Da Vinci's Ghost (13 page)

It’s not clear exactly how or when Leonardo began thinking this way. But by the time he struck out on his own as an artist he’d already started. In notes that survive from the early 1480s, for example, when testing out a new pen he scribbled variations on the phrase
“Dimmi”
(
“Tell me
”). “Tell me … tell me whether … tell me how things are … tell me if there was ever.” These are the tics of an increasingly hungry mind.

He began asking such questions of others, too. In one note, which dates from about 1481 and is written alongside sketches of a sundial, a pneumatic or hydraulic water clock, and various geometrical figures,
he lists eight Florentines
whom he seems to want to consult. Of those eight, three have yet to be identified, one is a painter, and the remaining four are men whose areas of expertise hint at the rapidly diversifying range of Leonardo’s curiosities. The first, Carlo Marmocchi, was an
astronomer and geographer whose quadrant (or treatise
The Quadrant
) Leonardo noted an interest in; the second, whom Leonardo called Benedetto of the Abacus, was a well-known local mathematician; the third, Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, was one of the great sages of fifteenth-century Florence; and the fourth, Joannes Argyropoulos, was a hugely influential Byzantine scholar who had fled to Italy after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

It’s no surprise that Leonardo was drawn to Toscanelli and Argyropoulos. Each was nearing the end of an illustrious life, and both had reputations as men who could teach Leonardo a great deal. During his exile, Argyropoulos had been pivotal in helping the humanists of Florence translate and reassess the works of Aristotle, whose broad range of writings on natural philosophy had been studied only very selectively in Europe during the Middle Ages, by Christian scholars interested only in those parts of his work that would help buttress their theology and metaphysics. Toscanelli, for his part, would have been a hugely appealing figure to Leonardo. A widely respected authority on subjects as varied as astronomy, geography, linear perspective, mathematics, and optics, and a friend of artists, humanists, and scholastics alike, he exerted a long and powerful influence on Florentine intellectual and cultural life. His circle included not only Alberti, Verrocchio, and Marsilio Ficino, the dean of the Florentine Neoplatonists, but also Brunelleschi—inside whose dome, in about 1468, he constructed a giant gnomon that for centuries afterward was used to make precise observations of the sun’s wanderings. Today, however, he’s best known for something else: the letter he wrote to a Portuguese friend in 1474,
proposing that the best way to reach the Far East from Europe was not to sail east, under Africa, but west, across the uncharted Atlantic. Several years later, that letter would catch the attention of Christopher Columbus, who in turn would write to Toscanelli to ask for more information—and the brief correspondence the two men entered into supposedly helped convince Columbus to set sail in 1492. All of which leads to a remarkable thought: in the year or two before his death, in 1482, Toscanelli may have dispensed advice to both Leonardo da Vinci and Christopher Columbus.

Needless to say, Leonardo’s investigations into natural philosophy consumed vast amounts of time and energy, and, inevitably, his productivity as an artist suffered. (Given the almost infinitely expanding nature of his interests and investigations, however, the wonder really is not that he finished so few paintings in his lifetime; it’s that he started any at all.) Most Florentine artists of his day did their work on private commission, for which a contract would be struck, a deadline established, and an advance given, with the balance to be paid upon delivery. The system served many artists well. But for Leonardo it was no way to make a living. What he needed was a royal patron of some kind, a powerful ruler who might hire him as an artist in residence but also allow him to pursue his own interests.

Finding such a position in Florence, he knew, wasn’t possible. The city had no monarch. Not only that, his star was waning: he was developing a reputation for not finishing his work, he didn’t fit naturally into the city’s literary-humanist milieu, and he probably still carried with him the taint of his sodomy charge. His notes from the time contain hints of despair, unrequited
love, and a longing for something different. The great city in which he had come of age seemed now to be rejecting him. Not surprisingly, he began to entertain thoughts of leaving.

The final straw came in 1481, when the pope asked Lorenzo de’ Medici to send some of Florence’s best artists to Rome to help decorate the recently completed Sistine Chapel. By the merits, Leonardo was an obvious choice. Despite his failings, he had proven himself to be a master of rare genius; not only had he collaborated with Verrocchio on a number of prestigious projects, he had also already produced some of the great paintings for which he is famous today, among them the remarkable
Annunciation
and his portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci. Lorenzo knew all of this. But he passed Leonardo over anyway, picking Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and two other artists instead.

The slight must have stung—and so, when Lorenzo later that year asked Leonardo to travel to Milan, perhaps to take part in a music festival or contest there, instead of taking umbrage he seems to have resolved to make the most of the opportunity. Feeling unloved and unappreciated, he decided he wouldn’t just visit Milan. He would move there—and try to win the patronage of Ludovico Sforza, the arts-besotted tyrant who just two years earlier had seized control of the city.

M
ILAN SITS NOT
far south of Lake Como and the Swiss Alps, in the middle of the fertile Po Valley. Known to the Romans as Mediolanum (from
in medio plano
, “in the middle of the plain”) and to the Goths as Mailand (probably a further corruption of the Roman name), the city represented a vital military and
commercial link between Rome and the countries of northern Europe. By Leonardo’s time, under the military rule of the newly ascendant Sforza family, the city had become something of a colossus, one of the richest, most populous, and most powerful cities in Europe.

The Sforzas had seized control of Milan only in 1450. Before them, for more than a century, the noble Viscontis had ruled the city. The most famous head of the family had been Giangaleazzo Visconti, who, at the end of the fourteenth century, had launched a series of military campaigns that put Milan in control of much of northern Italy. Acknowledging this new reality in 1395, the Holy Roman Emperor had granted him the title of duke of Milan. In the half century that followed he and his successors had made Milan into a kind of anti-Florence: a monarchy, modeled on the aristocratic courts of northern Europe, that was predominantly Gothic in style, militaristic in spirit, and steeped in medieval chivalric culture. Needless to say, by the early 1400s Florence and Milan had become bitter enemies.

When the Sforzas took control of Milan in 1450, they had no hereditary claim to power. To bolster their legitimacy, they therefore embarked on a grand program of urban renewal, central to which was an effort to complete the city’s gargantuan cathedral. Construction of the cathedral had begun in 1386, at the instigation of Giangaleazzo Visconti, who, fully aware that the Florentines were hard at work on a cathedral that they hoped would become the largest in all of Christendom, had decided that
his
, not theirs, would earn that distinction.

In the decades that followed, central Milan became a vast cathedral construction site. Huge walls and pillars arose,
defining the monumental outlines of the cathedral’s transept and nave, and thrusting their way upward toward a yet-tobe-built vault. Inside, open to the elements, stood a maze of timber supports and giant scaffolds—and the old church of Santa Maria Maggiore, still being used for services while the cathedral gradually came into being around it. Partially finished sculptures of monsters, saints, and angels sat atop cornices or lay on the floor, not yet put into their places; gaping holes in the walls awaited stained-glass windows. For years construction continued in fits and starts, but all the while, the overseers and builders of the cathedral argued back and forth about what sort of dome they should crown the structure with—a debate that Leonardo himself, after having moved to Milan, would eventually try to resolve.

B
Y THE
1470s a rapprochement was under way between Florence and Milan. Always on the lookout for new ways of making money, the bankers and merchants of Florence, led by Lorenzo de’ Medici, recognized the value of forging economic ties with the Milanese. The duke and his courtiers, for their part, recognized that Florence offered them not only a prosperous trading partner but also precious human resources, in the form of the city’s great architects, artists, musicians, scholars, sculptors, and writers, who could help boost Milan’s cultural prestige. In 1471, as part of this rapprochement, the young duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, paid a grand state visit to Florence, bringing with him a magnificent retinue intended to dazzle Florentines with its aura of courtly sophistication and wealth. A host of courtiers, dressed in costumes embroidered in gold and silver
thread, turned up in twelve covered carriages, accompanied by a vast train of musicians, dancers, poets, priests, secretaries, servants, and foreign slaves—and no doubt enough dwarfs, buffoons, and exotic animals to keep everybody entertained. Along with the whole retinue came
an army of animals
: a thousand horses, according to one account, and five thousand pairs of hounds.

For Leonardo, only nineteen at the time, the visit offered an eye-opening introduction to the glories of Milan. It also provided him with an inside sense of what life at the Milanese court might be like, because in preparing for the visit Lorenzo de’ Medici asked Verrocchio to redecorate his palace’s guest quarters in a style sumptuous enough to impress his Milanese visitors. Leonardo, the star apprentice, may well have had a hand in the job.

To some Florentines, proudly bourgeois as they were, the whole visit reeked of aristocratic decadence. A generation later, when Niccolò Machiavelli wrote his history of Florence, he described the latter half of the fifteenth century as a period of slackening morals in the city, which he attributed in part to the visit of this Milanese delegation.

There now appeared disorders
commonly witnessed in times of peace. The young people of the city, being more independent, spent excessive sums on clothing, feasting, and debauchery. Living in idleness, they wasted their time and money on gaming and women; their only interest was trying to outshine others by luxury in costume, fine speaking, and wit. … These unfortunate habits became even
worse with the arrival of the courtiers of Milan. … If the duke found the city already corrupted by effeminate manners worthy of courts and quite contrary to those of a republic, he left it in an even more deplorable state of corruption.

That’s surely not how the young Leonardo felt. What did he care about the political ideals of the Florentine republic or the austere classicism of its humanists? Elegant music, luxurious clothing, effeminate manners, witty talk, parlor games, domesticated animals, playful encounters with the exotic and the grotesque: he delighted in all of these things. In Milan, surrounded by such finery and generously supported by the duke, he might be able to pursue his interests in an environment far removed from the noise and mess of the Florentine workshops in which he had come of age.
“The well-dressed painter
,” he later wrote, describing the studio of his dreams, “sits at great ease in front of his work and moves a very light brush, which bears attractive colors, and he is adorned with such garments as he pleases. His dwelling is full of fine paintings and is clean and often filled with music or the sound of different beautiful works being read, which are often heard with great pleasure, unmixed with the pounding of hammers or other noises.”

When Florence seemed to be turning against him later in the decade, it’s easy to understand how Leonardo might have allowed himself to imagine creating a new life for himself at the Milanese court—and why, when Lorenzo asked him to travel there in 1481 as a kind of musical ambassador, he decided to make the most of the opportunity. If music, rather than painting, was to be his entrée into this new world, so be it.

* * *

O
N
D
ECEMBER
26, 1476, in Milan, Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza and a small entourage arrived at the Church of Santo Stefano, planning to attend Mass. Minutes later, the duke lay lifeless on the floor, knifed to death by three local assassins.

The murder created a political vacuum; Sforza’s elder son, Giangaleazzo, was only seven years old. Two years of bitter infighting and political maneuvering ensued, until, in 1479, the duke’s younger brother Ludovico seized power. Declaring himself regent, Ludovico cynically announced that he would rule until his late brother’s son came of age.
“I take up the burden
of power,” he said, “and leave the honors of it to my nephew.” In all but name, he had become the city’s duke. Many of his subjects, alluding to the swarthy color of his skin, soon began calling him simply the Moor.

Born in 1452, the same year as Leonardo, Ludovico received a respectable education as a boy. He read Latin and was proud of his skills as an orator. As a young man he spent several years living in exile in Tuscany, and while there came to recognize the degree to which Milan lagged behind Florence as a cultural power. Upon becoming regent he decided to rectify matters, devoting himself to matters of not only war and politics and commerce but also the arts.

Ludovico embraced the atmosphere of triumphant medievalism that he had inherited from his predecessors. He lived in a castle. He had a passion for heraldry. He commissioned churches in the Gothic and Lombard style. He surrounded himself with scholastic astrologers, doctors, and philosophers. He hired a fawning coterie of poets and painters to record his
greatness. He sought out talented musicians and dancers from all over Europe to adorn his court. He sponsored lavish pageants, hosted jousting festivals, and hunted with hounds.