Leonardo da Vinci (2 page)

The work of famed masters surrounded Leonardo - Florentine sculptors
Donatello
and
Lorenzo Ghiberti
and painters Fra
Filippo Lippi
,
Andrea del Castagno
, and
Domenico Veneziano
, all nearing the end of their careers.

The painterly vocabulary was exploding. Painters began to replace the flat gold backgrounds of medieval paintings with landscapes, many of them modeled on the Tuscan hills and valleys.
Piero della Francesca
had made a detailed study of perspective and was the first painter to study the science of light. Dutch and Flemish painters introduced new themes and techniques that would revolutionize Italian painting.
Filippo Brunelleschi
had figured out how to use perspective and shading to make paintings appear three-dimensional. Botticelli used billowing draperies, blowing hair, and blurred lines to suggest movement in his paintings. The Sicilian
Antonello da Messina
, who worked only in oil paint, arrived in Venice, where the acknowledged master
Giovanni Bellini
saw his work and all but abandoned tempera in favor of oils. And in Verrocchio’s workshop, Leonardo was soon using oils to touch up and enhance details of the studio’s tempera paintings.

A popular artist, Verrocchio got many commissions. Most patrons wanted portraits of themselves and their relatives or religious paintings that focused on the lives of Christ and the saints. In religious scenes, patrons would sometimes appear kneeling reverently to one side. Still-life drawings and landscapes were used only incidentally, as background for the paintings, and apprentices and journeymen artists often got the job of painting backgrounds and details of costumes, curtains, and the like. Leonardo soon developed a masterly touch for crisp detail and specialized in curly hair, every strand distinct. The small white dog trotting along with Verrocchio’s “Tobias and the Angel” is unmistakably Leonardo’s work.

Since Verrocchio wasn’t just an artist but a skilled engineer, his apprentices also got a grounding in mathematics and structures and many elements of carpentry, metalworking, chemistry, metallurgy, leatherworking, and plaster casting. Leonardo soaked it all up and hungered for more. The studio could turn from casting a bronze bust to painting a portrait to building the framework that would combine three paintings into an altarpiece. Verrocchio was once hired to make a gilded copper ball to top the cupola of the
Cathedral of Florence
, Santa Maria del Fiore. That, too, was grist for the apprentices’ mill – as was the formidable chore of hoisting the two-ton ball to the top of the cathedral, securing it there, and placing a cross on top.

When his apprenticeship ended in 1472, Leonardo, at twenty, was admitted to Florence’s painters’ guild. As an acknowledged master, he could now accept commissions, employ craftsmen, and have his own apprentices. For several years, however, he chose to stay on as a paid journeyman for Verrocchio. He was trusted to take on more difficult parts of the paintings, including whole figures.

During this time, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on a painting depicting the baptism of Jesus. Verrocchio painted the majority of the picture, but one of the two angels beside Christ is Leonardo’s. In the painting, Jesus is standing in a rocky stream while
John the Baptist
pours water over his head. Leonardo’s angel has an upturned face with a hint of a smile, and he looks kind and wise, so full of life that the rest of the painting seems stiff in comparison. The background, also painted in oil by Leonardo, is innovative for the time. Unlike most contemporary background landscapes with unnatural, sharply outlined trees, mountains, and other features, Leonardo’s background is fuzzy and unclear, with solid, three-dimensional features that appear blurred, as they would when seen far off by the naked eye. This gives the painting depth, with the figures in the foreground jumping out in relief.

As Vasari tells the story, when Verrocchio saw Leonardo’s finished work, he put away his brush and never painted again. That story may well be apocryphal, but it’s true that Leonardo took over more and more of the studio’s painting work, while Verrocchio concentrated on sculpture, which he seemed to prefer.

Leonardo’s next major work was “The Annunciation,” a larger painting that seems to be mostly his own. It shows the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary, telling her she will give birth to the Son of God. Although it is not fully realized, “The Annunciation” shows Leonardo’s increasing mastery. Notably, his Virgin is neither submissive nor surprised by the angel’s news; she is serene and composed, with a finger marking her place in the scriptures she has been reading.

Still in his early twenties, Leonardo produced other notable works in Verrocchio’s studio: a second, smaller Annunciation for a cathedral altarpiece, and “The Virgin with the Flowers,” one of several small altarpieces of the Virgin and Child he painted. His final drawing for a tapestry of Adam and Eve in a flowery meadow was widely praised. He also completed his first known portrait, of a prominent young Florentine woman,
Ginevra de’ Benci
. Regarded by some as Leonardo’s first masterpiece, it’s a clear departure from the style of Verrocchio’s workshop. Ginevra – young, beautiful, and rich – was one of the city’s social celebrities born into the family of one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s bankers. The portrait is an enchanted scene; the viewer has a sense of looking into it as if through a window as Ginevra sits uncannily still with heavy eyelids and glowing alabaster skin, gazing distractedly into the distance. The only hint of motion is the small cascade of ringlets surrounding her face, accenting the portrait’s stillness and mystery.

With his reputation on the rise, Leonardo left Verrocchio’s workshop and set up his own studio when he was twenty-five. He had spent ten years with Verrocchio, but now he was on his own in a hotly competitive market.

The art scene in Florence was a fraternity of sorts, and Leonardo associated with other prominent men – Sandro Botticelli,
Filippino Lippi
, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Pietro Perugino,
Andrea della Robbia
, and the Pollaiolo brothers,
Antonio
and Piero. He had patrons who gave him commissions and paved the way to commissions from others.

Leonardo’s first commission in his own studio, an altarpiece for the Chapel of San Bernardo in the Palazzo Vecchio, came in 1478. He received an advance on his fee, but the subject he chose is not known, and he never completed it. The job was given five years later to Ghirlandaio, who was displaced in 1485 for a new painting by Filippino Lippi.

Why did Leonardo forsake his first major commission? No one knows, but it was an omen: Leonardo was to abandon many projects, while much of his completed work deteriorated and crumbled because his quest for innovation kept him experimenting with new materials and techniques. However brilliant such work may have been, it couldn’t stand the test of time. In the end, Leonardo’s reputation rests on only fifteen paintings that scholars agree are his. His Florentine contemporary, the satirist
Pietro Aretino
, wrote, “I say to you that Leonardo was equal to the greatest. His limitation was that he had so elevated a genius that he was never satisfied with what was done.” In the case of the altarpiece, perhaps he was simply a perfectionist who couldn’t produce the vision he saw in his mind’s eye. Or perhaps, as with many later projects, he was sidetracked while studying his subject and jumped into a new one. His restless curiosity often stood in the way of earning a living.

The constant political turmoil in Florence was an endless distraction. Never a tranquil city, it was again being dragged into war. Throughout the early 1400s, the city had been sucked into clashes between the popes and the
Holy Roman Em
perors
and also caught up in conflicts with the rival city-states of Italy. In 1440, Cosimo de’ Medici triumphed for Florence over the
Viscontis
of Milan in the
Battle of Anghiari
. The Medicis were also bankers for Pope Sixtus IV. But when Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo broke with Sixtus, the pope turned over his finances to the
Pazzis
, a rival family of Florentine bankers.

In 1478, just as Leonardo was striking out on his own, the Medicis’ quarrel with the Pazzis erupted into a spectacular assassination in Florence’s cathedral. As Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother
Giuliano
knelt in prayer, two men – Francesco de’ Pazzi, one of the heads of the family, and Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli, a banker for the Pazzis – ran up with daggers drawn and stabbed Giuliano nineteen times. Two other assassins, dissident priests, attacked Lorenzo. Giuliano bled to death on the cathedral floor; the wounded Lorenzo was hurried to safety.

The attack was part of an attempt to overthrow the Medicis, but it failed. The conspirators were hunted down by infuriated mobs, and some twenty of them were killed. The Medicis hailed their triumph by commissioning Verrocchio to produce three life-size wax figures of Lorenzo with a scarf around his wounded neck, just as he appeared at a window of the Palazzo Medici; Botticelli was paid forty florins for a painting of the hanged assassins.

The Pazzi plot provided a telling sidelight on Leonardo’s relationship with Lorenzo de’ Medici. Assassin Bernardo Bandino hid in the bell tower of the cathedral and escaped the mobs, but a year later was tracked down in Constantinople, bought back to Florence in chains, and hanged from a window of the Bargello. Leonardo sketched his dangling body, with notes on the colors and style of his garments, indicating that he meant to do a full painting. But if he hoped for a reward like the ones Verrocchio and Botticelli had won for providing Medici propaganda a year earlier, he was disappointed.

In the following years, the Medicis’ feud with the pope escalated into a war that divided most of Italy. Inevitably, Leonardo was drawn to the conflict. While he had no experience in warfare, Verrocchio had taught him that an artist could design anything. Later, he would call war “beastly madness,” but at the time, he draw war machines, including armored cars, a machine gun, and even a submarine, complete with a conning tower and screw propeller.

Some were practical; others were not, because they relied on faulty theories or because they couldn’t have been built by fifteenth-century artisans. But all were ingenious.

The war raged for two years until Lorenzo de’ Medici brought it to a close by a daring stroke of diplomacy: With only a small retinue, he traveled to the enemy city of Naples, whose king,
Ferrante
, had sent his armies to reinforce the pope. The king might well have captured or killed Lorenzo, but the Magnificent used his charm to persuade Ferrante to desert the pope’s cause and back Florence instead. Without Naples, the papal assault collapsed. Lorenzo made a truce with Pope
Alexander VI
and with the pope’s former allies, the
Sforza
of Milan. With the return of an uneasy peace, Florentines again focused on the arts.

Leonardo was still trying to establish his studio. He won some minor commissions for small religious works and portraits, but lacked major projects.

One of his interests in the late 1470s and early 1480s was poetry. While Leonardo himself produced little verse, his Florentine circle included a group of
burchiellesco
poets – wry, slangy, rough-edged, and often bawdy writers. He was especially friendly with Antonio Camelli, known as “Il Pistoia,” a satirist whose style was summed up by a contemporary as “jokes, salt, and honey.” Leonardo’s notes and papers during those years also contain frequent references to prominent scholars, physicians, scientists, and mathematicians; he knew
Leon Batista Alberti
, sometimes called the “first Renaissance man,” and he had contacts within the intellectual circle of philosopher
Marsilio Ficino
.

Leonardo was also nurturing his lifelong passion for technology, further developing the hoists and cranes originally designed by Brunelleschi that lifted the great ball atop Florence’s cathedral when Leonardo was Verrocchio’s apprentice. According to Vasari, Leonardo offered the Signoria a plan to raise the entire Baptistery several feet and place a set of steps beneath it. “His arguments were so powerful that many people were persuaded it could be done,” Vasari wrote, “until they left his company and thought it over and realized it was impossible.” Leonardo’s drawings included a device for ripping the bars from a prison window, machines for pumping water to elevated tanks, and water-powered machines.

His studio included at least one apprentice, Tommaso Massini. Massini - who was to become a longtime friend, assistant, and general factotum for Leonardo over the next twenty-five years – was a flamboyant, talented, and likable man who was given a series of nicknames but was buried under a tombstone inscribed with the best-known one: Zoroastro.