Leonardo Da Vinci by Charles Nicholl

Author:Charles Nicholl [Nicholl, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141944241
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

PART SIX

On the Move

1500–1506

Motion is the cause of all life.

Paris MS H, fol. 141r

MANTUA AND VENICE

Leonardo’s first port of call was Mantua, and the court of the young marchioness, Isabella d’Este. He had doubtless met her already in Milan: she was there in 1491, at the wedding of her sister Beatrice to Ludovico, and again in early 1495, when news came of the French victory over Naples – a matter that touched her more nearly because her husband, Francesco Gonzaga, was among those fighting the French. She knew of Leonardo’s portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, which she had had sent to her so she could compare it with portraits by the Venetian maestro Giovanni Bellini; and she knew of Leonardo’s musical protégé Atalante Migliorotti, whom she had summoned to Mantua in 1490 to sing the title role in a performance of Poliziano’s Orfeo. In short, she and Leonardo were au courant, though whether there was much personal rapport between them is another matter.

Isabella d’Este was strong-willed, ferociously cultivated, and very rich. Though only in her mid-twenties, she ruled her court like an imperious maîtresse of a Parisian salon. The d’Este of Ferrara were one of the oldest and most illustrious families in Italy; their fiefdom included Modena, Ancona and Reggio. (There was also a German branch, founded in the late eleventh century, from which are descended the Este-Guelph houses of Brunswick and Hanover, and thence the British royal family.) Isabella was sixteen when, in January 1491, she married Francesco Gonzaga II, Marquis of Mantua, in a diplomatic triple-move of which the other parts were the marriages of her sister to Ludovico and of her brother to Ludovico’s niece Anna. The Gonzaga had been sworn enemies of the Visconti of Milan, but through the marriages of these eligible sisters the Sforza and the Gonzaga were now allies to one another and to Ferrara.

Isabella arrived in Mantua in style, sailing in an aquatic fantasia down the Po and entering the small, elegant fortress-city in a triumphal carriage, her possessions spilling out of thirteen painted marriage-chests. She swiftly became an icon of this era of conspicuous consumption, an avid and sometimes unscrupulous collector of precious and pretty things. She spoke petulantly of her sister’s fortune – the Sforza were even richer than the Gonzaga, but Beatrice was not a collector. ‘Would to God that we who spend willingly should have so much,’ Isabella said. She built on the Gonzaga collection of gems, cameos and intaglios – small, portable assets which were popular collectables – but in the later 1490s her letters show a broadening of interest. ‘You know how hungry we are for antiquities,’ she writes to her agent in Rome in 1499. And ‘We are now interested in owning some figurines and heads, in bronze and marble.’1 These antiques and figurines were for the display-rooms she was creating in the Gonzaga castle – her famous studiolo and its companion room, the grotta. She began to commission paintings – her interest in Bellini and Leonardo, as evinced in her letter to Cecilia Gallerani, was part of this.

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