The autumn that welcomed Leonardo to the southernmost city he had ever visited was hotter than a Milanese summer. The soaring sky, occasionally crossed by clouds from the sea, was very different in colour from the ultramarine blue he had mixed so many times for the skies above the hills in the backgrounds of his Madonnas; at midday it even had tinges of the colour of violas, while at sunset it shifted from gold to deep pink [lacca]. These colours showed to even better advantage the great marble and travertine monuments scattered between the Tiber and the hills, like ruins of a civilization of giants, while across the city immense pines stood out against the sharp outlines of temples and baths. They grew to heights found only in Rome, their crowns suddenly dark in the evening against the turquoise sky.
Leonardo must have been struck by the intensity of the light, the subject of his most penetrating observations as a scientist and painter and the inspiration for his best work: the pale blue light, which filtered at dawn through the mists rising from the Po valley; and the golden light of the sunset, which changed the world into a fabled vision. Leonardo had observed everything, but never light that arrived straight from a sun closer to the equator, a notion that was still unknown to the artist. This magnificent light enhanced especially the stone carvings, making them look very different from how draughtsmen had portrayed them in sketches of the Eternal City that had circulated in Europe for decades. Under the midday sun the travertine stone and the pale marble were animated by geometric forms that now seemed the stuff of fantasies, an obstinately unreal world that had survived the fury of barbarians and of autumn storms for over a millennium. On immense columns, on the side pillars of arches and in their curved undersides, armies of stone carvers – themselves become no more than dust – had captured men, animals and plants, giving eternal life to the imaginings of artists and poets, inventions that Leonardo now saw for the first time and was able to observe at his leisure.
There were monuments that seemed newly built, such was their solidity and strength: the Pantheon with its granite columns, fashioned with tools that no one knew how to make any longer, except perhaps in Florence, and capitals whose airy acanthus leaf designs stood taller than a man; the Colosseum, under whose lower arches passing herdsmen would shelter their flocks, but whose uppermost levels stood proudly intact, crowned by a cornice carved with the same rigour throughout its hundreds of metres of length. Between the white stones, vineyards and gardens filled with luxuriant plants grew year-round, on ground that not only yielded grapes and bitter oranges but where statues of all sizes had been unearthed, with arms, legs and muscles so perfectly fashioned in marble that no anatomist could rival them. Had these ancient sculptors also got queasy stomachs from dissecting corpses in hospitals? Woods and wasteland had spread into the spaces between abandoned buildings with the unstoppable vitality of the Mediterranean. Leonardo had only heard talk of it before, but now he saw with his own eyes how palm trees could rival the height of columns and bell towers.
When he arrived in Rome with all his luggage and personal effects, Leonardo saw how the groves of ilex stretched from the banks of the river to the hilltops, their shiny dark green leaves forming a dense canopy that light could not penetrate. Only the chestnut trees and the vines, already stripped of fruit, had started to turn colour and lose their leaves; for the rest, the gardens were still lush and created space for themselves everywhere, between stones, inside the great courtyards of the affluent families, inside the convents on the Aventine, and even on top of the Roman towers recently abandoned by the families who used them to protect their palaces.
But visitors from the north were not only impressed by the city’s historical grandeur. Rome was in the grip of a new building fever, which was changing its appearance for good. The huge Palazzo della Cancelleria, built by Cardinal Riario with money won at the gaming table, had already been finished. It looked as imposing and strong as an ancient royal palace, and its colonnaded courtyard was as large as a piazza. The vast blocks of ashlar masonry that Leonardo had seen used in his home city were smoother here, under the influence of the classical orders, and were used in all shapes and sizes. On the bank of the Tiber stood the newly completed palace of Europe’s richest banker, Agostino Chigi, designed by Baldassarre Peruzzi, an architect from Siena. Clearly influenced by Vitruvius, the villa was embellished with stone architraves and pilasters (or so it seemed to Leonardo) and in between with graffiti-style paintings, in an endless celebration of Ovid’s tales.
As one approached St Peter’s, one would suddenly get an idea of the colossal work of renovation the city had embarked on, thanks to the greatest concentration of talent ever seen. Julius II, the pope about whom Leonardo had heard so much, had started a process of urban transformation on an enormous scale, and the results were there for all to see. A wide road, clear on its course, ran parallel to the last stretch of the river before St Peter’s. The pope had intended that Via Giulia should house the offices for the administration of justice; and one of Leonardo’s old acquaintances, Donato Bramante, with whom the artist had collaborated in Milan on plans for the cathedral lantern, had designed a huge palace to this end. The foundations were already visible, marked with travertine blocks so large that one alone could have formed the base for Leonardo’s unrealized equestrian monument. New palaces for dignitaries were being built along the road facing St Peter’s, in a classical style reinvented by Bramante and a series of young architects whose names would soon become familiar to Leonardo.
Yet it was the basilica of St Peter’s, the heart of the city and of western Christianity, that revealed the scope of this renewal. The choir of the old Constantinian building had only just been demolished and a new basilica was being built to Bramante’s design, with a central plan and a dome supported by columns, each one as large as a church. Beside St Peter’s the great Belvedere courtyard was also under construction, like a Colosseum unrolled in a straight line. Three superimposed rows of arches ran from the side walls of the basilica to the Belvedere building, erected by Innocent VIII 50 years earlier as a country residence. The works impressed visiting European ambassadors, as the pope intended: not being able to show them armies, he showed them instead grandiose plans and intelligence. In order to overcome a natural rise in the hilly terrain, the large ‘corridor’ enclosed a courtyard that was so vast that naval battles could be staged there, along with bull races and spectacles of all kinds. While the project had been started by Julius II, the Medici pope on whom Leonardo relied proved to be no less enterprising in the first few months of his reign. Leo X had openly declared that it was the pope’s duty almam urbem pulchris edificiis exornari [‘to embellish the beloved city with beautiful buildings’].1
The city that welcomed Leonardo was the paradise dreamed of by artists of all kinds. Blessed with a wonderful climate and light, and filled – from spring to autumn – with scents that enraptured its inhabitants and the visiting pilgrims, this was a place guaranteed to seduce a man in love with every aspect of nature. To Leonardo, Rome must have brought home the power of the vast machine of the universe. But, even for him, the greatest wonder lay in the immense and well-preserved display of classical architecture – a perfect backdrop for the new challenges facing any ambitious artist. Moreover, here there was money, so much of it that a steady stream was conveyed through the ambassadors of European states and through the dignitaries of the papal court, and – an essential facilitator to the magnificence of both – in some measure to the artists who were reinventing a new world. It was all he could have wished for, even as a scientist. Rome not only boasted La Sapienza, one of the oldest universities, renowned for the calibre of those who taught there, but also benefited from the first discoveries brought back by the courageous monks sent to evangelize the New World. Unheard of plant species appeared in Rome’s monasteries and were immediately added to the rich collections of the Vatican’s physic gardens. News of rare animals and precious woods and minerals arrived in Rome before they reached Spain, where the colonization of the Americas was beset by complications.
In Rome, Leonardo found a city that seemed a paradise and a pope ready to act as his protector. It certainly seemed to be the start of a new chapter, one that heralded his arrival at the top of the world, although he immediately had the impression that he had got there too late: he was 60 and his age was beginning to have an effect, together with the accumulated frustration of the unfinished projects, of the discoveries that had failed to bring him the fame he deserved or thought he deserved. His mood darkened and he began to have regrets fuelled by ambitions that had ruled his entire life but remained unrealized. The comment that he wrote in the Arundel Codex at the very start of his Roman period throws a revealing light on the burden of his frustration and on what had been his entire life’s ambitions. He had wanted to compensate for his social status through his prowess in science, and had tried, again and again, to make the great discovery that would have changed the course of humanity, or at least of part of it, while bringing him eternal fame as the inventor:
Had anyone discovered the range of the power of the cannon in all its varieties and imparted his secret to the Romans, with what speed would they have conquered every country and subdued every army? And what reward would have been deemed sufficient for such a service? (Codex Arundel, p. 145r, f.279v)
Here, perhaps for the first time with refreshing honesty, he returned to the fantasy that had always inspired him: the dream of making a discovery that would have rendered him immortal, earning him the gratitude of those in power – not in his capacity as a painter but as a savant, like Archimedes, who, as Leonardo goes on to note, was honoured by the Romans as a semi-god despite the fact that he had ‘wrought great mischief’ to them. But now that Leonardo’s life was drawing to an end, this fantasy appeared for what it was, a childish dream – and, what was more, a dream embittered by recent events. His relations had not been with the great Romans but rather with miserly and minor tyrants constantly struggling for their own precarious survival. He had served Ludovico Sforza, who had ousted his own nephew using a series of shrewd and cunning tricks before failing him, Leonardo, in the most wretched way. He had then attempted to offer his services to the Venetian Signoria and to the quarrelsome republic of Florence before walking into the arms of that villain, Cesare Borgia, a beast hated by everyone, who finally dissolved like poisonous fumes, consumed by his own excessive ambitions. In desperation, Leonardo had even gone as far as to approach the Turks, who turned him down. Where were the Romans? Those men of vision who had built the palaces and temples that made made such an impression on him today, even if the passing centuries reduced them ruins? He could still turn to the pope’s brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, who nibbled on scraps of power among Rome’s insidious corridors; but what could Leonardo find that was extraordinary enough to offer a patron of his calibre? Would he still have time to discover something that would change the course of history?
It was autumn, and with these thoughts his mood turned gloomy, shaded by the ruined buildings from a past that no one could ever revive. Archimedes was destined to shine as a solitary star in the firmament of the great scientists and inventors whom Leonardo da Vinci aspired to join.