Leonardo and the Last Supper (3 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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
.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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”).
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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 defenseless 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.