Leonardo da Vinci Read Free

including “The Last Supper” and perhaps the splendid central portion of the “Battle of Anghiari” and the unfinished portrait of Isabella d’Este. When Leonardo and his household arrived in Rome in October 1513, Giuliano assigned architects to alter a suite of apartments for the artist in the Villa Belvedere, the pope’s summer palace.
    Rome was then a city of 50,000, considerably smaller than Milan, but notorious for the corruption of the papal court and the licentiousness of the clergy. There were plenty of artists in residence, many of them well known to Leonardo, including Bramante, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo’s former pupil Atalante Migliorotti, but Leonardo’s notebooks contain no record of his friends or of his social life during his two years there.
    His notebooks do contain various other correspondence. There are drafts of letters Leonardo wrote trying to persuade papal officials to cough up the benefice owed to his half-brother Giuliano, with whom he was now reconciled. There is also a letter to Giuliano da Vinci from his wife, Alessandra, which Giuliano evidently gave Leonardo because of a line in it: “I forgot to ask you to remember me to your brother Leonardo, a most excellent and singular man.” And there is a grumpy letter from Leonardo to Giuliano de’ Medici, complaining of an ungrateful, unruly, and deceitful German assistant, Giorgio, who had been subverted by another German, Johann the mirror-maker. Leonardo wrote that Johann, jealous of Leonardo’s influence with Giuliano, had talked Giorgio into abandoning the workshop Leonardo had given him and had taken it over for his own mirror works.
    Leonardo was exploring what would now be called solar power, the use of parabolic mirrors to focus the sun’s rays; he was struck by the fact that a mirror can reflect heat without absorbing it. He was also busy dissecting corpses again, probably at the hospital of Santo Spirito. Here again, he complained that the spiteful Johann had “hindered me in anatomy, denouncing it before the Pope and also at the Hospital.” Nonetheless, some of Leonardo’s most notable anatomical drawings – especially his studies of fetuses in the womb – date from this period.
    The notebooks record the ever-questing scope of Leonardo’s mind. He spent hours over geometric equations and drew long series of “lunes,” figures containing variable spaces formed by intersecting arcs of circles. He experimented in acoustics and hunted for fossils; he recorded bits of his household expenses in the coinage of Rome: “Salai: 20 giuli; for the house: 12 giuli.” His obsession with water continued in half a dozen texts pondering “The Deluge,” which he may have meant to be part of the great treatise on painting that he never wrote or as preparation for actually painting a great flood. “Broken trees loaded with people,” he wrote. “Ships broken in pieces, smashed against rocks. Flocks of sheep; hailstones, thunderbolts, whirlwinds. . . . Hills covered with men, women and animals, and lightning from the clouds illuminating everything.”
    With these musings, he left a series of ten drawings in black chalk, depicting the grand sweep and ferocious details of a great flood of water – torrents, erupting waves, vortices and tunnels of water, giant waterspouts, devouring whirlpools, the shattering impact of monstrous waves. Together, the drawings are a tour de force, an effort both to understand and to depict the full fury of nature. Such a painting would have been an even more ambitious project than his attempt to show the horror of war in the Battle of Anghiari .
    But the aging Leonardo - his beard turning white and his eyes needing spectacles – didn’t paint it. In a letter to Giuliano de’ Medici, who was suffering from consumption, he mentioned an unspecified “malady” that may have been a minor stroke; a visitor in 1517 noted that Leonardo’s right hand was paralyzed. That wouldn’t have hindered the