Leonardo da Vinci (9 page)

In Milan, Leonardo’s concept of the “Virgin and Child with St. Anne” continued to evolve. The great cartoon now in London’s National Gallery dates from 1508, and in this version Mary, on her mother’s lap, is holding the infant Christ, who is blessing a slightly older John the Baptist. But this cartoon was apparently never used for a painting. An oil painting, now in the Louvre and generally regarded as less powerful than the cartoon, reverts to Leonardo’s original concept, showing Christ reaching for a lamb but without John the Baptist. The painting was probably done around 1510 and was still in Leonardo’s studio in 1517. Part of a study for this painting has been detected beneath the surface of the Giampetrino “Leda.”

For a while, another great equestrian statue was in the works - for the tomb of the
condottiere
Gian Trivulzio
, who had made himself Marshal of Milan. Trivulzio set aside 4,000 ducats for this grandiose monument, and Leonardo drew many studies for it and roughly estimated what it would cost to sculpt and cast. The horse and its armored rider were to be prancing atop a huge carved marble arch, adding considerably to the cost, but even so Leonardo’s estimate came in at less than 3,000 ducats, leaving a hefty profit margin. Leonardo’s sketches are magisterial: dynamic and lifelike chargers ready to burst into action. But the project never materialized - for Leonardo or any other sculptor. The tomb remained Trivulzio’s fantasy.

There is evidence, albeit meager, that around age fifty-five, Leonardo had sex with a woman. In the early nineteenth century, artist, critic, and Leonardo aficionado
Giuseppe Bossi
baldly asserted that there had been such a relationship. Arguing that an artist must experience a passion in order to depict it, Bossi wrote: “That Leonardo . . . loved the pleasures of life is proved by a note of his concerning a courtesan called Cremona, a note which was communicated to me by an authoritative source. Nor would it have been possible for him to have understood human nature so deeply, in order to represent it, without becoming, through long practice in it, somewhat tinged with human weakness.”

If Leonardo wrote a note about such a woman, it has been lost, and Bossi said nothing more about his “authoritative source.” The only other hint of
La Cremona
’s existence is a list, in Leonardo’s writing, of his companions on a journey, possibly the trip to Pavia in late 1509 to hear Marcantonio della Torre’s anatomical lectures. Besides identifiable associates including Salai, there is a “chermonese,” Leonardo’s spelling for Cremonese, a native of Cremona. At about the same time, a distinctive new face appears in Leonardo’s studies for the head of Leda and for a series of drawings, reminiscent of the “Mona Lisa,” known as the “Nude Gioconda.” The model for these drawings - in a pose similar to Lisa’s - is nude to the waist.

As evidence, this is circumstantial at best. But it is plausible that Leonardo, with his passion for firsthand knowledge of everything from grinding pigments to dissecting corpses, would be curious about heterosexual love. In his notes, he muses about a spontaneous triggering of desire that appears to refer to a woman.

Meanwhile, the tide of war was on the rise again in northern Italy. Pope Julius II had now turned against his French allies, decreeing that they must be driven out of the country. By the end of 1511, the pope’s Swiss mercenaries were threatening Milan. In April 1512, the French won a tenuous victory at Ravenna, but by year’s end, they had abandoned Milan to Ludovico Sforza’s son
Massimiliano
and the forces of the
Hapsburg
emperor Maximilian, who was in league with the pope.

Still wary of how the returning Sforza might reward his apostasy to Ludovico, Leonardo made himself scarce. He was still on the French king’s payroll, but his patron Charles d’Amboise had died and his purse was a good deal thinner. Now, however, he was safe with friends at the comfortable country house of soldier and engineer Girolamo Melzi on a bend of the
Adda River
near the village of Vaprio. In truth, he was only twenty miles from Milan, but that was far enough.

Melzi was the father of one of Leonardo’s pupils, Francesco Melzi, nicknamed Cecco, who had joined the studio in 1507 and quickly made himself indispensable. He was to become a fine draftsman and painter (he drew a lovely red chalk drawing of Leonardo at about sixty years old), but he functioned primarily as Leonardo’s secretary and scribe. His elegant handwriting appears throughout Leonardo’s notes, copying faded or illegible writing, providing captions and footnotes, and taking dictation from the master. Melzi, an educated aristocrat, had the manners and breeding that Salai so clearly lacked. Leonardo was fond of him, but the relationship was probably not homosexual; in later life, Melzi married one of the most beautiful women in Milan, who bore him eight children.

After Leonardo’s death in 1519, Francesco Melzi became his literary executor, collecting and preserving Leonardo’s papers and generally preserving the flame. Melzi assembled and published the great
Treatise on Painting
that Leonardo promised during his lifetime but never got around to. As we have seen, a good many of Leonardo’s paintings and papers have not survived him, but without Melzi, much more would have been lost.

In retreat at the Villa Melzi in 1512 and early 1513, Leonardo resumed his lifelong study of water, sketching eddies, currents, and complex swirls resembling braided hair. He did a series of anatomical studies, some apparently worked up from sketches made during the Pavia lectures and others from animal dissections done at the villa. There is a self-portrait of the artist at sixty, a drawing that critic Kenneth Clark called not so much a portrait as a self-caricature exaggerating the ruefulness and decrepitude that Leonardo felt on passing another decade. He drew himself sitting with crossed legs, chin resting on a long staff, his beard white, one hand to his forehead, with hooded eyes gazing wistfully into the distance. Cecco Melzi’s red chalk drawing, probably done about the same time, shows a man still handsome and vigorous with an unlined face, steady eyes and a firm mouth. Even allowing for Melzi’s affection for Leonardo, it is probably the better likeness.

Leonardo was in dire need of a patron. French governor of Milan Charles d’Amboise, his friend and benefactor, was dead. King Louis XII was preoccupied with war. Leonardo had sounded out Sforza loyalists as to how the new duke, Massimiliano Sforza, might receive a painter who had served his father’s enemies, but the signs weren’t encouraging. So in the summer of 1513, when he received an invitation from Giuliano de’ Medici to come to Rome and live under his protection, it was a Godsend.

Giuliano and his brother Giovanni, the surviving sons of Lorenzo the Magnificent, had lived in exile in Urbino and Mantua during the turbulent years of Savonarola’s reign and the subsequent Florentine republic. But in the summer of 1512, they staged a bloodless coup to overthrow the republic and regain their heritage. As Gonfalonier Soderini left town by one gate on his way to exile, Giuliano de’ Medici entered by another. His elder brother Giovanni followed with 1,500 soldiers, and Medici’s rule resumed with quiet efficiency. There were no executions; members of the Signoria kept their
palazzi
; no one went to jail.

The corpulent, shrewd Giovanni was a natural leader and a talented administrator. He was also a powerful cardinal on his way to becoming pope, and when he became Pope
Leo X
in March 1513, he decided that his brother, a charming but hardly forceful man in frail health, wasn’t up to ruling Florence. So he gave that job to their cousin
Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici
and took Giuliano to Rome, where Giuliano - festooned with the titles Prince of Modena, Piacenza, and Parma - was given command of the papal armies. He made little impact on the troops, but he was universally liked and admired for his scholarship, courtesy, and taste. He also carried on the Medici heritage as a patron of the arts. Historian
Benedetto Varchi
wrote that Giuliano treated Leonardo “more like a brother than a friend.”

It’s unclear when Leonardo met Giuliano de’ Medici or how well they knew each other. It is possible that they first met in Venice in 1500, and Giuliano had surely seen some of Leonardo’s work, including “The Last Supper” and perhaps the splendid central portion of the “Battle of Anghiari” and the unfinished portrait of Isabella d’Este. When Leonardo and his household arrived in Rome in October 1513, Giuliano assigned architects to alter a suite of apartments for the artist in the Villa Belvedere, the pope’s summer palace.

Rome was then a city of 50,000, considerably smaller than Milan, but notorious for the corruption of the papal court and the licentiousness of the clergy. There were plenty of artists in residence, many of them well known to Leonardo, including Bramante, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo’s former pupil Atalante Migliorotti, but Leonardo’s notebooks contain no record of his friends or of his social life during his two years there.

His notebooks do contain various other correspondence. There are drafts of letters Leonardo wrote trying to persuade papal officials to cough up the benefice owed to his half-brother Giuliano, with whom he was now reconciled. There is also a letter to Giuliano da Vinci from his wife, Alessandra, which Giuliano evidently gave Leonardo because of a line in it: “I forgot to ask you to remember me to your brother Leonardo, a most excellent and singular man.” And there is a grumpy letter from Leonardo to Giuliano de’ Medici, complaining of an ungrateful, unruly, and deceitful German assistant, Giorgio, who had been subverted by another German, Johann the mirror-maker. Leonardo wrote that Johann, jealous of Leonardo’s influence with Giuliano, had talked Giorgio into abandoning the workshop Leonardo had given him and had taken it over for his own mirror works.

Leonardo was exploring what would now be called solar power, the use of parabolic mirrors to focus the sun’s rays; he was struck by the fact that a mirror can reflect heat without absorbing it. He was also busy dissecting corpses again, probably at the hospital of Santo Spirito. Here again, he complained that the spiteful Johann had “hindered me in anatomy, denouncing it before the Pope and also at the Hospital.” Nonetheless, some of Leonardo’s most notable anatomical drawings – especially his studies of fetuses in the womb – date from this period.

The notebooks record the ever-questing scope of Leonardo’s mind. He spent hours over geometric equations and drew long series of “lunes,” figures containing variable spaces formed by intersecting arcs of circles. He experimented in acoustics and hunted for fossils; he recorded bits of his household expenses in the coinage of Rome: “Salai: 20 giuli; for the house: 12 giuli.” His obsession with water continued in half a dozen texts pondering “The Deluge,” which he may have meant to be part of the great treatise on painting that he never wrote or as preparation for actually painting a great flood. “Broken trees loaded with people,” he wrote. “Ships broken in pieces, smashed against rocks. Flocks of sheep; hailstones, thunderbolts, whirlwinds. . . . Hills covered with men, women and animals, and lightning from the clouds illuminating everything.”

With these musings, he left a series of ten drawings in black chalk, depicting the grand sweep and ferocious details of a great flood of water – torrents, erupting waves, vortices and tunnels of water, giant waterspouts, devouring whirlpools, the shattering impact of monstrous waves. Together, the drawings are a tour de force, an effort both to understand and to depict the full fury of nature. Such a painting would have been an even more ambitious project than his attempt to show the horror of war in the
Battle of Anghiari
.

But the aging Leonardo - his beard turning white and his eyes needing spectacles – didn’t paint it. In a letter to Giuliano de’ Medici, who was suffering from consumption, he mentioned an unspecified “malady” that may have been a minor stroke; a visitor in 1517 noted that Leonardo’s right hand was paralyzed. That wouldn’t have hindered the left-handed Leonardo in drawing and painting, but it might well have slowed him down and ruled out any major new projects.

He did complete two paintings in Rome – probably the last of his career. Both, now in the Louvre, depicted a young, somewhat androgynous John the Baptist. In one, usually called “St. John in the Desert,” he is sitting under a tree in a wild place, his right arm crossed over his chest with the forefinger extended. In details that may have been added to the painting long after Leonardo’s death, St. John is wearing a panther-skin loincloth and a crown of grape leaves, leading some critics to call the picture “St. John with the Attributes of Bacchus.” The other painting, more powerful but uneasily ambiguous, shows the naked torso of the saint against a dark background, again with his right arm crossed over his chest, but now with the forefinger pointed to the sky. The faces in both paintings show the same features, but the half-length St. John has a subtle smile as mysterious as Mona Lisa’s. This painting may well have been commissioned by Pope Leo; the pope did order a work by Leonardo. But when he heard that the artist was distilling oils for the varnish he would use on the painting, the pope complained, “Alas, this man will never do anything, because he starts to think of the end before he has even begun the work.”

The pose of the half-length “St. John” may have evolved from a sketch of an announcing angel – Gabriel – dating from about 1505, with the right arm pointing to the sky and the left touching the chest. The sketch may have been done by Salai, but the position of the pointing arm was corrected in Leonardo’s hand. But the evolution of the drawing was not filled out until 1991, when another sketch turned up in a private collection – the notorious drawing now known as the “Angelo Incarnato,” or angel made flesh.

In this version, the right arm is still upright, but the left hand, with feminine grace, holds a veil of filmy fabric against the chest, and below, a large erection clearly appears through the veil (though someone has smudged it slightly, apparently trying to erase it). The figure has the head and face given to St. John in both paintings, but the expression has been transformed: The cheeks are gaunter, suggesting illness; the eyes are large and pleading; the smile is a sly invitation. In this context, the arm is no longer announcing but beckoning. The drawing is disturbing, verging on pornography.

The finished painting of the half-length
St. John
has none of this lurid quality. The right arm has been crossed over the chest, half hiding the overly graceful fingers of the left hand; the face glows, softened and deepened by fine layers of the varnish that vexed the pope. But the androgyny and mystery of the painting remain – and the effect is highlighted by the uneasy knowledge of the
Angelo Incarnato
.

Leonardo was part of the pope’s entourage when Leo traveled to Bologna and Florence in October 1515 to meet the new French king. Only twenty-one years old, Francis had taken the throne when Louis XII, his cousin and father-in-law, died without a male heir, and Francis had recently proved himself by defeating the Sforzas’ Swiss mercenaries in the
Battle of Marignano
. The new king had long admired his father-in-law’s paintings by Leonardo and had seen “
The Last Supper
.” In addition, he had been presented with a mechanical lion constructed by Leonardo when Francis met Giuliano de’ Medici the previous July.

There is no record of their first meeting or any trace of a royal invitation to Leonardo. But in the late summer or early fall of 1516, about six months after his patron Giuliano de’ Medici died of consumption, Leonardo and his entourage left Rome on the long journey to Francis’ court at
Amboise
, in the valley of the
Loire
. They probably stopped over in Milan, where Salai stayed for a while in Leonardo’s garden; Salai would rejoin the household only from time to time after that. In Amboise, the king gave Leonardo a home, an elegant manor-house half a mile from the royal residence, together with a generous pension. From then on, Leonardo was to be formally titled the
paintre du Roi
. He was also to be the king’s friend.

Francis was a tall, vigorous man, with a wide-ranging curiosity and an enormous nose. He was also charming, with a reputation as a ladies’ man. The Italian traveler Antonio de Beatis wrote that Francis “is lascivious and enjoys entering the gardens of others to drink different waters.” Francis was overwhelmed by Leonardo, and not only for his artistic talents.
Benvenuto Cellini
, who worked for Francis years later, wrote that the king “was completely besotted” with Leonardo’s mind “and took such pleasure in hearing him discourse that there were few days in the year when he was parted from him, which was one of the reasons why Leonardo did not manage to pursue to the end his miraculous studies.” Cellini said Francis told him “he could never believe there was another man born in this world who knew as much as Leonardo, and not only of sculpture, painting and architecture, and that he was truly a great philosopher.”

Now sixty-five, Leonardo was looking and feeling older; the great self-portrait now in the Biblioteca Reale in Turin shows him white-haired and stooped, with a deeply lined face and a thousand-yard stare, but still alert and on the lookout for a new idea. He spent much of his time rearranging his papers and making geometrical studies and sketches of moving water. Occasionally, he would still draw a striking face or a floor plan. But in 1517, he told the visiting Antonio de Beatis that he had stopped painting. (It was Beatis, traveling with Cardinal Luigi of Aragon, who recorded Leonardo’s story of the “Mona Lisa” being commissioned by Giuliano de’ Medici.)

Leonardo did launch a major project for the king: plans for a huge new palace complex at
Romorantin
, some thirty miles to the east of Amboise, and a network of canals to be built between the Loire and the
Saone
. None of this got built, but Leonardo’s drawings of the palace resembled the “ideal city” he first visualized in Milan thirty years before.

He also had a fresh, enthusiastic audience for his talents as an impresario, and he provided a series of tableaus, masques, and pageants for Francis and his court. Back in Mantua, Isabella d’Este still kept tabs on Leonardo, and she got a lavish description of the triumphal arch he set up for a double feast marking the baptism of the king’s first son and the wedding of the royal niece to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, now Duke of Florence. For a pageant honoring Francis’ victory at the Battle of Marignano, Leonardo rigged huge mortars to fire inflated balloons that drifted down on the entranced audience and bounced merrily on the ground. In 1518, Leonardo threw a party of his own for the king in the gardens of his manor house, with a vast canopy of blue cloth spangled with golden stars hanging over the royal dais. The show repeated the
Paradiso
Leonardo had first conjured up in 1490, with actors representing the planets and hundreds of torches blazing.

We will leave him there, master of the revels, pleased with the impact of his pageant and the delight of his royal guest. Leonardo lived for another year, apparently in failing health; he drew up his will in April 1519, leaving his papers to the faithful Melzi, his Milanese garden to Salai, a fur-lined cloak to his housekeeper, and a remembrance for his half-brothers in Florence.