Leonardo and the Last Supper (50 page)

In this memo, for one of the few times in his life, Leonardo wrote in code. His memo begins cryptically: “Find Ingil and tell him that you wait for him at Amor and will go with him to Ilopan.” The code is disappointingly easy to crack, since Leonardo simply reversed the order of the letters: Amor is Roma and Ilopan is Napoli. Evidently Leonardo planned to go to Rome and from there—once he met “Ingil”—proceed to Naples. A curious aspect of Leonardo’s attempted encryption is that because the memo is written in mirror script, the reversed words are actually more legible than the rest of the page, making for woefully ineffective information security.

The Ligny memorandum

“Ingil” was Louis de Luxembourg, among whose numerous titles was Count of Ligny. He was Louis XII’s lord high chamberlain and, as the governor of Picardy and castellan of Lille, one of his top military advisers. Leonardo probably met him during the first invasion in 1494, when Ligny was made the governor of Siena. Five years on, Leonardo hoped to find employment in Ligny’s service. The French still had designs on Naples, and the key to capturing the south of Italy was holding the fortresses in Tuscany and the Papal States. Leonardo’s memo ends with a reminder to “learn levelling and how much soil a man can dig out in a day,” which suggests that he intended to immerse himself in the construction of earthworks and other fortifications, thereby fulfilling his dream of working as a military engineer.

In the end, Leonardo did not find a patron in Ligny, who soon quit Milan and returned to France. Apart from Robertet, the French seem to have kept their distance from Leonardo, probably viewing him as an untrustworthy Sforza loyalist. One of his best friends was a Sforza die-hard, the
architect Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara, the man at whose dinner table the ten-year-old Salai had once behaved so rambunctiously. Giacomo Andrea was such a close friend of Leonardo that Pacioli, in his introduction to
On Divine Proportion
, called him Leonardo’s brother. In December 1499, Giacomo Andrea went to Innsbruck to help Lodovico plot his return to power. The French response, when he returned to Milan, was to hang, draw, and quarter him.

Leonardo’s enthusiasm for serving these new political masters no doubt waned as rapidly as everyone else’s. At first Louis had won over Milanese hearts by cutting taxes, but French behavior soon became cruel and obnoxious. Many courtiers had already fled the city. Donato Bramante made his way to Rome, where he quickly occupied himself by measuring ancient ruins and painting the pope’s coat of arms on the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano. Luca Pacioli, too, was making preparations for his departure.

Milan had few attractions or possibilities left for Leonardo. Before the end of December he finished clearing out of the Castello dell’Arengo, packing or selling his possessions. He must have made one last trip to Santa Maria delle Grazie: his list of things to do before he left Milan included an instruction to “take the braziers from the Grazie.”

Then, as the century slipped away, he took to the frozen roads with his mules and his boxes.

Epilogue: Tell Me If I Ever Did a Thing

Over the following years, a familiar litany followed Leonardo: desultory progress, unhappy patrons, elaborate schemes that—however ingenious—finally came to nothing.

Mantua, one hundred miles to the southeast, was Leonardo’s first stop after Milan. Isabella d’Este, the marchioness, sister of Beatrice, desired her portrait. Isabella was an indomitable personality: a “woman with her own opinion,” according to her husband, who “always wanted to do things her own way.”
¹
A combination of Leonardo and Isabella did not bode well. Within weeks he departed for Venice, leaving behind a chalk sketch and vague promises to complete the portrait.

In Venice, military matters. In the early spring of 1500, Leonardo offered to the Senate his skills in engineering, proposing among other things a sluice gate on the River Isonzo that would flood the valley and drown the invading Ottomans.
²
Even grievous territorial losses to the Turks did not tempt the Venetians to accept.

Leonardo’s stay in Venice must have had its poignant moments: the sight of Verrocchio’s equestrian monument would have been a forceful reminder of his own lost opportunity with the bronze horse. In the early months of 1500, however, his hopes for his horse may briefly have revived. Lodovico Sforza made a victorious return to Milan in the first week of February, having reconquered large parts of the duchy with the help of Swiss and German troops. He was greeted by the Milanese people—for whom the French rule had become tyrannical and loathsome—by enthusiastic cries of “Moro! Moro!” But any plans Leonardo might have made for a return to Milan and a resumption of his old life were dashed two months later as the French army reasserted itself. Abandoned by his own army and trying to escape in the disguise of a Swiss soldier, Lodovico was captured at Novara on the tenth of April. In a scene of treachery replete with biblical resonance, he was pointed out to the enemy by one of his own Swiss mercenaries, who had taken money from the French in return for betraying him. The Judas, identified as one Hans Turmann, was promptly executed by the Swiss for his treason.
³

Within a week of Lodovico’s capture, Leonardo, for want of other opportunities, returned to Florence. He was now forty-eight years old. His father was still alive, living in the Via Ghibellina with wife number four and his eleven children, the youngest of whom, Giovanni, was a two-year-old. Leonardo took a set of rooms in the monastery of Santissima Annunziata, where his father—ever the puller of strings—seems to have arranged for him to paint an altarpiece for his clients, the Servite friars. Old habits died hard. “He kept them waiting a long time without starting anything,” Vasari later recounted.
⁴
An explanation for this leisurely progress is accounted for by an agent sent by Isabella d’Este to check Leonardo’s progress on her portrait. The agent ominously reported that Leonardo was distracted by his mathematical studies. The artist’s habits, he informed Isabella, were “variable and indeterminate,” and he seemed to live from one day to the next. Moreover, Leonardo “could not bear his paintbrush.”
⁵
The friars of the Annunziata, like Isabella, would never receive a painting from Leonardo.

In 1502 came the opportunity to work as a military engineer. Leonardo entered the pay of Cesare Borgia, but the warlord’s savagery left him shocked and disillusioned. War, he decided, was “the most brutal kind of madness.”
⁶
He then applied to the Ottoman sultan, offering to construct a bridge across the Golden Horn. But the Gran Turco showed no interest. Another engineering scheme—an ambitious plan to divert the course of the Arno by means of a canal—was given the go-ahead by the city fathers in Florence, with Niccolò Machiavelli an enthusiastic proponent. But the plan quickly and disastrously miscarried.
⁷

Weary of painting Leonardo may have been, but other commissions came his way—and met with predictable fates. In 1503 he began a portrait of Lisa, the young wife of a well-to-do cloth merchant named Francesco del Giocondo. True to form, he proceeded in no great haste. “He worked on this painting for four years,” Vasari reported, “and then left it still unfinished.”
⁸
The portrait, though eventually completed, would never be delivered to Francesco del Giocondo.

No angry complaints survive from either Francesco or his wife, but another patron—the government of Florence—voiced anger and irritation at his failure to follow through on his obligations. In October 1503, around the time he began the
Mona Lisa
, Leonardo was contracted to paint a mural,
The Battle of Anghiari
, on the wall of the council hall in the Palazzo Vecchio. He began painting in June 1505, using an experimental technique, but soon abandoned the work. Early sources blame everything from defective plaster and the inferior quality of the linseed oil, to the failure of the braziers to dry the paints (which apparently trickled down the wall) and even “some kind of indignation” on Leonardo’s part—a repeat, perhaps, of the “scandal” that saw him leave his scaffold in Milan a few years earlier. Whatever the cause, the project came to what Paolo Giovio called an “untimely end.”
⁹
In 1506 he left Florence and returned to Milan, leaving the city fathers disgruntled and accusing him of impropriety: “He received a large sum of money and has only made a small beginning on the great work he was commissioned to carry out.”
¹⁰
But Leonardo was deaf to their entreaties, and
The Battle of Anghiari
would never be completed.

Bridges, canals, flying machines, numerous paintings: all left to languish on the drawing board or easel. Even Leonardo’s beloved mathematical and geometrical studies eventually failed him. A forlorn entry in his notebooks records the sad end of his investigations: “St. Andrew’s night. I am through with squaring the circle, and this is the end of the light, and of the night, and of the paper I was working on.”
¹¹

The candle gutters, dawn light peeps through the shutters, and Leonardo, in nightcap and spectacles, blearily casts aside his pen.

“Tell me if anything was ever done,” Leonardo used to doodle in the pages of his notebooks. Coming in the midst of so much dereliction and neglect,
The Last Supper
was the triumphant discharge of the debt that his genius owed to history. Over the course of three years he managed—almost for the only time in his life—to harness and concentrate his relentless energies and restless obsessions. The result was 450 square feet of pigment and plaster, and a work of art utterly unlike anything ever seen before—and something unquestionably superior to the efforts of even the greatest masters of the previous century.

The Last Supper
combined intensity of color with subtlety of tone, storms of movement with a delicate grace of line, symbolic beauty with vivid narrative and distinctive characterization. Above all, it possessed more lifelike details—from the expressive faces of the apostles to the plates of food and pleats of tablecloth—than anything ever created in two dimensions. An entirely new moment in the history of art had been inaugurated. “The modern era began with Leonardo,” declared the painter Giovanni Battista Armenini in 1586, “the first star in that constellation of greats to have reached the full maturity of style.”
¹²

The Last Supper
is indeed a landmark in painting. Art historians identify it as the beginning of the period they used to call the High Renaissance: the era in which artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael worked in a magnificent and intellectually sophisticated style emphasizing harmony, proportion, and movement. Leonardo had effected a quantum shift in art, a deluge that swept all before it. This radical shift can be seen in the career of one of his contemporaries. In 1489 the men in charge of the decorations of the cathedral in Orvieto confidently declared the “most famous painter in all of Italy” to be Pietro Perugino. A decade later the wealthy Sienese banker Agostino Chigi could still claim that Perugino was “the best master in Italy,” that Pinturicchio was second, and that there was no third. And yet when Perugino unveiled his latest altarpiece in 1505 he was ridiculed for his lack of ability and want of originality. The world, by 1505, had witnessed the staggering creative powers of Leonardo.
¹³

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of
The Last Supper
for Leonardo’s own life and legacy. It was responsible, far more than any of his other works, for his reputation as a painter. During his lifetime and for many decades, even centuries, after his death, the majority of his other paintings (and only fifteen survive, four of them unfinished) were seen by neither the public nor other artists. In the three centuries between his death and the early nineteenth century, many of the works we know today were widely dispersed, unrecognized, inaccessible to the public, or completely unknown.