Leonardo and the Last Supper (7 page)

Leonardo’s
The Adoration of the Magi

Success in Florence, then, seemed to beckon. On the verge of his thirties, Leonardo looked to be establishing himself as a successful workshop master in the stamp of Verrocchio, securing numerous commissions—and very prestigious ones at that—through both his talent and his connections with powerful friends. He probably hired apprentices of his own at this point.

But his work did not proceed auspiciously. Most of these commissions met with unhappy fates. The seamstress Lisabetta did not get her dowry, or at least not from Leonardo. Nor did the monks receive their Adoration of the Magi. Despite further incentives (the monks sent him a bushel of wheat and then a cask of red wine) he failed to complete the work, which remained in a state of frantic and mesmerizing incompletion. Leonardo did, however, finish for the monks another, lesser task. They engaged him to paint one of their sundials, for which he received in return a load of firewood.

Other of Leonardo’s works also went unfinished or undelivered. For some reason, the tapestry design for the king of Portugal was never sent to Flanders, where it was to have been woven in gold and silk. Nor did Leonardo bring to completion his altarpiece for the chapel in the Palazzo Vecchio. His failure to deliver this latter work to the Signoria, the men who employed his father, may have involved Ser Piero in some awkwardness and embarrassment, as did, no doubt, his inability to furnish the dowry and complete the Adoration for the monks of San Donato. His tardiness and delinquency—caused by a combination of distractions, experimentation, a quest for perfection, and a general intellectual restlessness—appear to have been well developed at this early stage of his career. A Florentine poet named Ugolino Verino, surveying Leonardo’s career from the vantage point of the mid-1480s, tut-tutted that he “barely managed to complete a painting in ten years.”
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However bad it may have looked to his disappointed patrons, Leonardo’s failure to complete his work was not the result of incompetence or a lack of resources. Rather, he was frustrated by the extremely high standard he set for himself in his quest for a new visual language. He looked much more closely at the world than his contemporaries, wishing to integrate its features more naturalistically into his art.

A good example of how Leonardo worked can be seen in the painting of a Virgin and Child with a cat that he planned in about 1480. The painting
itself was never done, or else has long since been lost, but his scattered sketches show that he repeatedly—and almost obsessively—rehearsed the pose of a toddler holding a cat. Verrocchio used terra-cotta statuettes as models for the Christ Child in his paintings. Leonardo, however, was determined to capture life more accurately and realistically. Since his drawings of the child with the cat date from the late 1470s or early 1480s, it is tempting to see in these vignettes one of Leonardo’s infant half brothers, Antonio (born in 1476) or Giuliano (born in 1479), wrestling with the family cat. Antonio and Giuliano were almost certainly the models for two Madonna and Child paintings that he did finish,
Madonna of the Carnation
, done between about 1476 and 1478, and the
Benois Madonna
, painted a year or two later. In each case Leonardo depicts a Christ Child whose unfocused eyes and clumsy grasp were surely based on his actual observation of babies.
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Leonardo believed the painter required a vast store of resources, especially deep powers of observation, since he was to reproduce in his works “all that the eye can see”
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—such things as the effect of the wind on trees, or shadows on clouds, or how objects looked underwater. The sight of sun and shadow playing across people and objects obsessed him. He planned to write a treatise on light and shade that would account scientifically for subtle atmospheric effects such as mist and reflected light. The motions of the human body also absorbed him. A sixteenth-century biographer reported that in order to be able to paint joints and muscles realistically Leonardo dissected corpses, “indifferent to this inhuman and nauseating work.”
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No artist had ever peered so deeply into the physical features of men and their world, or struggled so intensively to capture them in paint.

Leonardo was relentlessly inquisitive, seeking answers to a wide variety of phenomena. His notebooks are filled with reminders to ask questions of friends and acquaintances: how a tower in Ferrara was constructed, how the people in Flanders “go on the ice” in winter, how the capon hatches the eggs of the hen.
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He also made his own firsthand investigations, occasionally ones requiring vigor and courage. From the Po Valley near Milan the giant hulk of the 15,203-foot Monte Rosa can be seen rising in the distance, and at some point Leonardo climbed toward one of the summits of this great massif, thereby becoming one of history’s first mountaineers.
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Ascending the jagged slopes to understand, among other things, why the sky was blue, he marveled at how the world looked different at high altitude, with the thin atmosphere making the sun look brighter and the sky darker.
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Leonardo was not content, therefore, to work according to the tried-and-trusted styles of the day, looking at the world with the same eyes as everyone else and churning out altarpieces little different from what painters had been doing for the previous fifty years. Instead, he continually experimented, setting himself almost impossible tasks. He wanted to create entirely unique and different visual forms: ones inspired not by earlier paintings but by the world around him. Many of his contemporaries were highly competent technicians who could create elegant and pleasing works of art to satisfy their patrons. But they did not climb up mountains or study the muscles of corpses. Leonardo had a deeper and more exhilarating vision of the world, and a more ambitious and exacting conception of how art might capture and interpret it.

In about 1482—the precise date, and even the exact year, is uncertain—Leonardo left Florence, armed with his silver horse-head lyre and his letter of credentials. The unfinished commissions smoldered behind him, but in Milan, despite the fresh start, he did little to mend his ways.

Leonardo’s long letter of credentials to Lodovico Sforza reveals a certain amount of reinvention. He failed to mention that he was Verrocchio’s pupil, nor did he describe any of his paintings (completed or otherwise) or the fact that he had done work for such important patrons as the king of Portugal, Bernardo Bembo, the Florentine Signoria, and Lorenzo de’ Medici. He clearly hoped for a career change in Milan: he wanted to work as an architect and military engineer rather than as a painter. He therefore boasted of his abilities to execute projects (bridges across rivers, tunnels under moats) for which, in reality, he had at best limited experience and, at worst, none whatsoever.

No evidence indicates that Leonardo actively participated in any of these sorts of engineering schemes in Florence. One early source claimed that his expertise in hydraulic engineering was what originally brought him to Milan. Impressed by certain dams constructed by Leonardo along the Renello River, Lodovico supposedly hired him to combine two canals and look after the city’s sewers and floodgates.
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This early experience cannot be verified—and the identity of the “Renello River” is impossible to ascertain—but Leonardo would hardly have made audacious claims for engineering
skills if he had no competence or ability. In fact, the design for one of his war machines may have predated his departure for Milan: a wheeled gun carriage that allowed a cannon to adjust its aim through both a vertical calibration and a horizontal pivot. Furthermore, his notebooks reveal that while still living in Florence he drew designs for (but probably did not actually construct) a crossbow, waterwheels, and numerous gears, cranks, and screws, all of which could have had a wide application. These designs testify to his striking ability to visualize solutions to complex technical problems; all that was wanting was the opportunity to implement them.
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Leonardo once wrote that “mechanical science” was the “noblest and the most useful” of all the disciplines.
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His fascination with mechanics and the kind of breathtaking engineering projects to which he aspired possibly dated from—or at least was spurred by—one particular experience in Verrocchio’s workshop. In May 1471, when Leonardo was nineteen, Verrocchio and his team hoisted a two-ton copper ball some three hundred feet into the air to the top of the lantern crowning the dome of the cathedral in Florence. This marvelous feat of engineering clearly enthralled Leonardo, who made drawings of the gears in the Brunelleschian hoists used to perform the task. Painting altarpieces for local politicians or obscure bands of monks must have paled in comparison to such a spectacular undertaking.

Leonardo evidently believed that Milan, with its much larger population, held more opportunities for engineering than Florence. Yet work in these fields was not swiftly forthcoming. His first known project in Milan, arranged in the spring of 1483 by the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, was yet another painting: an altarpiece for a chapel in the church of San Francesco Grande. The commission was at least a prestigious one. Located in one of Milan’s oldest and wealthiest neighborhoods, San Francesco Grande housed more relics than any other Milanese church. Among its treasures was the head of St. Matthew and a piece of wood from the room in which Christ ate the Last Supper.
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The confraternity, founded in 1475, was a religious group composed of wealthy laymen who worshipped together and advocated the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Having recently acquired their chapel and seen its ceiling frescoed, they now wanted an altarpiece. For the previous three years a woodworker had been busily constructing the enormous frame into which would be set painted decorations as well as carved statuettes and reliefs.

Leonardo was hired to execute the altarpiece alongside a pair of brothers,
Evangelista and Ambrogio de Predis, the latter of whom was Lodovico Sforza’s court painter. The most important part of the commission was to be a central panel depicting (as the contract particularized) the Madonna in an ultramarine blue mantle flanked by two prophets, with the Christ Child seated on a golden platform and God the Father, also in ultramarine blue, hovering overhead. The fact that Leonardo was deemed the major partner in this enterprise is indicated by the stipulation that this centerpiece was to be “painted by the Florentine.”
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Although Leonardo did not find his desired employment building doomsday weapons, within a year of his arrival in Milan he had nonetheless secured a highly prestigious commission. Then two years later, Lodovico, on behalf of Matthias Corvinus, the king of Hungary, engaged Leonardo to paint a Madonna.
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Sadly, he stayed true to his habit of leaving contracts unfulfilled and patrons disgruntled. Nothing is known of the Madonna painted for Corvinus, while the commission for the confraternity’s altar-piece became a sorry saga of delays, recriminations, and legal proceedings. Leonardo and the two brothers were contracted to finish the altarpiece on time for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in December 1483—a deadline giving them a little more than seven months. Something of Leonardo’s reputation for belatedness must have been known to the confraternity because they inserted into the contract a special clause stating that if he left town without completing his share of the work he would receive no further payment.