Leonardo Da Vinci Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  LEONARDO DA VINCI

  ‘Witty, penetrating… this is a wise and moving book’ David Gelernter, The New York Times

  ‘Quick. Put down The Da Vinci Code and pick up this treasure-trove of material about the Renaissance sage. You’ll feel smarter in the morning… Charles Nicholl’s gloriously rendered portrait is rich in detail and a warm piece of storytelling’ Lisa Jennifer Selzman, Houston Chronicle

  ‘Part of the beguiling thrill of Charles Nicholl’s biography is the manner in which he meticulously salvages the fragmentary evidence, the missing half-lines… This gripping, beautifully designed biography is scholarship at its most accessible, and demotic’ Jasper Rees, Daily Telegraph

  ‘It is no small part of Charles Nicholl’s achievement that his Leonardo, though a genius, is thoroughly and convincingly human, likeable and, in many important respects, an exemplary person’ Aidan Dunne, Irish Times

  ‘Nicholl conjures up a fresh image of the artist… a book that no student or scholar of Leonardo should be without’ Art Newspaper

  ‘Clearly written by someone who is as fascinated by Leonardo as by the Italy he once inhabited, this book takes us into the mind of a man who never stopped asking why’ Royal Academy Magazine

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Charles Nicholl has spent many years studying Leonardo’s notebooks and manuscripts to create this portrait of the artist. He is the author of nine books of history, biography and travel, including the celebrated The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlow (winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography, and the Crime Writers’ Association ‘Gold Dagger’ Award for non-fiction), Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa (winner of the Hawthornden Prize), The Fruit Palace and The Creature in the Map. He has presented two documentaries for British television, and has lectured in Britain, Italy and the United States. He lives in Italy with his wife and children.

  CHARLES NICHOLL

  Leonardo da Vinci

  The Flights of the Mind

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  Published by Allen Lane 2004

  Published in Penguin Books 2005

  16

  Copyright © Charles Nicholl, 2004

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-194424-1

  For Kit –

  ‘L’inglesino’

  How could you describe this heart in words

  without filling a whole book?

  Note written by Leonardo da Vinci beside

  an anatomical drawing of the heart, c. 1513

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Introduction: The Cooling of the Soup

  PART ONE

  Childhood: 1452–1466

  Birth

  The da Vinci

  Caterina

  ‘My first memory…’

  At the Mill

  Speaking with Animals

  The ‘Madonna of the Snow’

  Education

  PART TWO

  Apprenticeship: 1466–1477

  The City

  Renaissance Men

  Andrea’s Bottega

  Learning the Trade

  Spectaculars

  On the Lantern

  First Paintings

  The Dragon

  Ginevra

  The Saltarelli Affair

  ‘Companions in Pistoia’

  PART THREE

  Independence: 1477–1482

  Leonardo’s Studio

  The Hanged Man

  Zoroastro

  The Technologist

  ‘Poets in a Hurry’

  The Musician

  St Jerome and the Lion

  The Gardens of the Medici

  The Adoration

  Leaving

  PART FOUR

  New Horizons: 1482–1490

  Milan

  Expatriates and Artists

  The Virgin of the Rocks

  Ways of Escape

  The First Notebooks

  Tall Tales, Small Puzzles

  Architectural Projects

  The Moor’s Mistress

  The Milanese Studio

  The Anatomist

  The Sforza Horse

  At the Corte Vecchia

  PART FIVE

  At Court: 1490–1499

  Theatricals

  ‘Of shadow and light’

  Little Devil

  Hunting Bears

  Casting the Horse

  ‘Caterina came…’

  Echoes of War

  The Making of the Last Supper

  The ‘Academy’

  Leonardo’s Garden

  ‘Sell what you cannot take…’

  PART SIX

  On the Move: 1500–1506

  Mantua and Venice

  Back in Florence

  The Insistent Marchioness

  Borgia

  Autumn in Imola

  A Letter to the Sultan

  Moving the River

  Mistress Lisa

  The Anghiari Fresco (I)

  Michelangelo

  A Death and a Journey

  The Anghiari Fresco (II)

  The Spirit of the Bird

  PART SEVEN

  Return to Milan: 1506–1513

  The Governor

  ‘Good day, Master Francesco…’

  Brothers at War

  Dissections

  Back in the Studio

  The World and Its Waters

  Fêtes Milanaises

  La Cremona

  The ‘Medical Schools’

  Chez Melzi

  Portrait of the Artist at Sixty

  PART EIGHT

  Last Years: 1513–1519

  Heading South

  At the Belvedere

  The Baptist and the Bacchus

  The Deluge

  Sickness, Deception, Mirrors

  Last Visit to Florence

  Maistre Lyenard

  The Cardinal Calls

  ‘Night was chased away’

  The Great Sea

  Notes

  Sources

  Illustrations

  Index

  Author’s Note

  A note on currencies and measurements. The reader will find a confusing range of Renaissance currencies here. The imperial lira, divi
ded into 20 soldi of 12 denari each (like the £.s.d. of pre-decimal Britain), was a benchmark of sorts, but throughout Italy regional coinage was minted: florins, ducats, scudi, giuli, etc. For much of the period covered in this book, the Florentine florin and the Venetian ducat were worth around 4 lire. These are the three currencies chiefly used by Leonardo da Vinci.

  To give some broad guidelines of value, in late-fifteenth-century Milan 1 lira would buy a month’s supply of bread for a family of four, or 12 pounds of veal, or 20 bottles of country-wine, or 2½ pounds of candle-wax, or just over a pound of that luxury item, sugar. In the 1490s Leonardo purchased a 600-page book on mathematics, in folio, for 6 lire, and a silver cloak with green velvet trim for 15 lire. A fine horse cost 40 ducats or 160 lire. In Florence a building worker earned 2 florins a month, and a senior civil servant in the Signoria 11 florins a month. The great mansions of the Medici and the Strozzi cost in the region of 30,000 florins to build. In a tax return, Cosimo de’ Medici declared assets of over 100,000 florins, and one may imagine that this was an understatement.

  A measurement of length frequently used by Leonardo is the braccio. The word means ‘arm’, and is thus equivalent to the old English ell (no longer in use as a measure but still heard in ‘elbow’, which is where your ell bows). According to one interpretation, a Florentine braccio was 55.1 cm (21.6 inches) and a Milanese braccio 59.4 cm (23.4 inches), but some calculations in one of Leonardo’s notebooks work out at 61.2 cm (24.1 inches) per braccio. I have rounded these out to a general conversion rate of 1 braccio = 2 feet. In measurements of distance Leonardo uses the miglia (mile) of a thousand passi (paces).

  A staio, or bushel, was a volumetric measure for crops, but is met here as a measurement of land-area. A staio of land was a plot capable of producing 1 staio of barley per annum. Judging from tenancy agreements of the period (rent being paid in the form of produce), this was reckoned as about half an acre.

  Translations from Leonardo’s Italian are in general my own, though I have of course consulted the admirable translations of Jean Paul Richter, Edward MacCurdy, A. P. McMahon, Martin Kemp, Margaret Walker and Carlo Pedretti. Large parts of Leonardo’s text remain untranslated into English. George Bull’s translation of Vasari’s Lives has been extremely helpful, though I have diverged from it in small points of interpretation.

  In giving brief quotations in Italian I tend to give Leonardo’s phrasing as he spelt it, which seems to be part of its timbre. I make the customary modifications for readability: i for archaic j; contractions expanded; elisions separated, etc. Sometimes, however, his spelling is too opaque to make much sense in a brief extract. Quotations from Italian poems of the period are given in the original spelling. In most other cases I have modernized.

  I have also modernized dates. The Florentine calendar was still reckoned from 25 March (the Feast of the Annunciation, or Lady Day), so an event dated 1 February 1480 in a Florentine document actually occurred two months after an event dated 1 December 1480; here this date would be given in modern reckoning, as 1 February 1481.

  My research for this book has been greatly assisted by staff at the Biblioteca Leonardiana in Vinci, the British Institute and the Archivio di Stato in Florence, the Biblioteca Statale in Lucca, the British Library, the Royal Library at Windsor, and (by no means least) the London Library. My thanks also to Antonio Natali, Alfio del Serra, Gianni Masucci, the Hon. Jane Roberts, Lauro Martines, Gordon Wetherell, Christie Brown, Bernie Sahlins and Liz Donnelly. I am grateful to Mrs Drue Heinz for the provision of a Writer’s Fellowship at Hawthornden Castle, to the staff there, and to my fellow Fellows, who heard the first of these pages newly minted. I owe the genesis of this book to David Godwin, and its eventual fruition to my editor Stuart Proffitt, picture-editor Cecilia Mackay and copy-editor Bob Davenport, and also Liz Friend-Smith and Richard Duguid. Other debts are too numerous to record except in the broadest of ringraziamenti – to the people of the Compitese, who welcomed us; to my children, who boldly shared this Italian adventure; and to Sally, who makes it all possible.

  Charles Nicholl

  Corte Briganti

  August 2004

  Introduction: The Cooling of the Soup

  In the Department of Manuscripts at the British Library is a sheet of geometrical notes by Leonardo da Vinci. It is one of his last pieces of writing: it probably dates from 1518, the year before he died. The paper is a dingy grey but the ink remains clear. There are some diagrams, and beside them a neatly blocked text written in his habitual, right-to-left ‘mirror-script’. It is not, on the face of it, one of Leonardo’s most exciting manuscripts, unless you happen to be an aficionado of Renaissance geometry. But it repays attention: it has a little twist in its tail. Three-quarters of the way down the page the text breaks off with an abrupt ‘etcetera’. The last line looks like part of the theorem – the handwriting has hardly wavered at all – but what it actually says is ‘perche la minesstra si fredda’. He has left off writing ‘because the soup is getting cold’.1

  There are other small nuggets of domestic detail in Leonardo’s manuscripts, but this is the one I like best. It is not that it tells us a great deal: that Leonardo ate a bowl of lukewarm soup on a day in 1518 hardly qualifies as an important piece of biographical data. What seems to make it special is a quality of surprise, of casualness. Into the dry abstractions of his geometrical studies has intruded this moment of simple, daily humanity. One sees an old man at a table, intently writing. In another room one sees a bowl of soup, intently steaming. Probably it is vegetable soup, for in later life Leonardo was a vegetarian. Probably it has been cooked by his serving-woman, Mathurine, to whom he would soon bequeath a ‘coat of fine black cloth lined with fur’ in recognition of her ‘good service’.2 Is it she who calls to Leonardo da Vinci to tell him his soup is getting cold? He continues to write for a few moments longer – the time it takes to write ‘perche la minesstra si fredda’ – and then he puts down his pen.

  There is also a hint of foreboding. As far as one can tell he never did return to these notes, and so this minor interruption seems to foreshadow the more definitive one soon to come. We might call this undistinguished-looking page ‘Leonardo’s last theorem’– yet another unfinished project. The great enterprise of inquiry and exposition to which he has devoted his life tails off with this throwaway joke, this one-liner about the imperatives of dinner-time.

  For the biographer, such glimpses behind the scenes are heartening. Leonardo was an extraordinary man, but his life constantly intersected with ordinariness, and it is perhaps at those points of intersection that the biographer – that emissary sent out from the ordinary world – can make some kind of contact with him. There are all those complexities and profundities and world-famous paintings to grapple with, all those things that make Leonardo uniquely Leonardo, but here at least he is, for a moment, someone much like the rest of us.

  It is the task of this book to try to recover something of Leonardo the man – that is, Leonardo the real man, who lived in real time and ate real bowls of soup, as opposed to Leonardo the superhuman, multi-disciplinary ‘Universal Man’ with whom we are more habitually presented. They are one and the same, of course, and the story of his life is only another way of approaching his formidable and ultimately mysterious greatness as an artist, scientist and philosopher, but I think it is important to get away from the hagiographic idea of the universal genius. I am encouraged in this by some words of Leonardo himself. In one of his profezie, or prophecies – which are essentially riddles cast in a prophetic mode – he writes, ‘There will appear gigantic figures in human shape, but the nearer you get to them, the more their immense stature will diminish.’3 The answer to the riddle is ‘the shadow cast by a man at night with a lamp’, but I like to think that the answer might also be Leonardo da Vinci, whom I approach through the darkness, nervously hoping that his immense stature will diminish to human dimensions.

  To write a book about Leonardo without once using the word ‘genius’ wou
ld be a feat worthy of the French author Georges Perec, who contrived to write a book without using the letter e. I have not expunged it entirely – it can be a useful translation of the Italian ingegno, which is often used in the Renaissance to mean something more than mere ‘talent’ or ‘intelligence’ – but it is a word to be used very sparingly. It can so easily obscure the humanity of those thus described. It celebrates their achievements as a species of marvel or miracle, which is partly true but mostly unhelpful. What Leonardo did is indeed miraculous, but one wants to ask how and why he did it, and not to have some foggy, semi-mystical idea of ‘inspiration’ provided as the answer. Shakespeare’s admirers liked to claim he ‘never blotted’ a line, to which Ben Jonson countered robustly, ‘Would he had blotted a thousand’4 – he was, in other words, a superb poet but not an infallible one; his genius lay in the extent to which he overcame his fallibilities. Jonson added, ‘I do honour his memory, on this side idolatry,’ which is surely the best location for the biographer to be based. Of course Leonardo was a genius, but the term tends towards the idolatrous, and runs counter to his own rigorous and sceptical turn of mind, and so I avoid it.

  Somewhat connected with the stereotype of genius is that of the ‘Renaissance man’. I am not one who argues that the Renaissance ‘never happened’: it is a perfectly useful overview term to describe the cultural changes which took place in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (or, in the Italian reckoning, the Quattrocento and the Cinquecento). But again there are clichés to beware of. We think of the Renaissance as a time of great intellectual optimism: a ‘new dawn’ of reason, a shaking-off of superstition, a broadening of horizons. Viewed from the vantage-point of the late nineteenth century, which is when this rather triumphalist reading took definitive shape, it was all of these things. But what was it like while it was happening? The old beliefs are crumbling; it is a time of rapid transition, of venal political strife, of economic boom and bust, of outlandish reports from hitherto unknown corners of the world. The experience of the Renaissance – not yet defined by that word, not yet accounted a ‘rebirth’ – is perhaps one of disruption as much as optimism. The palpable excitement of the period is laced with danger. All the rule-books are being rewritten. If everything is possible, nothing is certain: there is a kind of philosophical vertigo implicit in this.