Leonardo da Vinci (8 page)

By 1506, Leonardo had become a trophy, sought after by cities, nobles, and kings who squabbled over his talents, his attention, and his very presence.

Milan was calling him back, primarily to settle the long legal battle over payment for the “Virgin of the Rocks,” but Florence didn’t want him to leave, especially without finishing “The Battle of Anghiari.” In May, the Signori reluctantly permitted him to go to Milan if he promised to return in three months, with a penalty of 150 florins if he stayed longer – guaranteed by the manager of the bank where he kept his savings.

Milan now had a French governor, Charles d’Amboise, an intelligent, vigorous and self-indulgent young aristocrat – “as fond of Venus as of Bacchus,” one historian wrote – who was already a fan of Leonardo. He took him into his castle, the former Sforza stronghold, and Leonardo almost immediately began making detailed plans for a summer villa d’Amboise intended to build outside the city. He visualized the landscaping in exquisite detail, including orange and lemon trees, an arbor covered with a net of copper wire to keep songbirds inside, and a mock windmill powered by water to act as a fan on warm days.

The two men became as close as a master and servant can be. “We loved him before meeting him in person,” d’Amboise was to write, “and now that we have been in his company . . . we see in truth that his name, though already famous for his painting, has not received sufficient praise for the many other gifts he possesses, which are of an extraordinary power.” To mark Leonardo’s fifty-fifth birthday, the count gave him back his vineyard, which the French had confiscated soon after they took over Milan in 1500.

As Leonardo’s deadline for returning to Florence approached, d’Amboise wrote the Signoria asking for permission for Leonardo to extend his stay until the end of September to “supply certain works which he has at our request begun.” The Signoria agreed, not wanting to offend Florence’s powerful but touchy French allies. Early in October, however, with the painter still in Milan, Soderini wrote d’Amboise angrily pointing out that Leonardo “has not behaved as he should have done toward the republic, because he has taken a large amount of money and made only a small beginning on the great work he was commissioned to carry out. . . . We do not wish any further requests to be made on this matter.”

Early in December, d’Amboise wrote again, saying he would not seek any further extension but asking that Florence treat Leonardo with the respect and honors he deserved. Then, however, Soderini’s ace was trumped: His ambassador to France reported that Louis XII wanted Leonardo to stay in Milan until the king himself arrived there on a planned visit, because the king wanted “certain little pictures of Our Lady, and other things as they occur to my fantasy, and perhaps I will get him to paint my own portrait.” Soon, Soderini received the king’s own confirmation: “We have necessary need of Master Leonardo da Vinci, painter of your city of Florence.”

On an earlier visit to Milan, King Louis had been powerfully taken by “The Last Supper,” even exploring the possibility of removing the fresco from its wall and hauling it back to France. Then his courtier Florimond Robertet had shown him the “Madonna of the Yarnwinder,” and the king’s appetite for Da Vinci paintings became voracious.

There’s no record of any immediate commission for Leonardo after King Louis arrived in Milan at the end of April 1507, but the king did provide him some added income: the tolls from a section of Milan’s system of canals. The demand for Leonardo’s services had not subsided – Isabella d’Este was still writing imploring letters, and Soderini was still fuming in Florence – but the king’s whim was law, and there was no immediate need for Leonardo to leave Milan.

Legal wrangling over the “Virgin of the Rocks” would drag on for years. By this time, the dispute was about the second version of the painting, done mostly by Ambrogio de Predis after Ludovico Sforza sent the first one to Emperor Maximilian; the new painting was to replace the original in the chapel of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception.

The second painting was, in fact, delivered to the Confraternity sometime after 1499, but Ambrogio complained to King Louis in 1503 that the friars still owed money for it. The king sent the case to arbitration, and after three years the ruling went against the artists: The painting was
imperfetto
, meaning either incomplete or not good enough - perhaps simply that Leonardo’s hand wasn’t sufficiently evident. In either case, Leonardo was ordered back to Milan to finish it.

The judgment awarded the painters 200 lire on completion - less than they wanted, but twice what the friars had offered - and the Confraternity came up with half this amount in August 1507. But that didn’t end the dispute. The retouched painting was delivered early in 1508, but in August of that year, a new contract was drawn up: Instead of the final payment of a hundred lire, the painters would get the right to do yet another copy of the painting and sell it. Ambrogio was to do the painting under Leonardo’s supervision, and the two men would share equally in whatever price it brought. If this third “Virgin of the Rocks” was ever painted, it has vanished.

Another legal dispute finally took Leonardo back to Florence – a bitter fight with his half-brothers over the will of his uncle, Francesco.

When Leonardo’s father, Ser Piero da Vinci, died in 1504, Leonardo was passed over in his will. There may have been tensions simmering between father and son, or because Leonardo was by then a successful artist, with a growing retinue of apprentices and servants, he had less claim to Piero’s money than his eleven legitimate children. In either case, there is no record that Leonardo challenged Piero’s will.

But the omission evidently rankled Piero’s younger brother. Francesco had been Leonardo’s boyhood mentor on those long walks through the Tuscan countryside, and after Piero’s death, his brother drew up a new will naming Leonardo as his only heir. This reneged on an earlier agreement between the brothers that Francesco’s estate should go to Piero’s legitimate children, and when Francesco died, they moved immediately to have his will invalidated.

Leonardo took a large part of his household back to Florence to fight the case. It rapidly grew as rancorous as family fights get; Leonardo wrote that his brothers treated him “not as a brother but as a complete stranger” and that they had “wished the utmost evil” to Francesco while he was alive.

Leonardo brought some powerful guns to bear. Even before he arrived in Florence, the Signoria had a letter from King Louis asking for direct intervention in the case on behalf of “our painter and engineer in ordinary,” Leonardo’s official title. Another letter from Charles d’Amboise asked the council to expedite the legal matter as swiftly as possible. And a letter from Leonardo to Cardinal
Ippolito d’Este
, another of Isabella’s brothers, asked him to intervene with Ser Raffaello Hieronomo, a member of the Signoria who was adjudicating the case.

There is no record of how the dispute was resolved, but it was still dragging on in mid-1508, when Leonardo was back in Milan. But six years later, when his brother Giuliano was in Rome needing help to claim a benefice, Leonardo tried to provide it; and a cordial letter from Giuliano’s wife conveying greetings to Leonardo was among Leonardo’s papers when he died. Whatever the outcome, the bitter family feud ended in reconciliation.

In the Milanese court of Charles d’Amboise, Leonardo resumed another role of the Sforza years: the showman-in-chief, stager of public celebrations, masques, and entertainments for the count and his retainers. He began with a grand welcome for Louis XII, with arches of greenery over the streets from the Duomo to the castle, a triumphal chariot carrying actors depicting the cardinal virtues, the arms of France and Brittany prominently displayed, and the god
Mars
“holding in one hand an arrow in the other a palm.”

King Louis was welcomed again the next year when he returned to Milan after routing the Venetians at the
Battle of Agnadello
. This
festa
included an allegorical battle between a dragon, representing France, and the lion of Venice. Leonardo’s stage, set for a production of the operetta
Orfeo
, dramatizing
Orpheus
’ trip to the underworld to rescue his wife
Eurydice
, had a mountain that opened (by means of pulleys and counterweights) to show
Pluto
at home in hell, complete with devils, furies, and in Leonardo’s notes, “many naked children weeping.” There were appropriate musical themes for the characters: trombones for Pluto, treble viols for Eurydice, contrabass viols for Orpheus, and guitars for Charon, ferryman on the
River Styx
.

While he was in Florence battling his brothers, Leonardo picked up the anatomical studies he had begun there years earlier. He was staying with linguist and mathematician, Piero de Braccio Martelli, also an intellectual and patron of the arts, and Leonardo used the long intervals between formal court proceedings to hobnob with other artists, to reshuffle his notes en route to a final organization of his papers that never materialized, and to perform dissections, both on animals and human corpses.

By this time, Leonardo wrote, he had dissected “more than ten human bodies.” But in late 1507 or early 1508, he witnessed a strangely peaceful death: “This old man, a few hours before his death, told me he had lived for more than a hundred years and that he was conscious of no deficiency in his person other than feebleness. And thus, sitting on a bed in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, without any movement or sign of distress, he passed from this life. And I made an anatomy to see the cause of a death so sweet.”

He was especially interested in the vascular system, and he boasted about his skill in exposing its intricacies: He had stripped away “in the most minute particles all the flesh that lies around these veins, without causing any flow of blood save a scarcely perceptible bleeding of the capillary veins.” He discovered that the old man’s arteries were “very dry, thin and withered,” and “in addition to the thickening of their walls, these vessels grow in length and twist themselves in the manner of a snake.” The old man’s death, he concluded, came from “weakness caused by a lack of blood to the artery which feeds the heart and lower members.” He found that the liver was deprived of blood and “desiccated, like congealed bran in color and substance,” while “the skin is almost completely deprived of nourishment” and therefore “the color of wood, or dried chestnuts.” Leonardo followed that dissection with one of the body of a two-year-old boy, “in which I found everything to be the opposite to that of the old man.”

Leonardo’s drawings from this period are wonderfully detailed and shaded, showing three-dimensional layerings of muscles, bones, and tendons. He drew male and female genitalia and a standing woman showing her uterus in early pregnancy. He left studies of the lungs and abdominal organs of a pig and the placenta and uterus of a cow, with a small fetus inside. And he described the grisly work of dissection without refrigeration, telling the reader: “You will perhaps be deterred by the rising of your stomach.” One body wouldn’t last long enough for a thorough exploration of the vascular system, he noted, so “it was necessary to use several bodies in succession . . . I repeated this process twice, in order to observe the variations.”

Two years later, Leonardo traveled twenty miles south of Milan to Pavia, where he spent several months listening to
Marcantonio della Torre
’s lectures on anatomy. “Messer Marcantonio,” as Leonardo called him, was a young man, but an acknowledged master of the skill, and Leonardo made swift drawings as the professor lectured and his assistants carved the bodies in the anatomy theater of Pavia’s famous university.

Della Torre and Leonardo were kindred spirits, both seeking the deepest possible knowledge of the body and all its works. They equally detested “abbreviators,” their term for ostensible scholars who simply rehashed the work of others in digested form. “The abbreviators of works insult both knowledge and love,” Leonardo wrote, “seeing that the love of something is the offspring of knowledge of it . . . Impatience, the mother of stupidity, praises brevity, as if we did not have a whole lifetime in which to acquire complete knowledge of a single subject, such as the human body.”

Leonardo was working in his studio during his second Milan period with varying degrees of urgency. He was soon done with retouching the “Virgin of the Rocks” and went to work for Louis XII; in a letter Leonardo mentions “two Madonnas of different sizes done for our most Christian king,” which have been lost. He still had his “Mona Lisa” in the studio, and was probably reworking and retouching it whenever he felt moved to do so. In 1508, he drew several studies of lips, including the unmistakable half-smile that appears in the painting; it’s likely that this defining feature of “La Gioconda” first appeared then, too. Leonardo and his assistants were working on several versions of “Leda” during this period as well; one finished painting by Leonardo’s talented associate Giampetrino (Gianni Pietro Rizzoli) probably dates from 1510 or 1511 and shows Leda on one knee, surrounded by four babies and broken eggshells - but without the swan.