by Ross King
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.51
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.”52
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.53 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.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Leonardo and his partners failed to deliver. The exact date that Leonardo completed his panel—the work now known as The Virgin of the Rocks—is not known, but as much as a decade later it had still not been handed over. By the early 1490s the two parties were in dispute, with Leonardo and Ambrogio (Evangelista had since died) appealing to an authority, probably Lodovico Sforza, to complain that their payment of eight hundred lire had been exhausted on the materials. The contract had made allowances for a bonus to be paid once the job was finished, but the assessors, a Franciscan friar and two members of the confraternity, offered only an extra hundred lire: the painters wanted a bonus of four hundred lire. In their appeal, Leonardo and Ambrogio mentioned a third party (whose identity has never been known) willing to purchase the altarpiece from them at a more advantageous price. There was a certain highhandedness and even arrogance to their complaint, which stated that the members of the confraternity were unfit to pronounce on the painting “because the blind cannot judge colours.”54
The wealthy and powerful men in the confraternity must have been taken aback by such a haughty attitude in mere painters. Patrons generally regarded painting as something too important to be left to the artists. Painters were craftsmen working in strict accordance to the wishes of their employers, who were always their social betters. A few years earlier, Leonardo’s contemporary Domenico Ghirlandaio, a reliable and established painter with an excellent reputation, was hired by Fra Bernardo di Francesco, prior of the Foundling Hospital in Florence, to paint an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi. The contract repeatedly stressed that Fra Bernardo, not Ghirlandaio, was to be judge and jury in the matter of appraising the content and quality of the work. Every particular was to be done “according to what I, Fra Bernardo, think best,” and the painter would receive his payment only “if it seems to me, the abovesaid Fra Bernardo, that it is worth it.” Fra Bernardo reserved the right to get a second opinion on the finished article, and if the assessment was unfavorable, Ghirlandaio would receive “as much less as I, Fra Bernardo, think right.”55
Ghirlandaio was happy to fulfill his patrons’ various demands. Not so Leonardo, who evidently did not enjoy working to order. His frustration with the members of the confraternity is understandable, but their reticence about a bonus for The Virgin of the Rocks came about partly, no doubt, because Leonardo had failed to stick to the description provided in his contract. The Christ Child does not appear on a golden platform nor does God the Father hover overhead. The members of the confraternity did not simply want a pretty picture to hang in their chapel: they wanted a work of art that would illustrate and reinforce their belief in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin: that is, that the Virgin Mary, unlike everyone else, was born free from the stain of original sin (and that she was conceived asexually by means of a chaste kiss between her parents). This doctrine was new and highly controversial, with the Franciscans in support and the Dominicans violently objecting. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception was recognized only as recently as 1476 in a papal bull issued by Sixtus IV, a Franciscan. The members of the confraternity, whose sole purpose as a group was to support and defend this doctrine, had no wish to see a painter improvising with his design in a way that ignored or meddled with their theological beliefs.
The members of the confraternity were probably also shocked at the sight of something so daring and new. Leonardo had failed to finish the Adoration of the Magi, a composition that if brought to completion would have been unlike anything seen in Italy. The startling promise of this work, with its attention to bodily movement and natural detail, was fulfilled in his mesmerizing The Virgin of the Rocks. Leonardo swept away the stock gestures and expressions used by artists to convey their meanings, giving his figures life and movement through a delicate ballet of motioning hands—the foreshortened left hand of the Virgin, the pointing forefinger of the angel—and skillfully calibrated postures.
Leonardo also created a truly fantastical setting for his figures. The contract mentioned mountains and rocks in the background, but he conjured an eerie, primeval landscape in which the distant, vertiginous drops of his 1473 Arno Valley sketch reappear, this time in closeup, in the hefty arches and priapic columns of rock forming the grotto where the scene takes place. It is a landscape whose eerie beauty was inspired by Leonardo’s close scrutiny of topographical features. A professional geologist studying the painting in 1996 celebrated the work as a “geological tour de force because of the subtlety with which Leonardo represents a complicated geographical formation.”56 In the foreground he painted, with the same naturalistic detail, plants such as columbine and St. John’s wort.57 The scene was given an overall unity through a subtle modulation of light and shadow, with the figures seen in a diffused, dusky light, as if through a smoky filter.
It was a virtuoso performance. Leonardo had finally created a magnificent work of art, a large altarpiece that should have been prominently displayed in one of Milan’s most important churches. And yet, because of the dispute with the confraternity, it remained in his studio, unappreciated and largely unseen. Twenty-five years would pass before an altarpiece—albeit with a different central panel, painted much later by Leonardo—was finally delivered to San Francesco Grande. What happened to the first version, and whether another buyer purchased it from the painters in the 1490s, has never been known for certain. For all intents and purposes, this paintin
g—unquestionably the greatest altarpiece of the fifteenth century—vanished from the view of history until 1625, when it surfaced in the collection of the kings of France.58
Such disputes left Leonardo at times exasperated and embittered. He did not regard humanity with the same repugnance as his contemporary Niccolò Machiavelli, who wrote in The Prince that the majority of men were “ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers.”59 But his notebooks register peevish complaints in which he projected an image of himself as someone who has been wronged, betrayed, or unjustly treated. “All the ills that are or ever were,” reads one of these passages, “if they could be set to work by him, would not satisfy the desires of his iniquitous soul.” Or again: “I know one who, having promised me much, less than my due, being disappointed of his presumptuous desires, has tried to deprive me of all my friends.” Sometimes he made clear his suspicion not of individuals but of people in general, at one point launching a tirade against people who are “nothing else than a passage for food and augmentors of excrement.” They pass through life leaving nothing behind, he sneered, but full latrines.60
Early in his career, Leonardo was short of neither friends nor benefactors, having worked for two of the most illustrious princes in Italy, Lorenzo de’ Medici and Lodovico Sforza. But his unwillingness to compromise his art for the sake of a contract was giving him a reputation as a difficult and unreliable artist that may have threatened future commissions. More to the point, he had yet to create his work of fame. As the French guns rolled through Italy and his bronze floated down the river to Ferrara, the debt that his genius owed the world still remained to be paid.
CHAPTER 3
The Cenacolo
The horses in Lodovico Sforza’s stables displayed on their harnesses a motif of a Moor holding aloft a globe of the world. Beneath was the motto: “As long as he wills it.”1 This emblem seemed appropriate in the autumn of 1494. Lodovico did indeed seem to be all-powerful, holding the fate of the world—or, at any rate, of Italy—in his hands. A Venetian chronicler marveled at his success and aplomb: “All that this man does prospers, and all that he dreams of by night comes true by day. And, in truth, he is esteemed and revered throughout the world and is held to be the wisest and most successful man in Italy. And all men fear him, because fortune favours him in everything that he undertakes.”2 But Lodovico was not only feared: he was also disliked. After his dealings with the French and his treatment of his nephew, few trusted him, and no one knew what he might do next.
King Charles VIII was also enjoying success in his undertakings: so much that one of his ambassadors marveled that “God himself” must have been guiding and protecting the young king so “that he might make him his instrument to scourge and chastise these Italian princes.”3 His relentless expedition into Italy continued apace, with his troops reaching the Florentine frontier before the end of October.
The French needed possession of Florence’s fortresses, dotted through the Tuscan countryside, in order to secure their flank as they descended deeper into Italy. When the Florentines, siding with King Alfonso of Naples, failed to accommodate, the French attacked the first of the fortresses, Fivizzano. Once again the French savagery shocked the Italians. The garrison was wiped out, the town sacked and burned, and, in a repeat of Mordano, the inhabitants slaughtered. On the last day of October, Piero de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s son and the new ruler of Florence, speedily acquiesced to the French king’s demands, surrendering the fortresses and offering free passage through Tuscany. When news of this capitulation reached Florence, “tremendous indignation flared up all over the city,” as Guicciardini wrote, and within days the Medici—who had ruled the city for sixty years—fled into exile.4
Lodovico had returned to the French camp on the day following his nephew’s funeral, but within days he was back in Milan. He proceeded to busy himself with the paperwork necessary for officially assuming his new title. Technically speaking, the title of duke of Milan could only be granted as an imperial privilege by the Holy Roman emperor, within whose territories (in name, at least) Milan lay. In 1395 the emperor Wenceslas had granted Giangaleazzo Visconti, the first duke, “pre-eminence and comprehensive jurisdiction and power” in Milan, to be exercised on the emperor’s behalf.5 A later emperor, Frederick III, had not been favorably disposed to the Sforza dynasty, and so neither Francesco nor his son Galeazzo Maria—though they ruled with absolute power and called themselves dukes—was ever officially invested with the title.
Determined to quash the claim of the duke of Orléans and establish the Sforza as a princely dynasty, Lodovico began courting Maximilian so that his title would be legitimate. The emperor was happy to entertain Lodovico’s claim, not least because a year earlier he had married Lodovico’s niece, Bianca Maria. The marriage was not a happy one: Maximilian was dismayed by his bride’s habit of eating her dinner on the floor. However, her dowry of four hundred thousand ducats, paid from Lodovico’s coffers, disposed him to overlook both his wife’s table manners and five-year-old Francesco’s claim to the dukedom.6
Besides his title, Lodovico was also thinking about the glorification of his family. Much of his art patronage, not least the bronze equestrian monument to his father, had been aimed at exalting the Sforza name. He now turned his attention to another grand project. The bones of his family members were scattered around various locations in the duchy, sometimes with a singular lack of ostentation. Lodovico’s great-grandfather, Giangaleazzo Visconti, who died in 1402, was humbly interred behind the high altar of the Certosa di Pavia, a monastery twenty-five miles south of Milan whose foundation stone he had laid in 1396. Distinguished visitors to the Certosa were sometimes conducted by the monks onto a ladder for a peek at these bodily remains, which one such guest reported “were no sweeter than nature permitted.”7
Giangaleazzo Visconti had intended the Certosa to be a mausoleum for himself and his family, but the project was curtailed by a lack of funds, a tardy building schedule, and Giangaleazzo’s premature death from the plague. In 1494, Lodovico decided to honor his great-grandfather with a more dignified and appropriate sepulcher, hiring a sculptor to carve an effigy of Giangaleazzo and create bas-reliefs on his sarcophagus. Already he had been lavishing attention on the Certosa itself. He engaged an architect to complete the facade and, after sending an agent to Florence in 1490, commissioned altar-pieces from Filippino Lippi and Pietro Perugino.
Lodovico was also contemplating his own last resting-place. At some point around 1492 he began planning a Sforza mausoleum for himself and his descendants. The location he selected was the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, built between 1468 and 1482 by the grandson of the architect of the Certosa in Pavia. Funds and land for the church, situated on the city’s western edge, had originally been provided by one of Francesco Sforza’s military captains, but Lodovico assumed the responsibility sometime after his death. In 1492 he began aggrandizing and beautifying the church, knocking down the east end and laying the first stone for a large new extension. Soon afterward he asked his secretary to bring together “all the experts to be found in architecture” to design the church’s facade.8
Leonardo da Vinci may have been one of these experts. His interest in architecture remained undiminished since his design for the dome of Milan’s cathedral had been rejected a few years earlier. At some point he drew up plans for both a tribune and what appears to be a funerary monument.9 His notebooks allude to conversations with the German masons working on the cathedral, and he once made a note revealing his eagerness to acquire a certain book on ecclesiastical architecture: a book “treating of Milan and its churches which is to be had at the last stationer’s on the way to Corduso.” Not least, he was a close friend of Donato Bramante, an architect who certainly was involved in the rebuilding of Santa Maria delle Grazie.10 However, Leonardo’s involvement was, if anything, minimal. Instead, Lodovico had something different in mind for him.
Bird’s-eye view of Santa Maria delle Grazie
The ch
urch of Santa Maria delle Grazie was part of a complex of buildings making up a Dominican convent: besides the church, there was a sacristy, a cloistered garden, cells in which the friars prayed and slept, and a refectory where they took their meals. These buildings, like the church, were recent constructions and required decoration if they were to be worthy of the Sforza name. Leonardo may have dreamed of constructing tanks and guns, of placing a dome on Milan’s half-built cathedral, or of completing the world’s largest bronze statue. But he was going to do none of these things. Instead, he was going to paint a wall.
For the previous two centuries, the Dominicans, or the Order of the Friars Preachers as they were officially known, had been, along with the Franciscans, the most active religious order in Italy. They were certainly the most visible. Dominican friars in their distinctive black-and-white habits could be seen in cities and towns all over Italy, preaching from the pulpits in their churches or to throngs in the piazzas in front of them.
The Dominicans originated early in the thirteenth century, after Dominic, their founder, traveled through the Languedoc region of southern France at the time of the Cathar heresy. Dominic was determined to counter these heretics, against whose austere lives and simple devotion the pomp and bluster of successive popes had fallen flat. He advocated fighting fire with fire: zealous preaching and an ascetic lifestyle. “Zeal must be met by zeal, humility by humility,” he famously reproached a trio of richly dressed, self-important papal legates whose latest mission to the Languedoc had failed.11 In 1217 the pope granted Dominic authority to found his order, calling him and his followers the “invincible athletes of Christ.”12 The Dominicans became the church’s spiritual enforcers and, after 1232, the papal inquisitors. When Maifreda Visconti announced that she would be crowned pope in Milan on Easter Sunday in 1300, the Dominicans rooted out her followers, interrogated them, and burned them at the stake. More recently, when four women in Turin were burned as witches in 1494, the inquisitor was a Dominican.13
