In 1490 – to be more precise, on 22 July – Leonardo was joined at home by a youth who would change his life. His name was Giacomo Caprotti, he was ten years old, and he was beautiful and high-spirited in a way in which only scamps who seduce older homosexuals can be. It is an old tale that has been relived time and again throughout history and would be repeated, with less drama, in the life of Leonardo’s rival, namely between Michelangelo and his beloved assistant, Urbino.
The mature intellectual, drained of his creative energy, was captivated by his own reflection in the vitality of this uncultured, coarse and ignorant assistant, who for precisely these reasons was direct and determined, like the whirlpools in the rivers that Leonardo used to stare at in silence for hours on end. Leonardo fell in love with the youth, deluding himself that this love would rejuvenate him or might simply infuse in him some of that vital spirit that he so appreciated in his observations of nature. Giacomo was a champion of unruliness and slyness and his hunger was not only metaphorical, for experience, but also for food, which he devoured at a rate that stunned Leonardo in the first few days. Leonardo ironically commented on the boy’s prowess in his diary (Codex C, in this case), in a continuous dialogue with his alter ego: ‘Iacomo came to live with me on Saint Mary Magdalene’s day in 1490, aged 10’ (Ms. C, fol. 15v).
The boy’s age should not surprise us, both because the process of growing up, both physically and psychologically, was faster in those days than it is today and because then a youth who was on the cusp of adolescence was regarded as being ready for work and more besides. Parents from modest backgrounds were all too willing to send their sons to a master, even if they were well aware of the sort of requests, not always entirely legitimate, that might be made of their boys. We know this from a letter addressed to Michelangelo in which a loving father, writing to offer his son’s services to the artist, stressed that, if Michelangelo caught sight of this handsome youth only once, he would not only want to engage him to work in his house but he would also certainly want him in his bed.
Leonardo’s refined elegance and the life he led at court left little doubt about his sexual inclinations, and the old charge of sodomy was certainly bandied as far as Milan by jealous rivals. In a period whose behavioural – and above all sexual – codes are difficult for us to decipher, we can only follow Leonardo’s own comments on the events that followed the beginning of that cohabitation. For all his angelic looks and blond curls that fell onto his shoulders, the boy soon proved to be a little devil, and indeed the name, Salaino or Salai, is taken from one of the protagonist devils in Morgante (an epic poem by Luigi Pulci that was enormously successful in Florence and in northern Italy from the 1480s on). Leonardo immediately ordered new clothes for the boy, and in repayment the boy stole money from his purse:
On the second day I had two shirts cut out for him, a pair of hose and a doublet, and when I put money aside to pay for these things he stole the money from the wallet, and it was never possible to make him confess, although I was absolutely convinced. 4 lire. Thievish, obstinate, greedy. (Ms. C, fol 15v)
These comments contain all of Leonardo’s fascination with the boy’s unscrupulous conduct. It never occurred to him, as it did to Michelangelo on more than one occasion, to send him back; instead he took him to dinner with his friend, the architect Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara. Here the little rascal’s behaviour became even more insolent: he broke three glass cups and spilled wine on the floor. But Leonardo’s comment, with all its good-humoured irony, reveals an affection that had already overwhelmed him: ‘had supper for two and did mischief for four’.
Such remarks continued in the next months, when it becomes all too apparent that the master is by now very taken by his pupil and a note of satisfaction creeps into the reports of his misdeeds. The frequency of entries that refer to Salai is itself a sign of the boy’s centrality in Leonardo’s life right from the outset, because Leonardo had never written about anyone so extensively and so often as he did about Salai. Almost all the other individuals in Leonardo’s life are vague shadows; only Salai, from the moment of his first appearance, is a real-life person in full colour – in flesh and blood and with emotions. On 7 September Salai stole a silver stylus (a nib used for drawing) worth 22 soldi from another of Leonardo’s collaborators, Marco d’Oggiono, who, unlike Leonardo, had no wish to be gulled by the boy and immediately searched in his box, where he found it hidden.
As time passed the boy’s behaviour remained unchanged, indeed his thefts became even more daring. On 26 January Leonardo took his collaborators to the house of Galeazzo Sanseverino, captain at arms and a relative of Ludovico il Moro, who had organized a tournament to celebrate the wedding of Ludovico and Beatrice d’Este in Pavia on 17 January. A pageant had also been held at the tournament with a masqued party for which Leonardo designed fanciful costumes of ‘savages’, enacting a popular theme in the Renaissance: the contrast between primitive ages and the refinement of contemporary civilization. Leonardo came to Sanseverino’s house together with the other players, and there they tried on the costumes under the supervision of their master, who acted like a modern art director at a fashion show. The grooms who were to appear in the pageant undressed in a room and, without a thought, left their garments and their purses on the bed. Salai promptly emptied their pockets: ‘certain of the grooms had taken off their clothes in order to try on some of the costumes of the savages who were to appear in this pageant, Giacomo went to the wallet of one of them as it lay on the bed with the other personal clothing, and took some money that he found there’ (Ms. C, fol. 15v).
Salai also learned to put his robbery to good use. In February he stole ‘a Turkish hide’ that had been given to Leonardo by Sanseverino himself, and he sold it to a cobbler for 20 soldi and with the money bought aniseed comfits. The thefts continued in April; this time the victim was another pupil, Antonio Boltraffio, who carelessly left a silver stylus on a drawing he was finishing. In a nutshell, Salai was not exactly the ideal sort of boy who could be relied upon in the intimate setting of a household, but Leonardo would never be apart from him for the rest of his life and lavished money on him, leaving him all his gold after he died, together with his clothes and the gems he had collected.
The boy was also very vain, or perhaps it was Leonardo who exalted his beauty, celebrating it with the fine garments that he continued to buy for him. To mark the first anniversary of his arrival, Salai received a completely new wardrobe and, as always, Leonardo kept a detailed record: ‘The first year: a cloak, 2 lire; 6 shirts, 4 lire; 3 doublets, 6 lire; 4 pairs of hose, 7 lire 8 soldi; a suit of clothes, lined, 5 lire; 24 pairs of shoes, 6 lire 5 soldi; a cap, 1 lira; laces for belt, 1 lira.’ But a note dated 4 April 1497 – seven years later, when Salai was 18 and must have been a young man in the flower of age and beauty – reveals that the pupil’s elegance had become a point of honour for his master, who gave him clothing fit for a prince and certainly very different from the clothes worn by other artisan apprentices: ‘The cloak of Salai the fourth day of April 1497, 4 braccia of silver cloth, 15 lire 4 soldi. Green velvet for the trimming, 9 lire. Ribbons, 9 soldi. Loops, 12 soldi. For the making, 1 lire 5 soldi. Ribbon for the front, 5 soldi. Given him 13 grossoni 26 lire 5 soldi. Salai stole 4 soldi’ (Ms. I, fol. 94r).
We can imagine how passers-by in the street looked in admiration at the elegant master and his handsome pupil dressed in costly velvet with frivolous ribbons fluttering on the front of his cloak. But, to many, the ostentatious sophistication of master and pupil alike seemed out of place, since no employee could have afforded such elegant attire. From the figures recorded in the notebook we learn that Salai’s cloak alone cost more than two months’ salary of a good employee, hence a sum that was completely out of reach for Leonardo’s apprentice. We can also imagine the cockiness with which Salai displayed his looks and elegance in Milan, where men and women spent their lives in the silk- and linen-spinning workshops that spread throughout the city and in the neighbouring countryside. His delinquent tendencies, noted by Leonardo from the first day they met, never changed and in the end led to his death in a brawl in 1525 – fortunately well after Leonardo had died and thus sparing him that sorrow. But during Leonardo’s moment of triumph in Milan, the eccentricity of the master and his pupil fuelled much malicious criticism of their living together – which irritated more on account of their ostentatious elegance than on account of the unusual nature of their relationship.
Idle gossip will always find those eager to listen to it, and a surviving example of the many criticisms levied against Leonardo, although untouchable while under Il Moro’s protection, is an obscene sonnet dedicated to him and to all Florentines, who were renowned for their preference for homosexual love affairs. The author of the sonnet, more accurately a biting satire, was a poet from Bergamo, Guidotto Prestinari, self-appointed censor of corrupt Tuscan habits. The fact that these criticisms of the master’s lifestyle were to a certain extent public, and even took the form of obscene poetry, testifies to how little he cared for such moralistic judgements, even if in other respects he was obsessed by any possible criticism of his science and his theories. His notebooks are pervaded by the fear that his reputation as a scientist would suffer because he lacked the typical qualifications of university scholars, and above all because he did not know Latin: ‘I know well that, since I am not a man of letters, some presumptuous persons will think they may with reason censure me by alleging that I am totally unlettered. Fools!’ (Codex Atlanticus, fol. 372v).
Yet at a private level Leonardo does not seem to have cared much about criticism. He continued his social and playful activities, and always found the time to organize festivities and masques, to scrutinize the world around him and in particular other people, their appearance, their strange gestures and anything else that drew the attention of this handsome man of exuberant vitality who, at the age of 40, was an arbiter of fashion at one of Europe’s most powerful courts – one that pulsed with feverish development, eager to appear as the sole centre of Italian elegance and modernity. The vacuum of talent, intelligence, and indeed culture that Ludovico il Moro had noted in his prosperous city seems to have been filled by Leonardo alone, so numerous were the projects and initiatives he undertook. Leonardo arranged his workshop so that, together with his collaborators, he could deal with the tasks requested by Ludovico while at the same time, in the midst of these festive commitments and of a rather complicated domestic life, he started to embark on experimental projects that had nothing to do with the commissions given to him by the duke – as we shall see. In the last decade of the century Leonardo reached the peak of social success, and this raised his ambition to its highest point. But both would be undermined by the failure of the project that was closest to his heart: the equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza.