Leonardo da Vinci Read Free Page B

household only from time to time after that. In Amboise, the king gave Leonardo a home, an elegant manor-house half a mile from the royal residence, together with a generous pension. From then on, Leonardo was to be formally titled the paintre du Roi . He was also to be the king’s friend.
    Francis was a tall, vigorous man, with a wide-ranging curiosity and an enormous nose. He was also charming, with a reputation as a ladies’ man. The Italian traveler Antonio de Beatis wrote that Francis “is lascivious and enjoys entering the gardens of others to drink different waters.” Francis was overwhelmed by Leonardo, and not only for his artistic talents. Benvenuto Cellini , who worked for Francis years later, wrote that the king “was completely besotted” with Leonardo’s mind “and took such pleasure in hearing him discourse that there were few days in the year when he was parted from him, which was one of the reasons why Leonardo did not manage to pursue to the end his miraculous studies.” Cellini said Francis told him “he could never believe there was another man born in this world who knew as much as Leonardo, and not only of sculpture, painting and architecture, and that he was truly a great philosopher.”
    Now sixty-five, Leonardo was looking and feeling older; the great self-portrait now in the Biblioteca Reale in Turin shows him white-haired and stooped, with a deeply lined face and a thousand-yard stare, but still alert and on the lookout for a new idea. He spent much of his time rearranging his papers and making geometrical studies and sketches of moving water. Occasionally, he would still draw a striking face or a floor plan. But in 1517, he told the visiting Antonio de Beatis that he had stopped painting. (It was Beatis, traveling with Cardinal Luigi of Aragon, who recorded Leonardo’s story of the “Mona Lisa” being commissioned by Giuliano de’ Medici.)
    Leonardo did launch a major project for the king: plans for a huge new palace complex at Romorantin , some thirty miles to the east of Amboise, and a network of canals to be built between the Loire and the Saone . None of this got built, but Leonardo’s drawings of the palace resembled the “ideal city” he first visualized in Milan thirty years before.
    He also had a fresh, enthusiastic audience for his talents as an impresario, and he provided a series of tableaus, masques, and pageants for Francis and his court. Back in Mantua, Isabella d’Este still kept tabs on Leonardo, and she got a lavish description of the triumphal arch he set up for a double feast marking the baptism of the king’s first son and the wedding of the royal niece to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, now Duke of Florence. For a pageant honoring Francis’ victory at the Battle of Marignano, Leonardo rigged huge mortars to fire inflated balloons that drifted down on the entranced audience and bounced merrily on the ground. In 1518, Leonardo threw a party of his own for the king in the gardens of his manor house, with a vast canopy of blue cloth spangled with golden stars hanging over the royal dais. The show repeated the Paradiso Leonardo had first conjured up in 1490, with actors representing the planets and hundreds of torches blazing.
    We will leave him there, master of the revels, pleased with the impact of his pageant and the delight of his royal guest. Leonardo lived for another year, apparently in failing health; he drew up his will in April 1519, leaving his papers to the faithful Melzi, his Milanese garden to Salai, a fur-lined cloak to his housekeeper, and a remembrance for his half-brothers in Florence.
    Leonardo da Vinci died on May 2, 1519, sixty-seven years old. According to Vasari, King Francis held his dying friend in his arms and propped up his head in the final moments, a scene portrayed in two romanticized nineteenth-century French paintings. But considering that a royal proclamation was issued in a town two days’ ride from Amboise at the time of