Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  16 Landucci, A Florentine Diary, 101. See also John M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 395–96. For Savonarola’s attack on classical learning, see Vincent Cronin, The Florentine Renaissance (London: Collins, 1967), 272–73.

  17 Commines, Memoirs, 234.

  18 Ibid., 248 and 251.

  19 Ibid., 254.

  Chapter 9

  1 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §572.

  2 Quoted in Clayton, Leonardo da Vinci: The Divine and the Grotesque, 130.

  3 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 261.

  4 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §503.

  5 Quoted in Clayton, Leonardo da Vinci, 13.

  6 Ibid., 138.

  7 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §§1387 and 1404.

  8 M. T. Fiorio, ed., Le Chiese di Milano (Milan: Electa, 1985), 308–9.

  9 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1403.

  10 One member of the family, Niccolò de’ Carissimi da Parma, possibly Alessandro’s father, had served as Francesco Sforza’s envoy to Florence in the time of Cosimo de’ Medici. See Rab Hatfield, “Some Unknown Descriptions of the Medici Palace in 1459,” Art Bulletin 52 (September 1970): 232.

  11 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §667.

  12 Carlo Vecce, Leonardo, 156.

  13 Pastor, A History of the Popes, vol. 5, 285.

  14 See Vecce, Leonardo, 156.

  15 Antonio de Beatis, quoted in Pedretti, Studies for “The Last Supper,” 145. Beatis and Cardinal Luigi of Aragon visited Leonardo in Amboise before seeing The Last Supper in Milan in 1517.

  16 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §§ 716 and 717.

  17 Quoted in Arnaldo Bruschi, Bramante (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 177.

  18 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1427. Bramante’s book is Antiquarie prospettiche Romane, a collection of four hundred verses on the antiquities of Rome composed about 1500. The author is identified only as “prospectiuo Melanese depictore” (Milanese perspective painter) but is widely regarded as having been Bramante, who often recited his poetry at the Sforza court. For an argument in favor of his authorship, see Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo: Architect, trans. Sue Brill (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 116.

  19 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1427.

  20 Charles Robertson, “Bramante, Michelangelo and the Sistine Ceiling,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49 (1986): 105.

  21 This proverb forms the basis for an insult by Michelangelo, who, shown a painting of a bull by an artist whom he disliked, replied, “Every painter paints himself well.”

  22 McMahon, ed., Treatise on Painting, vol. 1, 86.

  23 For good discussions of automimesis, see Frank Zöllner, Leonardo da Vinci, 1452–1519: The Complete Paintings and Drawings (Cologne, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Paris, Toronto: Taschen, 2003), 134–55; and Philip Lindsay Sohm, The Artist Grows Old: The Aging of Art and Artists in Italy, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 41–43.

  24 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §587.

  25 Quoted in Zöllner, Leonardo da Vinci, 134. Zöllner writes that there can be “no doubt that Visconti’s rhetoric is aimed directly at Leonardo.” See also the discussion (and translation) in Martin Kemp, “Science and the Poetic Impulse,” in Michael W. Cole, ed., Sixteenth-Century Italian Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 97–98. Kemp likewise argues that Leonardo is the butt of this “humorously critical poem” (p. 95).

  26 See Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 377.

  27 Bramly, Leonardo, 24.

  28 This latter self-portrait was first presented by the scientific journalist Piero Angela on the Italian television program Ulysses, broadcast on 28 February 2009. It has since found acceptance from scholars such as Carlo Pedretti.

  29 For the dating, see Clayton, Leonardo da Vinci, 112.

  30 Edward MacCurdy, Leonardo da Vinci (London: George Bell, 1908), 35.

  31 Leonardo’s drawing and descriptions of the play are found on a sheet of paper in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Allegorical Design (recto), Stage Design (verso) (17.142.2). For a description of Taccone’s play, see Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 154.

  32 See Pedretti, Leonardo: Architect, 28–29. Pedretti dates Leonardo’s submarine designs to 1483–85.

  33 Domenica Laurenza, Leonardo’s Machines: Secrets and Inventions in the Da Vinci Codices (Florence-Milan: Giunti, 2005), 31.

  34 Laurenza, Leonardo’s Machines, 34.

  35 For a discussion, see Kemp, Marvellous Works, 105.

  36 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1123.

  37 See the discussion in Laurenza, Leonardo’s Machines, 46–53.

  38 See Laurenza, Leonardo’s Machines, 54–61.

  39 The pair of wings appears in Codex Atlanticus, folio 844r; see Laurenza, Leonardo’s Machines, 62–69. Leonardo’s plans for a test flight are given in Codex Atlanticus, folio 361v-b. For discussions of this passage, see Carlo Pedretti, ed., Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus: A Catalogue of Its Newly Restored Sheets (Milan: Giunti, 1979), part 2, 232; idem., Commentary, vol. 1, 220–22; and Kemp, Marvellous Works, 105–6.

  40 Quoted in Lynn White Jr., “Eilmer of Malmesbury, an Eleventh-Century Aviator: A Case Study of Technological Innovation, Its Context and Tradition,” Technology and Culture 2 (Spring 1961): 98.

  41 Quoted in White, “Eilmer of Malmesbury,” 103.

  42 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1484.

  43 Quoted in Bramly, Leonardo, 286.

  44 Quoted in Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 221.

  45 White notes (p. 103) that no account of this story predates 1648. If true, the episode can be dated to February 1498, since it supposedly took place during the wedding celebrations of the mercenary Bartolommeo d’Alviano and Pantasilea Baglioni, sister of the lord of Perugia.

  46 Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 220–21. Pedretti writes, “There seems to be no doubt that Leonardo had made some attempt to fly” (p. 220).

  47 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1125.

  48 Ibid., vol. 2, §1428). See the discussion of this passage in Domenico Laurenza, Leonardo: On Flight (Florence-Milan: Giunti, 2004), 64.

  Chapter 10

  1 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §55.

  2 Claire J. Farago, ed., Leonardo da Vinci’s “Paragone” (Brill: Leiden, 1992), 207; Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §52.

  3 Ibid., vol. 1, §102.

  4 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, 305; and Kim Williams, “Verrocchio’s Tombslab for Cosimo de’ Medici: Designing with a Mathematical Vocabulary,” in Kim Williams, ed., Nexus: Architecture and Mathematics (Florence: Edizioni dell’Erba, 1996), 193–205.

  5 Thomas Brachert, “A Musical Canon of Proportion in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper,” Art Bulletin 53 (December 1971): 464.

  6 Brachert, “A Musical Canon of Proportion,” 464. See also Kemp, Marvellous Works, 185.

  7 Quoted in Kemp, Marvellous Works, 166.

  8 Lives of the Artists, 262–63. On Borso d’Este, see Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 1.

  9 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 263.

  10 Ibid., 206.

  11 Cited in Mrs. Charles W. Heaton, Leonardo da Vinci and His Works (London: Macmillan, 1874), 32, note 3.

  12 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 262. For the conservation, see Marani, “Leonardo’s Last Supper,” 18.

  13 John F. Moffitt, Painterly Perspective and Piety: Religious Uses of the Vanishing Point, from the 15th to the 18th Century (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 170.

  14 On ultramarine, see Cennini, The Book of the Art of Cennino Cennini, 47 and 50; and Merrifield, The Art of Fresco Painting, xxxvi. For rents in Florence, see Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 46
2. For Leonardo’s use of ultramarine, see Barcilon, “The Restoration,” 424 and 426.

  15 Quoted in Merrifield, The Art of Fresco Painting, 58. For Leonardo’s technique of painting Christ’s garment, see Matteini and Moles, “A Preliminary Investigation,” 129 and 131.

  16 See Rush Rhees, “Christ in Art,” Biblical World 6 (December 1895): 490–503.

  17 “Exposition on Psalm 133,” §6, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 8, trans. J. E. Tweed, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1888).

  18 Gerhard Wolf, “From Mandylion to Veronica: Picturing the Disembodied Face and Disseminating the True Image of Christ in the Latin West,” in Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf, eds., The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Biblioteca Hertziana, Rome and the Villa Spelman, Florence, 1996 (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1998), 153–79. For a discussion of the face of Christ, see Martin Kemp, Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 13–43.

  19 Quoted in Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 57.

  20 Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, trans. G. W. Bowersock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 60.

  21 George Eliot, Romola, ed. Andrew Sanders (London: Penguin, 1980), 75; and Sarah Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 20.

  22 Quoted in Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 93–94. On the beard as a sign of otherness, see Barbara Wisch, “Vested Interest: Redressing Jews on Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling,” Artibus et Historiae 24 (2003): 148. On Agyropoulos, see Deno John Geanakoplos, Constantinople and the West (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 111.

  23 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §§986, 987 and 837.

  24 Aimé Guillon de Montléon, Le cénacle de Léonard de Vinci rendu aux amis des Beaux-Arts dans le tableau aujourd’hui chez un citoyen de Milan (Milan and Lyon: Dumolard, 1811), 70.

  25 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1305.

  26 Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 384–85. Pedretti adds, “No such document is to be found in the archives of the church” (p. 384).

  27 See Katharine Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Early Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 47 (Spring 1994): 1–33, and Antonio Benivieni, De abditis nonnullus ac mirandis morborum et sanatorium causis (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1954).

  28 Stephen Jay Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 26, 28.

  29 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §910.

  30 Ibid., vol. 2, §886.

  31 Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 2, 127.

  32 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §858.

  33 Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 2, 128.

  34 Martin Kemp, personal e-mail communication, 1 January 2012.

  35 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 270.

  36 Luke Syson, “The Rewards of Service: Leonardo da Vinci and the Duke of Milan,” in Syson et al., Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan (London: National Gallery, 2011), 36.

  37 Quoted in Martin Kemp, “Dissection and Divinity in Leonardo’s Late Anatomies,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972): 211.

  38 Kemp, “Dissection and Divinity,” 212.

  39 Quoted in Syson, “The Rewards of Service,” 23.

  40 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1209.

  41 Ibid., vol. 2, §1296.

  42 Quoted in Gordon Griffiths, “Leonardo Bruni and the 1431 Florentine Complaint Against Indulgence-Hawkers: A Case-Study in Anticlericalism,” in Peter A. Dykema and Heiko A. Oberman, eds., Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 133.

  43 See my The Fantasia of Leonardo da Vinci: His Riddles, Jests, Fables and Bestiary (Delray Beach, FL: Levenger Press, 2010).

  44 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1284.

  Chapter 11

  1 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §§1434 and 1444.

  2 Leonardo’s word list is found in the Codex Trivulzianus, held in the Biblioteca del Castello Sforza in Milan.

  3 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §10.

  4 Ibid., vol. 2, §§1448, 1488, 1496, 1501, and 1448.

  5 Ibid., vol. 2, §1469. The equal balance between scientific and literary books is noted by Martin Kemp: see “Science and the Poetic Impulse,” 95. Kemp’s caveat is worth bearing in mind: Leonardo’s list of books does not necessarily provide “a complete or even a balanced record of what he read and owned,” and “the ownership of a book should not be taken as evidence that its owner has read it” (ibid.).

  6 For the second list, see Ladislao Reti, “Two Unpublished Manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci in the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid, Part II,” The Burlington Magazine 110 (February 1968): 81–91.

  7 These purchases are recorded in the Codex Atlanticus, folio 90v.

  8 On Leonardo’s involvement in recruiting Pacioli to Milan, see R. Emmett Taylor, No Royal Road: Luca Pacioli and His Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 206.

  9 Quoted in John Henry Bridges, ed., The “Opus Majus” of Roger Bacon (Oxford: Williams and Norgate, 1900), vol. 1, xxv.

  10 Quoted in Taylor, No Royal Road, 321, 320, and 283.

  11 Quoted in Carlo Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero: Piero della Francesca, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (London: Verso, 2000), 89.

  12 On these monikers, see Michael J. Fischer, “Luca Pacioli on Business Profits,” Journal of Business Ethics 25 (2000): 299.

  13 Kenneth Clark and Carlo Pedretti, eds., The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, 3 vols. (London: Phaidon, 1969), vol. 3, p. 47.

  14 Leonardo da Vinci: The Madrid Codices, vol. 5: Transcription and Translation of Codex Madrid II, ed. and trans. Ladislao Reti (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 8.

  15 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1444.

  16 See the discussion in Jeremy Parzen, “Please Play with Your Food: An Incomplete Survey of Culinary Wonders in Italian Renaissance Cookery,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 4 (Fall 2004): 26–27. De viribus quantitatis exists in a single manuscript in the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna.

  17 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 269.

  18 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §343.

  19 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, 73.

  20 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1471.

  21 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, 72.

  22 For references to Trezzo and Caravaggio, see Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 234, 236, 239, 244, and 254.

  23 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §§310, 324, and 343.

  24 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, 72.

  25 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 1, §396.

  26 For good discussions of Pacioli’s thought on divine proportion, see Alberto Pérez-Gómez, “The Glass Architecture of Luca Pacioli,” in Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, vol. 4, ed. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2003), 245–86; and Mario Livio, The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the Extraordinary Number of Nature, Art and Beauty (London: REVIEW, 2002), 128–37.

  27 Pacioli’s first quote is from his dedication in the 1509 edition of De divina proportione, the second from his unpublished manuscript of De viribus quantitatis.

  28 R. D. Archer-Hind, ed., The Timaeus of Plato (London: Macmillan, 1888), 193 and 197.

  29 Quoted in Kemp, Marvellous Works, 135.

  30 Pacioli’s description of Leonardo’s illustrations comes from the introduction to the edition of On Divine Proportion printed in Venice in 1509.

&n
bsp; 31 Quoted in Livio, The Golden Ratio, 131.

  32 See George Markowsky, “Misconceptions about the Golden Ratio,” College Mathematics Journal 23 (January 1992): 2–19; Livio, The Golden Ratio, 72–75; and Keith Devlin, “The Myth That Will Not Go Away,” Mathematical Association of America (May 2007), available online at www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_05_07.html.

  33 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1157.

  34 Ibid., vol. 2, §1504.

  35 David Bergamini, Mathematics (New York: Time-Life, 1963), 96.

  36 Matila Ghyka, The Geometry of Art and Life (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1946), 98. For a good survey of the golden section—and lack thereof—in Leonardo’s work, see Livio, The Golden Ratio, 162–66; and Markowsky, “Misconceptions,” 10–11.

  37 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §827.

  38 Livio, The Golden Ratio, 134–35; Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, 73.

  39 The Prince, 49.

  40 Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 237 and 245.

  41 Villata, ed., Documenti, 93.

  42 See Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci, 300–301. On annual salaries, see Gene A. Brucker, The Society of Renaissance Florence, 2.

  43 Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 8.

  44 For examples of Florentine real estate prices, see Patricia Lee Rubin, Image and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 6.

  45 For Leonardo’s portrait of Nani, see Irma A. Richter, ed., The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 329. On Leonardo’s plans for his altarpiece: Pedretti, Commentary, vol. 1, 387–88.

  46 Villata, ed., Documenti, 94.

  47 Commines, Memoirs, 191.

  48 Guicciardini, The History of Italy, 113.

  49 Quoted in Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 295.

  50 Quoted in ibid., 302.

  51 Richter, ed., The Literary Works, vol. 2, §1560.

  52 The spelling of the painting varies: the Louvre’s curators spell ferronière with a double n, virtually everyone else with a single n.

  53 Zöllner, Leonardo da Vinci, 228.

  54 Goldscheider, Leonardo da Vinci, 185.