The da Vinci Legacy. Jean-Pierre Isbouts
Leonardo, even when he was a young prodigy at the studio of his master Andrea del Verrocchio. For this, Leonardo blamed his lack of a formal education; as everyone knew, Lorenzo de’ Medici was a notorious snob. Now that the Medicis had captured the throne of St. Peter, Leonardo’s chance of matching the fame and glory of his competitors was receding by the day.
When his only patron, Giuliano de’ Medici, died in March of 1516, after a long battle with tuberculosis, Leonardo knew that the writing was on the wall. His last patron in Italy was gone. He would have died a pauper, unmourned and unloved, if a king from another country, François I, had not come to his rescue. The French king was kind enough to offer the ailing artist a comfortable place of retirement, not far from his own palace of Amboise on the Loire River. And so Leonardo removed himself from the beating heart of the Renaissance, the papal court in Rome. As it happened, it was the same summer of 1516 when Raphael reached the apex of his fame with Woman with a Veil (its pose slyly copied from Leonardo’s Mona Lisa), and Michelangelo carved the first figures for his monumental Tomb of Pope Julius II.
Few courtiers in Rome noticed Leonardo’s departure. He was simply an old man whose time had come and gone. Ensconced in a villa in Amboise, bent by age and felled by a stroke, Leonardo waited patiently until death carried him away on the night of May 2, 1519. Many of his notebooks, compiled over the course of his long career, were lost to the four corners of the earth.
That is where the story of Leonardo da Vinci should have ended. Except that it did not.
Today, Leonardo da Vinci is the most celebrated artist in the world. His Mona Lisa, the portrait of a pretty Florentine housewife, is routinely cited as the most famous painting around the globe. In addition to museums like the Uffizi and the Louvre, countless “da Vinci museums” have sprung up in recent years, featuring reconstructions of Leonardo’s intricate machines, including designs for a tank, a bicycle, a mortar, and a parachute. Special exhibits of his paintings, such as the blockbuster London exhibit Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan in 2012, are able to attract millions of visitors. The Louvre, for example, reports that the Mona Lisa alone typically draws nine million visitors per year.
The same is true for popular literature about the artist. Dan Brown’s fictional thriller, The Da Vinci Code, became one of the all-time best sellers in 2003, with an estimated eighty million copies sold worldwide to date. And in 2017, a book about Leonardo da Vinci by Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson zoomed to the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list.
How did this happen? Where does all this da Vinci mania come from? Why, exactly five hundred years after his passing as a recluse in a remote French villa, is Leonardo one of the leading pop icons of our day? And why did more than one thousand buyers, critics, and journalists cram themselves into an auction room at Christie’s to see a painting that had been dismissed as a copy only twelve years earlier?
This book is the first to try to unravel this mystery—a mystery that is quite possibly the last remaining enigma about this elusive genius. What strange phenomenon intervened to make sure that Leonardo was not relegated to the dusty pages of history, like so many other talented artists of the Renaissance? How did his mystique as a solitary genius survive five centuries of European history, and why does it continue to fascinate us in modern times?
To answer this question, we will embark on a journey—a long and fascinating journey that begins in a manor in Amboise in France in 1517, and ends in a packed auction room at Christie’s, one balmy evening in November 2017.
1 . Giorgio Vasari, “Lionardo da Vinci,” in Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti; 1568 Edition.
1. Leonardo in Amboise
1.
Leonardo in Amboise
If there is one thing we know without question, it is that Leonardo always had a strong affection for the French, and they for him. We might think that’s no surprise, given the reputation of France as a mecca for art, architecture, music, and good food. Who would not want to spend his retirement in a beautiful home near the river Loire, an area known throughout the world for being home to some of the country’s most famous vineyards?
That may be true today, but it was not the case in the early 16th century. Through much of the Middle Ages, it was actually the court of Bourgogne (Burgundy) that had led French culture, in art as well as poetry and music. Here, for example, was the birthplace of a new form of music, a beautiful polyphonic style developed by renowned composers such as Gilles Binchois and Guillaume Dufay. But in the 14th century, France was devastated by the Black Death, which wiped out a third of the nation’s population. This was followed by the even more devastating Hundred Years’ War, pitting the English House of Plantagenet against the French House of Valois, in which Joan of Arc played such a prominent role.
As a result, by the dawn of the 16th century, France was a mere shadow of its former self. Many of its artists and architects still labored in the Gothic style, rather than embracing the exciting new impulses from Greco-Roman art that had produced the Italian Renaissance. France, in sum, was in danger of losing its place as one of the leading cultural centers of Europe.
The French king Louis XII, who came to power in 1498—just as Leonardo neared completion of the Last Supper in Milan—was very much aware of the problem. It was this king who fell under the spell of Leonardo’s art after his armies captured the duchy of Milan in 1499. The king used his emissaries to commission a Madonna painting from Leonardo in 1501 (possibly the Madonna of the Yarnwinder), and then ordered a full-size copy of the Last Supper, painted on canvas.2 So close was Leonardo’s relationship to the French court that the king began to refer to him as “nostre peintre et ingénieur ordinaire,” proclaiming Leonardo the court’s official artist and engineer.
But before the relationship between Leonardo and his French admirer could blossom, Louis XII died on January 1, 1515, succumbing to an aggravated case of gout, a form of inflammatory arthritis that was a very common cause of death in those days. Worse, the king had no male heir to succeed him. By papal consent he had annulled the marriage to his first wife, Joan, Duchesse de Berry, because of her reported sterility—a case that was later avidly studied by King Henry VIII of England, in his attempt to secure a papal annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Louis had then eagerly tied the knot with Anne of Brittany, the widow of his cousin Charles VIII, so as to bring Brittany under the sway of the French crown and produce a needed heir. Anne gave birth to two daughters, but was unable to present her husband with the desired crown prince. She then died in 1514, one year before Louis, who reportedly loved her to distraction.
The death of Louis XII left his son-in-law and cousin, François, as the only plausible successor. Indeed, at the tender age of four, François had already inherited the title of Duke of Valois. He had a strong claim to the throne if Louis XII’s marriage to Anne of Brittany remained without male issue, as indeed was the case. François’s own marriage to Anne’s daughter, Claude, could only solidify his claim.
Fortunately, the young king was the product of a new age in France. By the end of the 15th century, most French artists and architects were ready to admit that French culture had been overtaken by the avant-garde of the Italian Renaissance. This was the reason why Louis XII had decided to order a life-size copy of the Last Supper. In his mind, no other painting so captured the astonishing accomplishments of the Renaissance than this monumental work. King François, his successor, proceeded a step further by making the development of an authentic French Renaissance style a matter of state policy. As a young man, he had been indoctrinated in new humanist theories by his tutors, Christophe de Longueil, a humanist from Brabant, and François Desmoulins de Rochefort. As a result, the new king was determined to bring France into the fold of the Renaissance, but on a more systemic basis. He devised a comprehensive strategy to attract Italian artists, sculptors, and architects to France so they could inculcate the new Renaissance style into the fabric of French artistic life. It was during François’s reign, for example, that the French court began to amass the huge collection of Italian art that eventually filled the Louvre Museum.
It was therefore most fortuitous that in October 1515, Pope Leo X decided to invite