by Ross King
5 Georgina Rosalie Galbraith, The Constitution of the Dominican Order (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), 118.
6 Patrick Barry, trans., “The Rule of Saint Benedict,” in Wisdom from the Monastery: The Rule of Saint Benedict for Everyday Life (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2005), 59.
7 Giovanni Battista Giraldi, quoted in Martin Clayton, Leonardo da Vinci: The Divine and the Grotesque (London: Royal Collection, 2002), 130.
8 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §571.
9 Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, vol. 1, ed. A. Philip McMahon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 55.
10 Quoted in Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca: Cornell Paperbacks, 1991), 461.
11 Quoted in Trevor Dean, The Towns of Italy in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 123.
12 For the benches and bench sitters in Renaissance Florence I am indebted to Yvonne Elet, “Seats of Power: The Outdoor Benches of Early Modern Florence,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61 (December 2002): 444–69.
13 Quoted in Elet, “Seats of Power,” 451. The anecdote of Leonardo and the bench sitters at the Palazzo Spini is found in “Leonardo da Vinci by the Anonimo Gaddiano,” in Goldscheider, 32.
14 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §594.
15 Pedretti has suggested that this sketch is Leonardo’s “earliest idea for a Last Supper.” See Leonardo: Studies for “The Last Supper” from the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, 32.
16 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §§601, 602.
17 Ibid., vol. 1, §608.
18 Ibid., vol. 1, §§665, 666.
19 McMahon, ed., Treatise on Painting, vol. 1, §248.
Chapter 5
1 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §509.
2 Quoted in Cecilia M. Ady, A History of Milan Under the Sforza (London: Methuen, 1907), 259.
3 Quoted in Paolo Galluzzi, ed., Leonardo da Vinci: Engineer and Architect (Montreal: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 1987), 6.
4 Quoted in Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 119.
5 McMahon, ed., Treatise on Painting, vol. 1, 37.
6 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 267.
7 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §494.
8 Ibid., vol. 2, §1344.
9 Ibid., vol. 2, §1460.
10 On Masini, see Scipione Ammirato, Opuscoli, vol. 2 (Florence, 1637), 242; Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 2, 377 and 383; and Nicholl, 141–45. For Leonardo’s opposition to alchemists and necromancers: Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §§1207, 1208 and 1213.
11 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1459.
12 Ibid., vol. 2, §1461.
13 See Gene A. Brucker, The Society of Renaissance Florence: A Documentary Study (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 2.
14 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1547.
15 Ibid., vol. 2, §1384.
16 Ibid., vol. 2, §1517.
17 Ibid., vol. 2, §1522.
18 Quoted in Stephen D. Bowd, Venice’s Most Loyal City: Civic Identity in Renaissance Brescia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 135.
19 Quoted in Sharon T. Strocchia, “Death Rites and the Ritual Family in Renaissance Florence,” in Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence, ed. Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt, and Rona Goffen (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 121.
20 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §494.
21 Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 373.
22 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1458.
23 Ibid., vol. 2, §1458.
24 Ibid., vol. 2, §1458.
25 Pedretti notes that these sentences are not in Leonardo’s handwriting. See Commentary, vol. 1, 342.
26 Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence, 371.
27 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1458.
28 Ibid., vol. 2, §§1516 and 1534.
29 Ibid., vol. 2, §1525.
30 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 265.
31 See Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 217.
32 Quoted in Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo: A Study in Chronology and Style (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 141.
33 Brucker, The Society of Renaissance Florence, 190.
34 Quoted in John M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 247.
35 Villata, ed., Documenti, 7–8.
36 Peter and Linda Murray, The Art of the Renaissance (London: Thames & Hudson, 1963), 230.
37 Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 11 (London: Hogarth Press, 1968), 71.
38 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1383.
39 Quoted in Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca: Cornell Paperbacks, 1991), 389.
40 The letter is reproduced in Villata, ed., Documenti, 11–12. For a good discussion of Paolo, see Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci, 131–32.
41 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 256.
42 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §680.
43 Giraldi, quoted in Clayton, Leonardo da Vinci: The Divine and the Grotesque, 130.
44 Cennino Cennini, The Book of the Art of Cennino Cennini, trans. Christiana J. Herringham (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1899), 9 and 11.
45 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §§614, 616 and 617.
46 For the rarity of this technique, see A. E. Popham, The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946), 7.
47 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §368.
48 See Paola Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 48–49.
49 Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 2, 380.
50 For a discussion of this sheet, see Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design (London: V&A Publications, 2006), 3–6.
51 Pietro C. Marani, “Leonardo’s Last Supper,” in Leonardo: “The Last Supper,” trans. Harlow Tighe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 8.
52 Cennini, The Book of the Art of Cennino Cennini, 29.
53 Quoted in Carmen C. Bambach, “Leonardo, Left-handed Draftsman and Writer,” in Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman, ed. Carmen C. Bambach (New York and New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2003), 32.
54 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §110; Popham, The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, 10. The only evidence for Leonardo having a maimed right hand is the statement of Antonio de Beatis, the secretary of Cardinal Luigi of Aragon, made after a visit to Leonardo in France in October 1517, that “a certain paralysis has crippled his right hand.” Noting this evidence, Popham does go on to state that there is no reason why Leonardo’s left-handedness should not have been natural.
55 See Bambach, “Leonardo, Left-handed Draftsman and Writer,” 51.
56 Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Senses of Touch: Human Dignity and Deformity from Michelangelo to Calvin (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 212.
57 Riccardo Gatteschi, ed., Vita da Raffaello da Montelupo (Florence: Polistampa, 1998), 120–21. It is Raffaello who writes that Michelangelo was originally left-handed, the only known source for this claim.
Chapter 6
1 The Memoirs of Philip de Commines, 153.
2 Quoted in Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 257.
3 Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, vol. 3, 474.
4 Quoted in Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 255.
5 Commines, Memoirs, 155.
6 Quoted in Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 266.
7 Guicciardini, The History of Italy, 86.
8 Ibid., 88.
9 Ibid., 108.
10 Quoted in Samuel Lane, “A Course of Lectures on Syphilis,” Lancet, 13 No
vember 1841, 220.
11 Quoted in Katherine Crawford, European Sexualities, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 130.
12 Montorfano’s fresco is signed and dated 1495. For the argument that the two paintings were begun at the same time, see Creighton Gilbert, “Last Suppers and their Refectories,” in Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman, eds., The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 380.
13 Jacob Burckhardt, Italian Renaissance Painting According to Genres (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2005), 120.
14 Quoted in Creighton, “Last Suppers and their Refectories,” 382.
15 Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 3, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1912–14), 188–89.
16 Evelyn Samuels Welch, “New Documents for Vincenzo Foppa,” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 27 (May 1985): 296.
17 Commines, Memoirs, 174.
18 Ibid., 179.
19 Ibid., 183.
20 Quoted in Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 268.
21 Quoted in Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, vol. 3, 490.
22 Quoted in Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 5, 472.
23 Quoted in Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 270.
24 Giovio, “The Life of Leonardo da Vinci,” in Goldscheider, Leonardo da Vinci, 29.
25 Ibid., 29.
26 For this performance, see Kemp, The Marvellous Works, 153.
27 Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 142.
28 Quoted in Kemp, Marvellous Works, 154.
29 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 259.
30 Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance, vol. 2 (London: Phaidon, 1968), 32.
31 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1339.
32 For the full text, see Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 307–8.
33 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin, 1995), 20.
34 McGrath, “Lodovico il Moro and his Moors,” 71.
35 Quoted in Kemp, Marvellous Works, 150.
36 See Larry J. Feinberg, “Visual Puns and Variable Perception: Leonardo’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder,” Apollo (August 2004): 38. For examples of Leonardo’s rebuses, see Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 388–94.
37 Commines, Memoirs, 228.
38 Ibid., 193.
39 Ibid.
40 Quoted in Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 271.
41 Commines, Memoirs, 198.
42 Quoted in Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 272–73.
43 Commines, Memoirs, 201.
44 Quoted in Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 284.
45 Commines, Memoirs, 214.
46 Ibid., 216.
47 Guicciardini, The History of Italy, 105.
Chapter 7
1 Palomino, quoted in Mary Philadelphia Merrifield, The Art of Fresco Painting as Practised by the Old Italian and Spanish Masters (London: Charles Gilpin, 1846), 70.
2 E. H. Ramsden, ed., The Letters of Michelangelo, vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), §208. Barna’s fate is recorded in Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 10 vols., vol. 2, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1912–15), 5.
3 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 268.
4 Quoted in Merrifield, The Art of Fresco Painting, 53.
5 Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 21.
6 Pinin Brambilla Barcilon, “The Restoration,” in Leonardo: “The Last Supper,” trans. Harlow Tighe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 409.
7 Quoted in Merrifield, The Art of Fresco Painting, 53.
8 Quoted in ibid., 71.
9 Quoted in ibid., 55.
10 Quoted in ibid., 113.
11 On these fingerprints, see David Bull, “Two Portraits by Leonardo: Ginevra de’ Benci and the Lady with an Ermine,” Artibus et Historiae 13 (1992): 70 and 81.
12 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §634.
13 See Charles Lock Eastlake, Materials for a History of Oil Painting (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847), 185. The account of Hubert’s relics is found on pp. 191–92. For Vasari on the invention of oil painting, see Maclehose, ed., Vasari on Technique, 226.
14 Christopher Kleinhenz, ed., Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 834.
15 Eastlake, Materials, 46.
16 Quoted in Eastlake, Materials, 213.
17 Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, vol. 3, 104.
18 See Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, The Early Flemish Painters: Notices of their Lives and Works (London: John Murray, 1857), 211–12.
19 Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 177.
20 See Ladislao Reti, “Two Unpublished Manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci in the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid, Part II,” The Burlington Magazine 110 (February 1968), 81.
21 Vasari is the main source for information on these works. While Vasari is not always reliable, John R. Spencer has written that he was obviously familiar enough with Castagno’s paintings in Santa Maria Nuova to describe them in some detail. See Spencer, Andrea del Castagno and His Patrons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 81–84. Furthermore, the ledger for Santa Maria Nuova records payments made to Veneziano for linseed oil. See Hellmut Wohl, “Domenico Veneziano Studies: The Sant’ Egidio and Parenti Documents,” The Burlington Magazine 113 (November 1971): 636. Wohl is skeptical, however, about whether these payments verify Vasari’s story.
22 Howard Saalman, “Paolo Uccello at San Miniato,” The Burlington Magazine 106 (December 1964): doc. 7, 563.
23 Barcilon, “The Restoration,” 416. Carlo Vecce describes this technique of mixing tempera and oil as “revolutionary”: see Vecce, Leonardo (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1998), 154.
24 Barcilon, “The Restoration,” 411.
25 Mauro Matteini and Arcangelo Moles, “A Preliminary Investigation of the Unusual Technique of Leonardo’s Mural The Last Supper,” Studies in Conservation 24, no. 3 (August 1979): 125–33. See also Barcilon, “The Restoration,” 336 and 412.
26 Morris Hicky Morgan, trans., Ten Books on Architecture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 246.
27 See John F. Moffitt, “Painters ‘Born Under Saturn’: The Physiological Explanation,” Art History 11 (1988): 195–216; and Piers Britton, “‘Mio malinchonico, o vero...mio pazzo’: Michelangelo, Vasari, and the Problem of Artists’ Melancholy in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Sixteenth Century Journal 34 (Fall 2003): 653–75.
28 Ibid., 13.
29 Barcilon, “The Restoration,” 412.
30 Ibid., 416.
31 Ibid., 416.
32 Quoted in Merrifield, The Art of Fresco Painting, 49.
33 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §264.
34 Ibid., vol. 1, §280.
35 Chevreul’s 1839 work, De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs, was expanded by Charles Blanc in 1867. The theories were then popularized by the American physicist Ogden Rood, whose 1879 treatise Modern Chromatics was translated into French in 1881. Neither Chevreul nor his followers appear to have been aware of Leonardo’s writings.
36 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §265.
37 Hamlin Garland, “Impressionism,” in Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, eds., Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 930.
38 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §626.
39 Ibid., vol. 2, §1540.
40 John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 131.
41 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §§621, 622, 626, and 627. For Leonardo’s purchases from San Giusto alle Mura, see
Villata, ed., Documenti, 14.
42 Quoted in Marani, “Leonardo’s Last Supper,” 61, n 1.
43 Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, 2nd ed., trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, ed. Hellmut Wohl (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 58. For Michelangelo’s assistants, see William E. Wallace, “Michelangelo’s Assistants in the Sistine Chapel,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 11 (December 1987): 203–16.
44 Quoted in Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 23.
45 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §§1466 and 1467.
46 Luke Syson et al., Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan (London: National Gallery, 2011), 278.
Chapter 8
1 Commines, Memoirs, 227.
2 Quoted in Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 219.
3 David Nicolle, Fornovo 1495: France’s Bloody Fighting Retreat (Oxford: Osprey, 1996), 80.
4 Commines, Memoirs, 234.
5 Ibid., 242.
6 Ibid., 244.
7 Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 279.
8 Quoted in Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 55–56.
9 See Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 174. On Leonardo’s textile machines, see Kenneth G. Ponting, ed., Leonardo da Vinci: Drawings of Textile Machines (Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker Press and Pasold Research Fund Ltd., 1979).
10 Vasari tells the story of this commission in his life of Cronaca, not in his life of Leonardo: see “Life of Simone, called Il Cronaca,” in Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 10 vols., vol. 4, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1912–15), 270. Vecce suggests that Leonardo may have been called by Savonarola as a consultant: see Leonardo, 152.
11 Quoted in Vecce, Leonardo, 208.
12 Quoted in Lauro Martines, Scourge and Fire: Savonarola and Renaissance Florence (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 126.
13 Luca Landucci, A Florentine Diary from 1450 to 1516, trans. Alice de Rosen Jarvis (London: J. H. Dent, 1927). 89.
14 Quoted in Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 5, 481.
15 Anne Borelli and Maria C. Pastore Passaro, eds., Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola: Religion and Politics, 1490–1498 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 220.
