Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

NOTES

  Chapter 1

  1 Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Italy, trans. Sidney Alexander (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 32.

  2 Ibid., 49.

  3 Quoted in Julia Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475–1497: A Study of the Renaissance (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1910), 314.

  4 Philip de Commines, The Memoirs of Philip de Commines, Lord of Argenton, vol. 2, ed. Andrew R. Scoble (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856), 151.

  5 Quoted in Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 223.

  6 Commines, Memoirs, vol. 2, 107–8.

  7 Edoardo Villata, ed., Leonardo da Vinci: I documenti e le testimonianze contemporanee (Milan: Castello Sforzesco, 1999), 76.

  8 Evelyn Welch, “Patrons, Artists and Audiences in Renaissance Milan,” in Charles M. Rosenberg, ed., The Northern Court Cities: Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, Ferrara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 46.

  9 Villata, Documenti, 77.

  10 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, vol. 1, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1965), 255; Kate T. Steinitz and Ebria Feinblatt, trans. “Leonardo da Vinci by the Anonimo Gaddiano,” in Ludwig Goldscheider, Leonardo da Vinci: Life and Work, Paintings and Drawings (London: Phaidon, 1959), 32; Lomazzo, quoted in Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo: Studies for “The Last Supper” from the Royal Library at Windsor Castle (Florence: Electa, 1983), 134.

  11 For the horseshoe: Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 270; for the mountaineering: vol. 2, Jean-Paul Richter, comp. and ed., The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, 2 vols., (London: Phaidon, 1970), §1030.

  12 Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 160.

  13 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1018.

  14 Ibid., vol. 2, §1340.

  15 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1961), 21; and Christopher Lynch, ed. and trans., The Art of War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1, 62.

  16 Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Manfield, trans., Florentine Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 313.

  17 Villata, ed., Documenti, 44.

  18 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1363.

  19 Steinitz and Feinblatt, trans., “Leonardo da Vinci by the Anonimo Gaddiano,” in Goldscheider, Leonardo da Vinci, 30.

  20 See Caroline Elam, “Art and Diplomacy in Renaissance Florence,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 136 (October 1988): 813–20.

  21 Villata, ed., Documenti, 45.

  22 Richter, ed. The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1384.

  23 Steinitz and Feinblatt, trans., “Leonardo da Vinci by the Anonimo Gaddiano,” in Goldscheider, Leonardo da Vinci, 31.

  24 Richter, ed. The Literary Works, vol. 2, §§1190 and 796.

  25 Villata, ed., Documenti, 44.

  26 Ibid., 45–46.

  27 Ibid., 46.

  28 Ibid., 57–61.

  29 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §720.

  30 Villata, ed., Documenti, 62–63.

  31 Ibid., 78–79. The first poem, by Baldassare Taccone, states that Leonardo is still working on the clay horse, so the model was not finished, much less publicly exhibited, in 1493.

  32 Jean-Paul Richter, ed., The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, with a commentary by Carlo Pedretti, 2 vols. (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1977), vol. 1, 9. Hereafter referred to as Commentary.

  33 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §§710, 711.

  34 Ibid., vol. 2, §714.

  35 Commines, Memoirs, vol. 2, 125.

  36 Quoted in Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 256.

  37 Commines, Memoirs, vol. 2, 133.

  38 Luca Landucci, A Florentine Diary from 1450 to 1516, Alice de Rosen Jarvis, trans. (London: J. M. Dent, 1927), 22.

  39 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1340.

  40 Banfield and Manfield, trans., Florentine Histories, 309.

  41 Bartolomeo Cerretani, Storia fiorentina, ed. Giuliana Berti (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1994), 201.

  42 Pietro Bembo, History of Venice, ed. and trans. Robert W. Ulery Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 81.

  43 Guicciardini, The History of Italy, 54.

  44 Quoted in Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 231.

  45 Villata, ed., Documenti, 85.

  46 Thomas Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara: Ercole d’Este (1471–1505) and the Invention of a Ducal Capital (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 97.

  47 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1514.

  Chapter 2

  1 Stenitz and Feinblatt, trans., “Leonardo da Vinci by the Anonimo Gaddiano,” in Goldscheider, 31.

  2 Quoted in Janice Shell and Grazioso Sironi, “Cecilia Gallerani: Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine,” Artibus et historiae 13 (1992): 48; and Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo: Architect, trans. Sue Brill (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 77.

  3 For a discussion of this story, see Alexander Nagel, “Structural Indeterminacy in Early Sixteenth-Century Italian Painting,” in Alexander Nagel and Lorenzo Pericolo, eds., Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art (Farnham, Hants.: Ashgate, 2010), 17–23.

  4 Christiane Klapische-Zuber states that life expectancy in Renaissance Italy was “between twenty and forty years.” See Lydia Cochrane, trans., Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 57, n45.

  5 Richter, comp. and ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1346.

  6 Ibid., vol. 2, §§1365, 1366. Leonardo’s friend, the poet Antonio Cammelli, is quoted in Charles Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 160.

  7 Paolo Giovio, “The Life of Leonardo da Vinci,” in Goldscheider, Leonardo da Vinci, 29.

  8 Villata, ed., Documenti, 3. For the discussion of the tradition that assigns the farmhouse in Anchiano as Leonardo’s birthplace, see Nicholl, Flights of the Mind, 18–19.

  9 Villata, ed., Documenti, 102 and 87; Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §722.

  10 Quoted in Iris Origo, “The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 30 (July 1955): 321. Origo reports (p. 325) that domestic slaves were common in the villages and towns outside Florence. For the price of slaves, see Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 377. On the possibility that Leonardo’s mother was a slave, see Francesco Cianchi, La madre di Leonardo era una schiava? Ipotesi di studio di Renzo Cianchi (Vinci: Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci, 2008).

  11 See Malcolm Moore, “Leonardo Da Vinci may have been an Arab,” Telegraph, 7 December 2007; and the report by Marta Falconi: www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15993133/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/experts-reconstruct-leonardo-fingerprint/#.TwGqXRzCcrg.

  12 Serge Bramly, Leonardo: The Artist and the Man (London: Michael Joseph, 1992), 242.

  13 Elisabetta Ulivi, Per la genealogia di Leonardo: Matrimoni e altre vicende nella famiglia da Vinci sullo sfondo della Firenze rinascimentale (Vinci: Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci, 2008).

  14 Thomas M. Izbicki, trans. Gerald Christianson and Philip Krey, Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius: Selected Letters of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II) (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 159–60.

  15 Gino Arrighi, ed., Piero Della Francesca: Trattato d’abaco (Pisa: Domus Galileana, 1970), 51. For schooling in Renaissance Tuscany, see Ronald Witt, “What Did Giovannino Read and Write? Literacy in Early Renaissance Florence,” I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 6 (1995): 83–114; and Robert Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany: Teachers, Pupils and Schools, c. 1250–1500 (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

  16 Lives of the Artists, 255.

  17 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §§1421 and 1525.

  18 Quoted in Bramly, Leonardo, 117. For Ser Piero as Cosimo de’ Medici’s notary, see James Beck, “Leonardo’s Rapport with His
Father,” Antichità viva 27 (1988), 5–12. For his professional association with the Jewish community, see Alessandro Cecchi, “New Light on Leonardo’s Florentine Patrons,” in Carmen C. Bambach, ed., Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman, (New York and New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2003), 123.

  19 Stefano Ugo Baldassarri and Arielle Saiber eds., Images of Quattrocentro Florence: Selected Writings in Literature, History and Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 40 and 73. For the purveyors of luxury goods, see David Alan Brown, Leonardo da Vinci: Origins of a Genius (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 12.

  20 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 256. For Ser Piero’s association with Verrocchio, see Cecchi, “New Light,” 124.

  21 Ugolino Verino, quoted in Brown, Origins of a Genius, 34.

  22 Maud Cruttwell, Verrocchio (London: Duckworth & Co., 1904), 27.

  23 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 258. Leonardo’s involvement in the painting of this angel is widely accepted: see Brown, Origins of a Genius, 142.

  24 Leonardo’s participation in this work, first noted by William Suida in 1954 but widely dismissed, has more recently been recognized by David Alan Brown: see Origins of a Genius, 51. Brown further suggests (p. 54) that Tobias’s head may also be by Leonardo.

  25 Steinitz and Feinblatt, trans., “Leonardo da Vinci by the Anonimo Gaddiano,” in Goldscheider, 32.

  26 For Leonardo’s list of clothes, see Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 332. For fifteenth-century fashions, see Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 14–15, and Carole Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes and Fine Clothing (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 3.

  27 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1369. On Leonardo’s involvement with the landscape background of Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, see Brown, Origins of a Genius, 140.

  28 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §987.

  29 Ibid., vol. 2, §721.

  30 Cruttwell, Verrocchio, 37.

  31 Francesco Sacchetti, Il Trecento Novelle, ed. Antonio Lanza (Florence: Sansoni, 1984), 44.

  32 Quoted in Bramly, Leonardo, 123. I discuss Leonardo’s pessimistic view of family life in The Fantasia of Leonardo da Vinci: His Riddles, Jests, Fables and Bestiary (Delray Beach, FL: Levenger Press, 2010), 47.

  33 Steinitz and Feinblatt, trans., “Leonardo da Vinci by the Anonimo Gaddiano,” in Goldscheider, 30.

  34 D. A. Covi, “Four New Documents Concerning Andrea del Verrocchio,” Art Bulletin 48 (March 1966): 97–103.

  35 Steinitz and Feinblatt, trans., “Leonardo da Vinci by the Anonimo Gaddiano, in Goldscheider, 30. For evidence of Leonardo’s participation in Lorenzo’s garden, see Lodovico Borgo and Ann H. Sievers, “The Medici Gardens at San Marco,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 33. Bd., H. ⅔ (1989), 237–56; and Caroline Elam, “Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Sculpture Garden,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 36. Bd., H. ½ (1992), 41–84.

  36 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §663.

  37 William Roscoe, The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847), 236.

  38 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 258.

  39 For Ser Piero’s Benci connections, see Cecchi, “New Light,” 129.

  40 For the contract for the altarpiece, see Villata, ed., Documenti, 13–14.

  41 Baldassarri and Saiber, eds., Images of Quattrocento Florence, 209.

  42 For a discussion of the “visual ungainliness” of the Christ Child in these two paintings, see Larry J. Feinberg, “Sight Unseen: Vision and Perception in Leonardo’s Madonnas,” Apollo (July 2004): 28–34.

  43 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §500.

  44 Paolo Giovio, “Life of Leonardo da Vinci,” in Goldscheider, 29.

  45 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §§1448 and 1432.

  46 Other pioneers were Petrarch, who climbed Mount Ventoux in 1336, and Pietro Bembo, the future cardinal, who ascended Mount Etna in 1494.

  47 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1060. See Nicholas and Nina Shoumatoff, The Alps: Europe’s Mountain Heart (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 192–93.

  48 This account, by Count A. G. Rezzonico, was published in 1780, and is quoted in Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 175. Pedretti notes that the story is “puzzling” but also that Count Rezzonico may have had access to documents that no longer exist.

  49 For these early designs, see Kemp, Marvellous Works, 58–66. For the springald, see Domenico Laurenza, Leonardo’s Machines: Secrets and Inventions in the Da Vinci Codices (Florence-Milan: Giunti, 2005), 75–79. Laurenza dates the design to c. 1482.

  50 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1154.

  51 Claire Farago, “Aesthetics before Art: Leonardo Through the Looking Glass,” in Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg, eds., Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art In and Out of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 56.

  52 For the contract, see Villata, ed., Documenti, 19–28. Hannelore Glasser discusses both the contract and the legal fallout at length in Artists’ Contracts of the Early Renaissance (New York: Garland, 1977), 208–70.

  53 Villata, ed., Documenti, 35.

  54 Glasser, Artists’ Contracts, 345. The authority to whom the painters appealed was addressed as “Most Illustrious and Most Excellent Lord,” which almost certainly makes him Lodovico Sforza. However, the identity of the prospective buyer cannot be settled so easily.

  55 Quoted in Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 6.

  56 Ann Pizzorusso, “The Authenticity of The Virgin of the Rocks,” Leonardo, 29 (1996): 197.

  57 For an identification of the plants in the paintings, see Brian Morley, “The Plant Illustrations of Leonardo da Vinci,” The Burlington Magazine 121 (September 1979):559.

  58 It is often assumed that Lodovico Sforza purchased the painting and presented it as a wedding gift to Maximilian. The hypothesis is feasible but unsupported by any documents except the Anonimo Gaddiano’s assertion that Lodovico sent to Maximilian a “most beautiful and unusual work” painted by Leonardo. Steinitz and Feinblatt, trans., “Leonardo da Vinci by the Anonimo Gaddiano,” in Goldscheider, 31.

  59 The Prince, 54.

  60 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §§1356, 1357 and §1179; and Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 309.

  Chapter 3

  1 Elizabeth McGrath, “Lodovico il Moro and his Moors,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 65 (2002): 85.

  2 Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 246.

  3 The Memoirs of Philip de Commines, 153.

  4 Guicciardini, The History of Italy, 58.

  5 Quoted in Jane Black, Absolutism in Renaissance Milan: Plenitude of Power under the Visconti and the Sforza, 1329–1535 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 70.

  6 For Bianca Maria’s table manners, see Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 219.

  7 Commines, Memoirs, 137.

  8 Quoted in Welch, “Patrons, Artists and Audiences in Renaissance Milan,” 46.

  9 Carlo Pedretti, “The Sforza Sepulchre,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 89 (1977): 121–31; and S. Lang, “Leonardo’s Architectural Designs and the Sforza Mausoleum,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31 (1968): 218–33.

  10 On this relationship, see Carlo Pedretti, “Newly Discovered Evidence of Leonardo’s Association with Bramante,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 32 (October 1973): 223–227. For Leonardo and the German masons, see Lang, “Leonardo’s Architectural Designs,” 221. For his note on the book on Milan and its churches, see Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1448.

  11 Quoted in Henry Hart Milman, History of Latin Christianity, vol. 4 (London: John Murray, 1855), 251.

  12 Monumenta ordinis fratrum praedicatorum historica, vol. 15 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 1933), 90–91.

/>   13 Michael M. Tavuzzi, Dominican Inquisitors and Inquisitorial Districts in Northern Italy, 1474–1527 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 255.

  14 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, vol. 2, ed. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 44–45.

  15 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, vol. 1, ed. Thomas Gilby (Cambridge and London: Blackfriars, in conjunction with Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964), 3.

  16 Voragine, The Golden Legend, vol. 2, 44.

  17 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, vol. 43 (1968), 115.

  18 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1340.

  19 Quoted in Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 26.

  20 Louisa S. Maclehose, trans., and G. Baldwin Brown, ed., Vasari on Technique (New York: Dover, 1960), 222.

  21 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1344. Carlo Pedretti dates this letter (found in the Codex Atlanticus, folio 315v) to approximately 1495. See Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 296.

  22 Guicciardini, The History of Italy, 66.

  23 Quoted in Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–1571, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984), 456.

  24 Quoted in Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, vol. 3, 477.

  25 Commines, Memoirs, 149.

  26 Quoted in Ludwig Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, vol. 5, ed. F. I. Antrobus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trübner, 1898), 454.

  Chapter 4

  1 Leonardo’s record of his purchase is found in the Codex Atlanticus, folio 104 r-a. For a discussion, see Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo: Studies for the Last Supper from the Royal Library at Windsor Castle (Florence: Electa, 1983), 137. Leonardo’s list of books is found in the Codex Atlanticus, folio 210r.

  2 The Gospel accounts of the Last Supper are found in Matthew 26:1–29; Mark 14:1–25; Luke 22:1–30; and John 13:1–30.

  3 Eusebius of Caesarea, History of the Church, in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Erdmans, 1982), 153.

  4 Quoted in R. Alan Culpeper, John, the Son of Zebedee: The Life of a Legend (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 167.