Leonardo and the Last Supper Read online

  Piattini noted in a letter that though “keenly sought out” by Leonardo to produce a poem, he did not doubt that the artist had made the same request “to many others.” This may well have been the case: Leonardo was certainly mounting a vigorous offensive to keep his job. Around the same time another poet, Francesco Arrigoni, wrote a letter to Lodovico observing that he had been asked “to celebrate with some epigrams the equestrian statue.” His effort was much longer than Piattini’s, a series of Latin epigrams rhapsodizing both the bronze horse and its ambitious author, who was once again compared to the finest sculptors of ancient Greece.28

  Whether Il Moro was swayed by this suave publicity is impossible to know, but Leonardo was not, in fact, removed from the job. In April 1490 he wrote that he had “recommenced the horse,” by which he meant he had started work on a different design, opting for a less audaciously difficult pose: the rearing attitude was abandoned in favor of a more balanced pose.29 Around this time he began sculpting a full-scale version in clay.

  Various distractions and interruptions followed. In January 1491, in order to forge an alliance with a powerful Italian family, Lodovico reluctantly shed his beautiful, pregnant mistress Cecilia Gallerani (whose portrait Leonardo had recently painted) and married Beatrice d’Este, daughter of the duke of Ferrara. Leonardo was heavily involved in the nuptials, designing costumes for the festivities, decorating the ballroom, and helping to arrange a jousting match. The following year he found himself creating a waterfall for the new duchess’s villa outside Milan. He also pursued private interests that struck colleagues at the court in Milan as eccentric. A poet named Guidotto Prestinari attacked him in a sonnet for spending his days hunting in the woods and hills around Bergamo for “various monsters and a thousand strange worms.”30

  By the end of 1493, the full-size clay model of the horse (albeit, apparently, without its rider) was near enough to completion that it was celebrated by other poets more receptive to Leonardo’s genius—and ones whose verses were perhaps urgently solicited by Leonardo himself. One of them praised Leonardo’s “rare genius” and exalted the “great colossus” as something the size of which even the Greeks and Romans had never witnessed. A second envisaged Francesco Sforza gazing down from the heavens and heaping compliments on Leonardo.31

  The model was undoubtedly a marvel, but the problem of how to cast such a monstrosity needed to be faced. Leonardo would have learned a time-honored method of casting bronze more than two decades earlier in the Florentine studio of Verrocchio. A core made from clay and fashioned roughly into the shape of the statue would be coated with a layer of wax, which was then sculpted with the finer details. The wax-covered model was enclosed in a rough outer shell (made from ingredients such as cow dung) into which casting rods were inserted. This chrysalis was fired in a casting pit, at which point the melting wax drained through the rods, to be replaced by molten bronze introduced through another set of tubes. The bronze then cooled and solidified, after which the charred husk was broken open to reveal the statue. The bronze would then be “chased”: smoothed and polished with chisels, files, and pumice.

  Leonardo jotted numerous notes to himself when the time came to think about the casting process. He was highly secretive in his approach, reverting to code, albeit a fairly primitive one that saw him simply reversing the order of the letters in certain words: cavallo (horse) became ollavac.32 He seemed prepared to experiment with various recipes: making casts from river sand mixed with vinegar, wetting the molds with linseed oil or turpentine, and making a paste from egg white, brick dust, and household rubbish.33 He might even have considered using a rather unorthodox ingredient since one of his diagrams for the horse included offhand observations about the happy chemical effects of burning human excrement, which is not perhaps so eccentric if we consider that cow and horse dung were often used by sculptors.34 One ingredient, though, was certain: seventy-five tons of bronze had been earmarked for the monument.

  By the end of 1493, Leonardo had spent as many as eight or ten years on the giant equestrian monument. He was putting the finishing touches to his clay model and deliberating the practicalities of casting in bronze when, in January 1494, far to the south in Naples, seventy-year-old King Ferdinand I, returning from his country villa, climbed down from his horse and keeled over dead. His death brought to the throne his son Alfonso, the cruel and avaricious father of Isabella, wife of the hapless Giangaleazzo, rightful ruler of Milan. The time had come for Lodovico Sforza to act.

  In early October 1494, with French troops poised for their descent into Italy, Lodovico entertained the unlikely savior of his domains, Charles VIII, with a boar hunt and a banquet at his country home in Vigevano. Relations between Lodovico and Charles were cordial, in part because Lodovico took the precaution of amply providing the French king with Milanese courtesans. However, Charles was disappointed by the Italian wines and found the weather disagreeably hot.35 Lodovico meanwhile quickly came to regard his royal guest as foolish, haughty, and ill-mannered. “These French are bad people,” he confided to the Venetian ambassador, “and we must not allow them to become our neighbours.”36 The dislike of the French soon spread across his dukedom. A French statesman accompanying King Charles ruefully observed, “At our first entrance into Italy, everybody thought us people of the greatest goodness and sincerity in the world; but that opinion lasted not long.”37

  The character and intentions of the French became evident only a few weeks later, at Mordano, twenty-five miles southeast of Bologna. For the previous century, military campaigns in Italy had been relatively bloodless affairs, cautious and tactical, full of pomp and display rather than violent or heroic altercations, not unlike giant chess matches in which one mercenary, outmaneuvered by his opponent, would concede the advantage and peaceably withdraw from the field. Thus at Zagonara, where the Florentines suffered a famous defeat in 1424, the only casualties were three soldiers who fell from their horses and drowned in the mud. In 1427, eight thousand Milanese troops were bested by the Venetians in battle at Macalo; not a single life was lost. As one Florentine observer sarcastically remarked, “The rule for our Italian soldiers seems to be this: You pillage there, and we will pillage here; there is no need for us to approach too close to one another.”38

  The French commanders who invaded Italy in 1494 took a different approach to warfare. They were equipped with siege weapons that had been shipped by boat to La Spezia on the Italian coast. These cannons were cast in bronze, unlike Italian artillery, which consisted of copper tubes covered with wood and animal hides. The French guns fired wrought iron cannonballs the size of a man’s head, unlike Italian artillery, which made use of small stone balls carved by masons (even Leonardo’s designs for cannons were designed to “fling small stones”).39 The French gunners were trained in special artillery schools, and their guns could be sighted with deadly accuracy. While the Italians used plodding oxen to drag their guns, teams of swift horses pulled the French gun carriages. Maneuvered quickly into position and fired with great rapidity, their artillery could wreak havoc on either city walls or ranks of soldiers on the field of battle. The fearsome weapons of Leonardo’s imagination had suddenly appeared in Italy.

  One of the keys to capturing the south of Italy was gaining control of a series of strategic fortresses that blocked access to the Apennines in Tuscany and central Italy. Mordano was one such fortress. It was owned by Caterina Sforza, Countess of Forlì, the illegitimate daughter of Lodovico’s brother Galeazzo Maria and (despite her Sforza blood) an ally of Naples rather than Lodovico and the French. When the troops of Charles VIII appeared outside the walls in October 1494, the soldiers and civilians inside Mordano were counting on the strength of their fortifications and the usual diffidence of the enemy to engage. But when their demand to surrender was refused, the French troops quickly breached the walls with their artillery.

  King Charles VIII of France

  Sieges in Italy occasionally turned brutal if soldiers found women and defen
seless civilians, rather than enemy soldiers, on the business end of their halberds. The violence had been appalling in 1472 when the warlord Federigo da Montefeltro captured Volterra on behalf of the Florentines. “For a whole day it was robbed and overrun,” Machiavelli later recorded. “Neither women nor holy places were spared.”40 The French assault on Mordano—in which all the inhabitants of the castle, soldiers and civilians alike, were put to the sword—was even more shocking. News of the massacre, known as the “terror of Mordano,” spread quickly through Italy. Soon the French troops even began attacking and pillaging in the territories of their ostensible allies. The French invaders, wrote a Florentine chronicler, were “bestial men.”41

  Before departing the Duchy of Milan to lead his expedition, Charles had briefly paid his respects to Giangaleazzo Sforza, the rightful duke, at the castle in Pavia where he enjoyed an aimless liberty. The two men, who were first cousins, had much in common, including reputations for licentiousness. Some observers faulted Lodovico for the intellectual and moral shortcomings of his nephew. According to a Venetian chronicler, Lodovico had made every effort “to see that the boy would never come to anything,” deliberately neglecting to educate him in the art of war or in the skills required by a ruler. He even went so far as to employ people “to corrupt and deprave his childish nature” so the young duke would become habituated to “every sort of indulgence and idleness.”42 Whatever the truth of the accusation, Giangaleazzo required little encouragement. His enthusiastic indulgences took a toll on his health, and he was gravely ill by the time of the French king’s visit. One day after the massacre at Mordano, he died at the age of twenty-five. One rumor had it that he expired from “immoderate coitus”; more persistent gossip claimed he was poisoned by Lodovico.43

  Giangaleazzo’s death came at an undeniably opportune moment for Lodovico. Two days later, ignoring the hereditary claim of Giangaleazzo’s five-year-old son, Francesco, and stressing present dangers and the need for a decisive ruler in such troublous times, he assumed for himself the title and seal of duke of Milan. However, just as one of Lodovico’s rivals for the dukedom expired, another appeared on the scene. Il Moro’s growing misgivings about his French allies were exacerbated by the presence of Charles’s thirty-two-year-old cousin and brother-in-law, Louis, the duke of Orléans. As a great-grandson, like Lodovico, of the very first duke of Milan, a crazed and cruel tyrant who died in 1402, Louis was anxious to assert his own right to rule the duchy. To some observers, the handsome and dissolute Louis seemed no match for the crafty Lodovico. “He has a small head with not much room for brains,” wrote the Florentine ambassador to Milan, who predicted, “Lodovico will soon get the better of him.”44 But Lodovico would need to be wary of his French namesake, an enemy who—though supposedly an ally—was potentially more dangerous than the king of Naples.

  Alfonso, meanwhile, had dispatched an army northward to meet the king of France. It was commanded by a Milanese aristocrat, Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, a personal enemy whom Lodovico had exiled from the duchy. As Trivulzio’s troops neared Ferrara, 125 miles from Milan, Lodovico, realizing that the time had come to beat ploughshares into swords, expropriated Leonardo’s seventy-five tons of bronze. He arranged to have the metal sent to his father-in-law, the duke of Ferrara, under whose supervision a Maestro Zanin would turn it into three cannons, including “one in the French style.”45 Ferrara was one of the few cities in Italy with the capability to forge such weapons. The Castel Vecchio in Ferrara had—besides dungeons, a torture chamber, and a special room for decapitating prisoners—a foundry for casting artillery.46 To this grim fortress Leonardo’s bronze was sent.

  There was, for Leonardo, a sad irony to the situation. He had come to Milan with dreams of constructing instruments of war. His notebooks from his first years in Milan teem with inventive designs for wiping out the enemy. Promising that his war machines would be “out of the common type,” he prepared detailed plans for a cannon on a precision-controlled swiveling mount, a multibarreled machine gun, an armored tank mounted with cannons, and a spike-wheeled chariot armed with head-high rotating blades. Lodovico took little interest in these weapons of mass destruction. The relatively sedate nature of Italian warfare, coupled with the fact that the major Italian powers had avoided large-scale conflagrations for several decades, gave him little incentive to encourage Leonardo. When Lodovico suddenly saw the need for heavy artillery, the commission went to the foundries of Ferrara, and Leonardo—such was the grudging of fate—lost his seventy-five tons of bronze.

  Bilked of his chance to cast the monument, Leonardo composed a desperate, angry letter to Lodovico. Perhaps it was never sent, since the surviving page was ripped down the middle, possibly by Leonardo himself after some sober second thought. Or perhaps this is the ripped-up draft of a letter that Leonardo did send to Il Moro. In any case, only a series of fragmentary complaints convey Leonardo’s angry and incoherent splutter of indignation. “And if any other commission is given me by any—” it begins before breaking off. The fractured litany continues:

  —of the reward of my service. Because I am not to be—

  —things assigned because meanwhile they have—

  —which they well may settle rather than I—

  —not my art which I wish to change and—

  A little farther down the page, Leonardo stated that his life had been spent in the service of Lodovico, that he held himself ever in readiness to obey, and that he understood his lordship’s mind to be occupied with other things. “Of the horse I will say nothing because I know the times,” he wrote, momentarily striking a conciliatory tone before proceeding to tick off his grievances about his treatment over this particular commission: his unpaid salary going back two years, the skilled workmen whom he had been forced to pay out of his own pocket, the “works of fame” he had hoped to create, and how he had been toiling at his art to “gain my living.” The letter ends: “I conveyed to your Lordship only requesting you—”

  Precisely what request Leonardo conveyed to Lodovico is unknown. One of the fragmentary lines “remember the commission to paint the rooms” alludes to an assignment to decorate rooms in either Lodovico’s castle in Milan or his country retreat at Vigevano. For the latter, Leonardo seems to have been planning scenes from Roman history that incorporated portraits of ancient philosophers.47

  But Lodovico, however preoccupied with other matters, had something else in mind for his court painter. If the French invasion robbed Leonardo of the chance to cast the bronze horse, it would present him with an opportunity to create quite a different work of fame.

  CHAPTER 2

  Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Man

  The bronze horse was not the first commission that Leonardo, for various reasons, had been unable to complete. He was someone who promised much, who dreamed of impossible miracles. Yet thus far he had yielded a body of work that, however impressive, was still unhappily disproportionate to his talents. Despite his reputation in Milan, he had reached his forties without truly having achieved a masterpiece that would fulfil everything his astonishing talents portended. His career, in both Florence and Milan, had seen several major commissions abandoned unfinished, with the patrons dissatisfied and, in one case, litigious. Few completed works could be attached to Leonardo’s name, beyond an Annunciation altarpiece in a convent outside Florence, several Madonna and Child paintings done for private patrons, and a number of portraits, likewise done for private patrons, including the one of Lodovico Sforza’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani. He had also, apparently, done a painting—“the most beautiful and unusual work to be found in painting,” according to an early biographer—that Lodovico sent as a wedding present to Maximilian, the Holy Roman emperor.1

  All of these works, the portraits in particular, were stylistically progressive and beautifully executed. A court poet wrote a poem praising the “genius and skill” with which Leonardo had captured Cecilia’s likeness “for all time.” Cecilia herself, evidently pleased with th
e portrait, called Leonardo “the master who in truth I believe has no equal.”2 Leonardo had also painted a saintly figure so astonishingly and gorgeously lifelike that its owner “fell in love with it” (as Leonardo later claimed) and begged him to remove the religious trappings so he could “kiss it without misgivings.”3

  Yet these works were tucked away in private homes, unseen by anyone but princes and courtiers, and the painting given to Maximilian was presumably in faraway Innsbruck. Leonardo had so far created nothing to garner for himself the tremendous public fame won by legendary and beloved artists of the past: something that could take pride of place in a cathedral or public piazza, and that the people could see with their own eyes, like Donatello’s statue of Gattamelata in Padua, Giotto’s frescoes in Assisi, or Filippo Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence. His bronze horse would undoubtedly have caused wonder and excitement, but the opportunity had been lost.

  By the age of forty-two—and in an era when life expectancy was only forty—Leonardo had produced only a few scattered paintings, a bizarre-looking music instrument, some ephemeral decorations for masques and festivals, and many hundreds of pages of notes and drawings for studies he had not yet published, or for inventions he had not yet built.4 There was clearly a stark gulf between his ambitions and his accomplishments. Everyone who met him, or who saw his works, was dazzled by his obvious and undeniable brilliance. But too often his ambitions had been curtailed or frustrated. He hoped to find work as an architect, but in 1490 his aspirations were thwarted when his wooden model for a domed tower for Milan’s half-built cathedral was rejected. He tried to get the job of designing and casting the bronze doors for Piacenza’s cathedral, even going so far as to write the cathedral officials an anonymous letter extolling his talents: “There is no capable man—and you may believe me—except Leonardo the Florentine.”5 But no call came from Piacenza. He drew up detailed plans to redevelop Milan, dividing the city into ten districts of five thousand buildings each and including such amenities as pedestrian zones, irrigated gardens, and well-ventilated latrines. Not a single part of this plan was ever adopted or constructed. Meanwhile, Lodovico had harbored doubts about Leonardo’s abilities to complete the bronze equestrian monument, even sending to Florence at one point looking for possible replacements.