Leonardo and the Last Supper Read online

  Another of Leonardo’s notes recorded that in March 1493 “Giulio, a German, came to live with me.”11 He listed three other names immediately after Giulio’s: Lucia, Piero, and Leonardo. These, too, were probably helpers, with Lucia no doubt serving as his housekeeper and cook. Later that year, Giulio the German was still with Leonardo, making fire tongs and a lever for the master, and paying a monthly rent. Then, a few months later, an assistant named Galeazzo arrived, paying Leonardo five lire per month.12 Galeazzo’s father must have had business dealings in Holland or Germany, since he paid the boy’s rent in Rhenish florins (which were worth slightly less than Florentine florins). Five lire per month was steep at a time when a little more than double that amount would rent a small house in Florence for an entire year.13 But of course Galeazzo’s father was paying more than merely his son’s rent: he was paying for him to be trained by one of the greatest artists in Italy. Yet even Leonardo’s reputation was not always enough to concentrate their minds, and occasionally he was forced to rouse his young men from their beds and chivvy them along. In his notebooks one of them wrote (rather like a child writing lines on a chalkboard): “The master said that lying down will not bring you to Fame, nor staying beneath the quilts.”14

  Another tenant briefly shared Leonardo’s lodgings. One of Leonardo’s memoranda from this time stated, “Caterina came on 16th day of July, 1493.”15 Some biographers like to interpret this laconic announcement as the arrival in Leonardo’s house of his mother, come to Milan in her declining years (she would have been fifty-seven in 1493) to be reunited with and cared for by her famous son. The appeal of this scenario is obvious: separated from her infant son and then married off to the Troublemaker, the ex-slave (as she perhaps was) finally finds comfort in the bosom of her celebrated son. However, another of Leonardo’s memos, from six months later, recorded a payment of ten soldi to Caterina, which suggests that she was a domestic servant or, at any rate, performing tasks for which he paid her a wage.16

  The relationship, whatever it was, turned out to be short-lived, because within a few months Caterina was dead. In a rather passionless bit of accounting, Leonardo itemized the amount he spent on her funeral. Pallbearers, eight clerics, a doctor, and several gravediggers: all received their due from Leonardo’s purse. He also paid for candles, a pall over the bier, tapers for the funeral procession, and two soldi for the ringing of a church bell.17 This funeral was quite modest at a time when moralists and civil authorities in many parts of Italy attempted to curb what one writer denounced as the “ruinous costs and useless customs” of funerals.18 Funerals had become ruinously expensive for the simple reason that they were an important demonstration of family status and honor. One Florentine of Leonardo’s generation, burying his father, proudly observed that he had staged “a public celebration in keeping with the rank he and I merited.”19

  Caterina’s humble funeral was certainly not in keeping with the rank of the mother of an artist and engineer to Lodovico Sforza. Even so, the fact that Leonardo himself reached into his pocket for the funeral of a woman who had worked for him for less than a year suggests either that she had no family or (and perhaps we can be sentimental after all) that she was indeed his mother.

  One important piece of advice that Leonardo intended to pass along in his proposed treatise on painting was the necessity of young painters keeping good company. He was adamant that painters needed to avoid the “chatter” of others and give a wide berth to companions who might be “highly mischievous.”20 Yet Leonardo himself had a highly mischievous companion: a young boy named Giacomo.

  Child labor was common in Renaissance Italy, with virtually all boys working in one capacity or another by their early teens, if not earlier.21 Painters, like other artisans such as carpenters or stonemasons, often employed an errand boy—known as a fattorino—to perform various menial tasks about the house or shop in return for room and board. Some of them, such as Pietro Perugino, who began his career as a fattorino for a painter in Perugia, went on to become artists themselves.

  Leonardo took one such fattorino into his studio in the summer of 1490. “Giacomo came to live with me on the feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, 1490, aged 10 years,” he recorded. Giacomo’s full name was Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, but his unruly behavior in Leonardo’s studio quickly earned him a nickname: Leonardo began calling him Salai, Tuscan slang for demon or devil. Things went wrong very quickly. “The second day I had two shirts cut out for him,” Leonardo wrote in a long letter of complaint to the boy’s father, “a pair of hose, and a jerkin, and when I put aside some money to pay for these things he stole 4 lire, the money out of the purse; and I could never make him confess, though I was quite certain of the fact.” The boy’s transgressions did not end there. On the following evening, Leonardo went to dinner with a friend, a distinguished architect, and Giacomo, invited to the table, made a memorable impression: “Giacomo supped for two and did mischief for four, for he broke three cruets and spilled the wine.” Leonardo vented his fury at the boy’s behavior in the margin of the letter: “ladro, bugiardo, ostinato, ghiotto”—thief, liar, obstinate, glutton.22

  More was to come. Some weeks later, one of Leonardo’s assistants, Marco, discovered that a silverpoint drawing had gone missing along with some silver coins. Conducting a search of the premises, he found the money “hidden in the said Giacomo’s box.” No one was safe from Giacomo’s light-fingered predations. A few months on, early in 1491, Leonardo designed costumes of “wild men” for a pageant in honor of Lodovico Sforza’s wedding. Giacomo, who accompanied Leonardo to the costume fitting, spotted his chance as the men undressed to try on their outfits: “Giacomo went to the purse of one of them which lay on the bed with other clothes...and took out such money as was in it.” Shortly thereafter, another silverpoint went missing.23

  What did Giacomo do with his ill-gotten gains? Like any other ten-year-old, he took himself off to the sweet shop. This we know from Leonardo’s aggrieved account of the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of a Turkish hide for which Leonardo had paid two lire, and from which he was hoping to have a pair of boots made for himself. “Giacomo stole it of me within a month,” he wrote, “and sold it to a cobbler for 20 soldi, with which money, by his own confession, he bought aniseed candies.”24

  We might expect Leonardo to have announced, at the end of this grave catalog of crimes, that young Giacomo had been shown the door. But in fact he was not. While most of Leonardo’s apprentices and assistants came and went at regular intervals, Giacomo remained with him for many years. This was not necessarily due to any reformation of character on Giacomo’s part. He seems always to have been wayward, fractious, and demanding. In the pages of one of the notebooks is the statement—not, apparently, written in Leonardo’s hand—that reads “Salai, I want to make peace with you, not war. No longer war, because I surrender.”25 If Leonardo did not write these weary lines, then they must have been penned by one of Leonardo’s other apprentices. The tone suggests, as does the brazen theft of Marco’s money, that Giacomo was a cause of considerable friction among the others in the studio.

  Not only was Giacomo allowed to remain in the studio; the larcenous fattorino was clearly treated by Leonardo as a favorite. Indeed, Leonardo lavished gifts on him from the outset, making sure he was dressed, like his master, in beautiful clothing. In the first year alone, Giacomo’s wardrobe cost Leonardo twenty-six lire and thirteen soldi, the annual wage of a domestic servant.26 These articles included an astonishing twenty-four pairs of shoes, as well as four pairs of hose, a cap, six shirts, and three jerkins.27 Undated notes written sometime later recount how Leonardo bought Giacomo a chain and gave him money to purchase a sword and have his fortune told.28 “I paid to Salai 3 gold ducats,” reads another, “which he said he wanted for a pair of rose-coloured hose with their trimming.” Giacomo, like his master, evidently favored pink tights. A week or two later, more purchases: “I gave Salai 21 braccia of cloth to make a shirt, at 10 soldi the braccio.�
�29 Thus, the material alone cost 210 soldi, or more than 10 lire—half the annual wage of a domestic servant.

  Why this sticky-fingered little clotheshorse managed to keep his place in the Corte dell’Arengo is fairly simple. Giacomo held a great physical attraction for Leonardo, who was bewitched by the boy’s appearance, especially his curly hair. According to Vasari, Salai was “a very attractive youth of unusual grace and looks, with very beautiful hair which he wore curled in ringlets and which delighted his master.”30 Giacomo seems to have served as a model for Leonardo. No definitive image of him exists, but art historians refer to a distinctive face that appears repeatedly in his drawings—that of a beautiful youth with a Greek nose, a mass of curls and a dreamy pout—as a “Salai-type profile.”31

  A Leonardo drawing showing the Salai-type profile

  Leonardo’s relationship with Giacomo seems to have drawn little comment in his own lifetime. However, decades later, in about 1560, a painter named Gian Paolo Lomazzo, who turned to writing when he went blind, composed (but did not publish) a treatise called Gli sogni e ragionamenti (Dreams and Arguments). This work imagined a conversation between Leonardo and the Greek sculptor Phidias. Lomazzo was born in 1538, almost two decades after Leonardo’s death, so he had no actual knowledge about the relationship between Leonardo and Salai, apart from hearsay and speculation (he claimed to have spoken with some of Leonardo’s former servants).

  In the dialogue, Leonardo is seduced by Phidias into self-revelation, confessing that he loved Salai “more than all the others.” This disclosure prompts Phidias to inquire if the relationship was physical: “Did you perhaps play with him that backside game that Florentines love so much?” Leonardo enthusiastically confesses that he did: “And how many times! Have in mind that he was a most beautiful young man, especially at about fifteen.”32 According to Lomazzo’s account, Leonardo’s passion for the beautiful Salai therefore reached its peak at about the time work began on The Last Supper in Santa Maria delle Grazie.

  In the fifteenth century, Florentines were so well-known for homosexuality that the German word for sodomite was Florenzer. By 1415 the sexual behavior of young Florentine men had caused the city fathers such concern that “desiring to eliminate a worse evil by means of a lesser one” they licensed two more public brothels to go with the one they had opened with similar aspirations a dozen years earlier.33 When these establishments failed to produce the desired results, and still “desiring to extirpate that vice of Sodom and Gomorrah, so contrary to nature,” the city fathers took further action.34 In 1432, a special authority, the Ufficiali di Notte e Conservatori dei Monasteri, or Officers of the Night and Preservers of Morality in the Monasteries, was formed to catch and prosecute sodomites. Over the next seven decades, more than ten thousand men were apprehended by this night watch. Although burning at the stake was the official punishment for sodomites, most offenders were let off with a fine. Repeat offenders might find themselves in the gogna, the stocks on the outer wall of the local prison.

  One of the men apprehended by the Officers of the Night, in 1476, was Leonardo. At several locations around Florence, such as on the wall of the Palazzo Vecchio, the city fathers installed receptacles known as tamburi (drums) or buchi della verità (holes of truth). Into these openings Florentines could deposit anonymous accusations concerning crimes of any sort. Florentines who fell foul of this system of denunciation were the goldsmith Lorenzo Ghiberti (accused in 1443 of being illegitimate), Filippo Lippi (accused in 1461 of fathering a child with a nun), and Niccolò Machiavelli (accused in 1510 of sodomizing a prostitute named La Riccia). In April 1476, Leonardo’s name turned up in one of these holes of truth. Along with three other young men, he was accused of having sexual relations with a seventeen-year-old named Jacopo Saltarelli. The denunciation explained that Saltarelli “has been a party to many deplorable affairs and consents to please those people who request such wickedness of him.” The anonymous accuser provided the name of “Leonardo di Ser Piero da Vinci, who stays with Andrea de [sic] Verrocchio,” as one of four men who “committed sodomy with the said Jacopo.”35

  The charge was repeated two months later—this time in elegant Latin—but Leonardo was never charged because the anonymous accuser failed to come forward, and no other witnesses corroborated the story. The charges were eventually dropped and the case was dismissed. Most biographers and art historians are quick to convict. A husband-and-wife team, authors of a widely used textbook, claimed the accusation “was almost certainly true” before adding—bizarrely—that Leonardo’s homosexuality explained “his proneness to abandon things half done.”36 Questions of procrastination aside, Leonardo was almost certainly homosexual by the standards of later centuries. Freud was no doubt correct when he stated that it was doubtful whether Leonardo ever embraced a woman in passion.37 Two years after the Saltarelli affair, Leonardo wrote a partially legible declaration in his notebook: “Fioravante di Domenico at Florence is my most beloved friend, as though he were my...”38 A nineteenth-century editor of Leonardo’s writings hopefully filled in “brother,” but the relationship may well have been more intimate.

  Within a year or two of the Saltarelli affair, Leonardo appears to have been involved in one more scandal in Florence. In a letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici composed early in 1479, the ruler of Bologna, Giovanni Bentivoglio, raised the issue of a young apprentice recently exiled from Florence and then jailed in Bologna because of the “wicked life he had followed” during his time in Florence. Details of the youth’s crimes are unspecified, though he had fallen into what Bentivoglio called mala conversatione—bad company. He may have been little different from the many unruly young toughs, who, as one Florentine lamented, “threaten barkeepers, dismember saints, and break pots and plates.”39 What made him distinctive, however, was the name by which Bentivoglio referred to him: Paolo de Leonardo de Vinci da Fiorenza. This formulation—with its use of the patronymic “de Leonardo de Vinci”—might suggest that Paolo was Leonardo’s son. That scenario is impossible, however, since if Paolo was, say, sixteen years old in early 1479—the very youngest he is likely to have been—the maths require Leonardo to have been eleven when his “son” was born. If Paolo was older than sixteen, then Leonardo would have been even more startlingly precocious.40

  A far more plausible scenario is that Paolo was an apprentice who began working and studying under Leonardo after he struck out on his own following his long apprenticeship with Verrocchio. Apprentices often adopted (or were referred to by) the names of their masters. Verrocchio was a case in point: born Andrea Michele di Cioni, he dropped his father’s name and used that of his masters, the goldsmiths Francesco and Giuliano Verrocchio. Less certain is whether Leonardo was in any way involved in Paolo’s “wicked life,” or indeed whether Paolo’s wicked life involved “that vice of Sodom and Gomorrah.” Banishment to Bologna was not the usual punishment for sodomites, though the moral tone of the letter suggests that sexual misconduct of some variety was among Paolo’s transgressions. In any case, Paolo’s malfeasance, whatever it involved, no doubt redounded to his master’s discredit, and the young miscreant’s example may lurk in the background of Leonardo’s advice about keeping oneself from bad company.

  The Corte dell’Arengo would have been a scene of intense activity at the end of 1494, as Leonardo’s work on the gigantic horse gave way to the project for Santa Maria delle Grazie. Before painting either a panel or a mural, an artist needed to make dozens if not hundreds of drawings. These ranged from primi pensieri—the artist’s brainstorming “first thoughts”—to full-scale drawings that served as templates for the final work. Work on the mural therefore involved Leonardo in vast and intensive labors with paper, pen, and ink as he worked out the details of his composition and then prepared to begin work on the wall itself.

  Leonardo was a superb draftsman. One look at his adolescent doodlings supposedly convinced Verrocchio to hire him on the spot. A century later, Giorgio Vasari would marvel at Leonardo’s “beautifu
l and detailed drawings on paper which are unrivalled for the perfection of their finish.”41 At a time when other artists merely saw drawings as a means to an end, Leonardo evidently took pride in his sketches. At some point in the 1480s, probably soon after his arrival in Milan, he drew up a list of the drawings in his possession. They made for a varied collection, encompassing “a head of the Duke” (presumably Lodovico), three Madonnas, multiple drawings of Saint Sebastian and Saint Jerome, compositions featuring angels, portraits of women with braided coiffures, men “with fine flowing hair,” and the head of a gypsy girl.42

  According to one source, Leonardo used a stylus when he sketched in the little notebook he kept at his belt.43 A stylus was a metal-tipped drawing instrument widely used by artists before the invention of the pencil (graphite was not discovered until in 1504, and the wooden-cased graphite pencil appeared only in the second half of the seventeenth century). For drawing with a stylus, artists used paper specially coated with a ground made from, among other things, powdered bone. One fifteenth-century recipe recommended incinerated table scraps, such as chicken wings, whose ground-up ashes were sprinkled thinly on the paper or parchment and then brushed off with a hare’s foot.44 With the paper thus prepared, the artist went to work on its granular surface with his stylus, which was usually made from silver and sharpened to a point, and which, as it was drawn across the surface, left particles behind; these traces quickly oxidized, producing delicate lines of silvery gray.