The Last Leonardo: The Making of a Masterpiece. Ben Lewis

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The Last Leonardo: The Making of a Masterpiece - Ben  Lewis

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father. He designed the largest equestrian statue in the world, and built a clay model three times life-size. But before he could cast it in bronze, the French crown had turned against the Milanese duke. The duke reassigned the metal that had been intended for the statue to the production of cannons, but with little effect. The French King Louis XII invaded northern Italy and occupied Milan. The world lost a masterpiece and Sforza his dukedom. There is a touching description in the notebooks of how Leonardo hid his money in small bags around his studio as the foreign army approached. When they arrived, French archers used Leonardo’s giant clay prototype for target practice and destroyed it.

      Leonardo had now lost his great benefactor, and there followed several years of uncertainty, if not poverty. He travelled to Mantua and Venice, reduced on one occasion to making drawings of crystal and amethyst vases for Isabella d’Este, who was considering buying them, and on another to sketching the villa of a Florentine merchant for the Duke of Mantua, who wanted to build his own country mansion.

      Leonardo moved on to Florence in 1500, and spent the next six years there. He was given a studio in the large halls of the Santa Maria Novella church. A measure of stability returned, notwithstanding a curious brief interlude in 1502–03 when the notorious warlord Cesare Borgia employed him for two years as his military architect and engineer, although, beyond drawing a map, it is not clear what work the artist actually carried out for the commander.

      In 1506 Leonardo returned to Milan, lured there by its new French rulers, leaving the Battle unfinished, much to the fury of the Florentine town council. In Milan he continued to work on paintings designed or begun in Florence, the Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Madonna of the Yarnwinder among them, although the latter may have been partly executed by assistants. Here he and his assistants probably also finished painting the second version of the Virgin of the Rocks.

      Leonardo is known for the intricate and precise way he painted hair, so different from the patterned and schematic rendering of his Renaissance contemporaries. In the Salvator, Christ’s long curls glisten with highlights of varying intensity as they catch the light. Amidst the best-preserved strands on the right you will find a double helix, a shape that we find in Leonardo’s drawings of coiled ropes, machines and waterfalls. In his notebooks he wrote of the similarities between the way hair fell and water flowed. There were ‘two motions, of which one responds to the weight of the strands of hair and the other to the direction of the curls; thus the water makes turning eddies, which in part respond to the impetus of the principal current, while the other responds to the incidental motion of deflection’.

      These curls may also be carnal. Leonardo’s notebooks contain sketches of curly-haired boys, which are often said to be portraits of his teenage assistant and almost certainly his lover, Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, whom Leonardo nicknamed Salai, or ‘mischievous one’. In April 1476, a week before his twenty-fourth birthday, Leonardo was arrested by the zealous Florentine vice squad, which patrolled the city streets at night. The accusation was of sodomy with a male prostitute, though the artist was acquitted.

      All these elements cohere in the sfumato style in which the painting is executed. While

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