Leonardo da Vinci (5 page)

Both in Leonardo’s notebooks and on the monastery wall, “The Last Supper” evolved. He did it in oil and tempera rather than as a fresco, which would have required him to paint segments of the mural quickly on a fresh coat of plaster before it dried. Oil paint let him work more slowly and rethink later; subsequent restorations have revealed the way Christ’s fingers grew shorter, a dish changed position, and each of the four groupings of three disciples was subtly rebalanced.

The novelist
Matteo Bandello
, who as a boy watched Leonardo at work on the painting, recalled that sometimes he would paint from dawn to dusk, not even stopping to eat; at other times, he stood in front of the picture for as long as four days without touching a brush. This infuriated Bandello’s uncle, the prior, who urged Leonardo to hurry up and complained to the duke that the artist was loafing. But once, Bandello wrote, the painter was “driven by some sudden urge, at midday, when the sun was at its height, leaving the Corte Vecchia . . . to come straight to Santa Maria delle Grazie, without seeking shade, and clamber up onto the scaffolding, pick up a brush, put in one or two touches, and then go away again.”

The prior’s criticism echoes in an account of Leonardo searching through the seamiest district of Milan for a model with a face wicked enough to do justice to Judas and telling the duke, “If I cannot find one I will have to use the face of this reverend father, the prior.” Ludovico laughed loudly, Vasari wrote, and “the unfortunate prior retired in confusion to harass the laborers working in his garden.”

Sadly, the great painting was another victim of Leonardo’s restless innovation. Because of his use of oil and tempera rather than fresco technique, and perhaps because of lingering dampness in the refectory, the mural began to deteriorate and flake off the wall within a few years. By the time Vasari saw it in 1556, he described it as no more than “a muddle of blots.” Repeated efforts to restore it ruined many of Leonardo’s subtleties and hid details under layers of varnish. Then in 1796, anti-clerical French soldiers threw stones at the painting and climbed ladders to scratch out the apostles’ eyes. At one point, a door was cut through the painting, and later bricked up; it appears as the blank arch in the lower front of the mural, cutting off the view of Christ’s feet. And in 1943, Allied bombs came close to destroying the refectory and the painting with it.

Starting in 1978, a major restoration lasting twenty-one years dramatically changed the painting. Previous repaintings were peeled away, bit by microscopic bit, to try to uncover the original pigments, and many of the faces (including Judas’) became much more like Leonardo’s sketches. Only a fifth of the original paint was left. The parts of the painting that could not be saved were repainted in less vivid watercolors, giving a sense of the full composition but not hiding what wasn’t original.

The restoration was guided by a full-scale copy of “The Last Supper” painted by Gianni Pietro Rizzoli, known as Giampetrino, one of the apprentices who worked on the mural with Leonardo.

Perhaps inevitably, even this scrupulous work has been criticized as too intrusive and having lost the soul of Leonardo’s painting. But most critics say what is left reflects what he intended – and at least will not continue to deteriorate.

By this time Ludovico was Duke of Milan by title as well as force. His nephew Gian Galeazzo had died in 1494 - amid widespread suspicion that Ludovico had poisoned him - and Ludovico was proclaimed duke the next day. But Italy was in turmoil. The French king, Charles VIII, was capitalizing on rivalry among the city-states to claim weak territories. With French troops camped outside Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s son and successor, Piero, had signed a treaty granting the French control of Pisa and several other towns. The outraged Florentines had overthrown the Medicis, opening the way for the charismatic Dominican friar
Girolamo Savonarola
to set up a puritanical theocracy featuring “bonfires of the vanities,” which were fueled by paintings, books, and anything else deemed corrupt or heretical.

Charles VIII was obviously eager to expand his realm; nevertheless, Ludovico kept up his alliance with the French king, ignoring the fact that one of the French generals, the Duc d’Orleans, was the grandson of a Visconti and thus had a claim to the dukedom of Milan.

Political machinations aside, Leonardo was established as Ludovico’s favorite artist and enjoyed his patronage; estimates of Leonardo’s annual income range from an adequate 500 ducats to a princely 2,000. But Leonardo was not above grumbling. He complained in a letter that he hadn’t received payments: “If your Lordship thought I had money, your Lordship was deceived . . . It vexes me greatly that . . . my having to earn a living has forced me to interrupt the work on “The Last Supper” and to attend to lesser matters instead of following up the work which your Lordship entrusted to me.”

When Leonardo finished the mural, Ludovico gave him three acres of land outside the city walls with a house, garden, and vineyard. It was a refuge from the heat and clamor of Milan, and Leonardo cherished it.

After “The Last Supper
,
”
Leonardo had two years of comparative tranquility. He puttered in his garden, hobnobbed with cronies, and embarked on remodeling and redecorating the north wing of the ducal palace, which Ludovico turned into his private quarters after his duchess, Beatrice d’Este, died in childbirth. At the age of forty-five, Leonardo’s mind was as busy as ever, and a compatible mind arrived in Venice in the body of Fra
Luca Pacioli
, a scholar in mathematics and philosophy, who soon became Leonardo’s friend. Leonardo provided the intricate geometrical illustrations for Pacioli’s book,
Divina Proportione
, including a drawing of a dodecahedron with shadings that make it nearly three-dimensional.

Leonardo was also at least toying with the notion of starting his own academy, a group of intellectuals that might have included the architect Donato Bramante, the court poet Gasparè Visconti, the architect Giacomo Andrea, and the physician Giuliano da Marliano. Scholars differ on whether such an academy was actually organized, but it exists in Leonardo’s notes along with elaborate drawings of knot designs that spell out variations of “Academia Leonardo Vinci.”

This interlude for Leonardo was destined to be brief: Ludovico and the Sforza dynasty were about to be toppled. Early in 1499, the French were preparing to invade Italy. Charles VIII had died, and new King
Louis XII
, the former Duc d’Orleans, was determined to add Milan to his possessions. French troops crossed the border into Italy in May, and by late July, they neared Ludovico’s territory.

From his notebook, we can reconstruct a vivid picture of Leonardo preparing his studio for the arrival of looting soldiers. He counted the money in his cashbox: 1,180 lire, which he divided into packets and wrapped in paper, hiding them in nooks and crannies around the studio, and putting the small change back in the cashbox where it could easily be found. In late July, he observed another kind of preparation: “In the park of the Duke of Milan I saw a 700 pound cannon-ball shot from a height of one
braccia
. It bounced twenty-eight times, the length of each bounce having the same proportion to the previous one as the height of each bounce had to the next.”

Some of Ludovico’s allies were defecting, and his political foes whipped up a riot in which his treasurer was killed. On September 2, the duke fled the city, hoping for help from the Emperor Maximilian in Innsbruck. Four days later, the French took over Milan. There was no resistance.

Leonardo apparently tried to ingratiate himself with the French during the six weeks that the king stayed in Milan. He kept a coded note reminding himself to get in touch with the Comte de Ligny, whom he had met before, and another from an unidentified person urging him to “produce as soon as possible the report on conditions in Florence, especially the manner and style in which the reverend father Friar Jeronimo [Savonarola] has organized the state of Florence.”

But in December, Leonardo made plans to leave the city. The French had left, and Ludovico’s people said the duke was coming back with Swiss mercenaries and the backing of the emperor. It would hardly be prudent for a man who had collaborated with the occupiers to stick around to greet the patron he had failed to defend. His list of to-do notes, beginning with “Have two boxes made,” concludes a bit bleakly, “Sell what you cannot take with you.” So, after eighteen years and the completion of some of his greatest works, Leonardo left Milan.

Isabella d’Este wanted desperately to be Leonardo’s next patron. Her family was one of Italy’s oldest and most distinguished. Isabella was one of the three d’Este siblings whose marriages in 1491 cemented a new set of alliances in northern Italy. She began her collection with gems, intaglios, and cameos, but branched into busts and small sculptures and soon began commissioning paintings. In 1498, she had written, somewhat imperiously, to Cecilia Gallerani, asking to borrow Leonardo’s “Lady with an Ermine,” so that she could compare it with a portrait by Giovanni Bellini. (The request was a bit indelicate, since Cecilia was well-known to be the mistress of her sister’s husband.) Isabella was filling two large display rooms in her palace with her growing collection, which included two large allegories by Andrea Mantegna, two by Lorenzo Costa, and one by Perugino. But she had no paintings by Leonardo, and she badly wanted one.

Leonardo was probably accepting a standing invitation when he left Milan for Mantua in December 1499, and while he was Isabella’s guest that winter, he did a drawing of her. It shows a proud, aristocratic woman, past her prime, with the air of someone accustomed to getting her way. Shown in profile, the rendering bears a marked resemblance to a portrait of her sister Beatrice by Ambrogio de Predis.

The atmosphere in Isabella’s court may not have been entirely
simpatico
. Although considered intelligent, she was also strong-willed and capricious; when her lapdog died, court poets were called on to write tributes to it both in Latin and Italian. In any case, by mid-March, Leonardo was in Venice, and Lorenzo Guznago, a musician from Ferrara, visited him in his lodgings there and wrote a letter to Isabella reporting that her portrait was coming along splendidly – “very true to nature and beautifully done. It couldn’t possibly be better.”

While in Venice, Leonardo studied copperplate engraving and was busy with major works of engineering. His notes indicate that he was hired by the Venetian Senate to look into fortifying the Isonzo River, in the Friuli region northeast of the city, to ward off a Turkish invasion.

Leonardo learned of Ludovico Sforza’s last chapter in Milan. Troops loyal to the duke under Galeazzo Sanseverino had entered the city, but Ludovico’s army of Swiss mercenaries was routed, and he was captured and imprisoned. Leonardo’s note was laconic: “The duke lost his state, and his goods, and his freedom, and none of his works was completed.” It was a farewell not only to his patron, but to the great horse and “The Last Supper” as well.

In 1500, back in Florence after eighteen years, Leonardo found the city of his youth a diminished place. The theocracy of Savonarola was gone; the monk had been hanged and burned two years earlier. But Savonarola’s bonfires of the vanities had consumed Florence’s gaiety and confidence along with many of its treasures, and the Medici had yet to return; Florence was now a republic. After the French abandoned Pisa, city fathers had declared independence from Florence, and the Signoria had embarked on an unnecessary and badly waged war to regain control. Now Florence was bankrupt.

The artistic scene had changed considerably as well. Many of the older painters had died, including the Pollaiolo brothers and Domenico Ghirlandaio, but Botticelli and Lorenzo de Credi were still wielding brushes. Rising star
Michelangelo Buonarroti
, still only twenty-five, was in Rome, finishing his “Pieta” for St. Peter’s.

For the moment, however, Leonardo was a revered master. The fame of “The Last Supper” had preceded him, and he had no trouble finding work. The
Servite friars
had commissioned Filippino Lippi to do an altarpiece for the church of Santissima Annunziata, but Vasari wrote that Lippi, “like the good-hearted person he was,” stepped out of the way to let Leonardo have the job. “Then the friars, to secure Leonardo’s services, took him into their house, and met all his expenses and those of his household.”

Leonardo showed his gratitude in characteristic fashion. “He kept them waiting a long time without even starting anything,” Vasari wrote. But then, in the spring of 1501, he produced a drawing of Mary and her mother, St. Anne, with the infant Christ: the “Virgin and Child with St. Anne.” Put on display for two days, the drawing was a sensation. “This work not only won the astonished admiration of all the artists,” Vasari wrote, “it attracted . . . a crowd of men and women, young and old, who flocked there as if they were attending a great festival, to gaze in amazement at the marvels he had created.”

Fra Pietro Novellara, vicar-general of the
Carmelites
, wrote a description of the drawing: “An infant Christ, of about one year old, almost escaping from the arms of his mother. He has got hold of a lamb and seems to be squeezing it. The mother, almost raising herself from the lap of St. Anne, holds onto the child in order to draw him away from the lamb.”

Here, as in the “Benois Madonna,” Leonardo was prefiguring the Passion. But unlike that early work, this time, mother and child both know what the lamb means; he is embracing his fate, while she is dreading it. This scene changed repeatedly in the ten years it took Leonardo to finish it. Another drawing shows Mary on her mother’s lap holding her son, who is playing with an infant St. John. Vasari described a drawing that had St. John playing with a lamb while Christ gazed at both of them, but if that version ever existed, it has disappeared. The only indisputable fact is that it took a long time for Leonardo’s vision to fix itself – and that yet another altarpiece wouldn’t be delivered.

Though Leonardo escaped the daily urgings of Isabella d’Este, she had hardly given up on him; she wanted not only her portrait, but a larger painting for her gallery. Isabella asked the Carmelite Novellara for a report on what Leonardo was doing and whether he intended to produce something for her. In his response, he described the “St. Anne” drawing, saying it was the only work Leonardo had done since coming to Florence and added a discouraging word: “From what I understand Leonardo’s life is extremely irregular and haphazard, and he seems to live from day to day.” Apart from the drawing, Novellara wrote, Leonardo had only added a few touches to copies of his works done by his assistants. “He devotes much of his time to geometry and has no fondness at all for the paintbrush.”

In a second letter to Isabella, Novellara reported that he had talked to Salai “and some others who are close to him” and they had taken him to see Leonardo. Diplomatically, the maestro said he would like nothing more than to paint for her, and if he could escape his obligations to the King of France, he would start on Isabella’s portrait. Novellara said he had seen a painting that Leonardo was working on for one of the king’s favorites,
Florimond Robertet
, and described the “Madonna of the Yarnwinder.” The maestro hoped to be done with that within a month, Novellara said. “This is as much as I could get from him.”

Isabella sent a letter to Leonardo, delivered by another messenger, with no better result. Leonardo, the go-between wrote, “Sent back answer that for now he was not in a position to send another reply to Your Ladyship, but that I should advise you that he has already begun work on that which Your Ladyship wanted from him.” This evasion wasn’t much comfort, since Isabella had been told that Leonardo was working on her portrait more than a year earlier. In the end, the only service she got from him was an appraisal of some antique vases - formerly owned by the Medici family - she was thinking of buying.

“The Madonna of the Yarnwinder” was another portent of Christ’s passion. This time the infant Christ gazes rapturously at a cross-shaped gadget used for winding yarn, while his mother seems troubled. As in the “Virgin and Child with St. Anne,” both of them know – or at least have forebodings about – what the cross means.

Early in 1501, Leonardo also took a brief trip to Rome, where his friend Donato Bramante was beginning the redesign of St. Peter’s cathedral.