the second phase of his professional life in Milan, not for the last time reneging on his contractual obligations to finish paintings when he saw the opportunity for a step up the professional ladder. The new Milanese ruler, Duke Ludovico Sforza, had consolidated his power after defeating the French army and poisoning his nephew. Now, like many a newly established despot before and since, he turned to culture as a tool of statecraft (today this is called ‘art washing’). Sforza wished to make Milan a northern city to rival Florence, but Leonardo appears not to have been aware of the duke’s new priorities. There is a draft of a letter to him in the notebooks in which Leonardo – a man on the make as well as a genius – seeks to reinvent himself as an engineer. He pitches hard that he could make ‘all kinds of mortars, most convenient and easy to carry, and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm’. He could dig tunnels under rivers, make ‘safe and invincible’ chariots, ‘big guns’ and catapults, and lastly – change of subject – ‘I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever may be done.’ It was these last two talents that the duke would principally avail himself of.
At the time, Milan was a cultural backwater. The most popular local painters, Vincenzo Foppa, Bernardo Zenale and Ambrogio Bergognone, had barely left the Middle Ages, stylistically speaking. Their workshops were busy but the output uninventive. Thick halos of gold leaf encircled the heads of their saints, who stood stiffly in their heavy robes. Their complexions were pallid and their facial expressions dour and portentous. A wonky perspective in the depiction of a throne, canopy or manger in the foreground usually jarred with that of the architecture or landscape behind. By comparison, Leonardo was the avant-garde with his anatomical and botanical precision, his developing subtle tonality (aka sfumato) and his grip on storytelling.
Leonardo’s first commission in Milan was the most enigmatic painting of his entire oeuvre, the Virgin of the Rocks which now hangs in the Louvre (the National Gallery in London has a second, later version of the painting). Once again the traditional format for such paintings, in which the Virgin and child are seated on a throne on a podium, with saints on either side, has been unceremoniously discarded. Instead, the mother and child appear to have taken refuge in a mountain cave, along with a baby St John, who prays to Jesus, though the Bible never suggests that they met at this age. The group are perched on the edge of a rocky chasm which falls away in front of us, creating a gulf between the viewer and subject. The bizarre landscape of rocky pillars recalls the Surrealist paintings of Max Ernst four and a half centuries later. The painting is the epitome of the sophisticated but indecipherable symbology which Leonardo inserted into his compositions. The lake in the background on the left may symbolise the purity of the Virgin, and so may the foreground, since Mary is referred to in the Song of Songs as ‘the cave in the mountain’. Alternatively, the inhospitable terrain could refer to medieval biographies of St John the Baptist or St Francis, while the manner in which the entire rocky backdrop echoes the arrangement of holy figures could embody the belief, widespread in the Middle Ages and shared by Leonardo, that the earth with its land and water functioned much like the human body with its flesh and blood. Art historians have discussed the meaning of this painting for centuries, without reaching any degree of certainty or agreement.
In Milan, Leonardo introduced emotional transitions, suggested movement and implicit narratives into the static genre of portrait painting. The faces of his sitters show shifting and elusive emotions – moti mentali, as he described them – of acquiescence and resistance, of pleasure and fear. There is a strange atmosphere of serenity and intimacy in these portraits, whose subjects have the faintest of smiles, anticipating the Mona Lisa. The Lady with an Ermine is the most dramatic of them all. A young woman, not yet twenty, turns her head as if taken by surprise – perhaps even feigning surprise – as she hears someone approaching her from behind. She looks shy but inquisitive, demure but also coquettish. The painting was commissioned by the sitter’s lover, the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. The opposing directions of movement of her head and body belong to the already established Renaissance language of contrapposto, counterpoise, a way of articulating the body to create drama and volume, to which Leonardo has added a narrative purpose.
When Leonardo turned to The Last Supper, a commission for the dining hall of a Milanese convent, he was dealing with an established biblical narrative, in which gestures and facial expressions had long conveyed story and drama. However, he ratcheted up the excitement and action to new levels. He depicted the moment of greatest antagonism, when Christ tells his disciples, ‘One of you will betray me.’ Their reactions create an undulating wave of emotions on either side of Christ – postures and faces showing surprise, shock, denial (from Judas, clutching a bag of money), shame, anxiety, argument, and even fainting. ‘The painter who wants to have honour in his work,’ wrote Leonardo, ‘must always find the imprint of his work in the natural, spontaneous acts of men, born from the strong and sudden revelation of feelings, and from those make brief sketches in his notebook, and then use them for his purpose.’
In the 1490s Leonardo began to write and draw entries in his notebooks, of which only a quarter are estimated to have survived. These codices and manuscripts constitute one of the most important historical archives of all time, a cross-section of the European intellect and imagination at the doorstep of a new world of discovery and experiment, and proof that Leonardo possessed one of the most active and analytical minds of all time, ‘undoubtedly the most curious man who ever lived’, as Kenneth Clark called him.
Across the notebooks’ pages a dazzling array of thoughts unfold about the natural world and the sciences. The art historian Ernst Gombrich remarked how ‘Posterity had to struggle with that awe-inspiring legacy of notes, jottings, drafts, excerpts, and memoranda in which personal trivia alternate with observations on optics, geology, anatomy, the behaviour of wind and water, the mechanics of pulleys and the geometry of intersecting circles, the growth of plants or the statics of buildings, all jostling each other on sheets that may contain sublime drawings, absent-minded doodles, coarse fables, and subtle prose poems.’2 To be sure, Leonardo was as idiosyncratic as he was intelligent: all the text was written in right-to-left mirrored handwriting, which suggests to our imagination a desire to withhold secrets from all but the most dedicated students, but which may also be a sign of Leonardo’s ‘unlettered’ if not obdurate pragmatism. It was easier for the left-handed artist to write backwards because there was less risk of smudging the ink.
Leonardo appears to have been a highly unconventional character. He had a distinctive taste in clothes – his early biographer Anonimo Gaddiano wrote that he ‘wore a rose-coloured cloak, which came only to his knees, although at the time long vestments were the custom’. A list of his clothing in his notebooks itemises a pink cap, two rose-coloured gowns, a purple-velvet hooded cape, and two satin coats, one crimson and one purple again.3 One supposed portrait of him, which may hint at his character, is by his friend Bramante, who, the artist Gian Paolo Lomazzo wrote, used Leonardo’s face for a fresco of the melancholic Greek philosopher Heraclitus. We see a straggly-haired forty-something man, his face running with tears, perhaps from sadness, but also possibly from drunken mirth. Leonardo appears to have been, or to have become, a vegetarian. The Florentine traveller Andrea Corsali wrote a letter to a friend in 1516 in which he mentioned that Leonardo ‘lives on rice, milk and other inanimate foods’. That was a highly unusual diet for a Renaissance European.
Leonardo seems to have had a high sense of self-worth. His pictures did not come cheap by the standards of the day – The Last Supper cost 200 ducats. He could be short-tempered if he felt he was not being accorded the respect he was due: on one occasion he told a client’s cashier haughtily, ‘I am not a penny painter.’ But at the same time he apparently often felt dissatisfied with his achievements, and some early biographers cite that as the reason he left so many of his paintings unfinished. Lomazzo, who spoke to Leonardo’s assistant Francesco Melzi, wrote that ‘He never finished any of the works he commenced because, so sublime was his idea of art, he saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles.’
In this first Milanese period,
