481–82, pen and ink, London, Courtauld Institute Gallery. The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London.

classes that purchased pictures, almost continuously expanding in Florence throughout the Renaissance, would have more easily identified with this cordial, splendidly garbed Magdalene type. The metamorphosis of Mary Magdalene from wretched hag to beautiful companion of the Lord could only have occurred in the time and place that it did. From the high-minded deliberations of the Florentine Neoplatonists over the concepts of love and ideal pulchritude emerged a veritable celebration of female beauty – vanquishing centuries of medieval misogyny, during which a lady’s attractiveness was suspiciously regarded as a lustful trap, an instrument of the devil.

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Ficino’s elevated notions of amore platonico and of corporeal beauty as a reflection of divinity filtered down into popular culture and, by the beginning of the next century, engendered a publishing efflorescence of love poems and sonnets. The nostalgia for chivalry, particularly strong in the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, also helped this cult of feminine beauty to thrive. Consequently, there came to be a change of emphasis in the Magdalene’s story; where once she had been seen primarily as a victim of sin, visibly stigmatized, now her spiritual journey and awakening were regarded as life affirming and her inner beauty made manifest. In 1528, the new, positive view and treatment of women was authoritatively codified in Baldessare Castiglione’s famous manual of court manners and decorum, The Book of the Courtier, an imaginary conversation between Lorenzo de’ Medici’s youngest son, Giuliano, and other magnanimous gentlemen. Castiglione portrays Giuliano as a passionate champion of women, putting words into his mouth that have a curiously modern ring: – tell me, why has it not been established that a dissolute life is quite as disgraceful in men as it is in women? – if you will acknowledge the truth, you surely know that of our own authority we men have arrogated ourselves a license, whereby we insist that in us the same sins are most trivial and sometimes deserve praise which in women cannot be sufficiently punished, unless by a shameful death, or at least perpetual infamy.

It must remain an open question as to whether Leonardo was responding in his seemly conception of the Magdalene only to such larger cultural influences or whether the sin and sexual disgrace of his mother also affected his views. Leonardo appears to have waited until he returned to Florence from Milan in 1500 before developing his “lovely Magdalene” concept further. That year was a Jubilee or Holy Year (Anno Santo), which meant the Church offered special opportunity for penance: the contrite could receive exceptional indulgence, fully cleansing them of sin. In this atmosphere of atonement, there were external, often very public displays of remorse, and famous penitents, such as the Magdalene, were particularly recalled and revered. During this period, Leonardo may well have shared his designs (some much more advanced than the

26. First Thoughts for the Virgin of the Rocks

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Figure 76. Francesco Melzi, Flora, c. 1510, tempera and oil on wood panel, transferred to canvas, St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Courtauld sketches) with the eccentric painter Piero di Cosimo, who quickly fell under Leonardo’s spell. Piero executed a half-length Mary Magdalene around 1500–1, and thereafter his oeuvre became increasingly Leonardesque. He even went so far as to follow Leonardo’s advice of looking at wall stains (in Piero’s case, the dried “spittle” of “sick people”) to stimulate his imagination, envisioning in them marvelous “landscapes” and “battles.” The half-length Magdalene genre remained viable in Florence until at least the middle of the century, thanks to the generation of artists who matured around the time of Leonardo’s death, including the talented young men Domenico Puligo, Jacopo Pontormo, Francesco Bacchiacca, and Michele Tosini. Puligo painted a portrait of an unidentified lady as the saint, now in Ottawa, around 1520; and between 1526 and 1529, Pontormo executed a moving portrait of Francesca Capponi, the young daughter of a principal patron, as a penitent Magdalene. Francesco Ubertini, called Bacchiacca, produced a half-length Magdalene in the early 1540s. Tosini, around 1550,

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more than thirty years after Leonardo’s demise, painted a glamorous Magdalene that corresponds closely in pose to the Courtauld studies. After he returned to Milan in 1506–08, Leonardo must have handed off some (now lost) Magdalene drawings or cartoons to his dedicated followers, Bernardino Luini, Francesco Melzi, and Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, called Giampietrino. As a result, an entirely new genre of half-length, beautiful-lady pictures seems to have grown out of his workshop. In addition to the numerous Magdalenes that Leonardo’s disciples produced, such as Giampietrino’s two paintings of c. 1516 and Luini’s of c. 1520, they created many, stylistically related portraits of courtesans and mistresses, most thinly disguised as the mythological figure of Flora; a resplendent example, by Melzi, can be found in the Hermitage Museum (fig. 76). Most commonly associated with spring, Flora, the ancient Italian goddess of flowers, in Roman antiquity “presided” over an annual festival, the Floralia, which was notorious for its licentiousness. During that celebration, Flora was worshipped as the patroness of prostitutes, and in her honor nude women danced and public orgies erupted, until more prudent attitudes prevailed in Rome in the third century a.d. One legend holds that the rites of the Floralia derived from a posthumous cult dedicated to a wealthy prostitute, who called herself Flora and bequeathed funds to the state for bawdy parties in perpetuity. While the painted Floras of Melzi and other Leonardo followers do not fully exploit this richly sordid history, they do communicate effectively the prurient nature of the deity and of her intended beholder. Apparently, the popular, half-length Mary Magdalene and courtesan conceits spread rapidly from Milan and Lombardy to the neighboring Veneto region, where there was no shortage of mistresses and prostitutes. Many prominent Venetian artists, including Paris Bordone, Vicenzo Catena, Palma Vecchio, Bartolommeo Veneto, and, later, the great Titian turned the themes into a flourishing industry. With time, the alluring courtesan genre became, virtually, a panEuropean phenomenon. Painters at the court of Fontainebleau and in pious Antwerp, notably the anonymous artist dubbed the “Master of the Female Half-Figures,” created several memorable variants on the subject. Ironically, so far as we know, Leonardo never took the time to produce a courtesan or Magdalene painting himself.

27.

Milan

I

n the early 1480s, leonardo watched, no doubt enviously, as some of his successful contemporaries left Florence for major opportunities elsewhere. Botticelli and Ghirlandaio had gone to Rome to work in the Sistine Chapel. Verrocchio was then planning to move to Venice, having won, in 1480, the prestigious competition for the design of the monument for the great condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni. He died there in 1488, some years before the completion and installation of his magnificent equestrian statue. Having sought a papal project for many years, the Pollaiuoli were finally asked in 1484 to create a tomb for Pope Sixtus IV; they immediately relocated to Rome, where they died in the 1490s. Apparently, Leonardo, too, wished to leave. By then, he had learned some bitter truths about Florence and human nature that Vasari, decades later, would explain: all persons of spirit will not stay content with being equal, much less inferior, to those whom they see to be men like themselves, although they may recognize them as masters – nay, it forces them very often to desire their own advancement so eagerly, that, if they are not kindly or wise by nature, they turn out evil-speakers, ungrateful, and unthankful for benefits. It is true, indeed, that when a man has learnt there [in Florence] as much as suffices him, and desires to become rich, take his departure from that place and find a sale abroad for the excellence of his works and for the repute conferred on him by that city, as the doctors do with the fame derived from their studies. For Florence treats her craftsmen as time treats its own works, 179

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which, when perfected, it destroys and consumes little by little.

Understanding this, Leonardo preferred to couch his restless optimism as well as his frustrations – with his circumstances and with himself – in larger philosophical terms and context: With a constant joyous longing he awaits the new spring, always the new state, always the new months, the new years; for always it seems to him that the things longed for come too late, and he fails to realize that he is wishing away his own life. This same longing is the quintessence, the spirit – which finding itself imprisoned in the soul of the human body, longs always to return to its emitter.

At Lorenzo de’ Medici’s direction, but possibly after some courteous yet insistent lobbying by the artist, Leonardo traveled to Milan around 1482. His interest in that city may have been stoked by casual and enthusiastic remarks made by Verrocchio. The older master had been responsible for decorating the Palazzo Medici for the state visit of the Milanese duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza in 1471; for many years thereafter, he no doubt coveted the commission for the long-planned equestrian statue of the duke’s father, the great soldier Francesco. Leonardo would have recalled the Sforzas’ luxurious spending habits, notably the two thousand horsemen, five hundred pairs of hounds, and flock of hunting falcons in Galeazzo Maria’s traveling entourage. Officially an artistic emissary, a diplomatic gift from Lorenzo to Ludovico Il Moro Sforza (the younger brother of Galeazzo Maria, assassinated in 1476), Leonardo arrived in the Northern Italian city accompanied by a gifted, sixteen-year-old musician named Atalante Migliorotti. The Medici, and Lorenzo in particular, had been long allied with the Sforzas and heavily relied on them for military support. Just hours after the attempt on his life, Lorenzo had sent a letter to Ludovico pleading for protective troops. Having inherited at least some of old Cosimo’s political instincts, Lorenzo probably suspected that, before long, Ludovico would replace his young nephew as Duke of Milan and, in the meantime, would rule as the power behind the throne. As a present for Il Moro, the young Atalante brought with him an unusual lute in the form of a horse’s skull. Leonardo carried a letter of introduction, which he had crafted himself, and a “portfolio”

27. Milan

that included a few paintings, many drawings, and at least one piece of sculpture. The self-promoting, testimonial letter, apparently written by someone else at Leonardo’s dictation, indicates that he knew Sforza’s priorities were military: Most illustrious Lord, having sufficiently seen and considered the works of all those who are reputed to be masters and contrivers of war machines, and that the invention and operation of the aforesaid instruments are none other than those in common use, I will strive, without disparaging anyone else, to show my intentions to your Excellency, showing my secrets to you, and then offering all of them for your approbation, to work effectively at opportune times on all those things which are briefly noted in part below.

His grand promises were followed by a list of weapons and engineering projects with which Leonardo claimed to have either experience or brilliant ideas: portable bridges and “methods of destroying and burning those of the enemy”; “methods of ruining every castle or fortress, even if it is founded on rock”; bombarding machines that hurl myriad small stones “like a tempest”; new kinds of chariots; and various and novel types of guns and catapults. One must suppose that Leonardo would not have overstated his abilities too greatly and risked misleading the ruthless and bellicose Sforza. Strangely, however, he does not seem to have brought drawings to back up his boasts. The inventory he compiled soon after reaching Milan mentions only designs for “furnaces,” “gadgets for ships,” and “gadgets for water,” which may or may not have had defensive applications. Indeed, his informal, personal inventory, which I now quote at length, records the useful, “reference” drawings of someone who foremost wished to continue his artistic practice. The document reads: Many flowers copied from nature; a head full face, with curly hair; certain St. Jeromes; measurements of a figure; designs of furnaces; a head [portrait] of the Duke [an idealized likeness of Ludovico Sforza’s father, Francesco?]; many designs of knots; 4 drawings for the picture of the Holy Angel; a little narrative of Girolamo da Fegline; a head of Christ done in pen; 8 St Sebastians; many compositions of

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angels; a chalcedony [a carved semiprecious stone]; a head in profile with beautiful hair; certain forms in perspective; certain gadgets for ships; certain gadgets for water; a head portrayed from Atalante, who raises his face [probably a drawing made while Leonardo and the young musician rested on their journey from Florence to Milan]; the head of Girolamo da Fegline; the head of Gian Francesco Boso; many necks of old women; many heads of old men; many complete nudes; many arms, legs, feet, and postures; a Madonna, finished [Benois Madonna?]; another, almost finished, which is in profile [Madonna Litta?]; the head of Our Lady who ascends to heaven; a head of an old man with an enormous chin; a head of a gipsy; a head wearing a hat; a narrative of the passion made in relief; a head of a young girl with plaited tresses; a head with a head-dress.

Although in his letter to Sforza Leonardo asserted that he had expertise in marble and bronze sculpture, he seems to have neglected to transport examples of those as well, except, perhaps, for the “narrative of the passion made in relief,” which, for all we know, might have been executed in terracotta or plaster. He did, however, carry with him a “head of the duke,” presumably an idea he had for an idealized portrait of Ludovico’s late father, Francesco. In light of the excitement in the early 1480s concerning the competition for the equestrian statue of Colleoni in Venice, Leonardo had accurately anticipated that Il Moro would be keen to see realized, finally, the equestrian monument to his father, a grandiose project that had been under discussion at the Milanese court for over a decade. Leonardo was probably informed of his possible assignment to the project not long after he landed in Milan and then officially offered the job by 1483. The ambitious undertaking, which ended tragically, would occupy much of his adult life. Indeed, because of “The Horse,” as the Sforza monument was called, and countless engineering and festival projects, Leonardo was never able to step up his painterly production. When he departed from Florence at about the age of thirty, he left a rather meager legacy of perhaps five completed paintings (four of them small), two unfinished pictures, and a piece of sculpture or two – not an impressive output for fifteen years of artistic practice. On the other hand, he could claim

27. Milan

credit for several major artistic innovations, above all, the creation of the “High-Renaissance” or “Modern” style. In the Adoration of the Magi, particularly, he had devised a new, comprehensive pictorial language in which the entire apparatus of forms conveyed content – in which insightfully rendered human expressions and gestures were made to conform to an ideal geometry, and where the space itself, in its abstractness or mathematical perspective, communicated meaning. Through another invention, sfumato, he had managed to integrate his fresh and precise “scientific” observations of anatomy and landscape (as well as symbols and literary tropes) into a smokily cohesive composition. His ingenious achievement of this “Modern” or “Classical” style, as it is sometimes called, would not be fully understood for some twenty years and, only after Leonardo’s return to Florence in the next century, assimilated by the likes of the progressive painters Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Piero di Cosimo, and Fra Bartolommeo. During the last thirty-seven years of his life, until his death in 1519, Leonardo turned out artworks at about the same rate as he did during his first Florentine period. He created, with some shop assistance, just a dozen or so paintings, and two of those – the Last Supper and Battle of Anghiari – began deteriorating almost immediately because of the “time-saving” experimental media and techniques he had employed. Considering himself more of an inventor-designer than a craftsman, Leonardo wished the artistic thought process to be as thorough and profound as possible, but he tried to streamline the physical act of creation, and sometimes his works suffered because of it. Still, those paintings and sculptures that survive – and his drawings for those that do not – reveal how his art continued relentlessly to evolve and that, through subtle processes of idealization and his refinement of sfumato, he brought to his works unprecedented – and largely ineffable – qualities of expression. In fact, it can be said that in some cases the complexity and robustness of his ideas (such as those for “The Horse”) seem to have exceeded known technical means of realization.

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Leonardo and the Sforza Court 28.

F

or an artist whose designs, more often than not, failed to seep down from the conceptual to the material realm, Leonardo must have found Ludovico’s steady court stipend reassuring. Not wishing to disappoint his sponsor, Lorenzo, or Sforza (as he had Ser Piero), Leonardo was willing to play almost any role asked of him at the Milanese court. No design or engineering project was too minor, be it a belt buckle, a drainage ditch, or a water-driven gadget for the “bath of the Duchess.” Certainly, under the penetrating glare of Il Moro, Leonardo had to keep himself constantly busy and could not revert to some of his bad habits of youth. Watching over Leonardo, too, were – still affixed to a bell tower – the heads of those responsible for the murder, six years earlier, of Ludovico’s brother, Galeazzo Maria. The exceptional, creative cruelty of Il Moro and Galeazzo Maria, who once had a man nailed alive to his own coffin, cast an apprehensive pall over all of Milanese life. Leonardo had accepted as his new patron a man whose enormous power, energy, and artifice equaled his malevolence. Declared by the political expert Nicol`o Macchiavelli to be responsible for the “ruin of Italy,” the treacherous Ludovico Sforza summoned Charles VIII of France to Italy to aid him militarily. Bankrolled in part by Il Moro, the French king and an army of forty thousand men subsequently marched down the length of the Italian peninsula in 1494, leaving untold destruction and atrocities in their wake, to claim French sovereignty over the Kingdom of Naples. Meanwhile, Sforza quickly dispatched with the Milanese secretary of state and anyone else who, he thought, might undermine his authority. Not coincidently, by October of that year, Ludovico’s nephew, Duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza had taken ill. Most suspected he had been poisoned. Upon Gian Galeazzo’s 185

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death, Il Moro had his widow and children arrested and imprisoned, and proclaimed himself Duke of Milan. Leonardo would somehow learn to deal with the complicated Sforza, who was completely immoral and cynical but who sought to live within a highly civilized milieu. The self-consciously lesser, second son of the great Francesco, he was, nevertheless, gracefully sociopathic, known for his painstakingly courteous and velvety manner. The artist must have intuited that the callous and well-armed duke was vulnerable to flattery, especially if it was the clever and urbane sort in which Leonardo excelled. Nevertheless, although life was precarious for all in the Renaissance, the young man from Vinci must have felt that he continuously walked very close to a precipice. This was a challenge that he probably enjoyed mastering. He conducted his sexual life with utmost discretion, because the duke ostensibly banned homosexual behavior from his court. He was also careful never to contradict or offend the dark Sforza. A fragment of a letter from the artist to his benefactor gives us some indication of their relationship, as its tone and content, though frustratingly incomplete (the page is torn vertically at right), goes beyond the usual deferential groveling: My Lord, knowing the mind of your Excellency to be occupied – to remind your Lordship of my small matters, and I should have maintained silence – that my silence should make your Lordship become angry – my life to your service I hold myself ever ready to obey –

One is tempted to read as autobiographical an inscription that Leonardo appended to a drawing while in the duke’s employ: “Oh slave to human misery, of how many things are you willing to become a servant for money!” Much later, perhaps during his second period in Milan (1506–13), he would write on the cover of one of his notebooks the pessimistic Latin verses, Decipimur votis et tempore fallimur: et mors Deridet curas; anxia vita nihil – “we are deluded by promises and deceived by time, and Death derides our cares; life is anxiety, nothing else.” Leonardo’s Latin had not suddenly improved; he lifted the lines from the Amores of 1502 by the German poet laureate and humanist scholar Konrad Celtis.

28. Leonardo and the Sforza Court

Yet so long as he was able to stay on good terms with Il Moro, Leonardo knew that he could enjoy a rich existence in Milan. Word of his ignoble birth and his reputation had not preceded him there, and, within the bounds of a society more rigidly stratified than that of Florence, he was free to reinvent himself. Leonardo could try his hand at most every creative occupation – from architect, to engineer, to costume and pageant designer, to bard, to painter and sculptor – in the city and in Sforza’s court, which was then far more advanced in its protocols and ceremonies, more sophisticated in its entertainments, and more savvy in its propaganda than its Medici counterpart. Milan would lead not only to unimaginable triumphs for Leonardo but also, ultimately, to a measure of equity or justice. Although Il Moro would die alone and in misery, a prisoner in the French castle of Loches, Leonardo would expire not, as the legend holds, in the arms of Francis I but, almost as gloriously, in Amboise in the Palace of Cloux, as the first painter, engineer, and architect to the French king. His long journey there represented one of the greatest professional and social ascents of the Renaissance and acknowledged perhaps the highest flights of imagination the world has ever seen.

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Bibliography with Endnotes

LEONARDO MANUSCRIPTS – ABBREVIATIONS AND LOCATIONS

MS A Institute de France, Paris Ash I and II MS Ashburnham Institute de France, Paris MS B Institute de France, Paris B.L. (formerly known as Arundel MS) British Library, London MS C Institute de France, Paris Codice Atlantico Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan MSs D thru F Institute de France, Paris Forster I–III Victoria and Albert Museum, London MSs G thru M Institute de France, Paris Madrid I and II Biblioteca Nacional MS, Madrid Triv. (Trivulzio MS) Biblioteca Trivulziana, Castello Sforzesco, Milan Turin (Flight of Birds MS) Biblioteca Reale, Turin Urb. (Codex Urbanas and Libro A) W. Royal Library, Windsor Castle SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carmen Bambach et al., Leonardo da Vinci. Master Draftsman, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New Haven, and London, 1993 David Alan Brown, Leonardo da Vinci. Origins of a Genius, New Haven and London, 1998 Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci. An Account of His Development as an Artist, Cambridge, 1939; rev. ed., Harmondsworth, 1967 Kenneth Clark, The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, 3 vols., London, 1938, rev. ed., 1968 Cecil Gould, Leonardo. The Artist and the Non-Artist, Boston, 1975

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Bibliography with Endnotes

Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci. The Marvelous Works of Nature and Man, London, Melbourne, and Toronto, 1981; rev. ed. Oxford, 2006 Martin Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, New Haven and London, 1989 Edward MacCurdy, ed., The Notebooks of Leonardo, London, 1906, rpt., Old Saybrook, CT, 2003 Augusto Marinoni, Leonardo da Vinci. Il Codice Atlantico della Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano, 3 vols., Florence, 2000 C. O’Malley and J. Saunders, Leonardo da Vinci and the Human Body, New York, 1952 Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo. A Study in Style and Chronology, London, 1973 J. P. Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, 2 vols., London and New York, 1970; with Commentary by Carlo Pedretti, Oxford, 1977 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, & Architects, tr. Gaston du C. de Vere, ed., Kenneth Clark, 3 vols., New York, 1979. Giorgio Vasari, Le opere, 9 vols., ed. Gaetano Milanesi, Florence, 1998

NOTES BY CHAPTER

i. Leonardo was born on Saturday, 15 April, and Leo’s feast day fell on 11 April – the only festa for a male saint that week. Gene Brucker offers examples of how polite society dealt with illegitimate births in Renaissance Italy – see The Society of Renaissance Florence. A Documentary Study, New York, 1971, pp. 40–42 and, especially, pp. 218–22. For the vernacular curriculum in fifteenth-century Florence, see Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy. Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600, Baltimore and London, 1989, pp. 275–329. Source of Leonardo quotations: “Benedetto de l’abbaco” Codice Atlantico 320 verso; “I am fully aware . . . ” and “if indeed I have no power . . . ” Codice Atlantico, 327 verso. It has been suggested that the reference to “Benedetto de l’abbaco” refers to a textbook; this seems unlikely, because the name appears on a list of contemporary persons, including the physician Paolo Toscanelli, the notary Benedetto Cieperello, and the artist Domenico di Michelino. There is no evidence that Leonardo was ever maligned for his use of the “sinister” hand, but other left-handed individuals were sometimes singled out for persecution in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, particularly by the Inquisition, because that orientation was associated with the practice of necromancy. From the Renaissance, through the period of the witchhunts of English King James I, beginning in 1604, and until the famous witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, left-handedness was often regarded a sign of demonic possession or, at least, allegiance with the devil. In Western Europe, prejudices in favor of the right-handed and against the left-handed find their origins primarily in the Bible – see, for example, Deuteronomy 33:2, Psalms 45:10, and Matthew 25:31–34.

Bibliography with Endnotes

ii. The Florentine scholar Giannozzo Manetti finished his treatise On the Dignity and Excellence of Man in 1452 or 1453. The most influential and eloquent Renaissance treatise on the nobility of the individual was Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, written in 1486. For Cosimo il Vecchio’s personality and sense of humor, see Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance. The Patron’s Oeuvre, New Haven and London, 2000, pp. 15–68; and Alison Brown, “Cosimo de’ Medici’s Wit and Wisdom” in Cosimo “il Vecchio” de’ Medici, 1389–1464. Essays in Commemoration of the 600th Anniversary of Cosimo de’ Medici’s Birth, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis, Oxford, 1992, pp. 95–113. Cosimo’s library is discussed by A. C. de la Mare in “Cosimo and His Books,” in Cosimo “il Vecchio” de’ Medici, pp. 115–56. Cosimo’s lament over his son’s death recalls Euripides’ Phrixus (fifth century b.c.): “Who knows but life be that which men call death. And death what men call life.” Niccol`o Machiavelli relates that the first of the expanded Adoration of the Kings festivals, which “kept the whole city busy for many months,” was an attempt on the part of its citizens to “cheer themselves up” after Cosimo’s death in 1464 – see Niccol`o Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, tr. Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Princeton, 1988, pp. 289–90. iii. For Cosimo’s artistic patronage, see Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici. Lippi’s pictures are treated in Megan Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi. The Carmelite Painter, New Haven and London, 1999, pp. 122–28 and 174–82; and Jeffrey Ruda, Fra Filippo Lippi, London, 1993, pp. 224–33, no. 51, pp. 447–48, no. 58, pp. 465–66. An account of Piero de’ Medici’s life as well as his literary and artistic pursuits is given in Francis AmesLewis, The Library and Manuscripts of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici, New York and London, 1984. Lorenzo de’ Medici has been the subject of countless studies, see among them: F. W. Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, Baltimore, 2004; Michael Mallett and Nicholas Mann, eds., Lorenzo the Magnificent. Culture and Politics, London, 1996; and Cristina Acidini Luchinat, ed., Renaissance Florence: The Age of Lorenzo de’ Medici, 1449–1492, Milan, 1993. For a thorough, recent study of Lorenzo’s holdings of antique art, see Laurie Fusco and Gino Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Collector and Antiquarian, Cambridge, 2006. For Verrocchio’s sculpture, see Andrew Butterfield, The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, New Haven and London, 1997. Uccello’s Battle of San Romano and his works for the Medici are discussed and reproduced in Franco and Stefano Borsi, Paolo Uccello, tr. Elfreda Powell, New York, 1994, pp. 207–31. no. 14, pp. 307–12, no. 27, pp. 330–31. Leonardo’s lost design of a Lion Fighting a Dragon for the French king may be reflected in a drawing, attributed to his student, Francesco Melzi, in the St¨adel Museum, Frankfurt, reproduced in C[arlo] P[edretti], “Leonardo at the St¨adel Museum” in Achademia Leonardi Vinci (ALV). Journal of Leonardo

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Studies & Bibliography of Vinciana, vol. II, 1989, fig. 3. Leonardo may have regarded the lion as a personal mascot or signature of sorts, because of the connection of its Latin name, leo, to his own. For the Platonic Academy, see Arnaldo della Torre, Storia dell’Accademia Platonica di Firenze, Florence, 1902; and Arthur Field, The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence, Princeton, 1988. Leonardo’s views about the metaphysics of the Platonists and Neoplatonists are expressed in a brief preamble he wrote to some of his notes on optics: “What trust can we place in the ancients who tried to define what the Soul and Life are – which are beyond proof – whereas those things that can be known and proved by experience remained for many centuries unknown or falsely understood [?]” (Codice Atlantico 327 verso). For legitimation procedures and an overview of the problems of the illegitimate in Renaissance Florence, see Thomas Kuehn, Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence, Ann Arbor, 2002, esp. pp. 167–205. Source of Leonardo quotation: “bestow much more attention . . . ” British Museum 212 verso. iv. For Vasari’s report on the activities of the young Leonardo, see Vasari– de Vere, vol. II, p. 781. The Codice Atlantico is fully reproduced, with scholarly commentary, in Leonardo da Vinci. Il Codice Atlantico della Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano, 3 vols., ed. Augusto Marinoni, Florence, 2000. The story of the luckless giraffe is recounted in Marina Belozerskaya, The Medici Giraffe, and Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power, New York, 2006. Source of Leonardo quotation: “the goldfinch will carry spurge . . . ” MS H 63 (15) verso. For Lorenzo’s poetry, see Poesie del Magnifico Lorenzo de’ Medici, Bergamo, 1763, especially pp. 2–3 (sonnets II and IV) and pp. 121–66 (Canto di Pan) for examples of pastoral verses, and Guglielmo Gorni, “Su Lorenzo poeta: Parodia, diletti e noie della caccia,” in Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo mondo. Convegno internazionale di studi, ed. Gian Carlo Garfagnini, Florence, 1994, pp. 205–23; for Lorenzo’s musical talents, see Frank A. D’Accone, “Lorenzo the Magnificent and Music” in Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo mondo, pp. 259–90. v. For a discussion of the Tobias and the Angel, see David Alan Brown, Leonardo da Vinci. Origins of a Genius, New Haven and London, 1998, pp. 47–55. A comprehensive study of the lives and careers of the Pollaiuoli is provided in Alison Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers. The Arts of Florence and Rome, New Haven and London, 2005. For the Pollaiuolo Annunciation, in the Gem¨aldegalerie, Berlin, see Wright, Pollaiuolo Brothers, pp. 300–6 and p. 525, no. 58, fig. 245. vi. For Leonardo’s early machine designs, see Paolo Galluzzi, “The Career of a Technologist,” in Leonardo da Vinci. Engineer and Architect, ed. Paolo Galluzzi, exh. cat., Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, 1987, pp. 41–63. For Francesco di Giorgio Martini, see Giustina Scaglia, Francesco di Giorgio: Checklist and History of Manuscripts and Drawings in

Bibliography with Endnotes

Autographs and Copies from ca. 1470 to 1687 and Renewed Copies (1764– 1839), Bethlehem, PA, and London, c. 1992; Massimo Mussini, Il trattato di Francesco di Giorgio Martini e Leonardo. Il Codice Estense restituto, Parma, 1991; and Ralph Toledano, Francesco di Giorgio Martini: pittore e scultore, Milan, c. 1987. Indicative of Leonardo’s “organic” theory of architecture is a comparison he makes on a sheet in the British Library (B.L. 138 recto) between stress on a vault or dome and the effects of pressure on the skin of an orange or pomegranate. Sources of Leonardo quotations: “it is necessary to have a coat . . . ” MS B 81 verso; “why something seen in a mirror . . . ” “what sort of a mirror . . . ” Codice Atlantico 1004 recto; “why a dead woman floats face downward . . . ” MS H 31 verso; “the nephew of Gian Angelo . . . ” Codice Atlantico 611 recto; “the brother of Sant’ Agosta . . . ” Codice Atlantico 966 verso; “among the great things . . . ” Codice Atlantico 1109 verso; “the body of the earth . . . ” MS A 55 verso, Codice Atlantico 543 recto, and MS F 62 verso. Leonardo would have been familiar with the use of breathing tubes because Verrocchio almost certainly employed them in making life masks and casts of the whole (and upper part of the) body from live models. The cross-section illustration of sexual intercourse is on Windsor Castle sheet no. W. 19097 recto. On one manuscript (Forster III 75 recto), Leonardo wrote “Hippocrates says the origin of semen is derived from the brain.” vii. Metalpoint, a medium popular in the fifteenth century, employed a sharp instrument, or stylus (see note xiv), fabricated from silver, lead, or copper. Used on specially prepared paper, the instrument created a fine, delicate line (or ribbon) of metal. In the sixteenth century, the metalpoint technique was almost completely abandoned in favor of red and black chalk. For Verrocchio’s lost relief, see Butterfield, Sculptures of Verrocchio, pp. 156–57; and Brown, Leonardo, pp. 68–73. Corvinus’ Palace of Visegr´ad was intact in 1535 but captured soon thereafter, and his palace in Buda was seized by the Turks in 1541. The drawing of Vald´ez (Windsor 12484), so similar stylistically to those by Leonardo, may copy one of his lost studies. For Lorenzo de Medici’s lost antique cameo of Athena, see Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, pp. 102– 3. Source for Leonardo quotation: “when you – draw a face from memory . . . ” Ash. II, 26 verso. viii. The two Medici jousts are discussed in Paola Ventrone, Le tems revient ’l tempo si rinuova. Feste e spettacoli nella Firenze di Lorenzo il Magnifico, exh. cat., Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence, 1992, esp., pp. 167–205. For Verrocchio’s Sleeping Youth, see Butterfield, Sculptures of Verrocchio, pp. 86 and 215, where it is illustrated as fig. 108. For Botticelli’s standard, see Ronald Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli. Life and Work, London, 1978, vol. I, pp. 42–44, vol. II, pp. 58–60, D15, pp. 166–67. Plato’s

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explanation of the two Aphrodites can be found in Plato, The Symposium, tr. Walter Hamilton, Middlesex and New York, 1951, pp. 45–47; and Ficino’s exegesis in his Convivium Platonis Commentarium in Marsilio Ficino, Opera, Basel, 1576, 11, 7. Also, see Erwin Panofsky (Studies in Iconography. Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, Oxford, 1972, pp. 141–61) for an overview of the twin-Venus theme in art. Luca Pulci’s Il driadeo d’amore was finally published in 1489, when it was attributed, in error, to his brother, Luigi. For the quoted verse concerning Amor and the sleeping nymph, see Luca Pulci, Il driadeo d’amore, ed. Paolo E. Giudici, Lanciano, 1916, p. 31. ix. See Brucker (Society of Renaissance Florence, pp. 204–6) for the punishment of sodomy in the Renaissance. For Freud’s superannuated interpretation of Leonardo’s “dream,” see Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, tr. Alan Tyson, New York, 1964; and for recent studies of Freud’s analysis of the artist, see Wayne V. Andersen, Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Vulture’s Tail. A Refreshing Look at Leonardo’s Sexuality, New York, 2001; and Bradley I. Collins, Leonardo, Psychoanalysis, and Art History, Evanston, IL, 1997. Presumably based on information passed to him from Leonardo’s good friend and shop assistant Francesco Melzi, the Milanese writer and painter Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo authored, around 1560, an imaginary dialogue between Leonardo and the ancient sculptor Phidias, which included the following lines: Leonardo: “[Salai was] the man whom in life I loved more than all the others, who were several.” Phidias: “[did you] play the game in the behind that the Florentines love so much?” Leonardo: “And how many times! Keep in mind that he was a most beautiful young man, especially at about fifteen.” For Lomazzo’s dialogue, see Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti, ed. Roberto Paulo Ciardi (Florence, 1973–74), vol. I, lxxxi, p. 104, and Collins, Leonardo, pp. 80–81. Sources of Leonardo quotations: “the act of procreation . . . ” W. 19009 recto; “the painter sits in front of his work . . . ” Urb. 20 recto; “a painter was asked why . . . ” MS M 58 verso; “a man wishing to prove on authority . . . ” MS M 58 verso; “O cities of the sea . . . ” Codice Atlantico 393 recto; “the high walls . . . ” Codice Atlantico 1033 recto; “a woman crossing . . . ” W. 12351 recto; “the kite would seem to be . . . ” Codice Atlantico 186 verso; “keeps them without food . . . ” MS H 5 verso. As Collins (Leonardo and Psychoanalysis, pp. 76–77, and esp. p. 204, notes 12 and 13) points out, the evidence concerning the nature of Leonardo’s relation with his father is mixed. In one letter, the artist addresses Ser Piero with great concern and affection. However, Leonardo’s bizarre response to

Bibliography with Endnotes

his brother Domenico, after learning of the birth of the latter’s son, casts dispersions on the filial–paternal bond: Now in so far as I had judged you to be possessed of prudence I am now entirely convinced that I am as far removed from having an accurate judgment as you are from prudence; seeing that you have been congratulating yourself in having created a watchful enemy, who will strive with all his energies after liberty, which can only come into being at your death. x. Reproductions of Benedetto da Maiano’s sculpture of the Baptist can be found in Glenn Andres, John M. Hunisak, and A. Richard Turner, The Art of Florence, New York, 1988, vol. II, pls. 435 and 436; and Lippi’s Adoration for Lucrezia is illustrated in Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi, as fig. 171 on p. 175. In his Treatise on Painting (Urb 46 recto), Leonardo is adamant that the silhouettes of figures should be blurred, and that painters should not draw outlines around figures, as had been the Florentine practice. Source of Leonardo quotation: “poor is the pupil . . . ” Forster III, 66 verso. xi. For Vasari’s remarks about Perugino’s repetition of figures and his venality, see Vasari–de Vere, vol. I, pp. 741–42. For documentation and speculation on Ser Piero’s involvement with the Annunciation commission, as well as many others, see Alessandro Cecchi, “New Light on Leonardo’s Florentine Patrons” in Leonardo da Vinci. Master Draftsman, ed. Carmen C. Bambach, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2003, pp. 120–39. For Credi’s Madonna di Piazza predella and the rest of his oeuvre, see Gigetta Dalli Regoli, Lorenzo di Credi, Cremona, 1966. For the Madonna that Credi made for Spain, see Vasari–deVere, II, p. 983. Source of Leonardo quotation: “the greatest fault of painters . . . ” Urb. 44 recto. xii. For Leonardo’s concern with the theme of vision in his early Madonnas, see Larry J. Feinberg, “Sight Unseen: Vision and Perception in Leonardo’s Madonnas,” Apollo, vol. CLX, July 2004, pp. 28–34. Ficino’s views and other Renaissance beliefs about the supposed, curative powers of precious and semiprecious stones can be found in Marsilio Ficino, The Book of Life, ed. and tr. Charles Boer, Woodstock, CT, 1996, pp. 19, 25, 28, 62–63, 120, 123, and 153; George Frederick Kunz, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones, New York, 1913; and Larry J. Feinberg, “The Studiolo of Francesco I Reconsidered” in The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence, exh. cat., Palazzo Strozzi, Art Institute of Chicago, and Detroit Institute of Arts, New Haven and London, 2002, pp. 46–65. xiii. For Leonardo, Alberti, and the optics and neurology of sight, see Feinberg, “Sight Unseen,” pp. 28–32.

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xiv. For more on the Verrocchio Boy with Dolphin, including views from various angles, see Butterfield, Sculptures of Verrocchio, pp. 127–135, figs. 164–65, and 175a–d. Created at about the same time as the Child and Cat studies, a drawing by Leonardo of a Young Woman Bathing an Infant (Oporto, Academia de Belas Artes) also may record the artist’s immediate reaction to a contemporary work, Antonio Pollaiuolo’s relief of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist (c. 1478–80) for the altar of the Florentine Baptistery. Unusually, Leonardo portrays the nursemaid with long, flowing hair, immodestly uncovered, and directing her attention to the baby’s feet. In her hairstyle and foot-washing activity, the girl evokes Mary Magdalene and causes one to wonder if Leonardo has invented a new pictorial episode in her (and Christ’s) early life. For the Oporto drawing, see Leonardo da Vinci. Master Draftsman, no. 21, pp. 300–3, ill. In the Renaissance, the sharp tool known as a stylus was used in the metalpoint technique (see note vii) or lightly to incise lines into paper. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, artists often drew their designs in stylus before employing chalk or pen. This procedure permitted them to make many alterations to their drawing before applying indelible media. xv. The most recent account of the Pazzi plot and its intrigues is Lauro Martines’ April Blood. Florence and the Plot against the Medici, Oxford and New York, 2003. See also Macchiavelli, Florentine Histories, pp. 319–30; and Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici. Its Rise and Fall, New York, 1974, pp. 128–43. As pointed out in note ix, above, Lomazzo’s primary source for information on Leonardo was the latter’s follower and friend, Francesco Melzi. For the passage on Leonardo’s drawings of the condemned, which appears in Lomazzo’s treatise on the arts, see Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura, et architettura, Milan, 1585, p. 107. Sources of Leonardo quotations: “I recently saw an Annunciation . . . ” Urb. 32 verso; “Botticelli said that such study . . . ” Ash. II, 22 recto; “Tell me if anything . . . ” B.L. 251 verso. For Leonardo’s comments to an absent Botticelli, see Codice Atlantico 859 recto. xvi. For additional information, see Brown’s (Leonardo, pp. 101–21) interesting discussion of the Ginevra de’ Benci. Leonardo would also devote considerable thought and ink to the paragone between painting and sculpture; for Leonardo and the paragone, see Claire J. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone: A Critical Interpretation with a New Edition of the Text in the Codex Urbinas, New York, 1992. The x-radiograph of the Metropolitan Museum’s Portrait of a Lady is reproduced in John Walker, “Ginevra de’ Benci by Leonardo da Vinci” in National Gallery of Art. Report and Studies in the History of Art 1967, Washington, D.C., 1967,

Bibliography with Endnotes

fig. 15. The sumptuary laws of 1472 stipulated that new brides could wear no more than two brooches, one for the head and one for the shoulder; and, after three years, the woman could wear only one brooch. Alternatively, it was long ago proposed that the New York portrait represents Credi’s recently widowed sister-in-law, who was named Ginevra di Giovanni di Niccol`o (see Federico Zeri, Italian Paintings. A Catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Florentine School, New York, 1971, p. 154). Although this is possible, we do not know whether that particular Ginevra, married to Credi’s brother Carlo, was so young when she was widowed. Furthermore, it is hard to explain why the artist would first paint a face very similar to that of Ginevra de’ Benci and subsequently revise it to resemble his sitter. One should also take into account that Ginevra was a fairly common name in the Renaissance. A useful history of the Lady-andUnicorn theme, with illustrations of paintings and prints, is provided by Margaret B. Freemen, The Unicorn Tapestries, New York, 1976, pp. 33–65. Sources of Leonardo quotations: “And if you, poet . . . ” Ash. II, 19 recto; “hearing is less noble than sight–” Ash. II, 19 verso; “Take the case of the poet . . . ” Ash. II. 19 recto. xvii. For various portraits of Amerigo Vespucci, see Luciano Formisano et al., Amerigo Vespucci. La vita e i viaggi, Prato, 1991, pp. 204–19. For Leonardo’s rebuses, see Augusto Marinoni, I rebus di Leonardo da Vinci. Raccolti e interpreti, Florence, 1954; Kenneth Clark and Carlo Pedretti, The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London and New York, 1969, nos. 12693–99, pp. 175–77; and Larry J. Feinberg, “Visual Puns and Variable Perception: Leonardo’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder,” Apollo, vol. CLX, August 2003, pp. 38–41. A singer, Leonardo seems to have owned a copy of Guido da Arezzo’s Micrologus de disciplina artis musicae (c. 1025), which introduced the sol-fa musical system. Source of Leonardo quotation: “O moro, io moro – ” Madrid II, 141 recto. xviii. For various views of the Bust of the Young Christ and commentary, see Martin Kemp, “Christo fanciullo” in ALV, vol. IV, 1991, pp. 171–76, figs. 2–8, and 11. Assigning a date to the Young Christ is quite difficult in light of the lack of comparative material and our utter ignorance of Leonardo’s development as a sculptor. However, given the piece’s residual connections to Verrocchio and, in certain respects, to a few of Leonardo’s drawings, such as the Saint John the Baptist, one may tentatively place it in the second half of the 1470s. In profile, the bust has the sharp features associated more with Leonardo’s early profile studies of c. 1478–80 and preliminary sketches for his Adoration of the Magi (1481) than with his later drawings and paintings of heads. We must also consider the fact that polychrome, terracotta busts, still popular in Florence in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, had largely gone

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out of fashion by the time Leonardo returned home from Milan in 1500. By then, when busts were fabricated from terracotta (rarely), they were most often painted to look like bronze. Sources of Leonardo quotations: “I obey thee, O Lord . . . ” Forster III. 29 recto; “Fortune is powerless . . . ” W. 12349 verso; “Falsehood is so utterly vile . . . ” Turin 12 recto; “The Lord is the Light . . . ” Codice Atlantico 543 recto; “The Creator does not make anything . . . ” Codice Atlantico 19020 recto; “Rejoice that the Creator . . . ” Codice Atlantico 19022 verso; “How did the waters . . . ” Codice Atlantico 419 recto. xix. For a recent attribution of the Madonna Litta to Leonardo, see Tatiana Kustodieva, Leonardo: La Madonna Litta dall’Ermitage di San Pietroburgo, Rome, 2003. xx. It was not unusual for a man of Leonardo’s age to receive such paternal support; the Capponi and Ruccelai families had unmarried adult sons, some twenty-nine and thirty years old, living with them in the later fifteenth century – see Francis William Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai, Princeton, 1977, pp. 27–29. The names and gifts of the Magi tended to vary from time to time and from place to place. In Renaissance Florence, the oldest magus was typically identified as Melchior, who offered gold; Balthazar as middle-aged and swarthy (rarely black) with a jar of frankincense; and Caspar as the young magus who carried myrrh. This is how they were described in the popular, thirteenth-century Laude, or Hymns of Praise, of Frate Jacopone da Todi, republished in Florence in 1490. Occasionally, Balthazar was considered to be the bearer of myrrh, as in Pseudo-Bede the Venerable’s eighth- or ninth-century text, Collectanea; his portrayal of the Magi was also widely disseminated for centuries in hymns. If, familiar with this alternate tradition, Leonardo intended Balthazar, shown kneeling before the Christ Child, to be understood as holding myrrh, it might explain Saint Joseph’s sullen expression. An exotic resin used in embalming, myrrh came to symbolize impending death; after the Crucifixion, the priest Nicodemus prepared Christ’s body with a mixture of myrrh and aloes ( John 19:39). See Fusco and Corti (Lorenzo de’ Medici, pp. 35–39) for the two bronze horse heads in Lorenzo’s possession, one of which was, perhaps, not antique, but a Renaissance copy. From Vasari (deVere, vol. I, p. 688), we know that Verrocchio also copied horses from antique sculpture. Source of Leonardo quotation: “Every smallest detail . . . ” W. 19115 recto. xxi. Leonardo admitted that some of his chariot designs were useless, because their scythe-like weapons could injure friend and foe alike, and the enemy could easily spook the horses (MS B 10 recto). For Filippino Lippi’s substitute Adoration of the Magi, see Patrizia Zambrano and Jonathan Katz Nelson, Filippino Lippi, Milan, 2004, pp. 469–79, no. 52, pp. 594–96. Perhaps looking at the same (lost) antique relief,

Bibliography with Endnotes

Filippino, in late drawings preserved in the Uffizi (no. 169F) and formerly in the F. Koenigs collection (Haarlem), drew similar compositions with procession, altar, and classical architecture. xxii. Carmen Bambach suggested that the Allegory with Fortune drawing could refer to Lorenzo de’ Medici – see Leonardo da Vinci. Master Draftsman, no. 31, pp. 331–32. For Fortuna in Lorenzo’s poetry, see, for example, Poesie del Magnifico Lorenzo de’ Medici, pp. 12–13 and 19– 20 (canzoni I and III) and pp. 18 and 23 (sonnets XXV and XXIX). For Botticelli’s Primavera and Pallas and the Centaur, see Lightbown, Botticelli, vol. I, pp. 69–89; vol. II, B39, pp. 51–53, and B43, pp. 57– 60. For the Vasari reference to the troncon tagliato, see Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 8, p. 118. xxiii. For an illustration of Castagno’s Last Supper, see Andres, Hunisak, and Turner, Art of Florence, vol. I, pp. 670–71, pl. 379. For Vasari, Leonardo’s countless studies of drapery had paid off; he lavished praise particularly on the tablecloth of the Last Supper. For an explanation of stylus and stylus marks, see note for section xiv. Source of Leonardo quotation: “figures must be done . . . ” Codice Atlantico 139 recto. Logically, Leonardo believed that blood, like water, responded to gravity and flowed down through the body from the crown of the head (MS A 56 verso). xxiv. For Rossellino’s Empoli Saint Sebastian, see Eric C. Apfelstadt, “A New Context and a New Chronology for Antonio Rossellino’s Statue of St. Sebastian at Empoli,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, eds. Steven Bute, Alan Phipps Darr, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi, Florence, 1992, pp. 189–203. I prefer to call the subject of the Pollaiuoli painting the “Shooting of St. Sebastian” rather than the traditional “Martyrdom of St. Sebastian” for reasons of accuracy; according to legend, Sebastian survived the ordeal with the archers and only died later, after he was beaten (and thrown into the Roman sewer). For Lorenzo’s antique Marsyas sculptures and his Apollo and Marsyas gem, which reflects the pose of the lost, “seated Marsyas,” see Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, pp. 39–41, and p. 126, fig. 128. For the figura serpentinata, see John Shearman, Mannerism, Harmondsworth, 1967, pp. 81–91. Leonardo explored the limits of this figural type in his lost painting of Leda and the Swan, known from surviving drawings. xxv. For Lippi’s Saint Jerome in the Badia, see Zambrano and Katz, Filippino Lippi, pp. 254–57 (ill.), and no. 38, pp. 355–56. For Vasari’s demarcation of the three periods of art, see Vasari–deVere, vol. I, pp. 300–4, and vol. II, pp. 773 and 775. The manuscript illuminated by Francesco d’Antonio del Cherico is catalogued in Ames-Lewis, Library of Piero de’ Medici, no. 4, p. 238, figs. 102–3.

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For the Pollaiuolo practice of drawing a model from both front and rear, see also Antonio’s pen-and-ink Study of a Nude Man from Three Angles (Louvre, inv. no. 1486), reproduced in Wright, Pollaiuolo, as fig. 119, and his engraving of the Battle of Nude Men. Sources of Leonardo quotation: Evil flees away – MS H 18 recto; “After these [artists] came Giotto . . . ” Codice Atlantico 387 recto. xxvi. In the later fifteenth century, a number of works for domestic consumption, such as birth trays and other birth-related, painted objects, were produced for the open market, with only a few the products of special commissions. The findings of the infrared examination of the London version of the Virgin of the Rocks are published in Luke Syson and Rachel Billinge, “Leonardo’s Use of Underdrawing in the ‘Virgin of the Rocks’ in the National Gallery and ‘St. Jerome’ in the Vatican,” Burlington Magazine, vol. CXLVII, 2005, pp. 450–64. In her book, Mary Magdalen (London, 1993), Susan Haskins offers an interesting history of perceptions and images of the Magdalene in the Renaissance and through the centuries, including the dulcis amica dei. For the Castiglione “quote” of Giuliano de’ Medici, see Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed., Daniel Javitch, New York and London, 2002, (bk. 3, 138), p. 176. Sources of Leonardo quotations: “it is better to make landscapes when the sun is covered . . . ” MS G 19 verso; “you should make your portrait . . . ” Ash. II, 20 recto; “But see now the foolish folk! . . . ” Ash. II, 25 recto. xxvii. For Vasari’s comments about the bitter truths of life in Florence, see Vasari–de Vere, vol. I, p. 733. Sources of Leonardo quotations: “With a constant joyous longing . . . ” B.L. 156 verso; “Most illustrious Lord . . . ” Codice Atlantico 1082 recto. xxviii. Sources of Leonardo quotations: “bath of the Duchess” MS I 28verso; “let him expect disaster . . . ” MS H 119 verso; “My Lord knowing the mind . . . ” Codice Atlantico 915 verso; “Oh slave to human misery . . . ” W. 12698 recto; “Decipimur votis . . . ” MS L cover. Although Leonardo’s Latin inscription would have to date to 1502 or later (possibly several years later), the drawings contained within Manuscript L range in execution from c. 1497 to 1502. Scholars have sometimes misread the Latin on the MS L cover as “mos Deridet” rather than “mors Deridet” – that is, “habit derides” rather than, correctly, as “Death derides.” Leonardo may have learned Celtis’s verses secondhand, through his connections to the French court; the cynical lines were the motto of the well-traveled Erard de la Marck, whom French king Louis XII appointed as prince-bishop of Li`ege in 1506. Celtis’s lines remained popular in Belgium. In 1546, Susato of Antwerp used them in a motet.

Index

Alberti, Leon Battista, 9, 13, 20, 83 I libri della famiglia, 9, 13, 53 Albiera di Giovanni Amadori, 5 Antonio di Ser Piero, grandfather of Leonardo, 6, 89 Aristotle, 9, 45, 59, 61, 89, 155 ethics, 15 Bacchiacca, Francesco, 177 Baroncelli, Bernardo di Bandino, 100–104 Bembo, Bernardo, 105 Benci, Ginevra de’, 105–112, 143 Boltraffio, Giovanni Antonio, 125 Madonna Litta, 125 Botticelli, Sandro, 19, 40, 57, 79, 99–100, 143, 146, 162 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 17 Caprotti, Gian Giacomo, called Il Salai, 60 Castagno, Andrea del, 52, 103, 153 Castiglione, Baldessare, 176 Caterina, mother of Leonardo, 5, 89 Cherico, Francesco d’Antonio del, 167 Cicero, 15 courtesan pictures, 177–178 Credi, Lorenzo di, 67, 73, 77, 82, 86 Madonna of the Pomegranate, 82 Portrait of a Lady, 109 Virgin and Child with Saints John and Donato (Madonna di Piazza), 28, 67, 74 Donatello, 68 David, 17 Saint John, 68 Saint Mary Magdalene, 169 emeralds and semiprecious stones, 80–82 Ficino, Marsilio, 15, 21, 56, 105, 142, 176 Fior di Virt`u, 9, 65, 112, 115, 156

Flemish painting, 20, 34, 79, 178 Flora, the goddess, 178 Freud, Sigmund, 65 Leonardo’s “vulture dream,” 65 Gallerani, Cecilia, 115 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 19, 153 Giotto, 166 Gozzoli, Benozzo, 18 Procession of the Magi, 18 Jerome, Saint, 164–167 jousts, 14, 28, 55–58, 104, 137, 146 La Piagnona, 26 Lady and Unicorn theme, 111–112 Landino, Cristoforo, 20, 105 Leonardo, 5 allegories, 56–57, 145–147 birth, 5 boyhood, 5–8, 29–30 contrast of youth and old age, 89 drawings, 36 Adam and Eve, tapestry cartoon, 30 Adoration of the Magi, 139 Adoration of the Shepherds, 151 Allegory with Fame and Fortune, 148 Allegory with Fortune, Death, Envy, and Ingratitude, 145 Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli Hanging, 100 Bust of a Warrior, 47–52 Compositional Study for the Background of the Adoration of the Magi, 136 John the Baptist Pointing, 67 Lady with a Unicorn, 111 military devices, 40 Nativity, 151 Nursing Madonna in Profile, 125 Nutcracker Man, 47

201

202

Index

Leonardo (cont.) Phyllis Astride Aristotle, 59 presumed Self-Portrait, 63 Saint Sebastian, 159–162, 182 sheet of rebuses, 116 St. Jerome, 181 Studies for a Last Supper, 152 Studies for the Adoration of the Magi, 134 Studies for the Virgin of the Rocks, 171 Studies of Mary Magdalene, 173–178 Studies of Catapults and Crossbows, 139 Study of a Dog, 30 Study of a Female Head, 77 View of the Arno River Valley, 36, 43 Virgin and Child with a Cat, 87, 90–97 Virgin and Christ Child with St. John the Baptist, 151 Virgin of Humility, 151 education, 8–11 half-brother Antonio, 22, 79, 87 half-brother Giuliomo, 87 homosexuality, 59–62, 65, 74, 186 illegitimacy, 5, 22–23 interest in cardiovascular system, 155 inventions, 41–42 jokes and riddles, 64 in Milan, 180, 185–187 military devices, 139, 181 movement of water, 37, 39, 41–42 paintings, 30 Adoration of the Magi, 89, 129–138, 163, 183 Altarpiece for the Palazzo della Signoria, 97, 142 Annunciation, 75, 110 Benois Madonna, 83–88, 94 Head of Medusa, 30 Last Supper, 28, 89, 135, 152, 183 Madonna of the Yarnwinder, 117–119 Mona Lisa, 113, 127, 173 Monster on a Shield, 7, 29 Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with an Ermine), 113 Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, 105–112 Saint Jerome, 163–169, 171 Tobias and the Angel, 33 Virgin and Child with a Carnation, 79, 87 Virgin of the Rocks, 151, 171–173 paragone, 107 personality, 59–64 reversed, mirror-image writing, 10, 145, 146 sculpture, 121 Bust of the Young Christ, 121–124 Sforza monument, 182

Treatise on Painting, 99, 136, 172 in Verrocchio workshop, 22, 27–30, 33, 59, 67, 73, 82, 122 vision and optics, 34, 80–82, 83–86, 130 visual puns and rebuses, 108, 115–119 Lippi, Filippino, 142, 163 Lippi, Fra Filippo, 13, 17, 40, 142, 173 Adoration of the Christ, 17 Adoration of the Christ Child, 71–72 Luini, Bernardino, 178 Magdalene, Saint Mary, 174 Marsyas, 162 Martini, Francesco di Giorgio, 39, 139 Masaccio, 167 Medici, Cosimo de’, called Il Vecchio (the Elder), 8, 13–16, 17–18, 162 Medici, Giuliano de’, 55–58, 100, 149 Medici, Lorenzo de’, called Il Magnifico (the Magnificent), 18, 30, 39, 65, 79, 80, 100, 102–104, 105, 131, 137, 139, 145, 162, 176, 180 Medici, Piero de’, called Il Gottoso (the Gouty), 18 Melzi, Francesco, 61, 178 Profile Study of Leonardo, 61 Monna Lucia, grandmother of Leonardo, 6, 89 Neoplatonists, 20, 56, 142, 175 Pazzi family, 13, 100–104, 145 Perugino, 73, 142 Petrarch, 105, 112, 174 Piero di Cosimo, 176 plague, 26, 81, 140, 159–162 Plato, 9, 56, 83–84, 137 Platonic Academy, 20, 92, 106 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 22, 80 Podest`a (Bargello), 22, 26, 103 Poliziano, Angelo, 20, 57 Pollaiuolo, Antonio, 19, 27, 34, 168 Battle of Nudes, 36 Hercules and the Hydra, 69 Shooting of Saint Sebastian, 70, 132 Tobias and the Angel, 34 Pollaiuolo, Piero, 19, 34 Annunciation, 37 Shooting of Saint Sebastian, 70 Tobias and the Angel, 34 Pontormo, Jacopo, 177 Pulci, Luca, 56 Puligo, Domenico, 177 Rizzoli, Giovanni Pietro, called Giampietrino, 178 Robertet, Florimond, 118 Rossellino, Antonio, 27, 161

Index

Sebastian, Saint, 159–162 Ser Piero di Antonio, father of Leonardo, 5, 21–22, 29, 75, 97, 142, 174 notarial career, 5, 22, 75, 105, 129, 163 Sforza, Galeazzo Maria, 28, 180, 185 Sforza, Ludovico, 115, 119, 180–183, 185–187 Tornabuoni, Lucrezia, 19, 71 Tosini, Michele, 177 Uccello, Paolo, 20 Vasari, Giorgio, 28, 29, 72, 73, 75, 78, 113, 123, 167, 179–180 Verrocchio, Andrea del, 18, 47, 57, 60, 73, 82, 92, 102, 125, 162, 179 drawings, 55 Design for a Standard, 55 paintings, 34 Baptism of Christ, 28, 68 Tobias and the Angel, 33–37

203

Virgin and Child with Saints John and Donato (Madonna della Piazza), 28 repair of antique Marsyas, 162 sculpture, 47 Bartolomeo Colleoni, 50 Boy with a Dolphin, 92 Christ and Saint Thomas, 121 Crucifixion, 121 Darius relief, 47 David, 121 Equestrian Statue of Colleoni, 179 Lady with a Small Bouquet of Flowers, 110 lavamano, 27, 51 Sleeping Youth, 56 tombs for Cosimo, Piero, and Giovanni de’ Medici, 18, 27, 76 workshop, 26 Vespucci, Amerigo, 113 Vespucci, Simonetta, 57, 113 Voragine, Jacobus da, 9 Legenda aurea (Golden Legend), 9, 118, 164, 174