Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance

Early Development: 1452–1482

The most attractive individual of the Renaissance period was born on April 15, 1452, near the village of Vinci, about a hundred kilometers from Florence. His mother was a peasant girl named Caterina who did not bother with a legal marriage to his father. His seducer, Piero d'Antonio, was a relatively wealthy notary. In the year Leonardo was born to his mother, Piero married a woman of his own social rank. Caterina had to content herself with a peasant husband; she handed over her illegitimate child to Piero and his wife, and Leonardo, without maternal affection, was raised in a semi-aristocratic environment. Perhaps it was in early childhood that love of fine clothing and aversion to women appeared in him.

He entered a school near home. With great love he devoted himself to mathematics, music, and drawing, and delighted his father by singing and playing the lute. To paint well he examined every object in nature with curiosity, patience, and precision. Science and art, which were strangely blended in his mind, had only one foundation: precise observation. When he was fifteen, his father took him to Verrocchio's workshop in Florence and persuaded that skilled artist to accept him as an apprentice. Almost all educated people know Vasari's story about Leonardo painting an angel on the left side of Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ and how the master was so enchanted by the beauty of that angel that he gave up painting and took up sculpture. Perhaps the story of this change of profession was invented after Verrocchio's death. Verrocchio painted several pictures after the Baptism of Christ. Perhaps it was during his apprenticeship days that Leonardo painted the Annunciation (Louvre) with its unattractive angel and anxious Virgin. It seems unlikely that he learned delicacy from Verrocchio.

Meanwhile, Ser Piero grew richer: he bought several estates, moved his family to Florence (1469), and successively took four wives. The second wife was only ten years older than Leonardo. When Piero's third wife bore him a child, Leonardo left home and went to Verrocchio, reducing the overcrowding. In that year (1472) he joined the Guild of Saint Luke. The center of this guild or union, composed mainly of apothecaries, physicians, and artists, was at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Probably Leonardo there gained an opportunity to study internal and external anatomy. Perhaps in that year he—or someone else—drew the emaciated anatomical image of Saint Jerome, now in the Vatican Gallery and attributed to him. It is also possible that near 1474 he painted the beautiful and lively but unfinished Annunciation now in the Uffizi.

A week before his twenty-fourth birthday, Leonardo and three other young men were summoned before the Florentine city council to answer a charge of sodomy. The result of this trial is unknown. On June 7, 1476, the accusation was renewed; the investigating committee imprisoned Leonardo for a time, then acquitted and released him for lack of evidence. But Leonardo was undoubtedly homosexual. As soon as he could establish his own workshop, he gathered beautiful youths around him and took some of them with him on his travels from city to city; in his notebooks, when speaking of them, he called some “most beloved” or “dearest.” We know nothing of his intimate relations with these youths, but some passages in his notes show his aversion to sexual relations of any kind. Leonardo, perhaps rightly, wondered why, in a time when homosexuality was very common in Italy, only he and a few others were accused of it. He never forgave the rulers of Florence for the insult they had done him.

Apparently he himself took the matter more seriously than the city authorities. A year after the accusation, he was invited to take charge of a workshop in the Medici garden. He accepted the invitation; in 1478 the city council asked him to paint the chapel of San Bernardo in the Palazzo Vecchio. But for some reason he did not carry out this commission; Ghirlandaio undertook the work; Filippino Lippi completed it. Nevertheless, the board soon gave him and Botticelli another commission. This commission consisted of painting the images of two men who had been hanged for conspiring against Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici. Perhaps Leonardo, with his half-morbid interest in physical defects and human suffering, was somewhat attracted by this repulsive commission.

But in truth he was interested in everything. All movements and gestures of the body and expressions of the human face, all motions of animals and plants from the waving of wheat stalks in the field to the flight of birds, the ups and downs of mountains, the waves and currents of water and wind, atmospheric revolutions and the various states of the sky—all these were wonderfully astonishing to him. Repetition of no attitude made its magic and mystery tedious for him; he filled thousands of pages of paper with descriptions of his observations of various forms and drew countless panels with thousands of diverse shapes. When the monks of San Scopeto asked him to paint an image for their chapel (1481), he chose the Adoration of the Magi and became so absorbed in the details of its design that he never finished the picture.

Nevertheless this panel is one of his greatest works. The design he made for the picture fully conformed to the principles of geometric perspective; he divided the surface of the picture into squares that regularly and with precise proportion grew smaller—Leonardo's mathematical knowledge always competed with his painting art and sometimes cooperated with it. But Leonardo's art was so powerful that it always triumphed in the struggle with science; in this case too art prevailed: the Virgin in this picture had an attitude and expression that is seen in all Leonardo's works from beginning to end; the Magi are painted with the excessive knowledge of a young artist, according to the temperament of the followers; and the “philosopher” on the left side of the picture has the expression of a half-skeptical thinker, as if the painter, as soon as he took up the pen, had reviewed the story of Christianity with a skeptical yet faithful spirit from beginning to end. Around these figures almost fifty people have gathered, as if every kind of man and woman had rushed to the manger to eagerly understand the meaning of life and the light of the world and discover the secret of life in a great collection of births.

This unfinished masterpiece, which has almost faded with the passage of time, is installed in the Uffizi in Florence; but it was Filippino Lippi who executed the painting acceptable to the Scopeto brothers. Leonardo's habit, except in a few exceptional cases, was to think very loftily; to immerse himself in testing details; and beyond the subject, to bring countless perspectives of human, animal, and plant forms, architectural images, rocks and mountains, and streams and clouds and trees into the realm of imagination; to be more attracted to the philosophy of the picture than to its technical perfection; and above all to leave the lesser work of coloring the images that had thus been created to reveal the meaning to others; and then, after much mental and physical toil, to fall into despair at the inadequacy of hand and tools in expressing the dream of perfection: except in a few exceptional cases, Leonardo's temperament and destiny were like this from beginning to end.

In Milan: 1482–1499

In the letter that Leonardo sent to Ludovico, regent of Milan, in 1482, there was no hesitation and no reference to the merciless brevity of time; what was evident in it was the boundless ambition of a thirty-year-old man in whom many forces had accumulated and were seeking an outlet to reach lofty goals. He had grown tired of life in Florence; he wanted to see new places and new people whose images he had visualized in his imagination. He had heard that Ludovico needed a military engineer, an architect, a sculptor, and a painter; and he decided to introduce himself as all of them; therefore he wrote the following letter to him:

To the most illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently seen and considered the proofs of all those who count themselves masters and inventors of instruments of war, and finding that their invention and use does not differ in any respect from those in common practice, I shall endeavor, without prejudice to anyone else, to make myself known to Your Excellency for the purpose of unfolding to you my secrets, and thereafter offering myself at your pleasure effectually to demonstrate at any convenient time all those matters which are in part briefly recorded below:
1. I have plans for very light and strong bridges, suitable for carrying very heavy loads...
2. When a place is besieged, I know how to cut off water from the trenches and make an infinite number of bridges, scaling-ladders, and other instruments...
4. I have plans for making cannon, very convenient and easy to carry, with which to hurl small stones in the manner almost of hail...
5. If the fight is at sea, I have plans for many engines for both attack and defense, and ships that can resist the fire of the heaviest cannon, powder, and smoke.
6. Also I have ways of arriving at a certain fixed spot by caverns and secret winding passages, made without any noise, even though it be necessary to pass underneath trenches or a river.
7. Also I can make covered cars, safe and unassailable, which will enter among the enemy with their artillery, and there is no body of men so great that they will not break their ranks.
8. In case of need, I can make cannon, mortars, and light ordnance of very beautiful and useful shape, quite different from those in common use.
9. Where the use of cannon is impracticable, I can supply catapults, mangonels, trabocchi, and other engines of wonderful efficacy not in general use.
10. In time of peace I believe I can give as complete satisfaction as anyone else in architecture, in the construction of both public and private buildings, and in conducting water from one place to another.
Also I can execute sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay; and in painting I can do as much as any other, be he who he may.
Moreover, I would undertake the work of the bronze horse, which shall perpetuate with immortal glory and eternal honor the auspicious memory of the Prince your father and of the illustrious house of Sforza.
And if any of the aforesaid things should seem impossible or impracticable to anyone, I offer myself as ready to make trial of them in your park or in whatever place shall please Your Excellency, to whom I commend myself with all possible humility.

We do not know what Ludovico answered, but Leonardo arrived in Milan in 1482 or 1483 and soon found his way into Ludovico's heart. According to one account, Lorenzo sent him as a political representative to Ludovico to present him with a beautiful lute. Another account says that he won a music competition at Ludovico's court and was accepted there not for the services he had proposed “with all possible humility” to “that court,” but for his sweet voice, enchanting eloquence, and the sweet sound of the lute he had made with his own hand in the shape of a horse's head. Ludovico apparently kept Leonardo at his court not for the excellences he had claimed for himself in his letter, but as a talented young man—although he was less than Bramante in architecture and did not have enough experience to be used in military engineering—he could arrange entertainments with dance and song for the court, decorate the dresses of princesses or court mistresses, adorn walls with beautiful designs, paint portraits of courtiers, and perhaps build waterways to improve the irrigation of the Lombard plain. It distresses us to know that this highly talented man had to spend his precious time making belts for Beatrice d'Este, Ludovico's beautiful wife, designing costumes for festivals and tournaments, or decorating stables. But from a Renaissance artist one had to expect that, in the intervals between serious works, he would also attend to such matters; Bramante also participated in these courtly amusements. Who knows, perhaps Leonardo's aesthetic nature took pleasure in designing women's dresses and ornaments, and his equestrian taste was satisfied by painting swift horses on stable walls. He decorated the ballroom of the Castello for Beatrice's wedding, built a special bath for her, constructed a beautiful pavilion in the palace garden for her summer recreation, and decorated several other rooms for court ceremonies. He painted portraits of Ludovico, Beatrice, and their children, as well as of Ludovico's mistresses, Cecilia Gallerani and Lucrezia Crivelli; all these portraits, except one called La Belle Ferronnière in the Louvre which is said to be of Lucrezia, have been lost. Vasari, speaking of the family portraits in the Milan court, calls them “astonishing,” and a portrait of Lucrezia inspired a poet to compose an ardent ode on her beauty and the skill of the painter.

Perhaps Cecilia was Leonardo's model for the Virgin of the Rocks. The contract for this picture was drawn up in 1483 for the central part of the altarpiece of the church of San Francesco. The original version of this picture was later purchased by Francis I and is now in the Louvre. In front of it is the face of a tender mother that Leonardo used several times in his later works; an angel that reminds one of the Baptism of Christ in Verrocchio's picture; two beautiful children drawn with great skill; and a background of overhanging half-suspended rocks that only Leonardo could imagine as the dwelling of the Virgin. The colors of this picture have darkened with time, but perhaps the painter deliberately wanted to create a dark effect and veil his picture in a misty atmosphere that the Italians call sfumato or softening. This is one of Leonardo's greatest pictures, ranking only below The Last Supper, the Mona Lisa, and the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.

The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa are the most famous pictures in the world. Every day and every year visitors to the church of Santa Maria enter its refectory, which contains Leonardo's most precious works. In that simple square building the Dominican friars, attached to Ludovico's favorite church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, ate their meals. Shortly after Leonardo's arrival in Milan, Ludovico asked him to paint The Last Supper on the farthest wall of this refectory. For three years (1495–1498) Leonardo worked on this picture from time to time with seriousness or calm, while the duke and the friars grew impatient with his delay. The prior of the monastery (if Vasari's account is to be believed) complained to Ludovico about Leonardo's apparent slowness and wondered why he sometimes sat for hours in front of the wall without the slightest movement. Leonardo explained to the duke that the most important work of the artist is more in thinking about it than in executing it, but it was not easy for the duke to make this clear to the prior. According to Vasari, the narrator of this anecdote, “Men of genius do their greatest work when they work least.” Leonardo told Ludovico that in this case there were two difficulties—one was imagining expressions worthy of God, and the other was painting the face of a hard-hearted man like Judas. Perhaps the latter part of this sentence was a subtle hint to the prior that his face could be used as a model for the face of Judas Iscariot. Leonardo searched all Milan for faces that might be used in the picture of the apostles and from among hundreds of physiognomies selected those he needed and transformed them in the mint of his art into unique faces that formed the astonishing basis of this masterpiece heading toward destruction. Sometimes he would hurry from the streets of the city or his workshop to the monastery refectory, make one or two brushstrokes on the picture, and leave again.

The subject was very noble, but it had considerable defects from a painter's point of view. One great defect was that all the figures in the picture were men and there was no woman among them to soften the roughness of the men with her grace; another was that a very poor table was set and the scene of the picture was nothing but a dimly lit small room with a limited view; and there was no violent action that would give movement to the men and animate the picture. Leonardo sketched a small landscape beyond the three windows behind Jesus, and to make the picture relatively lively he chose the critical moment when the apostles had gathered around Jesus to learn who was the one whose betrayal he had foretold. Each of them asked him with terror or wonder: “Is it I?” Leonardo could have chosen the narrative account of the Eucharist for his picture, but this would have given a silent and lifeless dignity to all thirteen figures and made the picture lifeless. But, on the contrary, there is more than a violent physical action in this work; a kind of spiritual examination and revelation is hidden in it, and no artist has ever succeeded in embodying spiritual states to this extent in one picture. Leonardo had prepared several preliminary sketches for the apostles. Some of these sketches were so delicate and effective that only the works of Rembrandt and Michelangelo could compete with them. While struggling to understand the expressions of Christ, Leonardo realized that his imaginative power had been entirely spent on the apostles. According to Lomazzo's account (1557), Tessaglia, Leonardo's old friend, advised him to leave Christ's face unfinished, saying: “For Christ it is really impossible to imagine a more beautiful and noble face than that of James the Greater or James the Less. Therefore accept your failure and leave your Christ unfinished, for otherwise, when compared with the apostles, he will not be their savior or lord.” Leonardo accepted this advice, and with one of his pupils made the famous sketch for the head of Christ that now exists in the Brera Gallery. But this sketch, instead of showing bold resignation and Jesus' entry into Gethsemane, represents a feminine sorrow. Perhaps if Leonardo had possessed more piety and faith to add to his deep sensitivity and mastery, he might have brought the picture closer to perfection.

Since Leonardo was not only an artist but also a thinker, he avoided fresco as an enemy of thought; for this kind of painting had to be done quickly on fresh, wet plaster and finished before the plaster dried. Leonardo preferred to paint his pictures with colors dissolved in a gelatinous substance on dry plaster, because this method enabled him to apply sufficient thought and experiment. But these colors did not adhere properly to the wall; even in Leonardo's own time, due to the ordinary humidity of the refectory and heavy rains that sometimes soaked the back and allowed more moisture to penetrate inside, the picture gradually separated from the wall and crumbled; in 1556 when Vasari saw the picture, and sixty years later when Lomazzo observed it, it had deteriorated so much that it seemed irreparable; the monastery friars later helped its destruction by making a door to the kitchen through the feet of the apostles (1656). The engraved printed copies of this picture that have been published throughout the world and represent Leonardo's work were not taken from the original picture but from an incomplete copy made by one of Leonardo's pupils named Marco d'Oggiono. Today one can only examine the composition and general design of Leonardo's picture, and it is difficult to discern the chiaroscuro and details. But whatever the defects of Leonardo's work when he abandoned it, some experts recognized upon seeing it that it was the greatest product of the Renaissance up to that time.

At the same time (1483) Leonardo had undertaken a work that was different from the picture in question and much more difficult than it. Ludovico had long wanted to perpetuate the memory of his father Francesco Sforza with an equestrian statue comparable to Donatello's Gattamelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Colleoni in Venice. When Leonardo heard of this subject, his lofty ambition was stirred. He immediately studied the physical structure, bodily actions, and nature of the horse and prepared a hundred drawings of this animal, all very spirited. Shortly afterward he began making a clay model of the horse. When several citizens of Piacenza asked him to recommend an artist to design and cast some bronze doors for their church, he replied according to his habit: “No one but Leonardo the Florentine is worthy of this work, and since he has begun the work of the bronze horse for Duke Francesco, which will take a lifetime to complete and I do not think he will ever succeed in finishing it, it is better to dispense with him.” Sometimes Ludovico also thought this way about the statue; therefore he asked Lorenzo to request another artist to complete the work (1489). Lorenzo, like Leonardo, did not think anyone was better suited for this work than Leonardo himself.

Finally in 1493 the clay model of the statue was completed; the only work that remained was casting it in bronze. This model was installed under a triumphal arch in November of that year to adorn the path of the procession for the wedding of Bianca Maria, Ludovico's niece. The people were astonished at the size and grandeur of this statue. The horse and rider together were 8 meters high; poets composed odes in its praise and no one doubted that when cast in bronze it would surpass the masterpieces of Donatello and Verrocchio. But it was never cast. Apparently Ludovico did not have enough money for the fifty tons of bronze needed to cast the statue. When the French took Milan (1499), their crossbowmen used the clay statue as a target and damaged several places on it. In 1501 Louis XII expressed a desire to take it to France as war booty. After that nothing more was heard of the statue.

This great failure saddened and wearied Leonardo for some time and perhaps also disturbed his relations with the duke. Ludovico usually paid his artists well; a cardinal was greatly astonished when he heard that Leonardo, in addition to many gifts and benefits, received an annual salary of 2,000 ducats (equivalent to 25,000 dollars). This artist lived like nobles: he had several apprentices, servants, a house for pupils, and horses; he hired musicians for his entertainment; he wore silk and fur clothes; and he wore embroidered gloves and expensive boots. Although he created valuable works, sometimes it seemed that during work he wasted time or interrupted work for personal research or writing scientific, philosophical, and artistic articles. Ludovico, tired of this habit, in 1497 invited Perugino to decorate several rooms in his palace. Perugino could not come, and Leonardo undertook this commission, but this event caused resentment on both sides. Meanwhile Ludovico, due to financial constraints resulting from political and military expenses, delayed paying Leonardo's salary. Leonardo spent almost two years from his own pocket, and then in 1498 sent a mild note to the duke. Ludovico first politely apologized and a year later granted Leonardo a vineyard so that he could support himself from its revenues. At that time political misfortune had begun for Ludovico; the French took Milan, Ludovico fled, and Leonardo found himself uncomfortably free.

Florence: 1500–1501 and 1503–1506

When Leonardo tried to re-establish his broken bond with his birthplace, he was forty-eight years old. During his seventeen years of absence from Florence, both he and the city had changed; but this change was in two opposite directions. Florence had become a semi-democratic republic, and its luxurious and aristocratic life had inclined toward simplicity; whereas Leonardo had become accustomed to courtly, luxurious, and ceremonial life. The Florentines, who were accustomed to criticism, looked with anger at his silk and velvet clothes, his refined manners, and his curly-haired attendants. Michelangelo, who was twenty-two years younger than him, hated his well-groomed appearance, which contrasted greatly with his own broken nose, and wondered with his own poor condition where Leonardo had obtained this refinement. Leonardo had saved about six hundred ducats from his earnings in Milan, and now he refused many commissions, even from a powerful woman like the Marchioness of Mantua, and when he did undertake a work, he carried it out very slowly.

The Servite friars had hired Filippino Lippi to paint a picture for the altarpiece screen of the Annunziata church. Leonardo happened to express his desire to undertake such a work and Filippino courteously transferred his commission to him, who was considered the greatest painter in Europe. The Servites brought Leonardo and his “retinue” to the monastery and maintained them for a period that apparently was very long. On one of the days of 1501 Leonardo presented the design for the picture of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the young John the Baptist. Vasari says: “This design not only astonished every painter, but when it was put on display, men and women, old and young, flocked to see it for two days and were greatly amazed by its beauty. We do not know whether this picture is the one now among the precious possessions of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Burlington House, London; perhaps it is, although French experts believe that it is the first version of another picture now in the Louvre. In Leonardo's version, the smile mixed with proud tenderness that sweetens and brightens the Virgin's face is one of the wonders of that man's art; the famous smile of the Mona Lisa is lowly and plain in comparison. Nevertheless, although this picture is one of the greatest panels of the Renaissance, it is not very successful; for Leonardo placed the Virgin in an unstable way on her mother's open lap, and this itself indicates a relative lack of taste. Leonardo apparently hesitated in converting this design into a definitive picture and the Servites had to turn again to Lippi and then to Perugino—but shortly afterward, perhaps from another model of the sample now in Burlington, they made the Virgin, Saint Anne, and the Child Jesus of the Louvre. This picture, from the head crowned with Saint Anne's diadem to the Virgin's foot that is shamelessly bare but has a divine beauty, is a great technical success. The triangular composition of the picture, which in the design was devoid of grace and charm, is very successful on the main panel: the heads of Saint Anne, the Virgin, the Child, and the lamb form a full and solid line; the Child and his grandmother are turned toward the Virgin, and the incomparable robes of the women fill the scattered empty spaces. Leonardo, by using sfumato for the outer boundaries, has softened the parts of the picture. The smile characteristic of Leonardo's paintings became the model for his followers for half a century. In the design of the picture this smile is on the Virgin's lips, and in the painting itself on Saint Anne's lips.

A sudden event caused Leonardo to emerge from the mysterious attraction of these delicate works and be employed as a military engineer in Cesare Borgia's (Cesare Borgia) camp (June 1502). Borgia was beginning his third campaign in Romagna; he wanted someone to survey maps, equip fortresses, change the courses of streams, and invent offensive and defensive weapons. Perhaps he had become aware in some way of Leonardo's ideas and designs for making new war devices; for example, Leonardo had a design for a kind of armored cart whose wheels were to be operated from inside by soldiers. Leonardo had written that “these carts take the place of war elephants. One can charge the enemy with them, place several blacksmith bellows in them that when operated make a loud noise to frighten the enemy's horses, and place gunners in them to break the ranks of the enemy's companies.” Or, in Leonardo's own words, scythes of terrible size could be installed on their sides; also a large rotating scythe in front that would mow down the enemy like wheat stalks. Or the wheels of the cart could be made in such a way that they moved compartments on all four sides and severely crushed the enemy's soldiers. One could attack a fortress by placing soldiers under a kind of shelter and drive back the besiegers by throwing bottles of poisonous gas. Leonardo had compiled two books with these long titles: “How to make armies retreat by means of a flood obtained by diverting streams” and “How to drown enemy troops by pouring water into valleys.” He had designed devices for firing volleys from a rotating platform, for mounting mortars on carts to increase their range. He also had a design for a submarine, but refrained from revealing it. By presenting the idea that with steam pressure one could hurl an iron ball from a tube up to a distance of eleven hundred meters, he revived Heron of Alexandria's idea about the steam engine. He had made a device for uniformly winding thread around a spindle, and scissors that opened and closed with one hand movement. Often he surrendered the reins to amusement and whim: such as the design of an inflated ski for moving on water; or making a water mill that, while working, would operate several musical instruments. He described the idea of inventing a parachute in this way: “If a person makes a tent twelve braccia wide and deep of linen and closes all its pores, he will be able to attach it to himself and descend from any height to the ground without the slightest injury.

For half his life he thought about human flight. Like Tolstoy he envied birds, which in his opinion were superior to man in many respects. He carefully examined the details of the operation of their wings, their rising from the ground, their smooth movement in the air, and their turning and landing. His sharp eyes observed their movements with curiosity, and his pencil quickly drew and recorded them on paper. He watched how birds used the flow and pressure of air. He harbored the dream of conquering the air:

To present the subject that man may, by providing himself with wings and flapping them, keep himself in the air, the part of the muscles of a bird's chest that move its wings, and also the similar part of the human body, must be dissected. ... The rising of birds into the air without flapping their wings occurs only by their circular movement among the currents of wind. ... Your bird should not be compared with any creature but the bat, for the membranes of the latter are the means of binding together the parts of its wings. ... The bird is an instrument that operates according to mechanical laws. Man can reproduce this instrument with all its movements; but of course acquiring power like the power of birds' flight is not possible.

He prepared several designs for a screw mechanism by which man could supposedly flap the wings with the action of his legs enough to rise into the air. In a brief article entitled On Flight he describes a flying machine that he had built himself. Its structure consisted of a resistant starched linen cloth with leather joints and tabs of raw silk. He called this machine “the bird” and wrote detailed instructions for using it in this way.

If this instrument, made with a screw ... is turned rapidly, it will make a spiral movement in the air and rise. Test this machine over water, and you will see that if you fall, you will not be injured. ... This great bird will make its first flight and fill the whole world with amazement. Its fame will spread everywhere and it will bring eternal honor to its birthplace.

Did Leonardo really attempt to fly? Leonardo, in an announcement printed in the Corriere Atlantico newspaper, notes: “Tomorrow morning, January 2, 1496, I will perform my first flight experiment.” Fazio Cardano, father of the physicist Gerolamo Cardano, told his son that Leonardo himself had made two flights. Some have thought that the breaking of Antonio's leg (one of Leonardo's assistants) in 1510 was the result of flying with one of Leonardo's machines. We know nothing about this.

In Milan and Rome: 1506–1516

Observing such a picture, and also considering that for the minutes spent on the picture several hours of thought were necessary, compels us to change our judgment about Leonardo's doubt regarding its perfection, and once again to give justice that his work contained long thoughts in countless days; just as an author in a night walk, with one night's insomnia, prepares a chapter or a page of the next day's work, or nurtures a beautiful phrase in his mind, Leonardo also in those five years of his life in Florence, in addition to the picture of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne in all its various forms, and preparing the likeness of the Mona Lisa and the model of the Battle of Anghiari scene, also found time to create other panels such as the beautiful single portrait of Ginevra de' Benci and the young Christ. He finally presented this picture to the eager and insistent Marchioness of Mantua (1504). But the Marchioness's steward wrote to his mistress: “Leonardo has become very impatient in painting and spends most of his time on geometry.” Perhaps in those hours when Leonardo apparently seemed idle, he was busy burying his art in the grave of science.

But science brought him no material profit; and although he now lived simply, he regretted the time when he was the prince of Milan's artists. When Charles d'Amboise, regent of Milan on behalf of Louis XII, recalled Leonardo to that city, he asked Soderini to exempt him for a few months from fulfilling his obligations in Florence. Soderini complained that he had not yet done as much work as the salary he had received for the Battle of Anghiari picture; Leonardo collected money equivalent to that salary from his friends and brought it to Soderini, but he did not accept it. Finally in 1506 Soderini, who was eager to preserve the goodwill of the French king toward himself, gave Leonardo leave, on condition that after three months he return to Florence or pay a fine of 150 ducats (1,875 dollars). Leonardo went to Milan and although he returned to Florence three times in the years 1507, 1509, and 1511, he remained in the service of Amboise and Louis until 1513. Soderini protested against this, but Louis with a humility mixed with an expression of power forced him to silence and then, to make the matter completely clear, appointed Leonardo in 1507 as painter and engineer to the king of France.

This title did not bring him much benefit, and he worked to support a simple life. Again we will hear that he decorated palaces, designed or built canals, prepared groups of urban spectacles, and painted pictures; he made a model for the equestrian statue of Marshal Trivulzio and participated in anatomical studies with Marcantonio della Torre. Perhaps during this second stay in Milan Leonardo made two pictures that can be said to have originated from the lowest part of his genius. The picture of Saint John now in the Louvre has rounded contour lines that are used in painting women's faces, and has serial curls and delicate expressions more suited to Mary Magdalene. In the panel Leda and the Swan, which is in a private collection in Rome, Leda has a fleshy face that reminds one of Saint John and Bacchus; but it is most probably a copy of a lost picture or model that was the master's work. If these two pictures did not exist, it would have been better for Leonardo's fame.

In 1512 the French were expelled from Milan and Maximilian, Ludovico's son, ruled for a short time. Leonardo stayed in that city for a few more days, and when the Swiss set fire to the city, he was busy writing unreadable notes about science and art. In 1513, when he heard that Leo X had been elected pope, he thought that under Medici rule in Rome there might even be a place for a sixty-one-year-old artist; therefore he set out for that city with four of his pupils. In Florence, Leo's brother Giuliano de' Medici chose Leonardo for his service and set a salary of 33 ducats (412 dollars?) per month for him. After Leonardo's arrival in Rome, the art-loving pope warmly welcomed him and placed several rooms in the Belvedere Palace at his disposal. Leonardo probably met Raphael and Sodoma, and certainly impressed those two artists. Leo apparently had given him a commission to paint his portrait, for Vasari says that when the pope saw Leonardo mixing varnish colors before starting to paint, he said: “This man will never do anything, because he thinks of the end before he has even begun.” In truth Leonardo was no longer a painter; science attracted him more than ever; he worked on anatomy in the hospital, solved problems related to light, and wrote much about geometry. He used his leisure to make a mechanical lizard, put a beard, horns, and wings on it, and arranged for it to flap its wings by injecting mercury. Leo lost interest in him.

In France: 1516–1519

Leonardo entered France at the age of sixty-four with a sick body and settled with his twenty-four-year-old intimate friend Francesco Melzi in a beautiful house in Cloux, between the town and Amboise Castle, on the bank of the Loire River—which at that time was often the king's residence. By a contract with Francis I, he received the title “Painter, Engineer, Architect to the King, and Mechanic of the Country” and was employed with an annual salary of 700 crowns (8,750 dollars). Francis was generous and valued genius even in its decline. He enjoyed Leonardo's company and, according to Cellini's account, “said that no man had ever been born who had Leonardo's knowledge, for not only is he skilled in sculpture, painting, and architecture, but he is also a great philosopher.” Leonardo's anatomical designs astonished the physicians of the French court.

For a while he worked seriously in return for the salary he received. He arranged entertainments with dance and song for royal assemblies; he drew plans for connecting the Loire and Saône rivers by several canals, and for draining the Sologne marshes, and probably participated in designing parts of the Loire Castle. There is evidence that he also participated in planning the beautiful Chambord Castle. Perhaps after 1517 he painted less, because in that year the right side of his body was partially paralyzed by a stroke; he worked with his left hand, but needed both hands to draw precise pictures. Now he was quite broken and nothing remained of the beautiful limbs and face of his youth, the story of which reached Vasari after half a century. The former proud self-confidence and previous peace of mind had given way to the suffering of decline and his love of life had turned into religious hope. His will was very simple, but he requested that all religious ceremonies be performed at his funeral. Once he had written: “Just as a sweet sleep comes after a satisfactory day's work, so a fruitful life makes death sweet.”

Vasari tells an exciting story about Leonardo's death in the king's arms on May 2, 1519, but perhaps Francis was elsewhere at that time. His body was buried in the cloister of the church of Saint-Florentin in Amboise. Melzi informed Leonardo's brothers of his death and added in his letter: “I cannot describe the intensity of my sorrow at the death of my friend; although my body enjoys health, my soul will be sad until the end of my life. This sorrow has a great cause; all people mourn the loss of such a man, for nature cannot produce his like again. May Almighty God make his soul happy forever!”

Leonardo's Character

Now let us see what kind of man this great master of art was. There are several pictures that are claimed to show his face. Vasari speaks with great warmth of “his physical beauty which was never adequately praised” and “his well-groomed appearance which was very beautiful and cheered every sad soul”; but Vasari's statements were based on hearsay and we have no evidence to accept such a claim. Even in middle age, Leonardo grew a long beard and carefully perfumed and curled it. A picture of Leonardo, drawn by himself, shows a broad and delicate face with hanging curls and a white beard. This picture now exists in the Royal Library at Windsor. A valuable panel in the Uffizi Gallery shows him with a strong face, inquisitive eyes, white hair and beard, and a black hat. This panel is the work of an unknown painter. The face of Plato in Raphael's School of Athens (1509) apparently, and according to scholars, is that of Leonardo. A chalk picture in the Turin Gallery shows Leonardo bald to the middle of his head and wrinkles his forehead, cheeks, and nose. This picture is Leonardo's own work. From the evidence it appears that Leonardo's old age came early; he died at sixty-seven despite a vegetarian diet; whereas Michelangelo, who despised hygiene and had suffered from several illnesses several times, lived to eighty-nine. Leonardo wore luxurious clothes, whereas Michelangelo never took off his boots. Leonardo was famous for his strength in the prime of youth, he could bend a horseshoe with his hand, was a skilled swordsman, and had skill in riding and managing horses. He loved the horse very much and considered it the noblest and most beautiful animal. Apparently he painted and wrote with his left hand; therefore he wrote from right to left and this made his handwriting illegible, although he himself did not wish it.

We said earlier that his homosexuality was not innate, but resulted from the unpleasant relations of a stepmother burdened with an illegitimate son of her husband. His need to give and receive affection was fulfilled in the youths he later gathered around himself. He painted women's pictures much less than those of men; he admitted women's beauty, but apparently shared with Socrates the preference for beautiful youths over women. In the many writings left by him, no trace of love or even simple affection for women is seen. Nevertheless, he was aware of many stages of woman's nature; no one surpassed him in depicting maidenly tenderness, maternal affection, or women's cunning. Probably his sensitivity, his cryptic writings, and locking the door of his workshop at night stemmed from his anxious conscience regarding the unnaturalness of his sexual inclination and fear of accusation of atheism. He had no desire for his writings to be read by a large number of people. In this regard he writes: “Truth is excellent food for intelligent minds, not for wandering intellects.”

His sexual inversion probably affected his other moral elements. He was very kind to his friends. He did not consider killing animals permissible, and “could not tolerate anyone harming any living creature.” He bought caged birds and freed them. In other cases, he seemed morally insensitive. Apparently he had a great love for designing war devices. It seems he was not affected by the French behavior toward Ludovico and his imprisonment in a dungeon, although Ludovico had hosted him in Milan for sixteen years. When leaving Florence, he was not sorry that he was going to enter the service of one of the Borgia family; although the people of Florence feared that family and considered its power a threat to their freedom. Like every artist, every writer, and every homosexual, he was extremely self-centered, sensitive, and proud. In one of his notes he writes: “In solitude you are your own; in company half of your being belongs to others; therefore you are inevitably forced in every gathering to disperse your being according to the misplaced desires of those present.” Leonardo, like a good musician or orator, could entertain an assembly; but he always liked to separate himself from others and immerse himself in his work. Since he had never experienced hunger to value bread more than anything, he said: “The greatest blessing of nature is freedom.”

His virtues and merits surpassed his faults and defects. His aversion to associating with women freed his nature to devote all his effort to his work. His painful sensitivity made a thousand aspects of truth, which were not visible to the ordinary eye, evident to him. Sometimes when he saw an interesting face, he would follow it through several streets and alleys, or even a whole day; then, after returning to his workshop, he would paint it as if it were present before him. His mind always paid attention to strange forms, actions, and thoughts. In one of his notes he writes: “The Nile has sent water to the sea from all the waters of the present oceans; therefore all seas and rivers have passed through the mouth of the Nile countless times.” He indulged in strange jokes; for example, one day he hid a cleaned sheep's intestine in a room; when his friends gathered there, he inflated the intestine with a blacksmith's bellows placed in the adjacent room until that inflated skin pushed his guests against the walls.

Curiosity, perverse temperament, sensitivity, and Leonardo's love of perfection had added to his greatest defect—the inability or unwillingness to complete work—and had made a great fault for him. Perhaps he approached every artistic work with the thought of solving the problem of color combination or design, and when he found the solution to that problem, he lost his taste. He said: “Art is in conception and design, not in execution; this stage belongs to smaller minds.” Or it may have been that he had a particular delicacy, concept, or perfection in mind for his work that his patient, and ultimately impatient, spirit could not bring to realization; and therefore he had to abandon it, just as he did with the face of Christ. He quickly moved from one work to another or from one subject to another; he was attached to many things and lacked unity of purpose or thought. This “universal man” was a mixture of precious but incongruous parts; his abilities were so many that he could not harness them to reach a single goal and direct them toward one aim. At the end of his life, with sighs and regret, he said: “I have wasted useful times.”

He wrote five thousand pages of material, but never produced a complete book. In quantity, he was more a writer than an artist. He himself speaks of one hundred and twenty works, fifty of which remain. He wrote from right to left, his semi-oriental handwriting lends some credibility to the story that he once traveled to the Near East, served the Sultan of Egypt, and converted to Islam. His grammar and syntax were weak and his spelling unique. His studies were scattered and unrelated. He had a small library of thirty-seven volumes, as follows: the Bible; works of Aesop, Diogenes Laërtius, Ovid, Livy, Pliny the Elder, Dante, Petrarch, Poggio, Filelfo, Ficino, and Pulci; Mandeville's travel book; and treatises on mathematics, cosmology, anatomy, medicine, agriculture, chiromancy, and the art of war. He himself said: “Knowledge of past times and geography adorn and cultivate the mind.” But his many historical errors show that he had only scattered information in history. He wished to be a good writer; he tried many times to acquire eloquence—just as his repeated description of a flood event shows: and he wrote a spirited description of a storm and a battle. He clearly intended to print some of his writings, and several times set about arranging his notes for this purpose. As far as we know, he did not print any of his works during his lifetime; but apparently he allowed some of his friends to see selected writings of his, for references to his writings appear in the works of Flavio Biondo, Gerolamo Cardano, and Cellini.

He wrote equally well about science and art. His richest work is the Treatise on Painting, printed in 1651. Despite recent emendations to this treatise, its material is still disconnected, disorganized, and often repetitive. Leonardo, anticipating those who argue that painting can only be learned by painting, believes that correct theoretical knowledge of this art helps its practitioners, and mocks critics with this sentence: “Those whom Demetrius said: I value the wind that comes out of their mouths no more than the wind that comes out of their lower parts.” His basic instruction is that the student should pay more attention to the study of nature than to copying the work of artists. He says: “O painter, be careful that when you go to the countryside, you direct your attention to various objects, look well at them, pass from one to another in turn, and gather in your mind a collection of various objects chosen from among the least valuable.” Of course the painter must learn anatomy, perspective, and volume representation with chiaroscuro; a picture whose boundaries are clearly defined is more like a wooden carving than a painted panel. “Always make the picture so that the direction of the chest is not the same as the head.”—this is one of the secrets of the grace of Leonardo's own pictorial compositions. Finally he orders: “Make the picture so that it shows what thought its owner is pondering.” Had he forgotten such a point in the case of the Mona Lisa, or did he want to exaggerate about man's ability to read the soul of his fellow beings in their eyes and lips?

Leonardo's School

Leonardo left behind in Milan a group of young artists who admired him and valued him so much that they preferred to follow his style over originality and innovation. Small stone statues of four of them—Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Andrea Solario, Cesare da Sesto, and Marco d'Oggiono—like children gathered around their father, are placed around the base of Leonardo's statue in Piazza della Scala in Milan. Others such as Andrea Solari, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Bernardino de' Conti, Francesco Melzi ... were all who had worked in Leonardo's workshop and learned the delicacy of drawing from him, without reaching his level in finesse or depth. Two other painters confessed to his mastery, although we do not rightly know whether they had personally known him or not. Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, who earned the nickname Sodoma, may have met him in Milan or Rome. Bernardino Luini introduced the element of feeling into his works to the point of exaggeration, but the astonishing solidity and firmness that existed throughout his work protected him from blame. He repeatedly chose “the Virgin and Child” for his work; perhaps in this oldest subject of painting he felt the highest manifestation of life as a diagram of birth, the triumph of love over death, and a feminine beauty that never reaches perfection before motherhood. More than other followers of Leonardo he had understood the feminine delicacy of Leonardo's smile—not its mystery; the Holy Family panel in the Ambrosiana in Milan is a delightful imitation of the master's Virgin and Child with Saint Anne; and the Sposalizio in Saronno has the grace of Correggio's pictures. Bernardino, unlike Leonardo, apparently did not doubt the attractive story of the village virgin who brought a god into the world; with a simple piety that Leonardo could hardly feel or show, he softened the lines and colors of his pictures. Any skeptic who has a little faith in the bottom of his heart and can still value a delightful and inspiring legend will, when strolling through the Louvre, stand longer before Luini's pictures of the Sleeping Child Jesus and the Adoration of the Magi than before Leonardo's Saint John the Baptist, and find in those two more satisfaction and truth than in Leonardo.

With the death of these prominent men, the great era of Milan passed. Few of the architects, painters, sculptors, and poets who formed the astonishing jewels of Ludovico's court were natives of the city itself, and many of them, after the fall of that noble tyrant, headed to other places of favor. In the chaos that followed this fall, no talent was found to replace those lost geniuses; and one generation later, the only souvenir left from those ten years (the last decade of the fifteenth century) of splendor was only one palace and one cathedral.