Feinberg L.J. The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence
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8. Early Participation in the Medici Court 57
Figure 16.
Andrea del Verrocchio
and Leonardo da Vinci,
Study for a Joust Standard
for Giuliano de’ Medici,
1474–75,penand
ink over black chalk,
Florence, Uffizi,
Gabinetto Disegni e
Stampe. Art Resource.
The particular shape of the standard was derived, ultimately, from
the labarum or flag of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, whose
pennant was well known from the carved medallions on his triumphal
arch in Rome. Botticelli provided Giuliano with a similar banner (also
lost), featuring the goddess Pallas Athena. Grasping a lance and the
shield of Medusa, she stood in a white gown before a flowery meadow,
with a restrained Cupid nearby, bound by golden cords. All of this we
learn from a poem by Poliziano, which also notes that Pallas Athena
was shown trampling the flames of love before they could kindle the
olive branches at her feet, presumably a reference to her unassailable
purity. Known only to the poet and the patron, the full meaning of
Botticelli’s standard, like Verrocchio’s, was intentionally made elusive,
poetic secrets for Giuliano to savor.
Handsome as they were, the standards must have been almost
lost among the fancy costumes, some encrusted with twenty pounds
of pearls and fitted with billowing capes, damascened armor, and
caparisoned horses in the Piazza Santa Croce, and in the hoopla of
the twenty-two-year-old Giuliano’s predetermined victory, for which
he was awarded an ornate helmet designed by Verrocchio. He rode
triumphantly at the end of a long procession of gallant cavalrymen
and footmen, as a sharp fanfare of horns embroidered the air. The
more important prize eluded him, however; he could only watch
58 The Young Leonardo
from a distance as the woman he desired, Simonetta Cattaneo, the
consumptive, dying young wife of Marco Vespucci, was honored in
the festivities as the “Queen of Beauty.” Hopelessly unattainable, she
was the perfect, chivalric object of unrequited love. Verrocchio and
Leonardo, of insufficient social stature to partake in the ceremonies,
could only have observed the ritualized, poignant drama from the
sidelines. Despite its contrivance, this play of manners, performed long
before opera, would have just as effectively brought the spectators to
tears.
Thus, like Lorenzo’s joust of 1469, held in honor of his bride-to-
be Clarice Orsini, Giuliano’s event was mainly a pretext for courtship
and magnificent self-indulgence. So that there would be no con-
fusion about the former motive, Botticelli’s standard was inscribed
in gold Gothic letters with the French motto la sans par, “the lady
without peer,” in reference to Simonetta, and the figure of Pallas
Athena markedly resembled her. A couple of years before, in 1473,
with similarly amorous intentions, a certain young Florentine named
Bartolomeo Benci, accompanied by a retinue of eight colleagues and
thirty attendants, had serenaded his lady, Marietta, and then had orga-
nized a joust beneath her balcony (as she pretended to be besieged in a
castle). His associates later provided the same entertainments for their
girlfriends, who were probably impressed as well by the car their min-
ions led. This represented the Triumph of Love, a theme borrowed
from Petrarch, and featured mechanical, flying cupids and a bleed-
ing heart surrounded by flames. Although Giuliano’s own extravagant
production did not – could not – win him the spectrally beautiful
Simonetta, he lived long enough to see his mistress, Fioretta Gorini,
bear him a healthy son, Giulio, the future Pope Clement VII.
9. Leonardo’s Personality and Place
in Florentine Society
L
eonardo’s musings about romance, and about human
qualities, behavior, and failings, appear to have led to his un-
usual drawing of Phyllis Astride Aristotle (c. 1475–78), a scene of such
awkward folly that it anticipates the antiheroics of Shakespeare and
Rembrandt (fig. 17). The specific impetus for the study was probably
either a contemporary Florentine engraving or one of many circulat-
ing Northern European prints of the subject. According to legend,
the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, of steely mind but evidently
weak knees, allowed his beautiful young mistress, Phyllis, to ride on
his back in exchange for her favors.
In a cramped sketch of ungainly postures and forced perspective
(the furniture recedes too rapidly in space), Leonardo gently pokes
fun at his supreme intellectual mentor, who, on all fours, looks back
imploringly and shamefully at his dominatrix, in the general direction
of the bed that awaits them. For the good-humored Leonardo the
contrast between the realms of the intellect and the flesh made for fine
parody – a telling counterpoint to Michelangelo’s self-flaying paintings
and poems devoted to related themes of base carnality. Leonardo’s
bemused attitude toward heterosexual conduct is apparent in a remark
he later jotted in one of his notebooks: “the act of procreation and
everything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human
beings would soon die out if there were no pretty faces and sensuous
dispositions.”
Coincidentally, some of Leonardo’s own sexual peccadilloes were
revealed in the same period in which he sketched the compromised
Aristotle. In 1476, while still employed in Verrocchio’s shop, Leonardo
and three of his colleagues were accused, anonymously, of commit-
ting sodomy with a certain seventeen-year-old youth named Jacopo
59
60 The Young Leonardo
Saltarelli, an obliging apprentice in a goldsmith’s shop. If the alleged
acts had not been consensual, the Verrocchio gang would have been
indicted for a corporal or capital offense. Such charges are credible,
given the generally boisterous and promiscuous atmosphere of large
ateliers at that time and what we know of Leonardo’s later erotic
proclivities.
Homosexuality was regarded as an activity rather than an identity in
the Renaissance and for centuries thereafter, and the sexual preference
of many was, to say the least, fluid. Leonardo, however, appears to
have been fairly fixed in his desires; the relationship he later formed
with a young prot
´
eg
´
e, Gian Giacomo Caprotti, called Salai, endured
for decades. In any event, he and his coworkers seem not to have
suffered dire consequences for their behavior. Apparently, there was
no legal follow-up to the denunciations of the Verrocchio shop hands,
and, at that time, much greater dishonor fell on the person – probably
Saltarelli – who assumed the more passive role in such sexual escapades.
Leonardo remained in Verrocchio’s
´
equipe and continued his role of
favored collaborator for at least another two years.
One suspects that Leonardo’s disarming charm, as much as his
artistic talents, preserved his job and earned him the position of infor-
mal ringleader of the shop. Contemporary biographers say that he was
charismatic, with the graceful, unassuming manner of one to whom
all things come naturally and easily. His colleagues idolized him for
his leonine beauty, athletic physique and prowess, musical talents (he
sang and played the lira da braccio or “arm lyre”), and wit; and he seems
to have had no trouble in attracting younger, male companions. We
know that during his first period in Florence, he had a close rela-
tionship with a gentleman named Fioravante di Domenico, whom
Leonardo described in 1478 as his “most cherished” friend.
Word of his beauty and romantic preferences has caused a few
scholars to speculate that Leonardo may have had an intimate attach-
ment to Verrocchio, a lifelong bachelor. Some have further theorized
that the master modeled the lovely face of his bronze adolescent David
(created in the mid-1460s and now in the Bargello Museum, Florence)
on that of his attractive assistant. The exact nature of the two men’s
relationship will likely remain forever unknown. One should not draw
any conclusions from the fact that Leonardo resided for a period in
Verrocchio’s house because, as noted earlier, such master–assistant liv-
ing arrangements were not only common but typical. There is not,
9. Leonardo’s Personality and Place in Florentine Society 61
Figure 17.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Aristotle and Phyllis,
c. 1475–78,penand
ink on blue paper,
Hamburg, Kunsthalle.
Bildarchiv Preussis-
cher Kulturbesitz/Art
Resource, NY.
to my mind, an especially close correspondence between the David’s
profile and Leonardo’s, recorded in a red-chalk drawing at a more
advanced stage of life (fig. 18). Verrocchio had many suitable young
models from which to choose.
That profile study of Leonardo (now in the Royal Library, Windsor
Castle), probably created by his Milanese follower Francesco Melzi,
reveals how distinguished the master appeared in full maturity, with
refined, almost delicate, features and well-groomed beard. Leonardo
was no less fastidious in dress and was, perhaps, a little vain. We
learn that he frequently wore a dashing, rose-colored tunic, cut to
the knee, although longer garments were then in vogue. Although
immodestly revealing his strong, well-turned limbs, the shorter dress,
more significantly, was associated with princely courts. Leonardo was
almost certainly familiar with Diogenes Laertius’ then well-known
description of Aristotle, in the Lives of the Philosophers, as someone
who “indulged in very conspicuous dress” and who “used to groom
his hair carefully.” From the artist’s “shopping lists,” we know that he
kept his companion Salai nattily dressed as well – in silver cloth with
green velvet trim.
62 The Young Leonardo
Figure 18.
Francesco Melzi (?),
Profile Portrait of Leonardo
da Vinci,c.1510–12?,
red chalk, Windsor
Castle, Royal Library
(12726). The Royal
Collection
C
2010
Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth II.
Leonardo envisioned the genteel “ideal life” of a painter thus: “the
painter sits in front of his work at perfect ease. He is well dressed and
wields a very light brush dipped in delicate color. He adorns himself
with the clothes that he fancies; his home is clean and filled with
delightful pictures.” Socially disadvantaged by the illegitimacy and
geography of his birth, Leonardo would have dressed impeccably and
“fashion-forward” not only to fit into court life but also to compensate
for his plebeian background. In a general way, the stressed tidiness –
one could almost say “daintiness” – of his archetypal painter was meant
to play down the messy, physical aspects of his vocation, to present the
artist less as a craftsman in the mechanical arts (ars mechanica), a laborer
who works with his hands, and more as a thinker-designer, engaged in
the liberal arts (ars liberalis). The disheveled fellow with unruly hair and
9. Leonardo’s Personality and Place in Florentine Society 63
Figure 19.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Portrait of an Old Man,c.
1495–1505?, red chalk,
Turin, Biblioteca Reale
(15571). Alinari/Art
Resource, NY.
large, coarse features portrayed in the famous, presumed Self-Portrait
in Turin (fig. 19) and in other Leonardo drawings is obviously another
man.
Leonardo’s jocular, often self-deprecating attitude made it virtually
impossible for those he surpassed, which was practically everyone, to
envy or begrudge him. He seems to have heeded Aristotle’s advice
that “ironic persons who depreciate their own merits give an impres-
sion of superior refinement.” No doubt, such charm also allowed the
artist to dodge deadlines and responsibilities and, time and time again,
escape stern reproach. A tireless conjurer of riddles and, as we shall see,
64 The Young Leonardo
chronic punster, Leonardo could have diffused almost any difficult sit-
uation with a clever remark or joke. Examples of his jests, concerning
painting and reincarnation, can be found in his manuscripts:
A painter was asked why he had made his children so
ugly, when his painted figures, which were dead things
[inanimate], he had made so beautiful. His reply was that
he made his pictures by day and his children at night.
A man wishing to prove on the authority of [the ancient
Greek philosopher] Pythagoras that he had been in the
world on a former occasion, and another not allowing him
to conclude his argument, the first man said to the second:
“And as proof that I was here on a former occasion, I
remember that you were a miller.” The other, who felt
provoked by his words, agreed that it was true, for he
said he remembered the speaker had been the ass that had
carried flour for him.
On other pages, Leonardo offers tongue-in-cheek, apocalyptic
“prophecies” (profetie) of what were, actually, ordinary situations:
O cities of the sea, I behold in your citizens, women as well
as men, tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms
and legs by folk who will have no understanding of our
speech; and you will only be able to give vent to your grief
and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints,
and sighs, and lamentation one to another; for those who
bind you will not have understanding of your speech nor
will you understand them.
Leonardo refers, in this riddle, to infants wrapped in swaddling bands.
The high walls of mighty cities shall be seen inverted, in
their trenches
that is, the city walls are reflected in surrounding moats.
He seems to have possessed, in his small library, a copy of the Liber
Facetiarum,orBook of Jests (1451), by the Tuscan humanist Poggio
Bracciolini, which contained hundreds of funny anecdotes, puns, and
jokes, many of them off-color, and some that we, today, would term
“bathroom humor” – episodes of gentlefolk and clerics engaging in
9. Leonardo’s Personality and Place in Florentine Society 65
various sexual acts or irreverently passing wind. Like those of Poggio
(and Lorenzo the Magnificent), Leonardo’s jokes could occasionally
be lewd:
a woman crossing a treacherous and muddy place lifts up
her dress both in front and in back. Therefore, as she
touches both anus and vagina, she tells the truth three
times when she says “This is a difficult passage.”
Overinterpreted and overblown by Sigmund Freud, Leonardo’s
famous, reputed, youthful dream, in which a kite, a kind of hawk
(Freud called it a “vulture”), repeatedly thrust its tail into his mouth,
also may have been no more than a crude, private joke on the artist’s
part. Psychoanalysts now realize that a memory recounted from child-
hood is likely to be a legend. A claim to remember a childhood dream,
made by a very complex adult, would probably be a manipulation, or
even a perverse jest, rather than a straight story. Memories are altered
ineluctably each time they are recalled. The remnants of an early
dream (if it actually occurred) would have been wholly transformed
over the years.
Written on a sheet devoted to the aerodynamics of birds (specifi-
cally, their descent), the strange remark, alternatively, may have been
a not-so-veiled, hostile reference to his father, because, according to
the Fior di virt
`
u and Leonardo’s own rough draft for a bestiary, the
kite brutally attacks its own children out of envy and “keeps them
without food.” It would be easy, but irresponsible, for us to speculate
further on Leonardo’s relationship with his father; given the circum-
stances of the artist’s birth, his sexual activities, and, as we shall see,
his erratic work habits, there was certainly potential for familial con-
flict – potential, yet no clear evidence of it. That said, readings of the
purported dream as “homosexual fantasy” (Freud) or, more recently,
“homosexual anxiety” should also be considered with skepticism.