The renewed illusion of a powerful and generous patron was blown away in 1516 by the Scirocco and the bitter disappointments of Rome: the Medici family had its own painter, Raphael, and when special gifts were required to pay homage to the new French king, Francis I, it was again to him that its members turned. By contrast, Leonardo’s freedom to carry out his studies was curtailed for the first time and he was banned from continuing to perform his dissections and studies on reproduction. The observations of fetuses [Plate 64] convinced him that the fetus was so closely bound to the mother that it lived and breathed through her, and this simple consideration came into conflict with the dogma laid down by Leo X, namely that the soul was infused by God into the neonate at the moment of birth, giving it life. It was better not to take this line of enquiry any further and avoid an accusation of heresy that would have been particularly embarrassing for a guest maintained at the expense of the papal household. The artist faded from view, and that obscurity became even deeper after the death of his protector Giuliano on 17 March 1516 in Florence. Leonardo and his small household were now just a burden on the payroll of the Medici administration and life in the workshops at the Belvedere continued to be unbearable.
The climate in Rome became poisonous when a conspiracy against the pope was discovered around 1517; it was masterminded by a group of cardinals who had bribed his doctor to infect the anal fistula, from which the pope had suffered for years. It had been this affliction that had won him the papacy. During the conclave of 1513 the wound got inflamed and spread through the wooden cubicles crammed into the Sistine Chapel, where the cardinals were locked, a smell so abominable that it fuelled rumours of Giovanni de’ Medici’s grave illness. His most cunning friends quickly seized the opportunity to convince the more vacillating cardinals that Giovanni would not last long and therefore his papacy would be simply a way to extend the uncertainty that had paralysed the conclave. Three years after that election, the attention of those cardinals who wished to eliminate the pope focused on that fistula, but on this occasion Leo’s reaction was violent in the extreme: he imprisoned one of his electors, Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci, in Castel Sant’Angelo and gave orders that he be strangled in his cell on 4 July 1517. The arrest and death of a cardinal were events of unprecedented seriousness at the papal curia and terror spread through the entire court. We can imagine the frame of mind in which Leonardo passed those months in a foreign city where he had no friends or protectors, and where the pope on whom he depended was absorbed in a savage power struggle for his own survival.
It was, once again, a French king who rescued him from this captivity.
Francis I of Valois, who had become king of France in 1515, at the age of barely 21, travelled to Bologna that year to meet the pope. His appearance seems to have been a product of the extraordinary imagination of that century: handsome, young and courageous, he had all the characteristics of a fairy-tale king, as the Italian ambassadors were quick to comment in their dispatches when they saw his elegant entrance into the Emilian city. Moreover, his arrival coincided with a miraculous reflowering of roses. Among the nobles who thronged into Bologna to attend the meeting between the pope and the king was Filiberta of Savoia, all dressed in gold, as a relative of the king and wife of Leonardo’s patron, Giuliano de’ Medici. Leonardo was present too, and wasted no time in cautiously approaching the king through the latter’s master of the chamber, Artur Boissif, for whom he drew a portrait on paper with the promise of developing it in paint. Francesco Melzi diligently recorded the identity of the man in the margin of the sheet of paper, as well as the circumstances in which the drawing was made. At that stage Melzi never left the maestro alone for a moment, in an attempt to remedy his untidy habits.
Francis I had already come across Leonardo’s work, not only through paintings that had arrived in France over the previous two decades (Madonna of the Yarnwinder painted for General Robertet, the highranking court dignitary, and The Virgin of the Rocks), but also through one of the artist’s most fabulous inventions, a mechanical automaton that had astounded the guests at the celebrations hosted by the rich colony of Florentine merchants in Lyon on the occasion of the king’s arrival there four months earlier. At the festivities a mechanical lion had taken a few steps into the room and then, at the touch of a baton, it had opened before the young king’s eyes to reveal a cascade of fleurs-de-lis and an interior painted in royal azure. Both the colours and the flowers rendered homage to French monarchy. The lion had been invented by Leonardo and was probably sent by his protector, Giuliano de’ Medici, to the merchants in Lyon, so that they give the French king a token of Florentine magnificence. It was therefore not difficult for Leonardo to approach the king through his closest courtiers, and we can imagine that the master of the chamber was charged by Leonardo to give Francis drawings or other projects. On the other hand, while the king had already been able to appreciate the artist through his works, the ceremonies at Bologna allowed the latter to become enamoured of the king, seeing as he possessed all those traits – elegance, generosity and beauty – that Leonardo loved in a patron. The chronicles are lavish in their descriptions:
His Majesty was seated under a canopy of azure velvet embroidered with golden lilies, on a throne that was fashioned in like manner. His Majesty was sumptuously clothed; he had a tunic of gold soprarizzo velvet with a cape of silver soprarizzo velvet overlaid with gold velvet and lined with gold lamé; on his head he wore a velvet cap, and he had white stockings and shoes and a coat of heavy gold and silver silk. His Majesty is so handsome, with a beautiful but not very delicate face, his nose a little on the large side, black hair against a white complexion, broad shoulders, and he is a good hand’s breadth taller than me, aged 22, with the hint of a downy beard.25
With a physique tempered through jousting, which he engaged in right up to the time of his coronation, he was muscled and athletic in build. Francis appears to have been quite aware of his magnificent physical appearance and he took punctilious care to present himself on ceremonial occasions as finely dressed as in a painting. But what mattered more to Leonardo was that Francis was passionate about Italian painting and had made up his mind to take the best of Italy’s artists back to France. Just like Ludovico il Moro before, Francis I had a kingdom that was powerful but not exactly abreast of fashion in terms of art, and he intended to enrich it by bringing Italian artists and works of art back to France. At that time Leonardo was desperate and more than willing; he was 63 and still nurtured some ambition. The details of Francis’s proposal have not survived, but the timing makes it seem likely that it was Cardinal Bibbiena who acted as an intermediary in Leonardo’s transfer, also because Francis I showed particular regard for the cardinal’s critical opinions. Both men, Bibbiena and Leonardo, travelled to France in the late spring of 1517, the former as apostolic nuncio, the latter as painter and engineer. They would both be treated with great respect.
Leonardo and his small entourage were lodged in a residence in the small village of Clos Lucé, on a hill overlooking the Château of Amboise on the banks of the Loire, where the king often gathered his court. With its abundant marshes and woods, this was one of the most beautiful settings in France, and its variety of plants and birds, especially during the migratory season, made it a perfect place for Leonardo to spend the last years of his life. The leaves on the lime trees around the château turned yellow in the autumn, revealing glimpses of the grey river and slate roofs of the same colour. Leonardo arrived at the most beautiful time of year, when the reed beds were in flower and their flowery spikes floated downstream like snow. After spending three years in the Belvedere apartment, which was open to the inquisitive stares of friend and foe alike, Leonardo at last had a spacious residence all to himself, where no one could spy on his work. The Château du Clos Lucé had two floors, a simple structure with parallel wings that backed onto an octagonal corner tower with a steeply sloping roof not unattractive to look at. The pink brick façades stood out against the white snow during the long winter. The wide windows were framed in white stone jambs and divided by stone tracery that held the leaded glass in place and captured as much light as possible from the miserly northern skies. Twenty years earlier, King Charles VIII of France had bought this building from one of his predecessor’s favourite courtiers, Étienne le Loup, and had turned it into a comfortable house, adding a gothic oratory in tufa stone where his wife, Anne of Brittany, would retire to pray and mourn for her children, who had died in infancy. However, the queen’s sorrow did not erase the joyous feel that Charles had brought to the house with the help of talented Italian artisans; and the young duke of Angoulême, the future Francis I, had organized festivities and jousts while he lived there with his sister, Marguerite of Navarre, and his mother, Louise of Savoia.
The loving relationship that bound the young king to this house reflects more than any number of words the regard he felt for his guest, whose melancholy must have touched him and made him want to lighten his mood at all costs. After the rough-and-ready apartment at the Belvedere, Leonardo now found himself in ample, well-lit rooms with decorated wooden ceilings and monumental fireplaces. This was luxury fit for a prince and a man who, through his own talent, had finally broken down the social barriers that had held him prisoner to his illegitimate birth. The revolution in art became a social revolution, and what Leonardo had been denied by Rome was now handsomely rewarded by France and its king. The Château at Clos Lucé, with its comfortable halls, seemed an ideal place for the artist to resume and systematize his studies; and he settled in immediately, being personally cossetted by the king, who often came to visit him – so often as to inspire the the completely unfounded legend of a secret tunnel joining the Royal Château of Amboise with that of Clos, which allowed the king to visit Leonardo away from prying eyes – and, after the artist’s death, to visit his mistresses with even greater discretion.
Once again, this was a time for new and even more sumptuous festivities, for which Leonardo devised the most beautiful and highly original costumes [Plate 65], quite apart from overseeing their production in his own inimitable manner. The mechanical lion reappeared at a celebration given for Francis I at Romorantin, where the king had gone to visit his beloved sister, the cultured and highly refined Marguerite. The Mantuan ambassador noted the details of this event, during which a fake hermit led the king up to the mechanical lion; and this time it was the king himself who struck the lion with a cane, ‘and the Lion opened and inside it was all azure, which means love according to the customs here’.26 New projects were spoken of: the royal Château at Romorantin, with gardens as large as a town, and a new road for Orléans. Meanwhile the small village of Clos Lucé reminded Leonardo of his childhood, at the end of his circular journey. A drawing of Amboise captures on paper the gentle country scene with its woods and its peaceful nature, far from the libraries that had been a lifelong attraction and from the illustrious figures with whom Leonardo sought to debate and challenge new frontiers.
Paper, too, remained a favourite and a much loved object; only now it was not the scraps from his grandfather’s notarial deeds but entire reams of paper, marked with French watermarks. This was the paper that he used to make his last drawings, no longer of terrifying floods or horrifying sections of hearts and vertebrae, but rather a vision of domestic peace transfigured by his imagination: cats curled up around the hearth that, with a few strokes of the pen, become dragons, fantastic figures generated by an imagination that had remained unchanged since those long winters spent during his happy boyhood with his grandparents in the hamlet of Vinci – no larger than Clos Lucé but certainly less comfortable [Plate 66]. According to the secretary of Cardinal d’Aragona, at Clos Lucé Leonardo suffered from a paralysed arm and could draw and paint only with difficulty, helped by Melzi. This might have been a misunderstanding caused by the fact that the man would have seen Leonardo using his left hand; but it makes little substantial difference, because at this stage Leonardo was no longer interested in painting. His pride, his last efforts would be concentrated on the many volumes he showed to his guests: the notebooks on the anatomical dissections of dozens and dozens of corpses, so many that even he could not remember their exact number – ‘he said that he had dissected more than XXX bodies, both of men and women, of all ages’ – the book on the nature of water, sketches of various machines, and so much else. This blessed place on the banks of the Loire was the ideal gift for his closing years, as would have been the possibility of printing ‘an infinite number of volumes all in the vulgar tongue’, which he proudly showed to his visitors.27
Francis, the handsome king, was generous both with his money and with his affection. The royal accounts record the payments assigned to Leonardo, and these include an extremely generous pension of 2,000 livres a year, worthy of a general and much larger than the one paid to Primaticcio 15 years later, which only amounted to 600 livres a year. To his main collaborator, Francesco Melzi, Francis awarded a pension of 400 livres, and to Salai an occasional reward of 100 livres. But the king’s generosity emerged most clearly when in 1518 he purchased the three paintings Leonardo had brought from Italy for the astronomical sum of 2,604 livre tournois, equivalent to some 1,250 Italian scudi. This was much more than Sebastiano del Piombo was paid in the same year for his altarpiece, The Raising of Lazarus, which measured 381 × 289.6 cm (more than twice the size of all three of Leonardo’s paintings put together). The money for the paintings did not go to Leonardo, however. He had no need, and everything he loved was already inside his mind. It was paid to Salai, at the bank of Milan in 1518: ‘To Messire Salay de Pietredorain, painter, for some painted panels he has leased [baillié] to the King, IIM VICIIII l.t. III s. IIII d. (2,604 livres 3 sols 4 deniers tournois).’28
In Milan, Salai, who had already taken Leonardo’s vineyard (where the artist had planted Malvasia vines from Crete, a wine that was reputed to be extremely fortifying, so much so that Pope Paul III doused his member and rinsed his eyes in it every morning), now deposited the money and, after the artist’s death, he would also deposit the clothes and precious gems that his master had given him. For a boy who stole money from his companions’ purses, as well as scraps of leather and styles for drawing, he had come a long way. Not content with having acquired money, land, the house and the precious gems, Salai also took the copies of his master’s paintings that were lying in the workshop.29 But the old man was pleased for him, because the boy, now in his forties, had been close throughout his life and, in his own way, a faithful disciple. The king did not lose time in demonstrating his affection for Leonardo and the entire French court became Italianized. Francis’s increasing passion for Italian art knew no bounds, and in early January 1519 he asked Cardinal Bibbiena to procure the works of Michelangelo. There was no need to request works by the other star in the firmament of Italian art, since Pope Leo X had already commissioned two splendid paintings from Raphael, as gifts, and within a few months they would be sent to France: a Saint Michael Vanquishing Satan and a Holy Family with Saint Joseph and Saint Elizabeth. The two rivals who had overshadowed Leonardo in Rome were about to reach France with their works, and even there, at Amboise; the world had suddenly become a very small place. But Leonardo was not particularly concerned, and with the help of Francesco Melzi he set to work on a clean copy, ready for publication, of his Book on Painting, while in his spare time he continued to study geometry and mathematics. Melzi had become his hands and eyes, and he was a gentleman whom Leonardo could trust completely. When Leonardo felt that his end was drawing close, he asked Melzi to accompany him to the church of Saint-Denis to draw up his will.
It was the morning of 23 April 1519. At that time of year, the French countryside is in full bloom; the pale, trembling leaves of poplars are reflected in the waters of the Loire; in the orchards apples and plums merge into a sweetly odorous cloud of blossom. This was the last spectacle that nature offered the man who had loved it to the point of turning it into his religion. Under the grey vaults of Saint-Denis, Leonardo dictated his last will and testament to the parish priest of the church, Flery, before four witnesses, including a Francesco from Milan, a monk from the order of Minimes at Amboise. Months earlier, with considerable forethought, Leonardo had asked the king to grant him a special dispensation to dispose of his inheritance; without that, since he was a foreigner, the crown might have seized his possessions after his death or, worse still, might have bequeathed a large share to his legitimate heirs, those half-brothers who had tried to rob him even of his uncle Francesco’s bequest. This was the last act in a life that had always been lived outside the social norms of its time; and perhaps it was his way of balancing the books with the odious family that had always excluded him, causing him such suffering. The blood ties on which the society of the time based its rights and laws were replaced, in Leonardo’s case, by the bonds of love and true friendship that joined him to his assistants, his real family.
Francesco Melzi was appointed executor of his master’s will and one month after Leonardo’s death he wrote to those half-brothers, his dry tone barely concealing his scorn: for them there would be only the 400 gold scudi deposited with the bank of Santa Maria Nuova at Florence, a sum that might have been difficult to remove without creating scandal and objections. The rest of Leonardo’s assets were left to his real family, the disciples who had followed and loved him for years. Salai inherited almost all the valuables, and he had already received and lodged safely in Milan the 1,250 gold scudi; in his will Leonardo now left him the house built in the vineyard given to him by Ludovico il Moro and half of the land, which Salai and his family had already benefited from for the past 20 years. The remaining half was left to Battista de Villani, another servant. To Francesco Melzi, who is referred to in the will as ‘nobleman, of Milan’, went ‘each and all of the books’ written and preserved by Leonardo, together with the drawings and the instruments used for painting. To Melzi he also left the remainder of his royal pension and all his clothes, a sign of intimacy and affection that recalls the similar gesture made by his old master Verrocchio towards his most faithful pupil, Lorenzo di Credi.
Having returned home, Leonardo retired to bed and, barely nine days later, he died after a relatively short illness. The king was not at his bedside, as he might have liked and as legend has certainly preferred to see him over the centuries, but Francesco Melzi, Battista de Villani and his serving girl Maturina were all there; the scent of roses from the garden filled the room and he could hear the gentle murmur of the little river as it flowed down to join the Loire. A sweeter death could not have been desired. His funeral was simple, with sixty torches carried by paupers from the parish and no further pomp. The tomb was in a small, light-filled collegiate church, Notre-Dame-en-Grèves, built right beside the river that circled the small island: the church would be devastated during an uprising in 1807, the tomb smashed and its contents scattered. It was Leonardo’s fate not to have a homeland.