Leonardo and the Last Supper Read online

  At times Leonardo was troubled by his lack of achievement. As a young man he appears to have developed a reputation for melancholia. “Leonardo,” wrote a friend, “why so troubled?” A sad refrain runs through his notebooks: “Tell me if anything was ever done,” he often sighs. Or in another place: “Tell me if ever I did a thing.”6

  Leonardo was born in 1452, in a square-built stone farmhouse near Vinci, an “insignificant hamlet” (as one of his earliest biographers called it) sixteen miles west of Florence.7 His eighty-year-old grandfather proudly recorded the arrival in a leather-bound family album: “A grandson was born to me, the son of Ser Piero my son, on the 15th day of April, a Saturday, in the third hour of the night. He bears the name Lionardo.”8 He would bear, in fact, the name Leonardo di Ser Piero da Vinci, which was how, twenty years later, he registered himself in the Compagnia di San Luca, the painters’ confraternity in Florence. At the Sforza court he would sometimes be known as “Leonardo Fiorentino” or—grandly Latinized—as “Leonardus de Florentia.” That, at least, was how Lodovico referred to him in documents.9 The ducal artist and engineer was therefore identified not with an obscure Tuscan village but with the glories of Florence.

  Leonardo’s twenty-six-year-old father, Ser Piero, was (as his honorary title implied) a notary: someone who wrote wills, contracts, and other commercial and legal correspondence. The family had produced notaries for at least five generations, but with Leonardo the chain was to snap. He was, as his grandfather’s tax return stated a few years later, “non legittimo”—born out of wedlock—and as such he (along with criminals and priests) was barred from membership in the Guild of Judges and Notaries. Leonardo’s mother was a sixteen-year-old girl named Caterina, and an apparent difference in their social status meant she and Piero, a bright and ambitious young man, did not marry.

  Almost nothing is known about Caterina. She may have been the family’s domestic servant. A case has recently been made for her having been, like many domestic servants in Tuscany, a slave from another country. A century earlier, Florence’s city fathers had issued a decree permitting the importation of slaves, provided they were infidels rather than Christians, though they were promptly baptized and given Christian names (and Caterina was a popular choice) on arrival in Florence. Well-to-do Florentines could purchase slaves—usually young women who were to be used as domestics—from lands along the Black Sea (Turks, Tatars, Circassians) as well as from North Africa. Although they cost from thirty to fifty florins, half the yearly wages of a skilled artisan, they became so plentiful in the fifteenth century that a popular song described the sight of “charming little slave girls” hanging out of windows “shaking out clothes in the morning / fresh and joyous as hawthorn buds.”10

  Intriguingly, a wealthy friend of Ser Piero, a Florentine banker named Vanni di Niccolò, owned a slave named Caterina, and following Vanni’s death in 1451, Ser Piero inherited his house in Florence and served as executor of his estate. His friendship with Vanni and position as executor would have given him—so the theory goes—sexual access to Caterina. This hypothesis potentially sheds new light on another theory, that of a professor of anthropology whose team found that fingerprints identified as Leonardo’s reveal the same dermatoglyphic structure—that is, the same pattern of loops and whorls—as people of Middle Eastern origin. The announcement generated headlines that Leonardo was an Arab, though skeptics claim it is difficult both to determine someone’s ethnicity from his fingerprints and to be certain that the fingerprints taken from Leonardo’s notebooks are, in fact, those of Leonardo.11

  Given the dearth of information about Caterina, the theories that Leonardo’s mother was a slave, or that Leonardo had a Middle Eastern heritage, must remain speculative. What is known is that Leonardo was raised in the house of his father and grandfather, and Caterina largely disappeared from his life. Children of slaves were always born free, and the church allowed them to be adopted and legitimized by their fathers. The mothers themselves were often given a small dowry and married off to someone else. In Caterina’s case, a short while after Leonardo’s birth she married a local kiln worker nicknamed Accattabriga. This sobriquet, meaning Troublemaker, suggests that he was not a particularly good catch. She went on to have five children after Leonardo—four daughters and a son—and lived in humble circumstances in Campo Zeppi, near Vinci. Little is known of the Accattabriga clan except that sometime in the 1480s the son, Leonardo’s half brother, perhaps a troublemaker like his father, was killed by a crossbow in Pisa.12

  Soon after Leonardo’s birth, Piero married another sixteen-year-old, a girl named Albiera. Higher up the social scale than Caterina, she came from a well-to-do family of Florentine notaries, presumably making her a more attractive catch for the aspiring young Ser Piero. Albiera died when Leonardo was twelve, without giving Ser Piero any children. His second wife, Francesca, died in 1473, likewise childless. Leonardo would remain an only child until Ser Piero’s third wife gave birth to a son in 1476, by which time Leonardo was twenty-four and no longer living at home. Ser Piero would ultimately go on to have upward of a dozen children, with a recent study claiming he produced at least twenty-one offspring.13

  Leonardo appears to have been a much-loved child. As an eldest son he was welcomed happily into the home of his father and grandfather. No fewer than ten godparents attended his baptism, an indication that the family felt no shame about the new arrival. Although barred from the legal profession and university because of his illegitimacy, he seems to have suffered few if any other strictures or consequences. In fifteenth-century Italy, little social stigma attached to illegitimacy. The writers Petrarch and Boccaccio, the architect Leon Battista Alberti, the painters Filippo Lippi and his son Filippino, and even a future pope, Clement VII, all were born out of wedlock. Noble families set the fashion of accepting their illegitimate children. When Pope Pius II passed through Ferrara in 1459, his welcoming party consisted of eight bastards from the ruling family, including the reigning duke, Borso d’Este. Pius no doubt took a broad-minded view of the Este clan because before taking holy orders he himself had fathered several illegitimate children. “What is sweeter to a human being,” he wrote to dispel his father’s dismay that the children were born in sin, “both to extend his bloodline and for you to have someone to leave behind?... Truly, it is an enormous pleasure for me that my seed was fruitful.”14

  Ser Piero appears to have been equally delighted at the arrival of his son, though for unknown reasons he never legitimized him. Certainly Leonardo’s illegitimacy gave him one distinct advantage: it allowed him to escape the legal profession in favor of more creative and wide-ranging pursuits in the same way that Petrarch and Boccaccio, subject to only the faintest moral stain, and liberated from the demands of church and guild, had been able to experiment with new forms of expression.

  Leonardo’s schooling was probably fairly unremarkable, hardly designed to turn him into the polymath he eventually became. Between the ages of six and eleven he would have studied at an elementary school, what the Florentines called the botteghuzza because its primary concern was to prepare students for the bottega (workshop). The teacher would have been either a priest or a notary, and the students learned to read and write, mostly in the idiomatic Italian of Tuscany. Leonardo would also have received some Latin instruction through a grammar known as the Donadello. Later in life he owned no fewer than six of these Latin grammars, one of them perhaps his original schoolbook. This ardent stockpiling of elementary Latin grammars indicates how Leonardo, though he had some ability, was by no means fluent or even particularly competent in Latin. His most serious attempt to master the language would come when he was in his late thirties in Milan, when he transcribed parts of Niccolò Perotti’s widely used textbook Rudimenta grammatices. That one of history’s greatest brains struggled with amo, amas, amat should be consolation to anyone who has ever tried to learn a second language.

  At the age of eleven, students went to either a grammar school, where they s
tudied Latin literature to prepare for a learned vocation, or an abacus school, where the weight of the teaching was on numeracy rather than literacy. Leonardo almost certainly went to the latter. Pupils at abacus schools were introduced to some literature, such as Aesop and Dante, but mathematics was emphasized in order to prepare them for careers in commerce. A good example of what students had to learn is found in the painter Piero della Francesca’s Trattato d’abaco, which Piero claimed was a treatise on “the arithmetic necessary to merchants.” Among the many exercises is one that reveals the sort of brain-twisting commercial transaction common in Italy in the fifteenth century: “Two individuals are bartering, one with wax and the other with wool. The wax is worth 9 ducats and a quarter, the barter rate is 10 and two-thirds; the other one has wool and I do not know what the thousand is worth, its exchange rate is 34 ducats, and the barter was fair. How much was the wool worth in cash?”15

  One of Leonardo’s earliest biographers, the painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, claimed that Leonardo was so astute at mathematics that “he used to baffle his master with the questions and problems that he raised.”16 Vasari never met Leonardo (he was born in 1511) and many of his stories are open to doubt. However, it seems a safe assumption that Leonardo was a curious and gifted student, a brilliant geometer and draftsman in particular. Yet he was not overly adept at arithmetic, and he never used algebra.

  Neither, it appears, did Leonardo excel at writing in Italian, let alone Latin. He once described himself as an “uomo senza lettere”: a man without letters. The claim was an exaggeration, and it probably refers to his lack of ability in Latin. Nevertheless, his notebooks do reveal numerous grammatical inconsistencies, misspellings, skipped words, and a general lack of linguistic rigor. Some of his errors are curious even given the haste with which he may have been making his notes. For example, copying down a list of books in his library, he wrote “anticaglie” instead of “antiquarie.” On the same page he turned “Margharita” into “Marcherita.” Elsewhere he mangled the name of the Persian philosopher Avicenna, writing “Avinega.” Venezia he turned into “Vinegia.”17 Mitigating in his favor is the fact that the rules of spelling—like attitudes toward illegitimacy—were liberal in Leonardo’s day.

  Leonardo’s stepmother and his grandfather both died in 1464, when he was twelve years old. Either at that time or else at some unknown point in the next few years—but by 1469 at the latest—he moved to Florence to live with his father. Ser Piero had done extremely well for himself. By 1462 he had been working as Cosimo de’ Medici’s notary, and by 1469 he was the official notary to the Podestà, Florence’s chief law officer. Clients of his thriving practice included the nuns and friars of at least eleven convents and monasteries, and he was the notary of choice for members of the Jewish community in Florence. “If destiny bids you take the best man of law,” wrote a Florentine poet named Bernardo Cambini, “look no further than da Vinci, Piero.”18 He had a grace-and-favor apartment in the Palazzo del Podestà and, after 1470, a house in the Via delle Prestanze, the present-day Via de’ Gondi, a street running off the north side of the Palazzo Vecchio.

  With fifty thousand people, Florence must have been an impressive sight for a young man like Leonardo arriving from Vinci. “Nothing more beautiful or more splendid than Florence can be found anywhere in the world,” the scholar Leonardo Bruni had declared in about 1402. Fifty years later, a Florentine merchant, taking stock of his hometown, believed it even more resplendent than in Bruni’s day, with beautiful new churches, hospitals, and palaces, and with prosperous citizens sauntering through the streets in “expensive and elegant clothing.” Florence at this time could boast fifty-four dealers in precious stones, seventy-four goldsmith shops, and eighty-three silk-weaving firms. There was, the merchant acknowledged, a further attraction: the astonishing proliferation of Florence’s architects, sculptors, and painters.19 Highly conspicuous by the time Leonardo arrived in Florence were frescoes, statues, and buildings by men like Giotto, Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Donatello, and Lorenzo Ghiberti.

  Leonardo’s true education began not in an abacus school in rural Tuscany but in a goldsmith’s workshop in Florence when he was aged about thirteen or fourteen. He would have had little or no opportunity to indulge his artistic proclivities in the commerce-minded abacus school, but evidently his youthful sketches, made in his spare time, caught the eye of his father. Ser Piero served as the notary for the Florentine goldsmith and painter Andrea del Verrocchio, to whom, according to Vasari, he proudly showed a batch of the boy’s drawings.20 Ser Piero apprenticed Leonardo with Verrocchio, evidently unconcerned that his son would therefore become what was essentially a manual laborer. Ser Piero was a member of the powerful and prestigious Guild of Judges and Notaries in whose ranks could be found the sons of noble families and wealthy merchants. Painters, on the other hand, were part a guild that included doctors and apothecaries but also such lowly tradesmen as drapers, candle makers, hatters, glovers, grave diggers, and purveyors of cheese. Although Leonardo’s career choices were restricted due to his illegitimacy, Ser Piero was more liberal in his attitude toward the boy’s vocation than, say, Michelangelo’s snobbish father who, according to Vasari, scolded and beat his son when he first showed an interest in working with his hands.

  Apprentices in artists’ workshops usually studied six or seven years under a recognized master, who offered food, lodging, and hands-on instruction in return for a fee paid by the apprentice’s father or guardian. Leonardo was fortunate in his father’s choice. Verrocchio enjoyed a splendid reputation as the “fountain from whom painters embibed whatever skills they have.”21 Then in his early thirties, he was the son of a brick maker who later made good as a customs inspector. Andrea seems to have led something of a wild youth: at seventeen he was arrested for killing a fourteen-year-old wool worker with a stone (he was ultimately acquitted). He may have apprenticed in the workshop of Donatello, but his main teacher was a goldsmith named Giuliano del Verrocchio, from whom he took his name (Verrocchio means “true eye”—an apt name for an artist). He endured some lean times after striking out on his own in his twenties, going barefoot at one point when he was unable to afford a pair of shoes.22

  Verrocchio’s career kindled to life when he began working for the ruling Medici family in the mid-to-late 1460s, about the time, coincidentally, when Leonardo entered his studio. Becoming the Medici’s sculptor of choice, he designed and built the tomb for Cosimo de’ Medici, founder of the political dynasty who died in 1464. A few years later he sculpted the bronze-and-porphyry tomb of Cosimo’s sons, Piero and Giovanni. He also created for the family two remarkable bronze statues, a Putto with a Dolphin and a David. Leonardo was in Verrocchio’s workshop when these two elegant little statues were designed and cast, and in the figure of the David—a slim, athletic youth with tousled hair and an enigmatic half smile—it is tempting to see a portrait of Leonardo. If Leonardo was as beautiful as all his early biographers attest, Verrocchio could have naturally modeled the valiant young giant killer on his handsome apprentice. However, the absence of any youthful portrait of Leonardo with which to make a comparison means the identification must remain speculative.

  Leonardo stayed in Verrocchio’s workshop for at least six or seven years. He spent the better part of a decade, therefore, learning the trade secrets essential to a painter and sculptor: everything from how to tint a piece of paper or make a pen from a goose quill, to the best method of applying gold leaf or casting bronze. Like the other apprentices, he assisted the master on works such as Verrocchio’s altarpiece The Baptism of Christ, done for the monks at the abbey of San Salvi in Florence. Legend has it that Leonardo painted one of the two kneeling angels in this altarpiece, turning out a figure so sublime that as Vasari recorded, Verrocchio “would never touch colours again, he was so ashamed that a boy understood their use better than he did.”23 Leonardo may well have executed the angel with the flaxen curls, and he would indeed become a painter far superior to his master, whos
e true talent was in sculpture rather than painting. Alas for the myth, Verrocchio did not in fact throw away his paint box in despair, since years later he was at work on an altarpiece for the cathedral in Pistoia.

  Another Verrocchio painting on which Leonardo worked was Tobias and the Angel, for which he contributed the eager little dog—a creature with a wavy silver coat—as well as the fish and the golden ringlets over Tobias’s ears.24 Leonardo had a fascination with curly hair. His own hair, as one early biographer attests, was long and curly, and his beard “came to the middle of his breast, and was well-dressed and curled.”25 He evidently took pride in his appearance. Besides his well-dressed hair and curled beard, he had a taste for colorful clothing. Florence was renowned for its luxurious textiles—silks and brocades with names like rosa di zaffrone (pink sapphire) and fior di pesco (peach blossom). But most of these exotic fabrics were exported to the harems of Turkey because sumptuary laws—regulations against ostentatious dress—meant Florentines necessarily favored more sober colors. Not so Leonardo, whose wardrobe in later life, an audacious mix of purples, pinks, and crimsons, flouted the dictates of the fashion police. One list of his clothes itemized a taffeta gown, a rose-colored Catalan gown, a purple cape with a velvet hood, a coat of purple satin, another of crimson satin, a purple coat of camel hair, dark purple hose, dusty-rose hose, black hose, and two pink caps.26