Leonardo and the Last Supper (4 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 the portrait, called Leonardo “the master who in truth I believe has no equal.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.

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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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