On 13 January 1490, the rooms of the castle at Porta Giovia, Milan, were brightly lit to celebrate a feast that would be chronicled as one of the most elegant of the Italian Renaissance, and certainly the most elegant at the Sforza court. Ludovico [Sforza, known as] il Moro, who had ruled Milan with an iron fist for over a decade, wished to honour the new duchess, Isabella of Aragon, granddaughter of the king of Naples, who had married Gian Galeazzo Sforza one year earlier: a legitimate heir to the duchy, yet deprived of all power by his uncle. The feast and its golden decorations were intended to silence the rumours that had circulated for over a year in the corridors of European courts regarding Gian Galeazzo’s failure to deflower young Isabella, who was as pure and virginal in Milan as she was when she left Naples.
A hundred young maidens from the cream of Milan’s noble families had been selected for the evening, accompanied by as many knights. In the palace chapel a tribune had been constructed to accommodate the guests and, facing it, a small stage, decked in satin cushions like a throne, where the ducal family sat with its most honoured guests. A powerful, hard-working city like Milan had not dedicated many occasions to such luxurious display in the past years, but now Ludovico il Moro intended to follow the example of his friend, Lorenzo de’ Medici, who had transformed festivities of this kind into an instrument of government.
This goes some way towards accounting for the amazement of the guests who, having climbed the stairs, found themselves in a room brightly illuminated by candles and whose walls were embellished with precious fabrics and verdant festoons interlaced with ribbons. At the back of the room a closed hemispherical object was just visible, raised on a platform. Many speculated that it was a huge egg, cut in half and covered over with a satin cloth. Curiosity stimulated glances and speculation among the guests, who were dressed in their finest attire. When the room was full, the pipes and drums struck up as the young duchess made her appearance (or perhaps it would be more apt to say her apparition), dressed in a white silk cloak that covered her gold brocade gown.
Giving everyone the time to admire her, Isabella took her place on the small throne. She wore such ornate jewels that the ambassador of the Este [rulers of Ferrara], whose account of the feast has survived, reported that he thought he was looking at the sun, such was the beauty of her figure and the magnificence of her ‘Spanish’ elegance. When the music struck up again she danced two very graceful dances with three young women from her retinue and for a few minutes she successfully rivalled the great Ludovico himself as the focus of attention. In honour of the duchess and of the Neapolitan court, he, too, had dressed in Spanish style, wearing a dark red velvet doublet trimmed with ermine and a black cloak lined with gold brocade on a white backing. It was an outfit that must have cost many thousand scudi, as many of the guests remarked.
The dancing continued for two hours, giving both Ludovico and Isabella time to savour the triumph of the occasion in full. Even the ambassador of the Grand Turk, who had ridden on horseback into the room and then sat on cushions at the foot of the throne, after the custom at his own court, delivered a message of good wishes and stressed that the Ottoman sultan did not usually send dignitaries to festivities organized by infidels, but that a special honour had been granted to the court of Milan and that of Naples.
Excitement among the guests reached a climax when the duke silenced the musicians and turned to look at the back of the room – where, as if by magic, the silken cloth slipped off the enormous hemisphere, revealing a mock cavern lined with gold and stars, in imitation of the celestial vault. Cries of amazement rose from the room as the guests watched the seven planets in the sky light up with the signs of the Zodiac. It was a representation of paradise, whose beauty outshone the inventions of any painter who had previously tried to imagine it in colour. Starting with Jupiter, the planets were celebrating the young duchess’s virtues in verses composed by Bellincioni, the court poet. Many in Milan found his compositions too flowery and specious, but that evening even courtiers with more sophisticated tastes found nothing to criticize. Even the expensive garments and jewels of the noble citizens faded into insignificance in an instant, as general attention was gripped by a scenic machine that appeared to be nothing short of miraculous.
Not that mechanical equipment of this kind was a novelty at Italian court festivities. For example, every Good Friday a representation of Christ’s Passion had been enacted in Rome, at the Colosseum, for as long as anyone could remember, during which angels flew around a cross suspended from pulleys and chains that were prepared months in advance by the ingenious members of the confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato. But the mechanisms had always been quite visible in such plays, while at the Castle in Milan that evening nothing seemed prepared, no wheels jammed, the complex mechanics of the whole apparatus were so clever and so well concealed that their naturalness was disturbing. Many of the guests looked around the room, searching for the inventor of that extraordinary stage machine and the equally stunning masquerades.
The man responsible smiled quietly, satisfied at the astonishment he had kindled among guests of all ranks and from all parts. The inventor’s name was Leonardo and he had been born 38 years earlier, in a small village near Florence. He had the body of an athlete, a physique as harmonious and well muscled as a Greek statue. His face was handsome, with exquisite, large eyes and a straight nose below evenly arched brows and a high forehead framed by hair whose well-tended curls fell onto his shoulders in tight ringlets. He took great care of his elegant appearance and, during his eight-year stay in Milan, he had already been noted for the grace and originality of his knee-length garnet robes and the coloured stockings that emphasized his muscular legs. His reputation made him the best known foreigner in Milan, although no one knew his exact role at Il Moro’s court. In the rigid hierarchy of the time, he was recorded as a member of the painters’ guild, first in Florence and then in Milan.
Leonardo da Vinci, who was savouring his first public success in Milan that evening, was musician, engineer, sculptor, architect and painter, and it was in this capacity that he had offered his services eight years earlier to the duke of Milan, with a letter from Lorenzo the Magnificent, lord of Florence and his first patron. Over the past years he had won over the court and the city. Here he had created paintings of unparalleled beauty and hydraulic projects that would rationalize the canals around Milan; he had offered ideas for a new lantern tower [tiburio] over the city’s cathedral, as well as designs for war machines that were still to be tested and machines of various kinds, designed to lift and transport heavy weights. His anatomical drawings and physiological studies lay in untidy piles; they were mainly written with his left hand and back to front, but in Milan they had already attracted their first admirers in these golden years. His, too, was the clay model of a huge monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico’s father, which he was preparing in the large courtyard of the castle in order to cast the statue in bronze.
He alone possessed that acute spirit of observation that drove him to investigate every natural phenomenon, which he did often with confused and contradictory methods, but firm in his conviction that a single law must govern the universe and everything in it, small and large, whether it was water or women’s hair, blood circulating through veins or lymph circulating through a tree’s branches. His knowledge did not look down upon any field of application, and he had created the stage machine representing paradise in this magnificent ceremony with the same care he put into designing machines to throw bombards and to fly above the ground. That evening Milan, too, was his, and very soon letters would be dispatched post-haste to the other Italian courts lauding the marvellous mechanisms of paradise.
Happy in the wake of this celebrated and acknowledged success, Leonardo was already preparing a new theatrical machine for a comedy that would be staged in Mantua, Orfeo by Angelo Poliziano, during which he would terrify the audience with a cavern that opened effortlessly to reveal Pluto emerging from the underworld, balancing on a sphere. His knowledge of weights and levers found in these theatrical machines an ideal way to impress the public at large. He succeeded in devising them by using his discoveries of how to balance weights and create mechanical cogs, because he made no distinction when applying this knowledge: the stage was as good as the battlefield as a foil for his genius. He moved like a magician between science and art, exploring with the same insatiable thirst for knowledge the mysteries of nature and those of the imagination, and in his omnivorous mind even he was perhaps not fully aware of the extent to which the former fuelled the latter.
His reputation as a painter was already well established in Italy, given that three years earlier Giovanni Santi, the father of Raphael – a young artist who would later come to rival him – had written a chronicle that singled Leonardo out as one of the greatest Italian painters. But by 1490 he already felt constrained by that reputation, and the atmosphere in Milan, so cultured and refined in every field of knowledge, was rapidly spurring him to delve deeper into many, perhaps all, of those fields, including mathematics – a new departure for him and a subject on which he would expend much of his energy from now on. Unfortunately the wondrous machines that amazed all Italy were among the few mechanical inventions that contemporaries had a chance to appreciate among the many he devised, imagined and partly created, in a process to which he devoted much of his life. Other inventions were intended to improve water flow and weightlifting, and many, the majority, were never even given tangible form: in the end the sum of his scientific genius proved dispersive and inconclusive. For the most part his mental exertions were confined to endless sheaves of paper that he never published, let alone ordered, before his death and that were largely dispersed soon afterwards. But, despite himself – perhaps precisely because during his stay in Milan he ‘lost patience with his brush’ [impacientissimo al pennello] – between an anatomy session and an hypothesis for a helicopter, Leonardo found time to paint a number of images that were so extraordinary as to embed his memory forever in the minds of subsequent generations. Since the volumes containing his studies were lost and forgotten immediately after his death, it was these images, overlooked during his lifetime, that kept his memory alive until the time when, centuries later, his studies were again rediscovered and published. His codices had such an impact on European scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth century that they soon laid the foundations for a formidable myth, which is still growing today.
It is a myth that has overshadowed the often troubled life of Leonardo, the man and the painter, who attempted to verify all forms of institutional knowledge against direct experience and was more diffident than many towards the academic establishment, with which he never identified himself. Leonardo provocatively proclaimed himself in his writings ‘an unscholarly man’ [omo sanza lettere] in order to highlight that a pathway to knowledge of the real could be found even outside the universities of the time, which continued to teach uncritically a form of knowledge codified by antiquity and by the church.