LEONARDO 457
haired Medusa.[1] Lastly, Leonardo is related to have modelled in clay and cast in plaster, about this time, several heads of smiling women and children. In addition to these labours and researches, he was full of new ideas concerning both the laws and the applications of mechanical forces. His architectural and engineering projects were of a daring which amazed even the fellow-citizens of Alberti and Brunelleschi. History presents few figures more attractive to the mind's eye than that of Leonardo during this period of his all-capable and dazzling youth. There was nothing about him, as there was afterwards about Michelangelo, dark-tempered, secret, or morose; he was open and genial with all men. From time to time, indeed, he might shut himself up for a season in complete intellectual absorption, as when he toiled among his bats and wasps and lizards, forgetful of rest and food, and insensible to the noisomeness of their corruption; but anon we hive to picture him as 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; or anon 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 spell-bound while he expatiated on his plan for lifting the venerable baptistery of St John, the bel San Giovanni of Dante, up bodily from its foundations, and planting it anew on a stately basement of marble. Unluckily it is to the written biographies 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.
The interval between 1480 and 1487 is one during which the movements of our master are obscure, and can only be told conjecturally. Up to the former date we know with certainty that he was working at Florence, under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici. By the latter date he had definitively passed into the service of Duke Ludovico Sforza, called il Moro, at Milan. The main determining cause of his removal would seem to have been his selection by Ludovico for the task of erecting a great memorial statue in bronze to the honour of his victorious father, the condottiere Francesco Sforza. The project of such a monument had been already entertained by the last duke, Ludovico's elder brother. After Ludovico had possessed himself of the regency in 1480, he appears to have revived the scheme, and to have invited various artists to compete for its execution. One who complied with the invitation was the Florentine Antonio del Pollaiuolo, by whom a sketch for the monument is still preserved at Munich. It would seem as if the competition had been won by Leonardo, but a considerable time had been allowed to elapse before the work was actually put in hand. The question then arises, Was it during this period of postponement that Leonardo went on his mysterious travels to the East? The earlier biographers know nothing of these travels; recent investigation of Leonardo's MSS. has brought them to light. It has been not inaptly conjectured that the speculations of transcendental Platonism, which absorbed at this time the thoughts and the conversation of the Medicean circle, were uncongenial to the essentially experimental cast of Leonardo's mind, and that he was not sorry to escape from the atmosphere of Florence. At any rate his devouring curiosity would have made welcome the opportunity of enlarging his knowledge of men and countries by Eastern travel, even at the cost, which to one of his freethinking habits would not have been great, of a temporary compliance with Islamite observances. Certain it is that he took service as engineer with the sultan of "Babylon," which in the geographical nomenclature of those days meant Cairo, and in the course of his mission visited Egypt, Cyprus, Constantinople, the coasts of Asia Minor, especially the Cilician region about Mount Taurus, and Armenia. This biographical discovery adds to the career of Leonardo a characteristic touch of adventurous and far-sought experience. Perhaps it was his acquaintance with the Levant which made him adopt the Oriental mode of writing from right to left, a habit which some of his biographers have put down to his love of mystification, and others explain more simply by the fact (to which his friend Luca Pacioli bears explicit testimony) that he was left-handed. The probable date of Leonardo's Eastern travels falls between 1480 and 1483-84. By the last-named year, if not sooner, he was certainly back in Florence, whence he wrote to Ludovico il Moro at Milan a letter making him the formal offer of his services. The draught of this letter is still extant. It does not altogether tally with the statements of the earliest biographers, that Leonardo was recommended by Lorenzo de' Medici to the duke regent particularly for his accomplishments in music. Vasari indeed says expressly that Leonardo was the bearer to Ludovico of a lyre of his invention, ingeniously fashioned of silver in the form of a horse's head. In the autograph draft of the letter, to which we have referred, Leonardo rests his own title to patronage chiefly on his capabilities in military engineering. After explaining these under nine different heads, he speaks under a tenth of his proficiency as a civil engineer and architect, and adds 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. We shall probably be safe in fixing between the years 1484 and 1485 as the date of his definitive removal to Milan.
From this time for the next fourteen or fifteen years (until the summer of 1499) Leonardo continued, with very brief intervals of absence, to reside in high favour and continual employment at the court of Ludovico il Moro. His occupations were as manifold as his capacities. He superintended the construction of military engines, and seems to have been occasionally present at sieges and on campaigns. He devised and carried out works of irrigation and other engineering schemes in the territory of the duchy. He designed a cupola for the cathedral of Milan, and was consulted on the works of Certosa of Pavia. He managed with ingenuity and splendour the masques, pageants, and ceremonial shows and festivals of the court. Withal he continued incessantly to accumulate observations and speculations in natural philosophy, working especially at anatomy with Marcantonio clella Torre, and at geometry and optics with Fra Luca Pacioli, for whose book De Divina Proportione, he designed the figures. He made excursions into the Alps, and studied and drew with minute fidelity the distribution and formation of the mountain masses. He was placed at the head of a school or "Academy" of arts and sciences, where he gathered about him a number of distinguished colleagues and eager disciples. His pupils in painting included the sons of several noble families of the city and territory.
Among the more immediate scholars of Leonardo may be mentioned Antonio Boltraffio, Marco d'Opgionno, Gian Petrino, and
- ↑ A picture of this subject at the Uffizi still does duty for the original of Leonardo, but is in all likelihood merely the production of some later artist to whom the descriptions of his work have given the cue. In like manner, the Madonna in the Borghese gallery at Rome, in which occurs the motive of a bottle beaded with drops of dew, though it may well be the same painting which Vasari admired in the possession of Clement VII., is unquestionably the work, not of Leonardo, to whom Vasari ascribes it, but of his fellow-pupil Lorenzo di Credi. Altogether spurious, it may here be said, is the small Madonna which is made to pass for an early work of Leonardo in the gallery at Dresden.
