bats and wasps and lizards, forgetful of rest and food, and insensible to the noisomeness of their corruption. But we have to picture him as anon coming out and gathering about him a tatterdemalion company, and jesting with them until they were in fits of laughter, for the sake of observing their burlesque physiognomies; anon as eagerly frequenting the society of men of science and learning of an older generation like the mathematician Benedetto Aritmetico, the physician, geographer and astronomer Paolo Toscanelli, the famous Greek Aristotelian Giovanni Argiropoulo; or as out-rivalling all the youth of the city now by charm of recitation, now by skill in music and now by feats of strength and horsemanship; or as stopping to buy caged birds in the market that he might set them free and watch them rejoicing in their flight; or again as standing radiant in his rose-coloured cloak and his rich gold hair among the throng of young and old on the piazza, and holding them spellbound while he expatiated on the great projects in art and mechanics that were teeming in his mind. Unluckily it is to written records and to imagination that we have to trust exclusively for our picture. No portrait of Leonardo as he appeared during this period of his life has come down to us.
But his far-reaching schemes and studies brought him no immediate gain, and diverted him from the tasks by which he should have supported himself. For all his shining power and promise he remained poor. Probably also his exclusive belief in experimental methods, and slight regard for mere authority whether in science or art made the intellectual atmosphere of the Medicean circle, with its passionate mixed cult of the classic past and of a Christianity mystically blended and reconciled with Platonism, uncongenial to him. At any rate he was ready to leave Florence when the chance was offered him of fixed service at the court of Ludovico Sforza (il Moro) at Milan. Soon after that prince had firmly established his power as nominal guardian and protector of his nephew Gian Galeazzo but really as usurping ruler of the state, he revived a project previously mooted for the erection of an equestrian monument in honour of the founder of his house’s greatness, Francesco Sforza, and consulted Lorenzo dei Medici on the choice of an artist. Lorenzo recommended the young Leonardo, who went to Milan accordingly (at some uncertain date in or about 1483), taking as a gift from Lorenzo and a token of his own skill a silver lute of wondrous sweetness fashioned in the likeness of a horse’s head. Hostilities were at the moment imminent between Milan and Venice; it was doubtless on that account that in the letter commending himself to the duke, and setting forth his own capacities, Leonardo rests his title to patronage chiefly on his attainments and inventions in military engineering. After asserting these in detail under nine different heads, he speaks under a tenth of his proficiency as a civil engineer and architect, and adds lastly a brief paragraph with reference to what he can do in painting and sculpture, undertaking in particular to carry out in a fitting manner the monument to Francesco Sforza.
The first definite documentary evidence of Leonardo’s employments at Milan dates from 1487. Some biographers have supposed that the interval, or part of it, between 1483 and that date was occupied by travels in the East. The grounds of the supposition are some drafts occurring among his MSS. of a letter addressed to the diodario or diwâdar of Syria, lieutenant of the sultan of Babylon (Babylon meaning according to a usage of that time Cairo). In these drafts Leonardo describes in the first person, with sketches, a traveller’s strange experiences in Egypt, Cyprus, Constantinople, the Cilician coasts about Mount Taurus and Armenia. He relates the rise and persecution of a prophet and preacher, the catastrophe of a falling mountain and submergence of a great city, followed by a general inundation, and the claim of the prophet to have foretold these disasters; adding physical descriptions of the Euphrates river and the marvellous effects of sunset light on the Taurus range. No contemporary gives the least hint of Leonardo’s having travelled in the East; to the places he mentions he gives their classical and not their current Oriental names; the catastrophes he describes are unattested from any other source; he confuses the Taurus and the Caucasus; some of the phenomena he mentions are repeated from Aristotle and Ptolemy; and there seems little reason to doubt that these passages in his MSS. are merely his drafts of a projected geographical treatise or perhaps romance. He had a passion for geography and travellers’ tales, for descriptions of natural wonders and ruined cities, and was himself a practised fictitious narrator and fabulist, as other passages in his MSS. prove. Neither is the gap in the account of his doings after he first went to the court of Milan really so complete as has been represented. Ludovico was vehemently denounced and attacked during the earlier years of his usurpation, especially by the partisans of his sister-in-law Bona of Savoy, the mother of the rightful duke, young Gian Galeazzo. To repel these attacks he employed the talents of a number of court poets and artists, who in public recitation and pageant, in emblematic picture and banner and device, proclaimed the wisdom and kindness of his guardianship and the wickedness of his assailants. That Leonardo was among the artists thus employed is proved both by notes and projects among his MSS. and by allegoric sketches still extant. Several such sketches are at Christ Church, Oxford: one shows a horned hag or she-fiend urging her hounds to an attack on the state of Milan, and baffled by the Prudence and Justice of Il Moro (all this made clear by easily recognizable emblems). The allusion must almost certainly be to the attempted assassination of Ludovico by agents of the duchess Bona in 1484. Again, it must have been the pestilence decimating Milan in 1484–1485 which gave occasion to the projects submitted by Leonardo to Ludovico for breaking up the city and reconstructing it on improved sanitary principles. To 1485–1486 also appears to belong the inception of his elaborate though unfulfilled architectural plans for beautifying and strengthening the Castello, the great stronghold of the ruling power in the state. Very soon afterwards he must have begun work upon his plans and models, undertaken during an acute phase of the competition which the task had called forth between German and Italian architects, for another momentous enterprise, the completion of Milan cathedral. Extant records of payments made to him in connexion with these architectural plans extend from August 1487 to May 1490: in the upshot none of them was carried out. From the beginning of his residence with Ludovico his combination of unprecedented mechanical ingenuity with apt allegoric invention and courtly charm and eloquence had made him the directing spirit in all court ceremonies and festivities. On the occasion of the marriage of the young duke Gian Galeazzo with Isabella of Aragon in 1487, we find Leonardo devising all the mechanical and spectacular part of a masque of Paradise; and presently afterwards designing a bathing pavilion of unheard-of beauty and ingenuity for the young duchess. Meanwhile he was filling his note-books as busily as ever with the results of his studies in statics and dynamics, in human anatomy, geometry and the phenomena of light and shade. It is probable that from the first he had not forgotten his great task of the Sforza monument, with its attendant researches in equine movement and anatomy, and in the science and art of bronze casting on a great scale. The many existing sketches for the work (of which the chief collection is at Windsor) cannot be distinctly dated. In 1490, the seventh year of his residence at Milan, after some expressions of impatience on the part of his patron, he had all but got his model ready for display on the occasion of the marriage of Ludovico with Beatrice d’Este, but at the last moment was dissatisfied with what he had done and determined to begin all over again.
In the same year, 1490, Leonardo enjoyed some months of uninterrupted mathematical and physical research in the libraries and among the learned men of Pavia, whither he had been called to advise on some architectural difficulties concerning the cathedral. Here also the study of an ancient equestrian monument (the so-called Regisole, destroyed in 1796) gave him fresh ideas for his Francesco Sforza. In January 1491 a double Sforza-Este marriage (Ludovico Sforza himself with Beatrice d’Este, Alfonso d’Este with Anna Sforza the sister of Gian
