Free Leonardo da Vinci by Anna Abraham Page A

a height of one braccia . It bounced twenty-eight times, the length of each bounce having the same proportion to the previous one as the height of each bounce had to the next.”
    Some of Ludovico’s allies were defecting, and his political foes whipped up a riot in which his treasurer was killed. On September 2, the duke fled the city, hoping for help from the Emperor Maximilian in Innsbruck. Four days later, the French took over Milan. There was no resistance.
    Leonardo apparently tried to ingratiate himself with the French during the six weeks that the king stayed in Milan. He kept a coded note reminding himself to get in touch with the Comte de Ligny, whom he had met before, and another from an unidentified person urging him to “produce as soon as possible the report on conditions in Florence, especially the manner and style in which the reverend father Friar Jeronimo [Savonarola] has organized the state of Florence.”
    But in December, Leonardo made plans to leave the city. The French had left, and Ludovico’s people said the duke was coming back with Swiss mercenaries and the backing of the emperor. It would hardly be prudent for a man who had collaborated with the occupiers to stick around to greet the patron he had failed to defend. His list of to-do notes, beginning with “Have two boxes made,” concludes a bit bleakly, “Sell what you cannot take with you.” So, after eighteen years and the completion of some of his greatest works, Leonardo left Milan.

 

    Isabella d’Este wanted desperately to be Leonardo’s next patron. Her family was one of Italy’s oldest and most distinguished. Isabella was one of the three d’Este siblings whose marriages in 1491 cemented a new set of alliances in northern Italy. She began her collection with gems, intaglios, and cameos, but branched into busts and small sculptures and soon began commissioning paintings. In 1498, she had written, somewhat imperiously, to Cecilia Gallerani, asking to borrow Leonardo’s “Lady with an Ermine,” so that she could compare it with a portrait by Giovanni Bellini. (The request was a bit indelicate, since Cecilia was well-known to be the mistress of her sister’s husband.) Isabella was filling two large display rooms in her palace with her growing collection, which included two large allegories by Andrea Mantegna, two by Lorenzo Costa, and one by Perugino. But she had no paintings by Leonardo, and she badly wanted one.
    Leonardo was probably accepting a standing invitation when he left Milan for Mantua in December 1499, and while he was Isabella’s guest that winter, he did a drawing of her. It shows a proud, aristocratic woman, past her prime, with the air of someone accustomed to getting her way. Shown in profile, the rendering bears a marked resemblance to a portrait of her sister Beatrice by Ambrogio de Predis.
    The atmosphere in Isabella’s court may not have been entirely simpatico . Although considered intelligent, she was also strong-willed and capricious; when her lapdog died, court poets were called on to write tributes to it both in Latin and Italian. In any case, by mid-March, Leonardo was in Venice, and Lorenzo Guznago, a musician from Ferrara, visited him in his lodgings there and wrote a letter to Isabella reporting that her portrait was coming along splendidly – “very true to nature and beautifully done. It couldn’t possibly be better.”
    While in Venice, Leonardo studied copperplate engraving and was busy with major works of engineering. His notes indicate that he was hired by the Venetian Senate to look into fortifying the Isonzo River, in the Friuli region northeast of the city, to ward off a Turkish invasion.
    Leonardo learned of Ludovico Sforza’s last chapter in Milan. Troops loyal to the duke under Galeazzo Sanseverino had entered the city, but Ludovico’s army of Swiss mercenaries was routed, and he was captured and imprisoned. Leonardo’s note was laconic: “The duke lost his state, and his