Leonardo da Vinci (4 page)

Leonardo’s interest was partly metaphysical: His notes show him searching for the “confluence of the senses,” a physical spot where common sense and the “vital spirits” postulated by medieval medical theorists might be found. In later life, his language would be simpler and more bluntly descriptive, but he would never give up his formidable task of learning how human bodies work. Among the endless topics he posed for himself: “Which tendon causes the motion of the eye, so that the motion of one eye moves the other”; “What sneezing is”; “shivering with cold”; “Describe the beginning of man, and what causes it within the womb, and why a child of eight months cannot survive.”

More pertinent to a painter – and more useful in teaching apprentices – were Leonardo’s studies of the proportions of the human body and the mathematical ratios of one part to another. His study of
Vitruvius
, the Roman engineer and architect, led to Leonardo’s most famous anatomical drawing, the “
Vitruvian Man
.”

The drawing shows a man, in two simultaneous poses, standing inside a circle and a superimposed square. The mirror-written text above the drawing quotes Vitruvius: “The measurements of man are distributed as follows: that four fingers make one palm, and four palms make one foot; six palms make a cubit [forearm];” and so on, down to the distance from the hairline to the eyebrows being identical to the distance from the tip of the chin to the mouth.

In the drawing, the man - with his feet together and his arms outstretched horizontally - stands within the square, illustrating that his reach is equal to his height. The second figure, with legs akimbo and arms raised higher inside the circle, makes a different point: “If you open your legs so much as to decrease your height by 1/14th, and raise your outspread arms until the tips of your middle fingers are level with the top of your head, you will find that the center of your outspread limbs will be the navel, and the space between the legs will be an equilateral triangle.”

By the late 1480s, Leonardo had set up his own studio in Milan, where he was an instant hit for his talent, among others, for playing a lyre of his own creation, described as a kind of violin – in the shape of a horse’s skull – with a silver soundbox. A talented musician, Leonardo “gave some time to the study of music and learnt to play on the lute, improvising songs most divinely,” according to Vasari.

The location of his Milan studio is unknown, but evidence indicates it included at least eight artists and apprentices, including the two De Predis brothers and the faithful Zoroastro. Two wealthy amateurs,
Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio
and
Marco d’Oggiono
, joined the studio not as apprentices but as associate painters, and under Leonardo’s eye both of them became notable artists. An early apprentice was Francesco Galli or Napoletano, who went on to his own degree of fame; his “Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist and St. Sebastian” can be seen in the
Zurich Kunsthaus
. Another was a German called Giulio, like Zoroastro a metalworker rather than a painter.

Other newcomers to the studio would come and go, but one became part of Leonardo’s life for the next twenty-eight years. In one of his notes, he records, “Giacomo came to live with me on St. Mary Magdalen’s day [July 22] 1490.” Ten-year-old Giacomo’s father, an obscure villager named Pietro Caprotti, was willing to pay for his upkeep while the boy served as Leonardo’s servant, errand-boy, and studio model - and eventually one of his apprentices.

How soon Giacomo slept with Leonardo is a matter of conjecture, but there’s not much room for doubt that he did. As Vasari describes him, he “was extraordinarily graceful and attractive. He had beautiful hair, curled and ringletted, in which Leonardo delighted.” Another of Leonardo’s commentators, the artist
Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo
, was the first to assert Leonardo’s homosexuality, if only indirectly. In an imagined exchange between Leonardo and the long-dead Greek sculptor
Phidias
, Lomazzo has Phidias refer to Giacomo as one of Leonardo’s favorite pupils, to which Leonardo says, “. . . he was a very fair young man, especially around the age of fifteen.”

Giacomo was a special case – an unruly, mischievous, unmannered scamp who soon earned the lifelong nickname of “Salai,” an Arabic-rooted word meaning “little devil.” The list of Salai’s misdemeanors in his first year of service is impressive, as recorded by Leonardo, in what was presumably a draft of a letter to the boy’s father:

Leonardo’s accounting to Salai’s father ends with a list of the boy’s clothing costs, and in the margin are four words: thief, liar, obstinate, greedy. But there is an unmistakable tone of rueful amusement in this indictment, and no hint at all that Leonardo wants to be rid of his imp.

Indeed, Salai stayed on - as model, servant, companion, and, in time, apprentice. But the relationship between the head of the studio and his student was never entirely smooth. On one sheet of notes are the words, “Salai, I want to rest, so no wars, no more war, because I surrender.” This was written in someone else’s handwriting almost as part of a shopping list, as if overheard. Whoever wrote it, Leonardo let it remain in his official notes.

Over the years, Leonardo spent heavily on luxuries for Salai, along with loans for expenses such as a dowry for Salai’s sister. Eventually, Salai took possession a house outside Milan that Ludovico had given Leonardo, renting it out and keeping the proceeds. And for the “good and kind services” Salai had provided, Leonardo left him the house in his will.

In the summer of 1493, a woman he referred to only as Caterina also joined Leonardo’s household. She could have been a servant, but is more likely to have been Leonardo’s mother. She would have been in her mid-sixties then, and her husband had died three years earlier. He made no further note of her until about two years later, when he listed the costs of her modest funeral.

Like the studios of other Quattrocento artists, Leonardo’s
bottega
turned out several kinds of works. Some were almost entirely his own doing, as in the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani. Paintings by his associates Boltraffio and d’Oggiono would benefit from his tutelage, criticism, suggestions, and perhaps even a touch of paint here and there. Such works wouldn’t command Leonardo’s price, but would be seen as from his studio. His apprentices might contribute varying amounts of work on drapery, backgrounds, or even a figure in a large scene, which would be priced accordingly.

In 1489, about the same time Ludovico hired Leonardo to paint his mistress, the duke gave him a far more important commission: to create a giant statue of
Francesco Sforza
, the duke’s father, in full armor, mounted on a horse. At the time, there were four notable equestrian statues in Italy, two of them dating from classical times, and Ludovico wanted his father’s monument to be bigger and grander than any of them.

Leonardo had been angling for this job since his first letter to Ludovico, in which he offered “to begin work on the bronze horse which will be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the Prince your father’s happy memory and of the famous house of Sforza.” But even after giving him the commission, Ludovico seems to have had doubts that Leonardo could fulfill his vision; he had the Florentine ambassador to Milan write to Lorenzo the Magnificent asking if he could engage experts in bronze casting to assist with the job.

The duke’s misgivings were understandable. Casting bronze on such a scale would be a formidable task for anyone, and while Leonardo had probably helped Verrocchio with the planning of the great equestrian statue of
Bartolomeo Colleoni
in Venice, he had left the studio before Verrocchio did the actual casting. To make the job even more complex, Leonardo had conceived of something never before tried. The other four horses were sculpted in a trotting pose, with three feet on solid ground. Leonardo’s first sketches for the Sforza horse show it rearing on its hind legs – a dramatic but precariously unstable pose.

The horse was clearly the most formidable part of the commission, and Leonardo began with it, leaving the design of the armored rider aside for the moment. He explored at least two possible solutions to the technical problem of a rearing horse. In one, a fallen soldier connects one of the horse’s front feet to the ground; in another, the soldier has been replaced with a tree stump. But when Leonardo traveled to Pavia, some twenty miles south of Milan, to see the classical equestrian statue in the trotting pose known as
Il Regisole
, he was stunned by the realism of its arrested movement. It was probably there that he gave up the idea of a rearing horse. His field notes contain the line, “It is more praiseworthy to imitate antiquities than modern things”; all his subsequent studies of horses show variations of the trot.

Leonardo needed a huge studio to build the clay model around which the bronze would ultimately be cast, and Ludovico furnished one. Leonardo was installed in the Corte Vecchia, the dilapidated castle that had been the seat of the Visconti family until Francesco Sforza took over and began building his own Castello Sforzesca. Leonardo’s workshop was the former grand ballroom. Adjacent rooms served as his study, laboratory, and living quarters for the maestro and his helpers.

The model for the great horse was colossal: tons of clay packed around a supporting metal armature. It stood some twenty-four feet high. It was exhibited in November 1493 at the proxy marriage of Ludovico’s niece Bianca to Emperor Maximilian, and viewers were awed not just by its size but with its fine detail and spirited pose. “See how beautiful this horse is: Leonardo da Vinci alone has created it,” wrote the poet Baldassare Taccone, and Vasari noted, “Those who saw the great clay model that Leonardo made considered that they had never seen a finer or more magnificent piece of work.”

Ludovico had set aside approximately seventy-five tons of bronze for the casting, and as soon as the model was finished, Leonardo began planning the details of the casting process. He intended to cast the horse in a single piece, a challenge that some considered impossible. It involved making an outer mold of kiln-baked material, preserving every detail of the surface of the clay model, and supporting it with an armature of iron. The mold would then be coated with a layer of wax as thick as the intended bronze casting, and an inner mold would cover the wax. The united mold, upside down, would then be placed in a huge pit, with sand packed around it to support the weight and heated until all the wax melted and drained away. Then, molten bronze would be poured into the empty cavity where the wax had been and allowed to cool. When the outer mold was peeled away, the horse would be finished.

The pitfalls were tremendous. Channels had to be created to ensure all the wax drained and that no air bubbles kept the mold from filling with liquid bronze. If the mold wasn’t hot enough when the bronze was poured in, the temperature difference would crack it. In December 1493, Leonardo wrote, “I have decided that the horse should be cast without its tail, on its side.” But that meant another delay to redesign the network of channels needed for the casting. Leonardo’s notebooks are filled with drawings of molds for the horse, cranes, pulleys, and other mechanisms for hoisting the mold and its seventy-five tons of bronze.

In the end, the delays were fatal. Ludovico was under pressure; his father-in-law
Ercole d’Este
, the Duke of Ferrara, was angry about Ludovico’s friendship with French King
Charles VIII
and worried about defending Ferrara in case of a French invasion. Ludovico owed D’Este 3,000 ducats, and to pacify the duke, he offered him the bronze meant for the horse, to be cast into cannon.

The only record of Leonardo’s reaction is a half-page draft of an angry letter to Ludovico, torn vertically so that only fragments of sentences remain. Among them: “And if any other commission is to be given to me by some . . . Of the reward for my service, because I am not in a position to . . . My Lord, I know your Excellency’s mind is much occupied . . . my life in your service, holding myself always in readiness to obey . . . Of the horse I will say nothing, because I know the times . . . .”

By some accounts, five years later, the clay model was moved to a garden. Ludovico had been overthrown by his onetime French allies, and French archers occupying Milan used the horse for target practice. No trace remains.

Despite the disappointment, 1493 marked a year in which Leonardo’s studio was thrumming as he embarked on new works. His notes suggest that he had built a full-scale working model of his ornithopter on the roof of the Corte Vecchia, and he may have even tried to fly it. He was taking on a number of assignments from Ludovico - from interior decoration to creating emblems and allegorical drawings that served as a kind of propaganda for the duke, portraying him as the benevolent protector of his people.

Ludovico was still officially the regent for his nephew,
Gian Galeazzo Sforza
. Ludovico had married him off advantageously in 1490 to Gian Galeazzo’s cousin,
Isabella of Aragon
, whose father
Alfonso
stood to inherit the kingdom of Naples and was thus a prime ally for Ludovico.

For the wedding, Leonardo created the first of his elaborate pageants, an extravaganza depicting Il Paradiso, a representation of heaven, dramatically unveiled near midnight after a night of music, dancing, masques, and elaborate tributes to the young duke and his new duchess. As the diplomat Jacopo Trotti described it, “Il Paradiso was made in the shape of a half egg, which on the inner part was all covered with gold, with a very great number of lights, as many as stars, and with certain niches where stood all the seven planets [men dressed in appropriate costumes] . . . Around the top edge of this hemisphere were the twelve signs [of the Zodiac], with certain lights behind glass, which made a gallant and beautiful spectacle. In this Paradiso were heard many songs and many sweet and graceful sounds.”

Accounts of the event suggest that the actual pageant, with lyrics by the court poet Bellincioni, were less impressive than Leonardo’s stage setting and costumes. A year later, for the wedding of Ludovico himself to Beatrice d’Este, Leonardo created an even more dramatic show to be put on by Ludovico’s son-in-law, Captain Galeazzo Sanseverino. With a splendid golden helmet and matching shield, Sanseverino led a large band of “wild men” on horseback, dressed in animal skins and carrying clubs, accompanied by, one observer noted, “huge drums and raucous trumpets.”

Leonardo appeared to enjoy these theatrical events; he had a taste for fantasy and drama. On the street, when Leonardo saw someone interested him, he would follow that person until he knew his or her face well enough to go back to his studio and draw it – sometimes as a rough portrait, but often as a caricature or grotesque. As he once noted, he was fascinated with the “buffoonish, ridiculous, and really pitiable.”

During his years in Milan, Leonardo began his painstaking studies of light and shade, discerning seven distinct kinds of shadows and proposing to write a treatise on each one. Another manuscript from the time discusses different sources and qualities of light, with drawings showing how to depict them.

The Milan notebooks also offer practical advice to painters. To succeed, Leonardo wrote, you must “quit your home in town, and leave your family and friends, and go over the mountains and valleys into the country.” Also, portraits are best done “in dull weather, or as evening falls . . . See in the street toward evening, or when the weather is bad, how much grace and sweetness can be seen in the faces of the men and women. Therefore, O painter, use a courtyard where the walls are colored black, or with some kind of overlapping roof . . . and when it is sunny it should be covered with an awning. Alternatively work on the painting toward evening, or when it is cloudy or misty, and this will be the perfect atmosphere.”

Leonardo’s own studio was busily turning out work shot through with his influence, whether actually painted by the maestro or done by his associates and apprentices under his guidance and in his characteristic
Leonardesco
style. Besides the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, there are three paintings of this period that critics attribute entirely or mostly to Leonardo.

The earliest, dating from about the same time as Cecilia’s portrait, shows a young man holding a musical score, the reason the painting is usually called “The Musician.” It is the only known Leonardo portrait of a man. His face is striking and lively under a bright red cap, standing out against the velvety dark background Leonardo advised and uniformly used in these years. In contrast, the musician’s tunic and hand seem almost sketched in; the painting is sometimes called unfinished – like the portrait of Cecilia, with her left hand shading into darkness rather than fully modeled. It seems probable that Leonardo did this deliberately to sharpen the composition and focus attention on the faces of his subjects.

The second portrait was of another lovely woman, with a bold gaze and a sensual mouth. The subject was almost surely
Lucrezia Crivelli
, Ludovico’s next mistress after Cecilia, who bore him another acknowledged son in 1497.

Other paintings from the Milan studio are obviously
Leonardesco
(strongly influenced by Leonardo’s style), with or without the maestro’s actual intervention: Boltraffio’s “Madonna and Child,” Ambrogio de Predis’ “Lady with a Pearl Necklace” (perhaps a portrait of Ludovico’s wife, Beatrice d’Este), d’Oggione’s copy of “Virgin of the Rocks.” And the fees for all these works would have followed Leonardo’s ordering, ranging from expensive to “quite cheap” depending on how much he was involved. When Boltraffio and d’Oggioni collaborated on an altarpiece of the Resurrection in the church of Milan’s San Giovanni sul Muro, the contract awarded them fifty ducats, just a quarter of what Leonardo and the de Predis brothers were promised for “Virgin of the Rocks.”

As a monument to the Sforza dynasty and a kind of family mausoleum, Ludovico was expanding and modernizing the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, and soon after the great horse project failed, he commissioned Leonardo to paint a mural on the north wall of the monks’ refectory. The subject was the
Cenacolo
– Christ’s last supper with his disciples.

Traditionally, paintings of the last supper had shown the initiation of the covenant embodied in communion: “Eat this in remembrance of me.” But Leonardo chose the more dramatic moment when Christ announced, “Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.” “The Last Supper” shows the savior, sorrowful and resigned, at the center of the long table, with his disciples flanking him, electrified in shock and dismay. In Leonardo’s preliminary notes, he describes the painting:

In the finished work, the details have changed. The white-bearded
James
is the disciple holding up his hands and shrugging; the man knocking over a glass has become
Judas
the betrayer, spilling a salt cellar in nervous anxiety.
Philip
, rising from his seat, is asking, “Master, is it I?” But the mural is precisely what Leonardo meant it to be, a stop-action point in a vivid narrative.