Free Leonardo da Vinci by Anna Abraham

 

    By this time Ludovico was Duke of Milan by title as well as force. His nephew Gian Galeazzo had died in 1494 - amid widespread suspicion that Ludovico had poisoned him - and Ludovico was proclaimed duke the next day. But Italy was in turmoil. The French king, Charles VIII, was capitalizing on rivalry among the city-states to claim weak territories. With French troops camped outside Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s son and successor, Piero, had signed a treaty granting the French control of Pisa and several other towns. The outraged Florentines had overthrown the Medicis, opening the way for the charismatic Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola to set up a puritanical theocracy featuring “bonfires of the vanities,” which were fueled by paintings, books, and anything else deemed corrupt or heretical.
    Charles VIII was obviously eager to expand his realm; nevertheless, Ludovico kept up his alliance with the French king, ignoring the fact that one of the French generals, the Duc d’Orleans, was the grandson of a Visconti and thus had a claim to the dukedom of Milan.
    Political machinations aside, Leonardo was established as Ludovico’s favorite artist and enjoyed his patronage; estimates of Leonardo’s annual income range from an adequate 500 ducats to a princely 2,000. But Leonardo was not above grumbling. He complained in a letter that he hadn’t received payments: “If your Lordship thought I had money, your Lordship was deceived . . . It vexes me greatly that . . . my having to earn a living has forced me to interrupt the work on “The Last Supper” and to attend to lesser matters instead of following up the work which your Lordship entrusted to me.”
    When Leonardo finished the mural, Ludovico gave him three acres of land outside the city walls with a house, garden, and vineyard. It was a refuge from the heat and clamor of Milan, and Leonardo cherished it.
    After “The Last Supper , ”Leonardo had two years of comparative tranquility. He puttered in his garden, hobnobbed with cronies, and embarked on remodeling and redecorating the north wing of the ducal palace, which Ludovico turned into his private quarters after his duchess, Beatrice d’Este, died in childbirth. At the age of forty-five, Leonardo’s mind was as busy as ever, and a compatible mind arrived in Venice in the body of Fra Luca Pacioli , a scholar in mathematics and philosophy, who soon became Leonardo’s friend. Leonardo provided the intricate geometrical illustrations for Pacioli’s book, Divina Proportione , including a drawing of a dodecahedron with shadings that make it nearly three-dimensional.
    Leonardo was also at least toying with the notion of starting his own academy, a group of intellectuals that might have included the architect Donato Bramante, the court poet Gasparè Visconti, the architect Giacomo Andrea, and the physician Giuliano da Marliano. Scholars differ on whether such an academy was actually organized, but it exists in Leonardo’s notes along with elaborate drawings of knot designs that spell out variations of “Academia Leonardo Vinci.”
    This interlude for Leonardo was destined to be brief: Ludovico and the Sforza dynasty were about to be toppled. Early in 1499, the French were preparing to invade Italy. Charles VIII had died, and new King Louis XII , the former Duc d’Orleans, was determined to add Milan to his possessions. French troops crossed the border into Italy in May, and by late July, they neared Ludovico’s territory.
    From his notebook, we can reconstruct a vivid picture of Leonardo preparing his studio for the arrival of looting soldiers. He counted the money in his cashbox: 1,180 lire, which he divided into packets and wrapped in paper, hiding them in nooks and crannies around the studio, and putting the small change back in the cashbox where it could easily be found. In late July, he observed another kind of preparation: “In the park of the Duke of Milan I saw a 700 pound cannon-ball shot from