When Ludovico fled Milan and the French occupied the city, Leonardo had to give up his position as court artist. But he could not readily give up the habits of mind he had developed there.
In that city, he had enjoyed the freedom, space, and support to make art the way he wanted. He wrote about the science and philosophy guiding his art and put these ideas into practice. He experimented with techniques, some less successful than others. As he grew older and more famous, he acquired privileges that most artists did not have.
In the last twenty years of his life, Leonardo made art in a way that anticipated what we consider “modern.” He worked more and more in sync with what would later be known as a Romantic conception of art, according to which art expresses an artist’s own feelings and views instead of those of others. But he also presaged, in a deep way, our modern notion of “art for art’s sake”: it is only the artwork, as a freestanding autonomous object, that matters, not the patron who commissioned it or the practical purpose it was meant to serve. These are key concepts we must understand if we want to start to grasp why, for Leonardo, the process of discovery was more important than the final outcome, why his writings remained drafts that never found a final form, why he painted so incredibly slowly that ten or fifteen years were sometimes not enough to complete a work, and why even the Mona Lisa was never finished (Figure 12).
This shift in Leonardo’s artistic practice was evident to those who saw him at work, although most did not understand what was really driving him. In April 1501, about a year after he had left Milan for Florence, a visitor came to the rooms he occupied in Santissima Annunziata, one of the largest monasteries in Florence. Leonardo’s father had been the monastery’s notary for over thirty years and must have helped him secure his accommodations there. It was a difficult transition: Leonardo’s main source of income consisted of revenue from his Milanese properties and from works his assistants painted after his drawings. This visitor reported that “from time to time he puts his hand” to some of his assistants’ works. But otherwise, Leonardo seemed confused.
He lived day by day, alla giornata.
His life seemed scattered and unfocused, varia et indeterminata forte.
He was highly impatient with the brush, impatientissimo al pennello.
But beneath this apparent confusion were the underpinnings of a new phase in his art. He started to paint works that were absolutely revolutionary. What made them revolutionary was not their subject matter—one was a religious altarpiece, another a small devotional painting representing Saint John the Baptist. One represented the Greek mythological character Leda, and another was the Mona Lisa, a portrait of a silk merchant’s wife (Figures 12, 13, and 14).
What made the Mona Lisa and a handful of other paintings new was the special treatment he reserved for them.
In fact, he never meant to deliver the Mona Lisa and the other paintings, although they were commissioned by specific patrons.
He never meant to finish them, even though he worked on them for over fifteen years.
He never meant them for anybody but himself, even though he let others copy them, and he kept them in his possession until his death, bringing them with him as he moved from city to city.
These works became “his” personal works. With them, he pushed the boundaries of his new art—they were high-concept experiments, explorations of how optics could be translated into pictorial practice. He was never satisfied with the results, and abided by his own dictum:
If you will study and perfect your works in line with the theory of the two kinds of perspective [color and aerial perspective] you will leave behind works which will bestow upon you more honor than money would do.
In other words, he sought renown, not money.
He conceived the Mona Lisa and these other special paintings at different moments of his life, for different patrons and with different goals in mind. But as the years went by, they started to merge in his mind. He worked on them simultaneously, moving freely from one to the other, adding touches to the landscape of the lady’s portrait and then doing the same to the landscape of the religious work, or refining the transparency of the Virgin’s fabrics and then using the same layering of glazes for the lady’s dress and veil. An idea for the body of Leda was applied to the Virgin’s own body.
His brushes became smaller and smaller, his brushstrokes almost invisible.
Today, the Mona Lisa is by far the most famous of these personal works. But it was not his first, nor was it the most important in his mind. The work Leonardo cared about most was an altarpiece created for an unknown patron, the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Figure 13).
Saint Anne’s meeting with the Virgin and the Child was apocryphal, as Saint Anne was already dead when Christ was born, but it held immense religious and, in Florence, civic significance. In 1343, on Saint Anne’s feast day (July 26), the Florentines won a decisive battle and saved the republic, making Saint Anne the “saint protector” of the republic, just as David was its biblical hero, Hercules its ancient god, and Saint John the city’s patron saint. In 1481, Pope Sixtus IV declared the date of Saint Anne’s conception a feast day, in part as a way to promote Mary’s own Immaculate Conception (based on the belief that Saint Anne conceived Mary sine macula in her womb). A few years later, in 1494, another pope, Alexander VI, who was better known for his reckless pursuit of personal power than for his devotion, stipulated that those who prayed in front of an image of Saint Anne with Mary and the Christ Child would receive an indulgence. Undoubtedly, the patron who commissioned the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne—whoever he was—had in mind Saint Anne’s growing cult.
It has been suggested that Leonardo originally created this altarpiece for the Servite friars, who hosted him at Santissima Annunziata, as a way to repay them for their hospitality. But if there was an agreement between the friars and their notary’s son—we do not know for sure—it was never enforced. Leonardo did finish a cartoon representing the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, but he never delivered a finished painting. Two other artists who were deeply connected to Leonardo painted the work for the Servite friars years later. They were Filippino Lippi, who had painted the Adoration of the Magi for the Augustinian monks when Leonardo abandoned the work, and Pietro Perugino, who had been Leonardo’s friend since their common training in Verrocchio’s workshop.
But Leonardo continued to work on his version of the Virgin and the Child with Saint Anne, as it allowed him to explore fundamental aspects of his new philosophical art. What was the perfect composition, or componimento inculto, as he called it, to represent the intimate bond linking three generations, that timeless affection mothers have for their offspring? It took him over ten years, dozens of pen sketches, and three full-sized cartoons to discover the arrangement of figures he sought. His assistants copied these drawings and cartoons extensively and often documented intermediary stages of their master’s work.
His contemporaries understood that Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne was exceptional. Just as modern visitors flock to the museums where Leonardo’s works are kept, Florentines rushed to admire a cartoon the artist displayed for the public in 1501, the first of his highly popular exhibitions.
And one Florentine in particular understood how deeply the altarpiece was connected to the Mona Lisa and, for that matter, to the mural of the Battle of Anghiari.
Agostino Vespucci was Machiavelli’s secretary and the official in charge of overseeing work on Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari. He provided the artist with a translation of a historical account of the battle. Eventually, he gained Leonardo’s trust. The two became so close that Leonardo entrusted Vespucci with drafting a letter on his behalf to help him claim an inheritance that his stepbrothers had contested due to Leonardo’s illegitimate status. Vespucci had a clear sense of his friend’s worth. He was a regular visitor to his workshop, which from October 1503 was located in Santa Maria Novella. There he saw the cartoon for the Battle of Anghiari, along with other works in progress, including the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Mona Lisa.
In October of 1503, Leonardo’s unfinished works were on Vespucci’s mind. That month Vespucci read Cicero’s Letters to Friends, a book Renaissance humanists loved and used as a guide for their own lives. It is our good fortune that Vespucci’s copy of Cicero’s book has survived, having recently resurfaced in a German library. It is our even greater fortune that this humanist jotted in the margins the thoughts that the Roman orator inspired in him. Cicero reported that Apelles, the great artist from antiquity who was famous for his depictions of heads, “completed with the most polished art the head and bust of Venus but left the other part of her body [inchoate].” Vespucci could not help applying Cicero’s comment to his own friend, the “Florentine Apelles.” Vespucci wrote:
Apelles the painter. This is what Leonardo da Vinci does in all his pictures, as in the head of Lisa del Giocondo, and Anne, the mother of Mary. We will see what he will do in the hall of the great council, about which he has made an agreement with the standard-bearer, October 1503.
By that same October, the Mona Lisa, like Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, had also become famous.
And by early 1504, at the latest, the Mona Lisa had even become the fashionable new paradigm for Renaissance portraiture.
Raphael, who at twenty-one had arrived in Florence from his native Urbino, sketched Leonardo’s Mona Lisa as the work was in progress and immediately began using it as a model for his own portraits. He swiftly absorbed Leonardo’s work. Leonardo’s assistants painted exact copies of the Mona Lisa, and perhaps one of these copies did make it to the silk merchant who had commissioned the portrait in the first place.
The Mona Lisa was in fact the portrait of Lisa Gherardini, a member of a rich and prestigious Florentine family—not as powerful and wealthy as the Medici or the Benci, but nonetheless prominent and well off. In 1495, at the age of sixteen, she married the widower Francesco del Giocondo, who was nineteen years older than she and a wealthy silk merchant with extensive business and political connections in Florence and across Italy. Lisa and Francesco had two daughters (one died in 1499) and, in 1502, their first son. Francesco likely commissioned his wife’s portrait to celebrate the successful birth of his heir and to adorn the new family home he bought in the Via della Stufa, not far from the Medici palace, in April 1503.
How did Francesco del Giocondo, who was a respected merchant but not a leading civic figure, convince Leonardo—who was by then a legendary artist who refused commissions from duchesses and royals—to paint his wife? The answer must involve personal relations between Leonardo’s father, Ser Piero; the del Giocondos; and the friars of Santissima Annunziata. Francesco and his family had close business relations with the Servite fathers and had obtained funerary rights to one of their chapels. Ser Piero served as the monastery’s notary for many years, and on more than one occasion acted as an intermediary between the Servite friars and the del Giocondo family. Leonardo and Francesco del Giocondo must have met in Santissima Annunziata, where one lived and the other went to pray in his family chapel.
The Mona Lisa was supposed to be a conventional portrait that conformed to well-established ideas about women, beauty, and female behavior. But, as was always the case with Leonardo, what started as conventional ended up being exceptional.
In some respects, Leonardo did produce a conventional portrait.
The panel itself was typical of the genre: a single plank of poplar of about seventy-seven by fifty-three centimeters (or thirty by twenty-one inches). It was prepared with the usual layers of gesso and priming, onto which Leonardo transferred preparatory drawings. He sketched some of these drawings in front of Lisa, but none of them survive.
He represented Lisa in a decorously restrained posture, her hands crossed and close to her chest, her gaze directed toward the viewer but still modest, her head covered with a veil. She is dressed in silk, which was an expression of her social standing and sophistication but also a reference to her husband. She sits on a typical Florentine chair, her arm resting on the curved armrest, in a loggia that opens onto a vast, misty landscape filled with turning rivers, winding roads, deep valleys, and ragged mountains. As was common in portraits of the time, the sitter’s close-up view stood in contrast with a distant landscape.
Even Mona Lisa’s smile, which has become legendary since Leonardo painted it, conformed to expectations—it was simply the restrained expression married women were expected to display in their portraits. But viewers sought explanations for what was later perceived as a mysterious expression. For Giorgio Vasari, who never saw the portrait but who may have heard about it directly from Francesco’s heirs or from Mona Lisa herself, she smiles because jousters and musicians were sent to amuse her while Leonardo painted. The story was complete fiction, but effective at explaining the mood of this Florentine woman. According to the art historian Paul Barolsky, her smile is a pun on her husband’s family name, Giocondo—giocondo means “jocund” in Italian. Just like a juniper bush and an ermine were puns on the names of Ginevra de’ Benci and Cecilia Gallerani, so Mona Lisa’s smile was a pun on the family name of Lisa’s husband. And Gioconda—the title of the painting in Italian and French—is a clear reference to Mona Lisa’s mood: she is happy with her standing in life as the wife of Giocondo.
But this is where Mona Lisa’s conformity to traditional portraiture ends.
For Leonardo, the whole point of her smile, her body position, her hands, her dress, and even the landscape was for people to penetrate deeper and deeper into her emotions, to grasp the serene satisfaction she enjoyed.
And that was a hard response to elicit, in spite of his expertise.
To begin with, Leonardo did not paint jewels on Mona Lisa, although she surely owned many. Three decades earlier, with Ginevra’s portrait, he had learned that their shimmering appearance detracted from the balance of the work.
Then he adjusted certain details atop the priming. He deleted a few curls, as they obstructed Lisa’s face, just as he had done with Ginevra’s portrait. He retouched the way her right hand rested on the armrest and modified the fingers and nails of her left hand so that they were better aligned with her body motion, as he had done with the Virgin’s hand in the Virgin of the Rocks twenty years earlier. The science of art demanded these minute optical adjustments.
But one of the adjustments was highly unusual. After he sketched the landscape and the balcony, he added two barely visible columns at the margins—which, oddly enough, are not straight. Their bases on the balcony are clearly visible, but their trunks fade away at the top in ways that are inexplicable according to linear perspective. We are sure this is Leonardo’s original design because the painting still has the barb, or ricciolo, all around, which means that the painted surface retains its original size. Why did Leonardo add these columns? And why did he design them in this way?
Although we do not know for sure, it seems that Leonardo imagined these columns as if they were reflected in a slightly curved mirror—this would explain why their trunks fade away at the top and also why the sitter seems to emerge from the frame. It was a small, almost imperceptible optical adjustment, but, with it, Leonardo changed the whole image. He enhanced the sitter’s physical presence, as if she were jumping out toward the surface of the panel, her face and body as close as possible to the viewer, her smile emphatically connecting her inner world to ours, the landscape even more distant.
He experimented with other pictorial effects as well in the Mona Lisa and other later paintings. Transparency, flesh tones, and misty landscapes were among the things that mattered the most to him, and brushstrokes, even very minute ones, could alter the illusion of flesh, water, crystal, or air. He made his glazes thinner and thinner, and he experimented with colors and oils that had less and less pigment mixed with them. Veils, mountains, smiles, clouds, swirls of water emerged gradually from infinite layers of these thin glazes applied with minuscule brushes.
It is hard for us to understand how slow this process was. When we look at the Mona Lisa with the naked eye, we see no trace of brushwork, no layers. But modern quantitative X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy—an imaging technique that conservators who analyzed the Mona Lisa recently used because it “makes it possible to access the description of the paint layers used in flesh tones”—reveals how many layers of translucent glazes are present. There are many, perhaps as many as thirty. Some of these layers may be varnishes added by others over the centuries. But many are the original layers Leonardo himself applied to render his subject’s flesh. Conservators were able to determine that some were applied “in very thin films, down to a micrometer scale”—that is, one-millionth of a meter. To use the modern terminology of chemistry, we would say that Leonardo painted these experimental paintings with materials that have low atomic density—that is, pigments and oil-based varnishes that are highly diluted and have a small concentration of particles whose thickness and color shade he could alter minimally. This is the secret of the Mona Lisa’s smile: multiple layers of colors and varnishes with low atomic density.
Leonardo’s preparatory drawings for the Mona Lisa have been lost, but a few of those for the female heads in the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne have come down to us (Figure 15). In one beautiful drawing, he sketched her head in black and red chalk and blended the marks to create evanescent effects. He rendered the shadows in gray pencil and with minuscule touches of white chalk that are virtually imperceptible.
Flesh tones, in general, were hard to get right, not least because skin does not have a uniform color or texture. Hands have thicker skin than cheeks or lips, eyelids are softer than foreheads, the complexions of women are smoother than those of men, and the complexions of children silkier still. Light reflects differently off of different skin textures, which is why for flesh tones Leonardo used multiple layers that would differentiate between the skin textures of different parts of the body.
And yet skin tones are what make emotions visible. These tones were perhaps the “real” subject of another painting on which Leonardo worked while painting the Mona Lisa and which, like his other “personal” paintings, stayed with him until his death. It is a small devotional work representing Saint John the Baptist (Figure 14). He portrayed the saint from the waist up, emerging from a dark background, his body partially covered by sheepskin, his face, bust, arm, and hand fully lit with nuanced shading to differentiate them. Infrared photography reveals that he sketched the saint and then traced over this sketch with red chalk, often correcting the initial drawing underneath. He shadowed this sketch with thin, almost transparent layers of lead white mixed with minimal amounts of earth tone, ochre, vermilion, and black. Was this a special work, intended to study the flesh tones of different parts of the body? It would seem so, especially if we consider Paul Barolsky’s suggestion that in this painting, Leonardo investigated “the problematic relation between the spirit and the flesh” and made “visible the divine mystery of the spirit in flesh.”
Leonardo applied the same techniques to the Mona Lisa as well. If we look carefully, we can see how hard Leonardo worked at differentiating the flesh tones of his subject’s hands, which look more greenish than her face. He shaded her flesh with umber, an earth-colored pigment originating from the region of Umbria, sketching the shaded areas directly on the ground and building up the lighter areas with glazes. For her hands, he mixed more earth colors into the glazes—and on her lower neck there seem to be traces of azurite. Is this what captures her pulse, as Vasari famously observed? “In the pit of the throat, if one gazes upon it intently, one could see the beating of pulses.”
Mountains and landscapes were easier to paint than flesh tones. For one, Leonardo did not need to plan every single detail but painted them directly on the panel, making adjustments as he moved along—there are no traces of a preparatory drawing underneath the landscape of the Mona Lisa. He conceived the landscape as being made up of three areas: valleys right behind the sitter, rocks in the middle, and mountains and lakes in the far distance. As usual, he painted the blue sky in two layers, first a layer of cheaper copper blue and above it highly transparent layers of expensive lapis lazuli. The combination of these blues made for a bright sky, which is hard to detect today because of the many varnishes painted over it by restorers over the centuries.
In other paintings, Leonardo did plan out mountains in detail and, in some instances, sketched them from nature (Figure 16). Some of his most sophisticated drawings of mountains were executed “red on red”—that is, with red chalk on paper that he had brushed with a reddish wash: this allowed him to capture the minutest changes in the pervading atmosphere. In one he created a fantastic view of three mountain chains, one after another: crests are drawn red on red, their lighted peaks are touched with white, and their shadows are rendered in nuanced tones of red, the colors differentiated by way of subtle transitions. But none of these mountain drawings was made specifically in preparation for the Mona Lisa.
Leonardo painted Mona Lisa’s dress in verdigris and her sleeves in ochre. Again, the original colors were much brighter than those we see today due to layers of varnish that were added later and have yellowed. This bright dress with gold embroidery and minuscule pleats around the neckline also displayed beautiful see-through effects. Alhacen had written about the optical effects of flesh covered by fabric, and about how the two intermingle depending on the fabric’s texture and threads.
And then there was the effect of fabric seen through fabric. Mona Lisa wears a voluminous, ethereal gauze “cloak” that envelops her fully. Her ochre sleeves and greenish dress with golden embroidery are seen through this gauze, each fold and pleat shimmering with its own peculiar reflections. Over her head she wears a veil whose edges are marked with a dark thread that overlaps with the gauze, resulting in additional see-through effects.
No drapery studies for the Mona Lisa have survived, but a few Leonardo made for the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne are still in existence. In that panel, he went further in blending materials to render the shimmering of fabrics. He painted the Virgin’s dress on a red lake base, which allowed for a much more brilliant, translucent color than the pink primer he had used in his early paintings (remember the pink base of the gray palace in the Annunciation). Because Leonardo was sensitive to how fabrics were described in optical literature, especially in Alhacen, the colors of Mary’s brilliant red dress are allowed to filter through the threads of her blue mantle. Meanwhile, he painted Saint Anne’s gray dress over a preparation of red lake. He had become a master at modulating colors and glazes to render the transparency of fabrics—and of using his fingers to do so. His fingerprints are everywhere. On the Virgin’s shoulder and Saint Anne’s body, blurring their forms with the sky, and on the tree to the right. Was this blending another way to achieve the effect Alhacen had described: an atmosphere that makes outlines disappear?
The Mona Lisa is highly finished in many places. Leonardo painted the foreground and the background. He painted his subject’s face and dress. He painted the distant landscape. But there is one crucial part that Leonardo left unfinished: the middle ground.
This middle ground was essential to an optically balanced painting. There, foreground and background must merge seamlessly. It was the area Leonardo could paint only after he had firmed up everything else, only after the balance of the parts had been achieved.
But Leonardo did not finish the middle ground in the Mona Lisa—or, for that matter, in the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. On the right of the Mona Lisa (Figure 12), there are two blocks of brownish color that look like they were reserved for hills or some other natural feature. On the opposite side, there are two similar areas that seem like an extension of Lisa’s veil. All these unsightly brownish patches are hard to read today. But they were in fact a base color for the landscape. We cannot be sure what, exactly, Leonardo intended to paint there (a similar patch is also found in the middle ground of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, right behind Mary). But we can be sure that Leonardo never managed to paint over these preparatory layers and that the Mona Lisa is unfinished.
Part of the reason the Mona Lisa was never finished has to do with the fact that the optical science behind it was likewise unfinished business.
In fact, when Leonardo was not working on the Mona Lisa or on his other experimental paintings, he was writing.
He wrote incessantly.
He wrote with urgency.
He wrote into the wee hours of the night.
He wrote until he had no more paper to write on.
In a few months, between the fall of 1504 and the summer of 1505, while he was simultaneously working on the Battle of Anghiari, painting the Mona Lisa, perfecting the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, and designing the Leda, he also assembled numerous notebooks on various topics. The titles do not capture the diversity of material he dealt with. One notebook was on the flight of birds. Other folios were about the squaring of the circle, a vexing geometrical problem that neither Euclid nor Archimedes had been able to solve but that, on November 30, 1504, Leonardo claimed he had: “on the night of Saint Andrew I found the end of the squaring of the circle; it was finished at the end of the candle, and of the night, and of the paper on which I was writing; at the end of the hour.” He also wrote about Euclidean geometry and about “the transformation of a body into another without diminution or augmentation of its matter.”
The book on painting was constantly on his mind, and in order to write it properly he branched out into other fields, seeking the deep connections between man and nature. Often when he wrote about the body of the earth he was also thinking about the bodies of human beings. For instance, in a book on water, he planned to compare the earth’s rivers, lakes, and mountains to human ribs, bones, and blood vessels:
As man has in him bones [that are] the supports and framework of his flesh, the world has its rocks [that are] the supports of the earth; as man has in him a pool of blood in which the lungs rise and fall in breathing, so the body of the earth has its ocean tide which likewise rises and falls every six hours, as if the world breathed; as in that pool of blood veins have their origin, which ramify all over the human body, so likewise the ocean sea fills the body of the earth with infinite springs of water. The body of the earth lacks sinews and this is because the sinews are made expressly for movements and, being the world perpetually stable, no movement takes place and [since] no movement takes place, muscles are not necessary.
But in all other points they are much alike.
One cannot help imagining that while he was forming these comparisons he was also painting female bodies and landscapes in the Mona Lisa, the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, and the Leda. The landscapes were images of specific places, but the more he painted them, the more they transformed in front of his eyes into fantastic landscapes from primordial times: a cosmic view reflecting the microcosmos of mankind.
Beginning in 1507, Leonardo got some help with his writing. He took on a new apprentice, Giovanni Francesco Melzi, who was educated in letters and who helped him keep his papers in order. In March of 1508, while lodging in the house of his Florentine friend Piero Martelli, he came up with a publication plan, which he described in a new notebook that he started for that purposes (today it is part of the manuscript known as the Codex Arundel, from the name of a previous owner):
This [notebook] will be a collection without order, drawn from many pages which I have copied here, hoping to put them in order in their places, according to the subjects with which they will deal, and I believe that before I am at the end of this, I will have to repeat the same things many times—for which do not blame me, reader, because the topics are many and memory cannot retain them all and say: “I will not write this because it is written before.” And if I wished not to fall into this error, it would be necessary that in every case which I wished to copy, in order not to duplicate it, I would always have to reread all the preceding material, and all the more so because of the long intervals of time between the writing of one thing and the next.
Unfortunately, the plan was not much of a plan at all. But he did make some progress. That same year, he reorganized his notes on light and shadow in a new manuscript, which Melzi later called Libro W and which contained his most polished thoughts on the topic. It has unfortunately been lost, for the most part, but the bits and pieces that survive are some of the clearest sentences Leonardo ever wrote on light and shade: “A shadow is made of infinite darkness and of infinite diminution of that darkness”; and there are shadows with “smoky imperceptible boundaries [fumosi d’insensibile termine]” and others with “firm ends [termini noti].” In another notebook, known today as Manuscript G, he wrote unequivocally that “without optics nothing can be done well in the matter of painting.”
Around 1513 he wrote a detailed table of contents for a book entirely dedicated to shadows, but we do not know if that book ever went beyond the outline stage. He planned to write:
Of the usefulness of shadows
Of the motion of shadows
Of the figure of shadows
Of [their] quality
Of the quantities [of shadows]
Of the boundaries [of shadows]
Of simple shadow
Of composed shadow
Of decomposed shadow
Of darkness
Of light
Of light carried through holes of various shapes
Of light carried through various numbers of holes
Of the composition of several luminous rays
If it is possible that a luminous body originates luminous rays that intersect one another
If from a luminous body parallel rays can originate and whether they can go as such through a hole
He gathered his notes on the atmosphere and other natural phenomena in a small notebook, Manuscript F. He assembled his notes on vision and the eye into a set of ten folios, known today as Manuscript D. He compiled notes on water, which he called the vetturale della natura, on the moon’s reflected light (lumen cinereum), and on the transformation of the earth’s globe as documented by fossils and stratified rocks in a set of eighteen large folios, known today as the Codex Leicester. Often, he kept his papers as loose bifolios, which he gathered inside one another without binding. The most important folios were the largest, like the Codex Leicester. He obtained them by cutting a sheet of carta reale in two and then folding it in half.
In the winter of 1510–1511, he returned to the study of anatomy and completed eighteen folios. As the Head of Prints and Drawings for Royal Collection Trust at Windsor Castle Martin Clayton described them, “On these pages Leonardo crammed more than 240 individual drawings and notes running to over 13,000 words.” Anatomy was an early interest of his, dating back to at least his skull studies of 1489 and to a lost book that his friend Luca Pacioli said was titled On Painting and Human Motion, which dated from the late 1490s; it remains unclear how much of this lost book got into the last draft of his anatomical folios. At this time he also drafted a new table of contents for the book. “My depiction of the human body,” he wrote, “will be shown to you just as if you had a real man before you.”
The bodies will be examined, he wrote, “from different aspects, from below, from above, and from the sides, turning the subject around […] just as if you had the same limb in your hand and went on turning it gradually until you had a complete understanding of what you wish to know.”
Among his most stunning anatomical drawings are those of the shoulder and arm stripped down to show their muscles, which are shown from multiple directions in eight consecutive views that move through 180 degrees, from back right to front left. The sequence is now divided into two separate folios, but clearly Leonardo drew them on a single folio that was later cut in two. The accurate depiction of shoulders was paramount for him: their rotation was the most effective way to suggest the sinuous movements of people, as shoulders determine the motion of arms, busts, and legs. Just think about his female figures—the slight turn of Mona Lisa’s shoulder, Leda’s dramatically twisted body, and Mary’s arms folded across her body.
Ptolemy had begun his atlas with a map of the entire world, followed by individual maps of the world’s provinces. Leonardo wished to organize what he called his “cosmography of the Microcosmos,” “in fifteen entire figures in the same order as was adopted before me by Ptolemy in his Cosmography.” Echoing Ptolemy, Leonardo began his anatomy book with an overall anatomical table of the human body and moved from there to individual body parts. He reminded himself: “begin the anatomy at the head and finish at the sole of the foot.”
His book was also based on Galen’s classical text and on medieval compendia such as Mondino’s Anathomia or Johannes de Ketham’s Fasciculus Medicinae, which he owned—but he also relied on the over thirty corpses he dissected, including a centenarian man, a two-year-old child, and a seven-month-old fetus. His friend Paolo Giovio said Leonardo “dissected the corpses of criminals in the medical schools, indifferent to this inhuman and disgusting work,” but in reality he dissected with doctors in Florentine and Roman hospitals and with Marcantonio della Torre, a physician at the University of Pavia who died of the plague in 1511. Mainly, though, he dissected animal corpses—cows, pigs, bears—which were easier to find than human cadavers.
His anatomical drawings look so realistic that we might almost be led to believe that he made them during dissections. Nothing could be further from the truth. He made them at his desk, reorganizing the notes he took during dissection, which must have been necessarily brief—and spattered with blood. Because membranes intermingle with veins, arteries, nerves, cords, muscles, and bones, creating great confusion, and because blood stains every part the same color, he created many views of each body part to show—first its muscles and tendons, then its inner layers of nerves, veins, and arteries, and finally the structure of bones.
The anatomy book was quite advanced, and at some point, Leonardo finally realized that the end was in sight: “in the winter of this year, 1510, I hope to complete all this anatomy.” Three years later, he confided to his friend Giovio in Rome that he wished to publish it “from copper engravings for the benefit of art.” He even reminded himself: “have your books on anatomy bound.” We do not know if he ever actually bound these loose folios. What we know is that in 1513 he was forced to move again. “I left Milan for Rome on the 24th of September 1513 with Giovan Francesco Melzi, Salai, Lorenzo, and Il Fanfoia,” he wrote.
Rome was the art capital of Europe. Intrigue and corruption were everywhere, but the city was in the midst of change. In the course of the fifteenth century, a series of popes—all of whom loved antiquities, pagan literature, and art as much as they loved ruling a state and leading Christendom—had been transforming the city from the devastated ruin it had become in the late Middle Ages into a splendid capital. They erected palaces, opened ceremonial streets, and built bridges and churches. In the early sixteenth century, one pope, Julius II, was so bold as to demolish the old church of Saint Peter’s and have a new one built in its place. The project took centuries to complete, but the architect who started it in 1505 was none other than Leonardo’s, good friend from his Milanese years, Donato Bramante.
Leonardo affectionately called him “Donnino,” and Bramante regarded Leonardo as “a cordial, dear and delightful associate.” While Donato was designing the new Saint Peter’s for the pope, another artist, who admired Leonardo, was painting the pope’s apartments. This was Raphael. His frescoes of the School of Athens and the Liberation of Saint Peter show the extent of his debt to Leonardo: he could not have painted them without Leonardo’s teachings on reflected colors and backlight effects.
Michelangelo, however, was not exactly Leonardo’s friend, and luckily he had left Rome just before Leonardo arrived. But he had left behind the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which he had completed the year before and which had dazzled the city with its bold colors, the daring anatomy of its nude figures, and the sheer magnificence of biblical creation that it represented.
By and large, Leonardo stayed away—or was excluded—from what was happening in Rome, in spite of the fact that Bramante, Raphael, and even Michelangelo owed a great deal to him stylistically.
He settled in quarters next to a papal villa at the Vatican, on the top of the Belvedere Hill, which his patron Giuliano de’ Medici, who was the pope’s brother, had secured for him. This was where artists working at the papal court normally lodged, and the quarters were far from grandiose. There was a kitchen, a loft, a dining room, a studio, and a bedroom, as well as a few other features that had been added for his comfort. Floors were paved with tiles. Windows were enlarged. Beds for his assistants were added, and “a desk to grind colors” was added as well. Clearly, Leonardo intended to paint. Although his lodgings were less than half a mile away from the main papal palace, he lived immersed in nature, surrounded by ponds and ancient statues. In many respects, it was a perfect place to retreat from the frenzy of the papal court and to work on his philosophical art.
He brought his unfinished paintings to Rome, although it is unclear how much he worked on them. Mainly, he wrote. He worked on his anatomical studies until the pope abruptly ordered him to stop: in papal circles they resulted more in suspicion than in admiration. Leonardo shifted his focus to geometry, and in July 1514 he finished a book he titled De Ludo Geometrico. He returned to the question of the squaring of the circle and claimed that he had “given the rules for proceeding to infinity.” His calculations were approximations, but he loved that he was working at the limit of what the mind can imagine. In these years he also planned a “discourse on botany,” which would be an illustrated book. He wrote on hydraulics, that branch of science concerned with practical applications of fluids and liquids in motion. The motion of human bodies and natural forces had been a lifelong fascination of his, and the leap into hydraulics came naturally to him. Since youth, he had observed the similar patterns of water swirls and spirals, which he compared to curls of human hair. He wrote:
Observe the motion of the surface of water, which resembles the behavior of hair, which has two motions, of which one depends on the weight of the strands, the other on its line of revolving; thus water makes revolving eddies, one part of which depends on the principal current, and the other depends on the incidental and reflected motions.
He was also fascinated by fossils, especially those that came from high in the mountains. His explanations were insightful. He thought that high mountains were submerged in water, that ancient springs or lakes or seas were once there and had since disappeared. He was among the first to believe that the earth had a history and that its mountains, lakes, and rivers might bear the traces of it.
He was convinced that there were general laws of nature, rules that could be applied to its different aspects, and he went in search of them. “Write of swimming under water and you will have the flight of birds through the air,” he wrote, connecting the study of water and air.
The leap from science to poetry and imagination also came easily: rivers and lakes brought to the imagination catastrophic scenes of deluges and destruction by water. Some of his writings on the topic came from observation but also from thoughts connected to his Battle of Anghiari: “You will show the degrees of falling rain at various distances and of varying degrees of obscurity, and let the darkest part be closest to the middle of its thickness.” Some came from experiments that he imagined but did not actually conduct. His powers of observation were legendary, as was his ability to think abstractly. He saw things in natural phenomena that nobody else could see and was able to conduct experiments in his head or in his drawings, which were for him an extension of the mind, the sketches simply making visible his train of thought. For no other artist of the Renaissance did the connection between hand and mind have such a strong resonance.
But for Leonardo, the ultimate confirmation that he had gotten something right came from painting. Could he paint curls of human hair like spirals found in nature? Could he show the passing of time through the erosion of mountains? Or the erosion of valleys by rivers?
His approach to painting left many baffled. Baldassare Castiglione, who was a prolific writer and an acute observer of court life, reported that Leonardo “despises that art in which he is exceptional and he set about learning philosophy, in which he has so strange concepts and new chimeras, that even he who has such talent in painting does not know how to paint them.” Like many others, Castiglione did not grasp that Leonardo could understand natural phenomena only if he could paint them.
This is what the Mona Lisa—and the other experimental paintings—in fact were: a synthesis of the knowledge of the world Leonardo had acquired through observation.
In 1516, Leonardo moved again. After the death of Giuliano de’ Medici, his patron and the pope’s brother, he accepted an invitation from François I of France to join his court as royal painter for the handsome annual pay of one thousand scudi. In early October, he departed Rome with his longtime assistants Salai and Melzi. He packed his usual household items, his artist’s tools, and the fancy clothes he liked to wear. But he also brought items that required extra care to preserve from the accidents of travel. These were his unfinished paintings, the Mona Lisa, the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, the Leda, and Saint John the Baptist, among others. There were also his writings, thousands of pages, all unpublished, stored in heavy wooden chests. His time in France would be a good opportunity to order them and perhaps finally publish a few.
The French king had given him a royal property at Cloux, in the Loire Valley, just about half a mile from the royal castle of Amboise. It included a comfortable house, where he settled with his assistants and servants. By then he was an old man, his health failing. A visitor who came to see him reported that he was “somewhat paralyzed in his right hand” and that he could “no longer color with such sweetness as he used to” but that he was able “to do drawings and to teach others.” He has “trained up a Milanese pupil who works well.” This Milanese pupil was either Salai or Melzi. For the French king, Leonardo planned marvelous set designs for plays and dinner parties to entertain royal guests. Perhaps he planned an ideal city and palaces for high-ranking royal courtiers.
Mainly, he wrote, with Melzi at his side.
His writings—“an infinity of volumes, all in the vernacular”—made an impression in France, especially those on anatomy. The same visitor reported that he had seen with his own eye illustrations of “limbs, muscles, nerves, veins, joints, intestines […] never yet done by anybody else.”
As the years went by, Leonardo’s assistant and lover Melzi took charge of every aspect of Leonardo’s life, arranging things for him, handling his correspondence and contacts, and putting his writings in order. In fact, all the master did in the last two years of his life was write. He kept going and going, draft after draft, sentence by sentence, page after page. Time passed, until there was no longer time.
On May 2, 1519, Leonardo died at Cloux. He was sixty-seven. Legend has it that he “expired in the arms of the king.” This is only a legend, but although it is factually untrue, it suggests the genuine esteem the king had for his première peintre du Roi, first painter to the king. The truth was that François I was far away, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Beside Leonardo’s deathbed sat Francesco Melzi, his assistant of twenty years, and the man he had nominated to be the executor of his will—and heir to his belongings, including his precious drafts.