Читать книгу The da Vinci Legacy - Jean-Pierre Isbouts - Страница 10

The travel party that arrived in Amboise in the late summer of 1516 was significantly smaller than the one that Leonardo had led from Milan to Rome. This time, only his pupils and close companions Francesco Melzi and Salaì, as well as a Milanese servant, Battista de Vilanis, accompanied him. It is likely that Salaì returned to Milan in late 1517, for in 1518 he was busy with the upkeep of a small vineyard that had been granted to Leonardo by Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, many years before.

King François was extremely generous. He installed Leonardo and his party in the charming Manoir de Cloux, known today as Clos Lucé, which was just a ten-minute walk from François’s own residence at the Château d’Amboise. Previously, this manor house had served as a pleasure pavilion of sorts for the French court. Its lush gardens had even been used as lists for summer tournaments. An underground passageway connected the manor to the royal residence; either François or Leonardo could use it in inclement weather—not an unusual occurrence in northern France. “Here you will be free to dream, to think, and to work,” François said as he took Leonardo around his new dwelling. To further assure the comfort of his aging guest, the king endowed Leonardo with an annual pension of 1,000 écus au soleil.4

It is difficult to relate this sum to an equivalent in a modern currency, given the very different rates for food and upkeep in the 16th century. Still, it is probably fair to say that this pension would be worth between $75,000 and $125,000 today—certainly a princely amount for someone who had yet to produce anything of significance for his young royal patron. But perhaps it was sufficient that Leonardo’s fame lent the court of François the type of Italian allure that he so eagerly sought. Indeed, Leonardo was now formally addressed with the title of peintre du Roy, “the King’s painter.” Title aside, everyone must have realized that the old master was no longer able to undertake any new commissions, other than to draw, or to dab on the panels he had brought with him. Leonardo’s actual work was limited to the aforementioned sketch for a palace at Romorantin, as well as designs for masques, and perhaps a system of canals for the Loire.

That obviously did not apply to Melzi and Salaì. Some historians suggest they may have used this pleasant respite in France to work on copies of the paintings that Leonardo brought with him, including the Saint Anne and the Mona Lisa. And there may have been a good reason for this. In return for the king’s generous pension, it is likely that Leonardo agreed to bequeath to François, upon his death, the three works he had brought to Amboise. In that case, Melzi and Salaì would be able to return to Italy with copies of these works, to serve as models for other copies in the future.

And so Leonardo spent the last three years of his life in the quiet of his comfortable home, assisted by his loyal pupil and secretary Melzi, and attended by his servant Battista de Vilanis. Did he receive many visitors? We don’t know. We do know of one very important visit that took place in 1517, with major consequences for our understanding of Leonardo’s later work.

Leonardo’s residence in Amboise, the Manoir de Cloux, known today as Clos Lucé

The visitor in question was an august Italian prelate, Luigi, Cardinal of Aragon, accompanied by his secretary, Antonio de Beatis. Why did the cardinal visit Leonardo in a place so far away from the papal court? The answer is that the prelate had decided to undertake a grand tour of Europe, of the type that became popular with the English aristocracy in the 18th century, before taking up his see at Alessano, in Apulia. It is possible that such a visit had already been discussed in 1516, when the cardinal left his mistress, a young woman named Giulia Campana, to accompany the pope to the Bologna summit. If François did use this occasion to offer Leonardo a retirement in Amboise, it is possible he also extended an invitation to the cardinal.

What makes this visit so important is that the cardinal’s diligent secretary has left us a detailed report. “In one of the suburbs [of Amboise], His Eminence and we others went to visit M. Lunardo [sic] Vinci,” de Beatis writes, “[a] Florentine, over LXX years old, of the most excellent painters of our times.”5

The secretary adds that Leonardo is not just a painter, because “he has also written on the nature of water, on diverse machines and other subjects, according to what he says, an infinite number of volumes, all in vernacular, which if they are to be published, will be beneficial and very delightful.” Here is a powerful and possibly the last attestation of Leonardo’s notebooks. These notebooks soon passed into the diligent hands of Francesco Melzi and thus—though only in part—into posterity.

The most important passage in the diary, however, is still to follow. “It is true that we can no longer expect anything further from him,” de Beatis continues, “because he has been struck by a paralysis on his right side.” This would seem to suggest that Leonardo had suffered a stroke. “M. Lunardo can no longer work with colors as he was accustomed,” the secretary writes, referring to Leonardo’s apparent inability to paint in oils, but “he continues to do drawings and to teach others.” In fact, the cardinal’s secretary adds, “He has trained a Milanese disciple who does quite good work”—no doubt referring to Melzi, which would suggest that by this date, Salaì had already returned to Milan.

The greatest praise, however, is reserved for the three paintings that Leonardo had installed in his home:

One of these was of a certain Florentine lady, done naturally at the request of the late Magnificent Giuliano Medici. The other of Saint John the Baptist, young, and one of the Madonna with the child, seated on the lap of Saint Anne, all absolutely perfect.6

In sum, the secretary is referring to The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, John the Baptist, and the Mona Lisa, which are all currently in the collection of the Louvre. Why did Leonardo insist on bringing these three paintings to his retirement home in France? What significance did these paintings have for him?

The answer may be quite simple. For Leonardo, these works constituted the true testament of his oeuvre. Indeed, these are the only three surviving works from his mature period, possibly completed in Rome after a long genesis, even though Leonardo may have kept dabbing at them until the very end. Is there something that these three paintings have in common? The answer is yes. They all share one unique Leonardesque feature, the delicate, mysterious smile—what Louvre curator Vincent Delieuvin calls an “expression of grace,” a “touching, ambiguous and deeply hypnotic feature.”

But could there be another link between them? Is it possible that all three conform to some iconographic or allegorical problem that may have been obvious to the 16th-century beholder, but not to us in modern times? Is that the idea behind the enigmatic smiles on the three main protagonists in these paintings?

For us, that idea is difficult to accept. While the Saint Anne and the John the Baptist are sacred works, the portrait of the Mona Lisa is obviously a secular painting. We are creatures of the 21st century, in which the secular and the religious realms are rigidly separated; we expect the people of the Renaissance to have thought the same. But that is a common failing, and we cannot judge Leonardo by the standards of our own modern era. We must try to understand the workings of his mind in the context of his own age, the Renaissance, which in many ways still carried the theological imprint of the Middle Ages. For medieval men and women, religious and secular concerns were interwoven to a far greater degree—not only because of the greater influence of the Church, but also because daily life was governed by a myriad of religious customs, saint days, and celebrations. Christian thought and beliefs permeated the social fabric of Florentine society on all levels. In this context, the idea of an allegorical program governing Leonardo’s three most cherished paintings—a meditation on the coming of Christ as mankind’s most defining moment—is less eccentric than it may sound.

Leonardo da Vinci, John the Baptist, ca. 1513–1516; and the Mona Lisa (Louvre version), ca. 1507–1515

If there is one constant in Leonardo’s career as a painter, it is the theme of the Madonna. Of the eighteen paintings generally believed to be Leonardo autographs, ten are depictions of the Virgin Mary. Nor are they mere imitations of the standard Madonna genre. From the very beginning, starting with The Annunciation of 1475, Leonardo’s key focus was on developing a more human, a more accessible Mary, free from the stereotypical artistic conventions of the early Renaissance. The halo that still adorns the Mary in The Annunciation, so similar to the style of Leonardo’s teacher Verrocchio, was abandoned in the Madonna of the Carnation painted three years later. From that point on, Leonardo steadily moved away from the stilted motifs of medieval times, which placed Mary with her child Jesus on a throne as Queen regnant. He chose instead to focus on the tender interplay between a young mother and her newborn child. In the Benois Madonna, Mary’s stern expression relaxes and breaks into a smile as she plays with the child on her lap. By 1490, in the Madonna Litta, she lovingly holds the babe in her arms while nursing him at her breast. This growing intimacy between Mary and her son culminates in the Saint Anne, which is perhaps Leonardo’s most ambitious examination of close maternal bonds, set against the looming future of Jesus’s Passion.

So how does the Mona Lisa fit into this? Is the sitter of the Louvre Mona Lisa somehow a reflection of the Mary motif? In 2006, a group of researchers studied the garment the lady wears, using high-resolution imagery provided by the Louvre. They discovered evidence of a “fine, gauzy veil” that extended around the woman’s neck and shoulders, which had been all but obliterated by successive layers of varnish and dirt. In the Prado copy of the Mona Lisa, possibly painted by Salaì, this fabric is more clearly visible, the white gauze clearly standing out against the red sleeve of her left arm. Such a transparent veil, called a guarnello, was made of white silk or linen, and worn by Italian women to signal that they were expecting. It was then used to protect a woman’s modesty when she found herself compelled to nurse her baby in the company of others. Thus, the guarnello also became the attribute of the Virgin Mary, particularly in Madonna portraits that depict her as a young mother with her newborn.

The idea of the Virgin Mary as not only the mother of Christ, but also the eternal mother of humankind, is perhaps best expressed in Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, painted in Milan in 1483. Some authors have speculated that the grotto behind her is a symbol of the maternal womb, which through the narrow passage offers eternal life in a heavenly sphere.

The Mona Lisa may reflect a similar idea: that of the ideal mother, the quintessence of motherhood, informed by the iconographical model of the Virgin Mary. If that is true, then this interpretation would also, at long last, explain the mystery of the smile. Simply put, the lady is smiling for the same reason that Saint Anne and John the Baptist are smiling. Each has been given the secret of the coming Redentore, the Redeemer, which they cherish in their heart.

The idea that Leonardo, the consummate scientist, would want to seal his career with three devotional paintings on the subject of Christian salvation may strike some of us as far-fetched. No artist so embodies the Renaissance ideal of human discovery and observation, unfettered by Church dogma, as Leonardo da Vinci. Though he certainly confessed his belief that nature has a source in the divine, Leonardo never cared much for theological questions or the practices of the Catholic faith. In the first edition to his book, Vasari wrote that Leonardo “could not be content with any kind of religion at all, considering himself in all things much more a philosopher than a Christian.” Though this passage was omitted in the second edition of Lives of the Artists in 1568, Vasari was probably referring to the Leonardo of Florence and Milan.

Leonardo’s feelings may have changed after 1507, when the opportunity to conduct dissections, using female cadavers, gave him a privileged glimpse of the wonders of life and birth. As his notebooks attest, Leonardo was astonished at the perfection of creation and the marvels of the female body. Inevitably, his interest in spiritual matters deepened as he approached old age. While in Rome, suffering from some unspecified illness, Leonardo chose to register with the Confraternity of St. John of the Florentines. Working on behalf of confraternities was the type of “good works” that Catholics believed would earn them a place in heaven. Leonardo may have joined this group for any number of reasons—a desire to reach out to his fellow Florentines during his exile at the Vatican, or a concern for proper burial rites should he die unmourned in his papal apartments—but a yearning for the comfort of spiritual engagement may have played a part as well.

As the shadows deepened in his manor in Cloux, Leonardo experienced an even deeper desire to be reconciled with the Church. He drafted a detailed will, commending “his soul to our Lord, Almighty God, and to the glorious Virgin Mary,” as well as other saints. He also provided detailed specifications for the funeral ceremony and the order of the procession that was to carry his body for burial at the church of St. Florentin in Amboise. In addition, Leonardo requested “three grand masses” to be celebrated by the “deacon and sub-deacon,” while no less than “thirty low masses” were to be performed in the church of St. Gregoire and the church of St. Denis. These services were to be illuminated by prodigious quantities of candles, including “sixty tapers . . . carried by sixty poor men,” with ten pounds of wax in thick tapers to be distributed to the churches involved.7

Leonardo da Vinci, Views of a Foetus in the Womb, ca. 1510–1513

This doesn’t sound like the Leonardo from Milan and Florence. These are the words of a man who, in the twilight of his days, is anxious to be reconciled with a faith that he has avoided for much of his life.

As Leonardo approached death, Vasari tells us, “he earnestly wished to learn the teaching of the Catholic faith, and of the good way and holy Christian religion; and then, with many moans, he confessed and was penitent . . . and [took] devoutly the most holy Sacrament, out of his bed.” This may be Vasari’s attempt to exonerate Leonardo in case any statements in his notebooks would be considered heretical, as some have claimed. In light of the detailed proceedings he ordered for his funeral, it rings true. No man or woman can truly anticipate their emotions on the threshold of life and death. Here, too, Leonardo revealed himself as a man of his time, a Renaissance scholar who, on the verge of meeting his Maker, sought succor in the Church.

If it is true that the Mona Lisa was inspired by Leonardo’s lifetime preoccupation with the mystery of the Madonna, then it is fitting that Leonardo kept these three paintings—the John the Baptist, the Mona Lisa, and the Saint Anne—with him through the last chapter of his life. All three are meditations on the mysterious ways in which the divine reveals itself. They are the expressions of a mind that, having studied the secrets of nature, must acknowledge that there are limits to what human reason can accomplish.

2 Jean-Pierre Isbouts and Christopher Heath Brown, Young Leonardo. Tomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

3 See Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo da Vinci: The Royal Palace at Romorantin.

4 The écu au soleil was a gold currency established by Louis XI in 1475 to replace the écu à la couronne.

5 Rather than seventy, Leonardo was actually sixty-five at the time, though with his flowing beard and long hair, he may have looked older to his visitors.

6 Antonio de Beatis, “Account of the Visit of Cardinal Louis d’Aragon paid to Leonardo, at the Château de Cloux, October 10, 1517,” in Vincent Delieuvin, Saint Anne: Leonardo da Vinci’s Ultimate Masterpiece, p. 199.

7 “Leonardo’s Will” (1566), in Jean Paul Richter, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, pp. 468–469.