Leonardo and the Last Supper (23 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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Leonardo might have had another reason for visiting Florence at this time: to operate as a spy against his native city. In his notebooks, someone—not Leonardo—scribbled a partially legible phrase, a “memorandum to Maestro Lionardo” that exhorted the painter to “produce as soon as possible the report on conditions in Florence,” and in particular how Savonarola “has organized the state of Florence.”
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Leonardo was evidently to report back to someone in Milan on the political condition of Florence: in effect, to pass on information about Savonarola and the new republican government, presumably to Lodovico Sforza. He was ordered to pay particular attention to the city’s fortifications, for example, how the forts were armed and garrisoned, which suggests that an attack or an invasion was being planned.

No report from Leonardo survives, so it is unclear whether or not he operated as the duke’s secret agent in Florence. However, the assignment would not have been surprising in light of the poor relations between the two states. Florence had remained steadfast in its alliance with the French and, despite offers of military assistance from the other signatories, declined to join the Holy League. The French still occupied Pisa and various of Florence’s fortresses, but the Florentines clearly had more faith in the French than in Lodovico, whom they rightly suspected of aspiring to the lordship of Pisa. During the summer, in fact, Lodovico had dispatched a team of archers to Pisa to help the Pisans resist Florentine efforts to reclaim the city. He also hoped to undermine Savonarola’s influence. “I am doing things to turn people here against him,” reported his ambassador to Florence.
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Lodovico, meanwhile, had reason to be wary of both Savonarola and the Florentine alliance with France. When the Dominican friar met with
Charles VIII in June, he assured him that the entire city was on the French side. The entire city also seemed to be on Savonarola’s side. A Florentine shopkeeper noted in his diary that people of Florence were so devoted to Savonarola that they would have jumped into the fire if he asked.
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Upward of twelve thousand people flocked into the cathedral to hear his spellbinding sermons. His message was not a cheerful one. “I announce to you,” he declared from the pulpit in 1495, “that all Italy will be convulsed, and those who are most exalted will be most abased. O Italy! Trouble after trouble shall befall thee. Troubles of war after famine, troubles of pestilence after war, trouble from this side and that.”
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A portrait of Savonarola by one of his followers, showing his fierce aquiline features partially obscured by a cowl, bore the inscription: “This is a picture of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, a prophet sent by God.” The intentions of this prophet were clear. As one of his followers put it, he wished to “purge our whole city of vices and fill her with the splendour of virtue.”
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If Leonardo did indeed visit Florence in 1495, he could scarcely have sympathized with certain of Savonarola’s plans for purging Florence of vice. The friar’s opposition to vanity and luxury meant he sought to enforce sumptuary laws against ostentatious and “lascivious” clothing. He also deplored the study of pagan authors by humanist scholars. “Plato, Aristotle and the other philosophers are fast in Hell,” he blithely informed Florence’s enthusiasts of classical learning. Then in December 1494 he had called for the stoning and burning of sodomites. This appeal was quickly followed by an increase in anonymous denunciations of the kind that in 1476 saw Leonardo hauled before the court. Although the government rejected the death penalty for sodomites, the situation would soon become more menacing and dangerous as, early in 1496, Savonarola began mobilizing groups of white-robed children, his
fanciulli
, to search out and denounce sodomites. “The boys were held in such respect,” one citizen reported, “that everyone avoided evil, and most of all the abominable vice.”
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This, clearly, was no longer the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Swayed by Savonarola, the Florentines were rejecting the values that over the previous century had given the city its unsurpassed reputation for intellectual and artistic excellence: the passion for the classical cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, the preoccupation with secular as well as transcendental values, the belief that a man might fulfill himself other than through the army or the church, and the conviction that the nude body
(revealed in a work of art like Donatello’s bronze
David
or Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus
) was a site of beauty rather than shame. It must have been a relief for Leonardo to return to his castle in Milan.