11
The Heir
Twelve years before his death, Leonardo had taken on an unusual apprentice: Giovanni Francesco Melzi, the son of Girolamo Melzi, captain of the Milanese army.
As a result of his status, this boy had something exceptional to offer to Leonardo. He was educated—all legitimate sons of the elite were, after all. He could help Leonardo with his writing.
It was around 1507. Melzi was about fifteen years old. He was “a very handsome youth.” In the workshop he was known as “Cecho” or “Cechino,” both diminutives for Francesco. His relationship with his master evolved quickly. Francesco and Leonardo became bound not just by work, not just by mutual respect, not just by a common love of art, but also—as Melzi described it after Leonardo’s death—by “the consuming and passionate love he bore daily toward me.”
Melzi became Leonardo’s lover, replacing Salai, the other Milanese apprentice who had once filled that role and who was ten years older than Melzi. Leonardo and Salai had been close for almost fifteen years, but by the time Melzi joined the workshop Salai had exhausted the patience of his master and of others in the workshop. “Salai, I want peace, not war,” somebody wrote in one of Leonardo’s folios of those years. “No more wars, I give in.”
It was in very different terms that Leonardo wrote to Melzi during a short trip to Florence, where he had gone to attend to family business. He begged his new assistant for help: “Good day Messer Francesco, God knows why of all the letters that I have written to you, you have never replied. Just wait till I am with you, by God, and I shall make you write so much that perhaps then you will be sorry.”
As it turned out, Melzi would end up writing quite a bit, but apparently was never sorry for it—in fact, he stayed with Leonardo until the end of his master’s life.
Like his fellow apprentices, Melzi started by copying his master’s drawings—drapery studies, horse legs, male and female heads, hands and feet—until he was skilled enough to sketch three-dimensional objects such as plaster casts and statues. Leonardo insisted that his pupils not use colors until they learned how “to imitate with very simple marks the force of nature and the outlines of the bodies that appear to our eyes with such variety of motions.” He did not want them to be seduced by the “charm of brushes and the magic of colors.” Francesco was a quick study, and in about two years he learned how to draw in his master’s style.
His first signed drawing is a profile of an old man in red chalk—Leonardo’s signature technique. The drawing of the figure displays great depth, and the structure of his skull is well defined, the facial muscles are drawn appropriately to capture the man’s age, his wrinkles are correctly rendered, and the skin is convincingly rough. Francesco had clearly studied his master’s anatomical drawings and his red-on-red figure sketches. He had even been allowed to retouch a particularly beautiful drawing depicting the head of Judas, which Leonardo had made in preparation for the Last Supper (Figure 11).
Above all, Francesco had studied Leonardo’s shadow drawings in order to apply the sfumato technique to the old man’s facial muscles and, by way of this effect, seem to make visible the man’s soul. Proud of what he had achieved, Melzi signed and dated the profile: “On the 14th of August 1510, first draft in relief. Francesco da Melzo 17 years old.” Two years later, he retouched this highly competent drawing and dated it again near the man’s back: “19 years old, Francesco Melzi.” His most famous red-on-red drawing, however, dates from just a couple of years later, around 1515: it is a stunning portrait of his master in old age, the most vivid image of Leonardo we have.
But apart from copying Leonardo’s drawings, the real privilege of being in Leonardo’s workshop was to work side by side with the master as he refined his experimental paintings, especially the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Mona Lisa, two works that held a special place in Melzi’s imagination as they did in Leonardo’s own. Leonardo had not yet settled on the composition of these paintings, and Francesco watched him as he prepared drawing after drawing, trying to determine the best position for his figures, the best shapes for mountains and trees, and the right combination of glazes. Francesco copied many of these drawings, immersed in Leonardo’s creative process.
Like other assistants, Francesco participated in the main activity of the workshop, which was to duplicate Leonardo’s experimental paintings on new panels at the very same time as his master painted the originals. In those years, an exact copy of the Mona Lisa, now at the Prado Museum in Madrid, was created. It is of very high quality, even though its color scheme and execution are not at the level of Leonardo’s original. Melzi watched the copy being prepared and perhaps even painted it himself (this work is variously attributed to Salai as well as to Melzi). Various versions of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne were also painted in those years. Another highly successful work that came out of the workshop in many copies was the head of Christ in the act of blessing, the Salvator Mundi; many copies, each showing minor variations in Christ’s garments, his hands or hair, are dispersed in museums around the world.
Melzi also borrowed freely, with Leonardo’s blessing, from his master’s stock of sketches, drawings, preparatory cartoons, and unfinished paintings to make his own works. His first “independent” painting, Vertumnus and Pomona, was in reality an adaptation of Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, its subject a pagan myth instead of a Christian story. Vertumnus, the Roman god of seasons, plant growth, and change, approached Pomona, a goddess of fruitful abundance, in the disguise of an old woman to convince her to reciprocate his love. Leonardo had never painted this story, and had generally shown little interest in ancient myths even though they were highly popular among the cultural elite. But Leonardo had also learned from Verrocchio, and he taught his pupils that the same figure could be adapted to different scenes. A saintly woman could become a pagan goddess so long as her bodily motions and expressions were appropriate to the story.
Melzi’s Pomona was almost an exact copy of Leonardo’s Virgin from a cartoon, which is now kept at the National Gallery in London and known as the Burlington House Cartoon, after the name of a collection in which it was kept previously, although appropriately Melzi had her hold a basket of fruit instead of the Christ Child. The landscape was largely based on another version of Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, the one that is now at the Louvre. Trees, plants, and flowers came from his master’s botanical drawings. Pomona’s hairstyle was modeled on Leonardo’s famous studies of female heads with floating tresses and swirling curls. Her foot is an exact copy of Mary’s right foot, which Melzi had sketched in a separate drawing on a folio that had his master’s writing on the other side—no other pupil got to sketch on the pages on which Leonardo wrote his notes. Melzi signed his Vertumnus and Pomona in Latin on the stone in the foreground, and although a Parisian art dealer erased the signature in the nineteenth century, probably in order to sell the painting as a work by Leonardo, a few letters have reemerged thanks to a recent restoration confirming that Melzi was the creator of this painting.
Melzi absorbed Leonardo’s new art quickly, and even though he never reached a similar level of perfection and never managed to master the use of glazes, he nonetheless knew how to paint blurred edges and use color to depict soft smiles, half-open lips, and intense gazes. Eventually, Melzi gained a reputation as somebody who “paints extremely well” and whose works “are often confused with the master’s works.”
The first person to recognize Melzi’s talent at interpreting Leonardo’s new art was Leonardo himself, who trusted Francesco with two important tasks that he did not delegate to any other assistant. One was an urgent effort that pertained to his drawings. Leonardo loved to draw with silverpoint and soft chalk because these drawing tools leave only faint traces on the page. Silverpoint marks are so delicate that he could sketch in silverpoint on top of an already existing drawing without losing sight of the latter. He could blend chalk marks with his own fingers in order to soften edges and modulate shadows. But drawings in silverpoint and chalk are extremely fragile. Over time, particles of metal and chalk come loose from the folios, marks fade away, and drawings become almost illegible. Leonardo himself had used ink to redraw the fading lines of his early drawings that were disappearing in front of his very eyes, though there were so many of them that he could not possibly preserve them all himself. As a result, he entrusted Francesco with the job of retracing his own sketches, and we can see Francesco’s work on drawings such as the Head of Judas (Figure 11).
Francesco’s other assignment was to organize Leonardo’s writings, which were a mess. Over the years, Leonardo had accumulated thousands of unbound and unnumbered folios and notebooks, on which he had jotted down, in no apparent order, quotations from his readings, his own thoughts, his personal notes, and his to-do lists, alongside his sketches and drawings. Most of these notes were working materials for his books, but he had never ordered his folios and notebooks in a coherent manner, let alone organized them into complete books. The methodical work that would be required to complete these books was not exactly Leonardo’s forte.
But this sort of ability was precisely what Melzi brought to the table.
Having come from a patrician family, the boy was educated. Like other students of his standing, he was fluent in Latin and Greek. He also knew how to organize “commonplace books,” which were collections of quotations from ancient authors that students were taught to assemble and to use in their own writing. He had learned how to select passages from his reading, which was extensive, and copy them onto loose folios or into notebooks so that he would always have material for an essay at hand.
Leonardo himself had been exposed to this way of working, and had done something similar when he read optical texts. His optical writings were, in a way, commonplace books on optics, but he had never transformed them into complete essays. But Melzi knew what a book needed to look and sound like. He proved invaluable in helping Leonardo to write his own.
Melzi got to work right away. First he began to organize the thousands of pages of notes stuffed into chests in Leonardo’s residence. Then, as his confidence increased, he began to do more than just organize. He started making suggestions to Leonardo as to where he could more clearly explain his ideas, leading to a new proliferation of writings by Leonardo around 1510. Even as Leonardo’s mirror writing became harder and harder to read, Melzi became more and more adept at deciphering it, until he was the only one who could do so properly. His handwriting is everywhere on Leonardo’s papers. Often, Melzi rewrote in conventional writing what Leonardo had written in reverse, and in the process, he adjusted the language and expanded its scope, perhaps following Leonardo’s dictation.
Slowly, Melzi began to put Leonardo’s notebooks in order. He assigned a letter of the classical Latin alphabet to each notebook, and that letter became its primary identifier: Libro A, Libro B—all the way through Libro Z. When he ran out of classical Latin letters, he used the Greek alphabet, meaning that there must have been more than twenty-three notebooks. He then numbered the pages of each notebook and counted them one more time. When he was confident of that number, he entered it into the record. For instance, on Libro G, which was a notebook dedicated to light and shade, he wrote, “The folios are 28, that is, twenty-eight.” (Libro G is known today as Manuscript C, after the name given to it by a nineteenth-century librarian who adopted Melzi’s same cataloging system based on letters of the Latin alphabet.)
This was tedious work, but this is what, by and large, Melzi did for Leonardo in Milan, in Rome, and at Cloux: he redrew Leonardo’s fading drawings and kept his writings in order. In effect, Leonardo made Melzi the sole conservator of his legacy long before he drafted his will.
Because Melzi was the one who knew Leonardo’s writings and drawings better than anybody else, Leonardo wanted him by his side on April 23, 1519, when he went to a notary to sign his will. That Leonardo could make a will and nominate an heir was in itself exceptional, as in France the custom was for foreigners who died without children “to forfeit everything” to the king at death. But in consideration of the fact that he did not own land in France, Leonardo had obtained a royal privilege directly from François I to draft a will and nominate an heir.
In the Renaissance, wills did not just stipulate how the deceased’s worldly possessions were to be divided; they were also intended to assist in the soul’s passage to heaven. Catholic dogma holds that the souls of common people—saints are different—must expiate their sins in purgatory before going to heaven. The length of time spent in purgatory depends on the nature of these sins, but it can be shortened by Masses celebrated in the name of the dead. As a result, people in the Renaissance left detailed instructions in their wills regarding Masses to be said on their behalf.
Leonardo was no exception. He left generous donations of cash and candles to three local churches to celebrate Masses for his soul. He asked to be buried in the local church of Saint Florentine, which he selected in honor of the city where he had matured as an artist. He asked that, at his funeral, sixty people be hired to carry tapers. After having taken care of his soul, he instructed that his earthly goods be distributed among his two Milanese servants, Maturina and Battista de Villanis, and his two longtime assistants, Salai and Melzi. Salai was not at Cloux when Leonardo drafted his will, and indeed he got the short end of things, just half of a garden Leonardo owned in Milan. Perhaps Leonardo had given him some other things early on, including some paintings, but from the will, it seems he did not get much of Leonardo’s legacy. In any case, he would not have had much use for it. Six years later, he was killed during a fight in Milan.
Melzi received the bulk of Leonardo’s artistic and intellectual legacy: “each and all of the books of which the Testator [Leonardo] is currently in possession, and other tools and depictions connected with his art and the profession of painters.” He also got “each and all of the clothes which he [Leonardo] presently possesses in the said palace of Cloux.” Leonardo considered this to be remuneration for the “good and kind services done to him until now” instead of “for the cost, time, and trouble he may incur with regard to the execution of the present Testament.” That work would indeed fall to him, for he was named the sole executor of Leonardo’s will.
Ten days later, Leonardo died, and it was up to Melzi to carry out his last wishes.
Francesco was devastated by Leonardo’s death, but soon composed himself. He found a proper burial chapel at the Church of Saint Florentine. He hired sixty poor people from the hospital of Saint Lazarus to carry tapers at the funeral and paid them seventy soldi out of his master’s estate. He arranged for cash and candles to pay for Masses for Leonardo’s soul. A month later, he wrote to Leonardo’s stepbrothers in Florence. He told them that Leonardo had been to him “like an excellent father” and that “it is impossible to express the grief that I feel at this death.” He lost “the consuming and passionate love he [Leonardo] bore daily toward me” and for that loss he will feel “perpetual unhappiness.” Overcoming his hardly containable grief, he let the stepbrothers know that Leonardo had left them a small holding at Fiesole as well as a deposit he kept with the bursar of the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, which Melzi estimated amounted to about four hundred scudi, plus any accrued interest. It was not much. But it was plenty considering that Leonardo’s relations with his stepbrothers were strained after years of legal battles over the will of a childless uncle who had left his belongings to Leonardo, a fact his stepbrothers resented.
After he was done carrying out Leonardo’s wishes, there was nothing to keep Melzi in France. He gathered what he had of Leonardo’s work—thousands of loose folios of many different sizes, hundreds of drawings, and some notebooks—and began the journey to his family home just outside Milan.
The Melzi villa was an idyllic spot, located at Vaprio d’Adda, about twenty miles northeast of Milan. The family had acquired it in the late fifteenth century because it sat in a strategic place along the banks of the Adda River, on the border between the Duchy of Milan and the Republic of Venice. Leonardo had been a guest at the villa in 1512, when the political situation in Milan had become so tense that he deemed it wise to accept the invitation of his assistant’s family. To reciprocate such hospitality, he drew some landscape views on the walls of the villa, which are now lost, and suggested some architectural improvements, which were never implemented. Otherwise he spent his time in the study the Melzi family had arranged for him, most likely in the villa’s high tower. From there he made a beautiful drawing of the river, showing the river’s sudden turn around the villa and the cable ferry that transported people and cattle from one bank to the other. Occasionally, he wandered along the riverbank to observe “the flux and reflux of water as demonstrated at the mill of Vaprio.” He became interested in the physics of water vortices, a problem of hydraulics that has not been fully resolved to this day.
Melzi must have had vivid memories of his master’s visit to the family villa.
Soon Melzi settled into the life of a person of his standing. He married a patrician woman, Angela Landriani, who gave him eight children and an extensive network of friends and relations. He collected books—one volume of Spanish poetry, now held in a Milanese library, still has his name on it: Joannes Franciscus Meltius hic scripsit die xiij mensis Junij 1546. He spent time in the company of the Milanese cultural elite and served the duchy in various capacities and often offered expert advice in matters of art. He continued to paint. He even trained another artist, the illuminator Girolamo Figino.
But in the quietness of that grand mansion Melzi spent most of his time working on his master’s notes. For the rest of his life, he carefully guarded everything he had inherited. He kept “such papers together as if they were relics.” He was determined to collect his master’s writings into publishable books. He started with the one book that he knew his master had worked on for his entire adult life: Leonardo’s book on painting.
Of course, Leonardo had never started assembling his notes into a coherent book.
And so Melzi had his work cut out for him.
Melzi spent years—five years, ten years, fifteen years—poring over the thousands of pages that he himself had classified and numbered. Leonardo’s notes on painting were distributed across the folios and notebooks he had left behind. Melzi combed through these notebooks systematically, one after another, taking whatever he felt was relevant. If he did not find any material pertaining to painting in a given notebook, he would write on it “N. di P.”—an abbreviation for Nulla di Pittura, which means “Nothing on Painting.” But when he found a relevant passage, he marked it with a small circle in black ink, a little sign to remind himself to go back to that page and copy the note.
When he was done reading the thousands of pages, he started from the beginning once again, this time going straight to the passages he had marked with a small circle. He copied the most significant passages onto small loose folios, which were not dissimilar to modern flash cards, and crossed out the small circles on the originals to remind himself that they had already been copied. Then he moved these flash cards of sorts around and rearranged them topically. When he was finally satisfied with the order of the notes, he copied them into a new notebook, which he titled Book on Painting by Messer Leonardo da Vinci, Florentine Painter and Sculptor (Libro di pittura di Messer Lionardo da Vinci pittore et scultore fiorentino).
He assembled this new notebook from reams of large paper. He selected the highest-quality paper commonly available in Lombardy and Veneto at the time. He cut the folios in half and then folded them to obtain folios of about eight by six inches, which he gathered into sets of eight folios, or quires (quaderni in Italian). He calculated with great accuracy the notebook’s size based on the amount of text he expected to place on each page: 28 lines of approximately 50 characters per line. This would require a notebook of 344 folios (43 quires, with a few pages left over), which in turn corresponded to 688 pages, as one could write on both the front and back of each folio. (Today, one quire has only 6 folios, another has only 2 folios, but the remaining 41 quires have 8 folios, just as Melzi calculated.)
Melzi assembled the quires into a stack, but he did not bind them, as it was easier to write on them when they were loose. To make sure he did not mix up the sequence of these loose folios, he numbered them and devised a system for cross-referencing them.
His estimate of the notebook’s size was slightly off, as he eventually discarded two quires because he did not copy any notes on them. It was not unusual at the time to plan books so carefully. Writing was a laborious exercise, and paper was expensive. Even Leonardo had attempted a few such calculations when thinking about his various books. On a scrap of paper, he imagined a book made of 160 folios, which would have corresponded to 320 pages, each page having 21 lines of text. We do not know what book Leonardo had in mind when he made these calculations. But there is no doubt that he was planning to write a book and to print it.
Melzi copied Leonardo’s notes into the notebook he had so carefully planned.
He wrote with regular handwriting using the cursive script, which was the script preferred by Renaissance humanists. If an illustration accompanied a note, which was often the case, he left an empty space in the middle of the text where he planned to sketch the illustration. If the image was a geometrical diagram, he added to the sketch the letter keys that were mentioned in the accompanying text. If it represented a human figure, he sketched it first in charcoal and later fixed it in pen and ink, and then shaded it.
To maintain regular margins and consistent line and letter spacing throughout, Melzi used a lined sheet, which he placed underneath each folio: the lines were visible through the paper and served as a guide as he wrote. The way Melzi assembled the Book on Painting suggests that he wanted to create a clean, legible copy with well-spaced characters to give to a typographer, who would typeset the letters following Melzi’s handwritten example, and then make woodcut prints in the empty spaces after the text itself had been printed.
In giving form to Leonardo’s scattered notes, what Melzi wanted to preserve for posterity was Leonardo’s unique view that “painting is philosophy.” Here is how Melzi organized Leonardo’s ideas about the science of art:
He divided the book into eight parts, each dedicated to a different topic. He did not conceive of these parts as being equal in either length or significance. Unmistakably, the core of the Book on Painting was part 5, “On Shadow and Light” (De ombra e lume). With its more than 130 pages, 277 chapters, and 107 optical drawings, it was in effect a book within a book. It was the longest, the most complex, and the most original section of all. And it was stunning. Nobody had ever written anything of the sort. Leonardo had worked his entire life on this section, refining the drawings until he was satisfied both with their beauty and with their scientific rigor—after all, he thought that “optics is the signpost and gateway of painting.” Melzi assembled this section from his master’s most refined sketches and notes on the topic, selecting primarily those Leonardo made later in his life. Those were contained in a notebook Melzi had titled Libro W, which has unfortunately been lost. As a result, by and large we have access to Leonardo’s most advanced work on light and shadows only because of Melzi’s Book on Painting.
Part 5 was in many ways the culmination of the preceding sections of the work. The Book on Painting started with a chapter titled “Whether Painting Is a Science or Not” and insisted on the importance of experience, “the mother of every certainty”—the foundational tenet of Alhacen’s optics. It included Leonardo’s comparison of the arts, which he had written around 1490, and other Alhacen-inspired formulations he elaborated in later years, such as that painting is “a mental discourse” that passes through the power of vision, or virtù visiva. Painters work with “greater mental exertion [maggior fatica di mente]” than other artists because they have to follow “ten different discourses […] light, shadow, color, body, figure, site, distance, vicinity, motion, and stillness.” Here are Leonardo’s thoughts on “the science of painting” and his explanation on “how the eye is less deceived than any other sense in its workings in luminous or transparent and uniform mediums.” Here is spelled out Leonardo’s belief that painting is the highest art form because the sense of sight is superior to the other senses—all thoughts that were inspired by optical literature, including Alhacen’s.
Section 2 contained notes on studio practice, or precetti del pittore: 216 chapters designed to teach artists how to become a “universal painter.” Here, Melzi copied some of Leonardo’s most memorable instructions: painting represents “man and the intentions of his mind”; narrative paintings (istorie depinte) “ought to move those who behold and admire them in the same way as the protagonist of the narrative is moved.” About one hundred of these precetti del pittore deal with various aspects of aerial and color perspective, including reflections and transparent colors—all topics Leonardo had discussed from around 1490 onward, explaining both their philosophical underpinnings and the geometric procedures needed to render them in paint. Even the instructions Melzi selected on how to paint nudes, landscapes, faces, heads, night scenes, natural disasters, battles, deluges, and storms were informed by optics, as Leonardo taught artists that in order to move viewers more deeply, it was not enough to arrange figures on a panel—the traditional Renaissance understanding of “composition.” Rather, they had to select the right light sources and atmospheric effects and to render them on the basis of scientific principles.
Optical science also informed the 266 chapters of section 3, which was titled “Various Accidents and Movements of Man and Proportions of His Body.” This was a topic Leonardo had written about since at least 1489, when he began planning his book on the human figure, which he never completed. Interestingly, however, Melzi did not include notes about human proportions per se, but rather about how the atmosphere affects our perception of bodily motion.
The fourth section, “On Drapery and Ways to Dress Figures with Grace and on Clothes and the Nature of Drapery,” follows logically from the discussion of the human body: drapery has “to show the disposition and motion of figures and one should avoid the confusion of many folds,” which obscure movement and thus the visible outward expression of the soul. It is a very short section—only sixteen chapters. The fifth section, “On Shadow and Light,” followed, while three short sections on trees, clouds, and the horizon that dealt with landscape concluded Leonardo’s Book on Painting, at least according to Melzi’s organization.
But it was the fifth section, “On Shadow and Light,” that was the most important. Leonardo had been sketching shadow drawings since the 1470s and had written advanced drafts on the topic since at least the early 1490s. In his Book on Painting, Melzi had Leonardo start this section with general principles that were common to optical books, but he had him soon delve into examples of increasing complexity that were completely original. These examples pertain to delicate, blurred shadows that can be perceived only under conditions of faint light and at a close distance. Following the example of optical texts, he taught artists that the human eye cannot precisely delineate the border between light and shadow, or distinguish minute differences in color, and that to be great painters they had to learn to capture smoky shadows and subtle reflections with mathematical precision.
The previous sections of the book had conveyed their lessons by way of qualitative examples—that is to say, concrete situations in defined settings, such as riders in battle or mothers playing with sons. But the fifth section, “On Shadow and Light,” offered a strictly conceptual analysis of the same phenomena—that is to say, one based on the “mathematical demonstration” of optical principles.
To round out the volume, Melzi added a thirty-page-long table of contents and his own Memoria e Nota, which was a list of the eighteen notebooks by Leonardo, out of the many more he possessed, from which he had extracted notes on painting for his compilation. It is only thanks to this list that we have a sense of how many of Leonardo’s writings have been lost. Of these eighteen notebooks, only six are still in existence. The other twelve are missing. In other words, only about a third of Leonardo’s writings on painting have survived. If we apply the same ratio of dispersal to all of Leonardo’s writings, not just to those that dealt with painting, we get a sense of how much of Leonardo’s legacy was lost overall.
By the time Melzi was done with compiling the Book on Painting, or at least most of it, roughly twenty years had passed. By around 1540, he had assembled 662 pages containing 944 notes and over 200 drawings. This was the closest anyone would ever get to the book that Leonardo had dreamed of writing. He kept refining his compilation and may have considered also adding some more notes in the empty pages. He must have thought about finding a publisher, too, as every detail of the Book on Painting—the layout, the spacing of words and characters, the illustrations within the text—suggests that he had a printed book in mind.
At the time, most books were published in Latin. Some publishers, though, had also started to publish books in Italian, especially manuals and other technical works that were of interest to a non-Latin-speaking public. In Milan, there were several publishers that had assembled a decent catalog of art books in Italian. But the European capital of book publishing was Venice, and chances are that Melzi went to Venice to find a publisher.
In the preceding fifty years, Venetian presses had put out some of the most beautiful books of the Renaissance. The most prolific and forward-looking publisher was Aldus Manutius. He had published ancient authors in Greek and Latin and modern works by historians, poets, jurists, architects, and artists. Some of his books were lavishly illustrated, and many dealt with various aspects of art. His son Paolo continued the family tradition. The design of Melzi’s Book on Painting suggests that he had books from Manutius’s press in mind when he began work. The generous spacing of margins and letters, the placement of images within the text, the table of contents at the end, the list of sources—all these elements were trademarks of Manutius’s publications. At that publishing house, Leonardo’s text would have received the same philological and linguistic attention, the same editorial care, the same elegant layout that Manutius and his heirs had given to the great authors of the past.
But Melzi did not publish his compilation. We do not know why. Perhaps when he set about finding a publisher, he could find no takers. Or perhaps he was dissatisfied with the result.
Nonetheless, news of the book he had compiled began to circulate. Visitors went to see Melzi, and were often impressed by his own art as well. The Milanese painter Gian Paolo Lomazzo, who later wrote several long and convoluted art books, knew Melzi well and regarded him as a “wonderful miniature painter.” The aristocrat Giovanni Ambrogio Mazenta, who was also a Leonardo buff and who later played a big role in the dissemination of Leonardo’s work, thought Melzi had come nearer than anyone else to the manner of his master: his pictures were so finished that they were “often confused with the master’s works.”
The most important and consequential visitor of all, though, was Giorgio Vasari. Vasari was a Florentine artist turned writer who also served as the official artist of the Medici court. He found Melzi “a beautiful and kind old man” and remarked that he had been “a very beautiful young man, much loved” by Leonardo. Vasari was in the process of revising his own celebrated art book, The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors from Cimabue to Our Times, which he had first published in 1550 and was now enlarging and correcting for an augmented second edition. He wanted to know more about Leonardo and his famous notebooks, and so in 1566 he went to see Melzi. Melzi showed him Leonardo’s notebooks on human anatomy. He also showed him “a portrait of Leonardo of happy memory,” which presumably was the portrait Melzi himself had sketched when the master was an old man. Vasari used the image in his revised book.
Did Melzi, then, also show Vasari the Book on Painting he had compiled from his master’s notes?