by Martin Kemp
LEONARDO
DA VINCI
The 100 Milestones
MARTIN KEMP
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Text © 2019 Martin Kemp
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Interior design by Christine Heun
Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan
Picture credits – see page 202
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
REASONS FOR THE CHOICES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE 100 MILESTONES
LEONARDO’S LIFE: KEY DATES AND WORKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADDITIONAL READING
PICTURE CREDITS
INTRODUCTION
The illegitimate son of a Florentine notary and a fifteen-year-old orphan, Leonardo was born in the small Tuscan town of Vinci in April 1452. He has risen over the years to become the most famous person in the history of world visual culture.
Brought up in his grandfather’s household in Vinci, he entered the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio as a teenager, where he would have witnessed the making of sculpture in marble, bronze, precious metals, and terracotta. The workshop also produced paintings and designs for textiles and parade armor, and undertook at least one engineering project. The young Leonardo became deeply immersed in the Florentine tradition of the “science of art,” most notably linear perspective and anatomy.
He remained in the master’s workshop at least until he was twenty-four, and his early paintings, such as the Annunciation, can be viewed as products of “Verrocchio & Co.,” even if Leonardo was their sole author. As a rising star he was awarded commissions for two big altarpieces: a Virgin, Child, and Saints for the government palace in 1478; and an Adoration of the Magi for a Florentine monastery. There is no record of progress on the former, and the latter remained unfinished when he left Florence in 1482. This pattern of noncompletion was to become a feature of his career as a painter.
When Leonardo arrived in Milan, he wrote to Duke Ludovico Sforza (“il Moro”) advertising his services as a military and civil engineer. At the end of the letter he mentions his abilities in painting and sculpture. His first commission in 1483 was to provide painted decorations with two colleagues for a large architectural altarpiece ordered by a confraternity. Leonardo’s main contribution was the Virgin of the Rocks, which became mired in a dispute that was only resolved in 1508. His activities in Milan embraced painting, sculpture, architecture, and civil and military engineering, often as someone who generated ideas rather than as the hands-on executant. He progressively engaged with a range of sciences—anatomy, optics, dynamics, statics, geology, and mathematics.
He also served as a maestro of visual effects for major courtly celebrations, designing costumes and very expensive stage machinery. His grandest project was a massive bronze equestrian memorial to the duke’s father, Francesco Sforza, which reached the stage of a full-scale model and the making of a mold for casting, but was not realized before the fall of his patron in 1499 when the French invaded Milan.
Leonardo’s output of paintings during his period at the court is modest in quantity but high in innovatory quality. His two highly communicative portraits of the Duke’s mistresses reworked the relationship between the sitter and the viewer. The famed Last Supper raised narrative painting to new levels of formal and emotional grandeur.
Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci by a follower, c. 1507.
After his return to Florence, Leonardo embarked on some devotional pictures, including a Virgin, Child, St. Anne, and a Lamb. He was also engaged by Cesare Borgia and the Florentine government as an engineer. Leonardo’s work on an Arno canal informed his studies of geology, and he decided that the earth had undergone vast transformations over deep periods of time. His great painting project was the Battle of Anghiari for the large new council hall, where he was joined by Michelangelo as a rival. Leonardo began to paint on the wall in an experimental technique, which caused problems, and the unfinished mural was abandoned when he was pressed to return to Milan to serve the French rulers.
During his second period in Florence, Leonardo commenced the Portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the lost Leda and the Swan, the Salvator Mundi, and another version of St. Anne. He was also deeply engaged in geometry, optics, the science of water, and anatomy (particularly in the dissection of an old man in the winter of 1507–8).
Working for the French in Milan from 1507 onward, he resumed a range of courtly duties similar to those he performed for Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo seems to have been prized for his remarkable all-around qualities as much as for his practice as a painter. His studies of the skeleton and the muscular system around 1510 and his researches into the working of the heart are high points in the history of anatomical illustration. The records of his activities as a painter around this time are patchy, but the strange and engaging St. John the Baptist may have been begun in this period.
In 1513, he was drawn to Rome to work for Giuliano, the brother of the new Medici pope, again in an all-around capacity, working on a number of projects for his patron and continuing his own researches. His most significant impact was on Raphael, who translated Leonardo’s innovations in narrative paintings, Madonnas, and portraits in such a way that they reshaped the mainstream of painting for centuries to come.
After three years in Rome, he was invited to France to serve Francis I, who was buying into Italian Renaissance culture. He was housed grandly in the manor house of Clos Lucé and paid a substantial salary. Francis regarded Leonardo as a magus, a wise man who was an ornament of the court. The master generated plans for a large palace complex in Romorantin, which exercised a considerable influence on French chateau design.
When Leonardo died in May 1519, his large and diverse stock of manuscripts and drawings were treasured by his aristocratic pupil, Francesco Melzi, who was responsible for assembling what is now called the Trattato della pittura (Treatise on Painting), much of which was drawn from texts that have not survived. An edited version was published in 1651 and served to transmit a selection of Leonardo’s writings on art to successive generations. Melzi’s original selection began with the Paragone, the comparison of painting with sculpture, poetry, and music, in which painting emerges triumphant. Although a great proportion of Leonardo’s written and drawn legacy is now lost, what remains is one of the most remarkable testimonies to what visualization and representation can achieve.
REASONS FOR THE CHOICES
It is a challenge to select 100 images from Leonardo da Vinci’s vast range of work. The paintings are not a problem; there are no more than 19 or 20 of them. There is also a selection of those drawings that relate most closely to the surviving and lost works of art. To represent the full range of manuscripts adequately is very much another matter; there are over 6,000 surviving pages, covering an extraordinary range of topics. In the fields of engineering and anatomy alone, 100 images would still demand strict selection.
My emphasis is upon those areas in which his achievements bear comparison with any in the history of science and technology. His anatomical studies are extraordinary for their sense of form and function. His researches into water are equally notable, particula
rly when he looks at the role of water in the “body of the earth,” which leads him to formulate revolutionary views about the ancient history of our planet. His architecture, engineering, and mechanical inventions are less well represented in numerical terms, but something of their range and extraordinary visual quality should be apparent. His beloved mathematics is directly represented in its pure form only three times. In the context of this book it is difficult for diagrams and numbers to compete with more pictorial images, but the presence of geometry is explicit in many of the illustrations, most conspicuously in his studies of the behavior of light.
The clustering of images of science, nature, and technology in ways that resonate with each other gives an idea of how Leonardo perceived fundamental analogies across fields of study that we now assign to separate disciplines. He saw commonality where we see diversity. The broad progress of the 100 images is chronological, disrupted to a degree by the clustering. The most conspicuous disruption is the placing of the wonderful sheets of horses and cats (62 and 63) with his other studies of motion in man and animals, rather than much later in his career. Another is the placing of the St. John the Baptist at the very end, when it may well not be his last painting; the Saint and the Deluge Drawing at 99 seem to bring Leonardo’s life to a fitting conclusion. Generally, the placing of his paintings in chronological order is problematic. The majority underwent protracted evolution over a number of years. The dates assigned to them in the captions are permissive rather than definitive.
Leonardo was much interested in fame. I think he would have been gratified by the close attention he is receiving in the year that marks the five-hundredth anniversary of his death.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea for this project came from Barbara Berger, executive editor at Sterling Publishing, and she has acted as an enthusiastic and creative parent for the book throughout. Also at Sterling, I am grateful to Christine Heun, art director, for the stunning interior design; David Ter-Avanesyan, senior designer, for the beautiful cover design; Linda Liang, photography editor; Elizabeth Lindy, senior art director, covers; and Fred Pagan, production manager. Thanks also to Susan Welt, layout designer, and Joanie Eppinga, who has acted as copy editor with exemplary care.
As is the case with all my activities, Caroline Dawnay, my agent, and Judd Flogdell, my personal assistant, have performed crucial roles with high professionalism. I owe a broad debt to the community of Leonardo scholars, including those who work in museums and galleries, and to librarians and archivists. Over the course of fifty years, the number I should be thanking far outstrips the available space. I would however wish to make special mention of Carlo Pedretti, who died in 2018. His knowledge of Leonardo’s legacy, above all the drawings and manuscripts, has provided a platform on which we all stand.
I wish to make special mention of my daughter, Joanna, and my son, Jonathan, who in person and in company with their families bring very special dimensions into my life.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Baptism of Christ, Andrea Verrocchio and Assistants, c. 1474–76, Florence, Uffizi.
“Val d’Arno Landscape,” 1473, Florence, Uffizi.
The Annunciation, c. 1473–74, Florence, Uffizi.
Drapery of a Kneeling Figure, c. 1473–74, Paris, Musée du Louvre.
Study of a Lily (Lilium candidum) with the Ground Plan of a Building, c. 1473–4, Florence, Uffizi.
Bust of a Helmeted Warrior in Profile, c. 1476, London, British Museum.
Madonna and Child with a Vase of Flowers (or with a Carnation), c. 1475, Munich, Alte Pinakothek.
Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, c. 1478, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art.
Studies of a Woman’s Hands, c. 1478, Windsor, Royal Library, 12558.
Madonna and Child with a Flower (the “Benois Madonna”), c. 1478–80, St. Petersburg, Hermitage.
Studies for a Madonna and Child with a Cat, recto and verso, c. 1478–80, London, British Museum.
Studies for a Child with a Cat, c. 1478–80, London, British Museum.
Adoration of the Kings (or Magi), c. 1481–82, Florence, Uffizi.
Perspective Study for the Adoration of the Kings, c. 1481–82, Florence, Uffizi.
St. Jerome, c. 1481–82, Rome, Vatican.
Studies of a Mechanism for Repelling Scaling Ladders, c. 1475–80, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codice atlantico, 139r.
Studies of Archimedean Screws, Wells, and Pumps and an Underwater Breathing Device, c. 1475–80, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codice atlantico, 1069r.
Studies of a Scythed Chariot, an Armored Wagon, and the Point of a Halberd, c. 1483–85, London, British Museum.
Study of a Woman’s Head in Profile, c. 1481–82, Paris, Louvre.
Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1483–93, Paris, Louvre.
Head of a Young Woman Looking Outward, c. 1483–84, Turin, Biblioteca Reale.
Cartoon for the Head of the Infant St. John the Baptist, c. 1483–96, Paris, Louvre.
Study of a Rocky Cliff and Ravine, c. 1481, Windsor, Royal Library, 12255.
Portrait of a Man with a Sheet of Music, c. 1483–86, Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.
Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (or Lady with an Ermine), c. 1491, Kraków, Czartoryski Collection.
Emblematic Drawing of an Ermine and a Hunter, c. 1490, Cambridge, UK, Fitzwilliam Museum.
Knot Design for Leonardo’s “Academy,” c. 1495, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art.
Portrait of Bianca Sforza (“La Bella Principessa”), 1494, Private Collection.
Portrait of Lucrezia Crivelli (?) (“La Belle Ferronière”), c. 1498, Paris, Louvre.
A Rider on a Horse Rearing over a Prostrate Enemy, c. 1490, Windsor, Royal Library, 12358r.
Study of the Proportions of a Horse in the Stables of Galeazzo Sanseverino, c. 1493, Windsor, Royal Library, 12319.
The Sala delle Asse (Room of the Boards), 1498, Milan, Sforza Castle.
Studies for The Last Supper, Architecture, the Construction of an Octagon, and Two Columns of Numbers, c. 1496, Windsor, Royal Library, 12542.
The Last Supper, c. 1495–97, Milan, Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
Saints Thomas, James the Greater, Philip, Matthew, Thaddeus, and Simon (detail from The Last Supper).
Study for St. James the Greater and Designs of a Domed Corner Pavilion of a Castle, c. 1496, Windsor, Royal Library, 12552.
Study for the Head of St. Bartholomew or Matthew, c. 1496, Windsor, Royal Library, 12548.
Four Grotesque Characters Mocking an Old Man, c. 1495, Windsor, Royal Library, 12495r.
Two Human Skulls, Sectioned, with Proportional Analyses, 1489, Windsor, Royal Library, 19057r.
Vertical and Horizontal Sections of a Human Head with a Vertical Section of an Eye and a Vertical Section of an Onion, c.1489, Windsor, Royal Library, 12603r.
Studies of Light and Shade on Spheres, c. 1490, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, MS Ashburnham II 13v.
Studies of the Angular Impacts of Light on a Man’s Profile and Three Illuminated Spheres, c. 1490, Windsor, Royal Library, 12604r.
A Truncated and Fenestrated Dodecahedron (Icosidodecahedron) from Luca Pacioli, De divina porportione, 1496, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana.
Number Square, with Figures in Motion and Other Studies, c. 1501, London, British Library, Codex Arundel, 153r.
“Vitruvian Man,” c. 1497, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia.
Centralized Temple, Design for a Small Dome, and a Lifting Machine (?), c. 1488, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, MS Ashburnham I 5v.
Design for a Roller Bearing, Pinions Turned by a Wheel, and a Conical Screw with a Shaft and Rod, c. 1499, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Codex Madrid, I 20v.
Gearing for a Clockwork Mechanism and Wheels without Axles, c. 1499, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Codex Madrid, I 14r.
Designs for a Giant Crossbow, c. 1488, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codice atlantico, 149br.
Men Struggling to Move a Huge Cannon, c. 1485, Windsor, Royal Library, 12647.
Designs for a Flying Machine, c. 1488, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, MS B 74v & 75r.
Design for the Wing of the Flying Machine, c. 1485, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codice atlantico, 858r.
Cartoon for the Portrait of Isabella d’Este, 1500, Paris, Louvre.
Madonna of the Yarnwinder, c. 1501–8, Collection of the Duke of Buccleuch, Drumlanrig Castle, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland.
Madonna of the Yarnwinder (the “Lansdowne Madonna”), c. 1501–8, Private Collection.
Map of Imola, 1502, Windsor, Royal Library, 12284.
Copy of the Battle of Anghiari (the “Tavola Doria”), unknown artist, c. 1559 (original 1503–70), Florence, Uffizi.
Studies for the Battle of Anghiari, c. 1503, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia.
Studies of the Heads of Warriors, c. 1504, Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts.
Study of Heads of Horses, Lion, and Man, c. 1506, Windsor, Royal Library, 12326r.
Sequential Images of a Man Striking a Blow and Optical Diagram, c. 1506, Windsor, Royal Library, 19149v.
Studies of Horses in Motion, St. George and the Dragon, and a Cat (?), c. 1516, Windsor, Royal Library, 12331.
Studies of Cats and Other Animals, c. 1516, Windsor, Royal Library, 12363.
Scheme for a Circular Fortification, c. 1504, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codice atlantico, 132r.
Four Mortars Firing over a Castellated Wall, c. 1505, Windsor, Royal Library, 12275.
Scheme for an Arno Canal, c. 1503–5, Windsor, Royal Library, 192279.
Portrait of Lisa del Giocondo (the “Mona Lisa”), c. 1503–15, Paris, Louvre.
Portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, 2010, digitally restored by Pascal Cotte.
Studies of the Optics of the Human Eye, with an Experimental Model of the Eye, c. 1507, Bibliothèque de Institut de France, E 3v.
Study of the Vessels of the Arm, with a Demonstration of the Vessels of an Old and Young Person, c. 1508–10, Windsor, Royal Library, 19027r.
