The lack of documents concerning Leonardo’s time in Rome is inexplicable if one considers the volume of communications at the time. To get an idea of this ‘vacuum’ around Leonardo, one should reflect that John Shearman, in his monumental work on sources for Raphael, collected at least 74 documents concerning the latter for these three years, 1513–1516. A similar volume has not yet been produced for Michelangelo, but the known sources already allow his activity to be followed almost month by month.
The absence of documents on Leonardo for the same period and in the same context is in itself indicative of his isolation, and perhaps also of his lack of interest in the Roman artistic scene. The only trace he left in Rome records his involvement in a project for the construction of parabolic mirrors and in anatomical studies on the subject of reproduction. Proof of his lack of interest in the city’s artistic goings-on can be found in his registration in the Florentine community of Rome. Leonardo was introduced not by another artist but by a doctor; and other clues from his manuscripts include the Roman addresses of doctors, not artists.6 Vasari is of no help here, since he was told about Leonardo’s stay in Rome by Paolo Giovio, one of the few who left a written account of the artist from that period; in it Giovio acknowledges Leonardo’s greatness but appears not to have appreciated either his way of life or his character, given that it is to him that we almost certainly owe Vasari’s rather grotesque description of the master.
Paolo Giovio is one of the most important witnesses of Leonardo’s stay in Rome. In his ‘fragments’ he clearly emphasizes Leonardo’s interest and activities as an anatomist, confirming that, while he was in Rome, these occupied most of his time. Moreover, Giovio, who was born in Como in 1486, had studied medicine in Padua with the young anatomist Marcantonio della Torre, who had been very close to Leonardo at the end of the century. It was this common ground that allowed Giovio a full understanding of the artist’s work on the anatomy tables. Giovio himself had also arrived in Rome in 1513, in the household of Cardinal Bandinello Sauli, and his testimony is very important and agrees with the other traces left by the artist. The episode he recounts in his brief biography offers the most authentic interpretation of Leonardo’s Roman period, during which the artist was able to convey the meaning of his research for the very first time, and precisely to Giovio. Vasari’s translation (even if made on the basis of Giovio’s account) is a misleading trivialization of that experience. For this reason it is worth referring directly to Giovio in order to understand the judgement that the Roman court made of Leonardo:
Leonardo, born at Vinci, an insignificant hamlet in Tuscany, has added great lustre to the art of painting. He laid down that all proper practice of this art should be preceded by a training in the sciences and the liberal arts which he regarded as indispensable and subservient to painting. He placed modelling as a means of rendering figures in relief on a flat surface before other processes done with the brush. The science of optics was to him of paramount importance and on it he founded the principles of the distribution of light and shade down to the most minute details. In order that he might be able to paint the various joints and muscles as they bend and stretch according to the laws of nature he dissected the corpses of criminals in the medical schools, indifferent to this inhuman and disgusting work. He then tabulated all the different parts down to the smallest veins and the composition of the bones with extreme accuracy in order that this work on which he had spent many years should be published from copper engravings for the benefit of art. But while he was thus spending his time in the close research of subordinate branches of his art he only carried very few works to completion; for owing to his masterly facility and the fastidiousness of his nature he discarded works he had already begun…. There is also the picture of the infant Christ playing with His mother, the Virgin, and His grandmother Anne which King Francis of France bought and placed in his chapel.7
The passage is extraordinarily important because Giovio wrote it around 1540, well before Vasari embarked on his Lives, and it demonstrates that Leonardo and Giovio spent time together in Rome. Who else, at that date, could have known, and in such detail, about Leonardo’s anatomical studies? Unlike Vasari, who only mentions a ‘cartoon’ of Saint Anne, Giovio had seen the panel painting, which was at an advanced stage of completion and had been brought to Rome from Milan by Leonardo. Giovio makes no mention, however, of the other two paintings that many scholars believe Leonardo brought with him: La Gioconda and San Giovannino. During Giovio’s visits to Leonardo’s apartment in the Belvedere, the artist was only willing to show the panel of Saint Anne, which was probably the most complete.
Rounding off the people whom Leonardo knew in Rome, it is important to mention another member of the papal court and household: Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi of Bibbiena. It seems extremely likely that Dovizi played a role in the artist’s final decision to leave for France, given that he, too, was sent to France as apostolic nunzio in June 1517, on the very same day when Leonardo left (perhaps in the cardinal’s retinue). Bernardo Dovizi had been secretary to Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1488, when Leonardo was in the Medici palace, where he held an important position, and their acquaintance dates back to that time. Bibbiena was an exuberant homosexual and must have looked with a sympathetic eye at Leonardo, a shining example of elegance. Moving almost in parallel with Leonardo, Bibbiena was at the court of Ludovico il Moro at Milan between 1498 and 1499 and, while Leonardo was in Rome, Bibbiena was also a resident in the Vatican. It was there that he commissioned Raphael to decorate his licentious bathroom [stufetta] with amorous images from mythology; and he enjoyed particular favour with Leo X and his court. We can therefore suppose that Bibbiena and Giovio were the two main reference points for the bewildered artist, catapulted as he was into that new world where there was no time for scientific speculation and new palaces and churches came to life from dawn to dusk. Leonardo’s unease in such a competitive climate is summed up in an important document: the letter of complaint that the artist sent to his protector, Giuliano de’ Medici, in July–August 1515.
We know of the letter through the drafts that Leonardo wrote on some pages of the Codex Atlanticus, drafts that reveal his difficulty in communicating with his patron and in general the difficulties he faced in dealing with the outside world, especially at this stage and in this context. When Leonardo arrived in Rome, Giuliano had recently been appointed Gonfaloniere of the church by his brother, Leo X, and had his portrait painted by Raphael for that occasion. The painting was immediately celebrated as a masterpiece of royal dignity and psychological acuity. Shortly before, Giuliano had married Filiberta of Savoia, a union that the Medici family hoped would open the way to a fruitful alliance with the French royal family, and in the meantime he was already living in princely fashion in the majestic Palazzo Orsini at Monte Giordano (rather than a palace, this was a fortified neighbourhood). Giuliano’s public prominence intimidated Leonardo because, although accustomed to dealing with kings, here in Rome he felt out of place. He wrote and rewrote the letter several times, trying to find appropriate words to express his complaints:
Most illustrious Lord, I greatly rejoice most illustrious Lord at your … I was so greatly rejoiced my Lord by the desired restoration of your health, that it almost had the effect that [my own health recovered] – [I have got through my illness] – my own illness almost left me. But I am extremely vexed that I have not been able to completely satisfy the wishes of your Excellency, by reason of the wickedness of that deceiver, for whom I left nothing undone that could be done for him by me and by which I might be of use to him. (Codex Atlanticus, f. 252r)8
The desperate attempt to justify his own delays and failings reappears in Leonardo’s notebook like a recurrent nightmare, made more dramatic in Rome by the presence of artists who, month after month, astounded the world with the daring, the concreteness and the novelty of their endeavours. The substance was always the same. Leonardo had to justify himself for not having completed a commission, even if in this case the commission had nothing to do with painting. He had been given an assistant and collaborator for the task, a German referred to as ‘Giorgio Tedesco’, who also appears in payments of Leonardo’s stipend. It was precisely this assistant who was the target of Leonardo’s complaints and whose behaviour made his life impossible. The relation between the two allows us to glimpse a lack of authority and structure in the minor commission that Leonardo had been given. We are very far from the sort of work that was being commissioned from Raphael and Michelangelo at the time. But Leonardo’s main regret was that he had had to abandon his anatomy studies, the activity in which he was most interested. The dynamic of these events is not very interesting, at least not in comparison to what they reveal of the artist’s conditions: on the one hand, he was being used as an artisan; on the other, he was frustrated at not being able to pursue his studies of anatomy. In the letter, on the one hand we see the artisan annoyed at the rudeness of his assistant:
The next thing was that he made himself another workshop and pincers and tools in the room where he slept, and there he worked for others. Afterwards he would go and eat with the Swiss guards, where there are plenty of idle fellows, but none more than him; and he would go out on most evenings with two or three others, taking firearms to shoot birds among the ruins, and this went on till evening. (Codex Atlanticus, f. 671r)
On the other hand, we see the keen experimenter who has been banned from the study of anatomy: ‘This other hindered me in anatomy, disapproving of it before the Pope and likewise at the hospital.’ It is difficult to believe that an artisan paid seven ducats a month would have had an audience with the pope, yet alone convince him to stop Leonardo’s anatomy sessions, and also influence those in charge at the Ospedale della Consolazione (or other institutions) where the artist carried out his dissections.
If we follow instead a well-founded hypothesis put forward by Domenico Laurenza, the censorship of Leonardo’s scientific activities formed part of a more general attempt by Leo X to block certain philosophical speculations that questioned one of the fundamental dogmas of Catholic theology, namely the assertion that the soul was infused by God into the neonate at the moment of birth. Many natural philosophers questioned this assumption through theoretical arguments, but Leonardo, who was scarcely interested in religion for its own sake, did so using empirical methods that involved his meticulous observations of the structure of the placenta and fetus – never mind that he used bovine placentas in his studies of reproduction, under the mistaken view that they were the same as human ones. Without Leonardo’s even realizing it, his studies had landed him in the controversial field of theological philosophy, and he found himself in the middle of a bitter debate. Moreover, Leonardo regarded the debate with sarcasm, and his notes on reproduction and on the nutrition of the fetus end with a comment that sums up his position regarding the indisputable truths of the church: ‘The rest of the definition of the soul I leave to the imaginations of friars, those fathers of the people who by inspired action know all secrets.’9
His scepticism towards theological truths must have been well known to Giovio who, 30 years later, while helping Vasari to draft the first edition of the Lives, would summarize Leonardo’s conflict with the papal court by suggesting to the biographer that ambiguous passage that, in centuries to come, would be used to fuel all kinds of speculation regarding the artist: ‘because he held such a heretical view of the soul that he did not conform to any religion, believing himself to be more philosopher than Christian.’10
Leonardo’s unease in the intellectual climate of Rome can only partly account for his exclusion from the important commissions given by the Medici to other artists during these years. By far the most important one was the construction of the new St Peter’s, a task entrusted to Raphael in August 1514, after Bramante’s death a few months earlier. With well-deserved satisfaction, Raphael stressed the economic and professional value of the commission in several documents. But how can we explain Leonardo’s exclusion, precisely at a time when he was in the Vatican, manufacturing mirrors and being paid by the pope’s brother? Why did no one think of a role for Leonardo, particularly since he had worked for many years on the central plan and on architecture? It did not cross Bibbiena’s mind because during these months he appeared to be Raphael’s most powerful ‘patron’ at the curia, to the point of wishing to marry the young artist to his niece. Nor would matters go any better with the other great project that the Medici were preparing at the time, namely the construction of the façade of the church of San Lorenzo in Florence, which would be given to Michelangelo in spring 1516, while Leonardo was still in Rome. Despite the tension between Michelangelo and the family that was now firmly in power again in Florence, such was the trust and admiration in which the Medici held him that the past was forgiven and the sculptor and painter was entrusted with the first major architectural commission of his career, without any hesitation or need for some earlier proof of expertise in this field.
Leonardo’s complete marginalization from the Roman artistic scene was due to his proven inability to complete the projects with which he was entrusted. The pope wanted to see St Peter’s (and the façade of San Lorenzo) completed as quickly as possible; he wanted this so much that this condition was even specified in the brief that appointed Raphael as the master of the building project on 1 August 1514: Nos, quibus nihil est prope antiquius quam ut fanum id quam magnificentissime quamque celerrime construatur [‘We, who hold nothing more desirable than that this sanctuary be erected as magnificently and as rapidly as possible’].11 Nothing could be clearer.
There was, however, also a purely artistic reason that excluded Leonardo from these commissions: his approach to architectural design differed from that of the new generation of architects now in vogue in Rome. In his study of architecture, Leonardo focused on functionality and on the laws of geometry when creating forms, two characteristics that were now seen as outdated and belonging to the past century. As in anatomy, where he sought the laws governing the macro- and the microcosm, in architecture, too, he looked for geometric and mathematical rationality, which did not always coincide with Renaissance beauty and modernity. This autonomy of design in relation to the stylistic codes inherited from the past explains why Leonardo was not particularly interested in classical architecture and in surveying the ancient monuments. While it cannot be ruled out that Leonardo surveyed and made notes on classical fragments, we do know for certain that he did not base his architectural research on his observations of these ruins. On the contrary, with Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo the study of classical architecture became the backbone of a design ‘system’, and every project they conceived of drew inspiration from its model: classical architecture, whose fragments [testimonanze] they analysed and surveyed at every opportunity, even developing special instruments for the purpose, as Raphael mentioned in his letter to Pope Leo X.
Leonardo’s marginalization became even more dramatic when Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici decided to send two paintings to the French court as a sign of the excellence that had been attained by Italian painters, in hopes that this excellence would lead to a greater consideration of the Italian court, and of the Medici in particular. However, the cardinal did not turn to Leonardo, who at least in painting could boast undeniable fame, but rather to Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo, both of whom received commissions in early 1516 – to paint respectively a Transfiguration and a Resurrection of Lazarus. This was an explicit sign of the Medici’s lack of faith in Leonardo, now regarded as the relic of a glorious past who was unable to keep abreast of new developments. In the light of these events, Vasari’s passing reflections on Leonardo’s Roman years are coloured with bitterness: Leonardo’s indecisiveness provoked Leo X’s open criticism, and he became a figure that attracted more curiosity for his eccentricities than admiration for his art:
Leonardo went to Rome with Duke Giuliano de’ Medici upon the election of Pope Leo X, who was a great student of philosophy and most especially of alchemy. In Rome, he developed a paste out of certain type of wax and, while he walked, he made inflatable animals that he blew air into, making them fly through the air; but when the air ran out, they fell to the ground. To a particularly large lizard, found by the gardener of the Belvedere, he fastened some wings with a mixture of quicksilver made from scales scraped from other lizards, which quivered as it moved by crawling about. After he had fashioned eyes, a horn, and a beard for it, he tamed the lizard and kept it in a box, and all the friends to whom he showed it fled in terror…. He created an infinite number of these mad inventions and also experimented with mirrors, and he tried out the strangest methods of discovering oils for painting and varnishes for preserving the finished works.12