Leonardo and the Last Supper Read online

  When the time finally came to paint the wall of the refectory, Leonardo would have climbed to the very top of his scaffold. Frescoists almost always painted from top to bottom in order to avoid dripping paint onto completed areas. Leonardo was probably no exception, and so the first things he painted in the refectory would have been the three heraldic shields in the lunettes immediately beneath the ceiling vault: the emblems of Lodovico Sforza and his two male heirs. Lodovico’s coat of arms would soon be a familiar sight in and around Milan. He was planning to have them carved in marble and placed on the city gates as well as on all public buildings. It was an enterprise that he claimed lay “close to my heart.”42 But the first place they appeared in all their glory seems to have been the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

  These three heraldic shields have deteriorated drastically and are difficult to read, not least because they were painted over in about 1700, partially rediscovered seventy-five years later, and then fully uncovered only in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, the shield in the upper left—in all likelihood the first thing painted by Leonardo—is clearly that of Lodovico’s eldest son, Massimiliano. The name of the boy, who was born in January 1493, reflected Lodovico’s shifting allegiances and expanding political ambitions. He was originally named Ercole in honor of his maternal grandfather, Ercole d’Este of Ferrara, but within the year Lodovico had him rechristened Massimiliano to ingratiate himself with the emperor Maximilian. Since the boy bore the title duke of Pavia, his coat of arms showed both the Visconti viper and the eagles of Pavia.

  Massimiliano’s younger brother, Francesco, named for his paternal grandfather, was born almost exactly two years later, in February 1495, at around the time Leonardo was beginning work in the refectory. The newborn was celebrated on the shield in the upper right-hand corner of the room. The heraldic imagery is almost entirely lost, but the words DVX BARI—that is, duke of Bari, young Francesco’s title—are still legible. Lodovico and his wife were commemorated in the center, in the largest of the three lunettes. Once again, the heraldic imagery is difficult to read, although both the imperial eagle and the Visconti viper are present, while Beatrice would have been represented by the white eagle and the fleur-de-lis that adorned the Este family crest.

  Leonardo enjoyed inventing mottoes and clever imprese, but producing these three heraldic shields would have been an unimaginative task. He enlivened the images by surrounding each with a wreath of palm fronds adorned with grasses, acorns, and oak leaves, and fruit such as apples, apricots, and pears. In the central lunette he even added blackberries, olives, and quinces. These details he painted with naturalistic precision (even the veins in the leaves of the pear branches are carefully painted) despite the fact that they are over thirty feet from the floor and would have been difficult if not impossible to see in the dim light of the refectory. He also added gold detailing to the coats of arms, creating the illusion, through a sense of depth, that actual shields were suspended high on the wall.

  The three heraldic shields were not the only ones that Leonardo planned for the refectory. Lodovico, who thought so often of his ancestors, was also thinking about his posterity, and of how the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie could be turned into a kind of Sforza family gallery. To that end, Leonardo added two more shields in the lunettes on the walls adjacent to where he was about to paint his Last Supper. These were left blank, awaiting the birth of further Sforza heirs. a The gesture was an optimistic one at a time when the House of Sforza faced such dangerous threats. One thing must have occurred to Leonardo as he began work: should Lodovico fall from power, the commission was certain to be canceled.

  The central lunette above The Last Supper displaying the Sforza coat of arms

  Leonardo painted the Sforza coats of arms with the help of an underdrawing. He scored the wall with a stylus, creating an outline (possibly with the help of a cartoon) that he proceeded to reinforce with charcoal. The freehand charcoal sketch reveals backward hatching: a sure sign that Leonardo himself drew it. However, in time-honored workshop fashion, he almost certainly delegated some of the painting to various of his assistants.

  Whether working on panels or frescoes, artists always assigned the lesser tasks, such as background scenery and repetitive details, to their assistants or apprentices. Michelangelo’s famous claim that he worked alone on the vault of the Sistine Chapel, “without any help whatever, not even someone to grind his colours for him,” is demonstrably untrue.43 Patrons accepted that not every inch of a fresco could be painted by the hand of the master, but their contracts usually stressed that the head of the workshop should be responsible for the most important, conspicuous, and difficult aspects. Luca Signorelli’s 1499 contract for frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral was typical in its insistence that Signorelli himself was to paint “the faces and all parts of the figures from the middle of each figure upwards.”44 The contract also specified that Signorelli was to mix his pigments himself, an indication of the difficulty and importance of this tedious and time-consuming task.

  The precise identity of Leonardo’s assistants is not known for certain, apart from Salai. The little terror was by now fifteen and working as Leonardo’s faithful if undistinguished helper. Gathered about Leonardo in Milan, however, were more talented assistants, a small group of young painters who formed a kind of School of Leonardo. They included a wealthy young Milanese nobleman, born about 1467, named Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio. Another of Leonardo’s pupils, also born around 1467, was Marco d’Oggiono. Each had suffered the occupational hazard of working with Leonardo: Salai stole silverpoint drawings from both of them.

  Boltraffio and Oggiono had struck out on their own by the mid-1490s, working together in Milan on an altarpiece for the newly built oratory attached to San Giovanni sul Muro. They absorbed their master’s style so thoroughly that at one time this altarpiece was attributed to Leonardo himself. Leonardo had a close working relationship with both men, to the point of providing drawings and designs for them to work with (as perhaps was the case with their altarpiece for the oratory). He could easily have called upon them for assistance with his mural. No document records their presence in his workshop at this time, but absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of their absence.

  The notebooks do record the presence of other assistants. Ever the dutiful accountant, Leonardo registered numerous payments to various members of his household and studio in the Corte dell’Arengo: Gian Pietro, Benedetto, Giovanni, Gian Maria, Bartolomeo, and Gherardo.45 Gian Pietro was probably Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, later known as Giampietrino, a young Milanese painter who is known to have worked in Leonardo’s studio.46 The identities of the others are unclear. Recorded in Leonardo’s laconic accounting and spare of other details, their names are not easily identifiable as painters. It is unlikely that all were involved in the execution of the mural. However, several of them, such as Benedetto and Giovanni, were clearly skilled craftsmen of some sort, able to earn a sizeable income in the space of a few short months. If they were experienced frescoists, they must have regarded Leonardo’s plans for the refectory with incredulity and amazement.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Trouble from This Side and That”

  Charles VIII and his troops reached the safety of the fortress at Asti in the middle of July 1495. They were ragged, exhausted, and ill provisioned, having been reduced to drinking stagnant water from ditches and eating nothing but bread—“and that none of the best”—following their flight from Fornovo.1 Ten months earlier, Asti had been the setting for Charles’s first meeting with Lodovico Sforza. On that occasion, Charles was entertained by Lodovico with singers, dancers, and musicians, while Beatrice astonished the flower of French chivalry with the beauty of her gown, whose bodice (according to one breathless French report) “was loaded with diamonds, pearls and rubies, both in front and behind.”2 But now the two princes were at war, with Charles awaiting the arrival of twenty thousand Swiss mercenaries so he could renew his assault.

>   Lodovico could at least take heart that his rival for the lordship of Milan, the duke of Orléans, was faring badly. Having been forced to retreat into Novara following his bold feint at Milan, Louis and his troops were now besieged, surrounded by a combined force of Venetian and Milanese soldiers. Lodovico did not plan to attack Novara. He lacked the artillery, and in any case he had no wish to see one of his own cities destroyed by cannon. Instead, he decided to starve Louis and his troops, who had fled inside Novara in such a panic that, in a drastic oversight, they failed to provision themselves. The Holy League’s soldiers diverted the water that powered the mills inside the town, leaving the French troops unable to grind their small store of grain. The soldiers were starved of information as well as food, since Lodovico, ever the master of deception, sent into Novara forged documents claiming that Charles had died in the field at Fornovo. Morale inside the walls was not helped by another rumor: that Charles was too busy trying to seduce Anna Solaro, the daughter of a local lord, to trouble himself with their plight.3

  The siege of Novara lasted through the summer of 1495 and into the autumn. The town quickly plunged into the most dire misery. “Every day some were starved to death,” wrote a French chronicler.4 From Asti, Charles dispatched a train of pack animals in hopes of provisioning the town, but it was easily captured and the supplies confiscated.

  At length, there was hope for the besieged troops. With both winter and the Swiss mercenaries fast approaching, Francesco Gonzaga began to make overtures to Charles, first of all returning the sword and helmet captured at Fornovo, along with the album of the king’s amorous conquests. Charles expressed his thanks and, through his ambassador to Venice, let it be known that he, too, desired peace. Negotiations were opened, with Lodovico initially taking a hard line. But he needed peace much more than he wanted war, and the evacuation of Novara was quickly agreed. By the time the siege ended, after three months and fourteen days, two thousand of Louis’s troops had perished of starvation and disease. A French ambassador was shocked by the sight of the survivors—“so lean and meagre that they looked more like dead than living people; and truly, I believe never men endured more misery.”5 Hundreds more died on the roadsides as they evacuated Novara, and a dozen miles away, at the French outpost of Vercelli, the dung heaps were stacked with corpses.

  Louis was eager for revenge against Lodovico. Immediately after the evacuation, according to a shocked French ambassador, he “began to talk of fighting again.”6 As the twenty thousand Swiss mercenaries finally arrived in the French camp, he urged Charles to cease negotiations and turn his army loose on Milan.

  These political events may have temporarily distracted Leonardo from his work in Santa Maria delle Grazie. No situation was so dire that Lodovico could not see fit to summon a bit of pomp and circumstance, and once more Leonardo—“the arbiter of all questions relating to beauty and elegance”—may have been enrolled into service.

  In August, during the siege of Novara, Lodovico presided over a review of the Holy League’s army, a spectacular parade that witnessed the Milanese troops marching under a gigantic banner featuring the familiar figure of a Moor holding an eagle in one hand and strangling a dragon with the other. “It was indeed,” wrote a Neapolitan scholar who watched the review, “a stupendous sight.” There was an unfortunate hitch in the proceedings when the horse carrying Lodovico stumbled and fell, throwing him to the ground and muddying his finery. “This was held to be an evil omen,” observed one chronicler, “and was remembered afterwards by many who were present that day.”7

  No evidence reports that Leonardo was involved in the siege of Novara or in the diversion of the town’s water supply. However, his interest in hydraulic engineering—and his experience with everything from canals and fountains to water-powered alarm clocks—would have made him a natural choice. His letter of introduction to Lodovico had touted his expertise in “guiding water from one place to another.” While in Lodovico’s employ he had made a study of the canals in the countryside around Vigevano, where the main channel, the Naviglio Sforzesco, lay at the heart of a large and complex network of waterways. Determined to improve the area’s navigation and irrigation, he offered detailed suggestions about the construction and operation of mills, sluices, and locks.

  One assignment Leonardo was probably given around this time was the fortification of the Castello in Milan. Military architecture was yet another of his interests. He owned a copy of the Trattato di architettura civile e militare by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, the most sought-after military engineer in Italy. His copy still exists, its sketches and marginal annotations testimony of his close and avid reading of the text. Francesco was probably a kind of boyhood hero of Leonardo’s: the man who, as a designer of military hardware, first inspired his interest in war machines. In 1490 he met Francesco when the two of them consulted on the central dome for Milan’s cathedral. They then traveled together to Pavia, riding there on horseback and staying together at an inn while they consulted with engineers about Pavia’s cathedral. Leonardo’s interest in fortifications must only have increased after 1494, when the French artillery starkly revealed the extreme vulnerability of Italian fortresses.

  Leonardo’s notes confirm that he conducted a thorough survey of the Castello’s defenses with a view to improving them and making the refuge impregnable. “The moats of the Castle of Milan...are thirty braccia,” stated one memorandum (one braccia being twenty-three inches). “The ramparts are sixteen braccia high and forty wide... The outer walls are eight braccia thick and forty high, and the inner walls of the castle are sixty braccia.” He wrote that such fortifications “would please me entirely” were it not for the fact that the embrasures—the small apertures at which, he noted, “good bombardiers always aim”—were in line with secret passageways inside Castello’s walls. If these weak spots were breached by the artillery, the invaders would pour into the fortress and “make themselves masters of all the towers, walls and secret passages.”8 If Lodovico read these words in the aftermath of Novara, they must have sent a chill down his spine.

  Activities such as safeguarding the state and foiling its enemies would undoubtedly have given Leonardo more pleasure and prestige than painting a mural in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie. His letter to Lodovico had emphasized his ability to invent and deploy deadly “instruments of war.” Yet for a dozen years his ideas had largely been ignored as he was required instead to amuse courtiers with gadgets and pageants. Then suddenly the Italians had been humiliated in battle, with their castles and cannons proving worthless against the French assault, and with Lodovico, at the first whiff of gunpowder, forced to cower inside his castle. Leonardo must have believed that with the peninsula at war and Lodovico menaced by powerful enemies, he would at last be given the opportunity to build his war machines.

  Leonardo seems to have been involved in another project in 1495: one that apparently took him back to Florence, a city drastically changed from the days of his apprenticeship. Over the years he had probably made occasional (but undocumented) return visits to the city, which lay only 150 miles to the southeast. Although his old master and friend Verrocchio had died in 1488, his father was still alive. Ser Piero, now sixty-nine, had married for the fourth time, and his house in the Via Ghibellina (to which he had moved in 1480) was filled with babies. He now had eight children besides Leonardo: six boys and a pair of girls. All but the two eldest, Antonio and Giuliano, had been born since Leonardo’s departure for Milan. The youngest, Pandolfo, was only a year old, and in 1495 Leonardo’s latest stepmother, a thirty-one-year-old named Lucrezia, was pregnant with yet another child.

  If Leonardo did return to Florence, it was not for artistic reasons. He received no painting commissions from any Florentine patrons during his Milan years, in part, no doubt, because of his reputation for belatedness. He did, however, hope to involve himself with the Florentine business community, in particular the wool merchants. Florence had a thriving cloth industry, and Leonardo designed
numerous machines for the textile trade, such as hand looms, bobbin winders, and a needle-making machine that he calculated would produce forty thousand needles per hour and revenues of a mind-boggling sixty thousand ducats per year. All of these inventions he no doubt hoped would find their place in Florentine industry. In about 1494 he drew plans for a weaving machine, and in the same pages he outlined a project for a canal by which, he claimed, Florence’s Guild of Wool Merchants could transport their goods through Tuscany and, by extracting revenues from other users of the canal, boost their profits in the process. These pursuits reveal the breadth of Leonardo’s interests, the scope of his ambitions, and the depth of his conviction that there was no task that could not be improved through technology and invention. None of his plans seems, however, to have tempted the hardheaded merchants of Florence.9

  What appears to have brought Leonardo back to Florence in 1495 was the change of government and the possibility of an architectural commission. Florence had declared itself a republic and adopted a new constitution following the expulsion of the Medici at the end of 1494. The power vacuum caused by the expulsion was swiftly filled by Girolamo Savonarola, who claimed to enjoy undisputed authority as God’s mouthpiece. He advocated establishing a popular assembly composed of all Florentine males over the age of twenty-nine. Such an expansion of government meant that a large new council hall needed to be built.

  Vasari recorded that opinions on the construction of the hall were solicited from various artistic worthies, among them Leonardo and a young Michelangelo. The latter was only twenty years old at this time and, in truth, unlikely to have been consulted. In fact, Michelangelo was not even in Florence in 1495, having left for Bologna after the fall of the Medici. Vasari may have been more accurate regarding Leonardo’s involvement. Yet if Leonardo hoped to secure the commission—the details of which were decided only after “much discussion”—he was disappointed. The job went instead to Simone del Pollaiuolo, known as Il Cronaca, a man who was, as Vasari pointedly remarked, “the devoted friend and follower of Savonarola.”10