Leonardo da Vinci Read Online Free PDF

goods, and his freedom, and none of his works was completed.” It was a farewell not only to his patron, but to the great horse and “The Last Supper” as well.
    In 1500, back in Florence after eighteen years, Leonardo found the city of his youth a diminished place. The theocracy of Savonarola was gone; the monk had been hanged and burned two years earlier. But Savonarola’s bonfires of the vanities had consumed Florence’s gaiety and confidence along with many of its treasures, and the Medici had yet to return; Florence was now a republic. After the French abandoned Pisa, city fathers had declared independence from Florence, and the Signoria had embarked on an unnecessary and badly waged war to regain control. Now Florence was bankrupt.
    The artistic scene had changed considerably as well. Many of the older painters had died, including the Pollaiolo brothers and Domenico Ghirlandaio, but Botticelli and Lorenzo de Credi were still wielding brushes. Rising star Michelangelo Buonarroti , still only twenty-five, was in Rome, finishing his “Pieta” for St. Peter’s.
    For the moment, however, Leonardo was a revered master. The fame of “The Last Supper” had preceded him, and he had no trouble finding work. The Servite friars had commissioned Filippino Lippi to do an altarpiece for the church of Santissima Annunziata, but Vasari wrote that Lippi, “like the good-hearted person he was,” stepped out of the way to let Leonardo have the job. “Then the friars, to secure Leonardo’s services, took him into their house, and met all his expenses and those of his household.”
    Leonardo showed his gratitude in characteristic fashion. “He kept them waiting a long time without even starting anything,” Vasari wrote. But then, in the spring of 1501, he produced a drawing of Mary and her mother, St. Anne, with the infant Christ: the “Virgin and Child with St. Anne.” Put on display for two days, the drawing was a sensation. “This work not only won the astonished admiration of all the artists,” Vasari wrote, “it attracted . . . a crowd of men and women, young and old, who flocked there as if they were attending a great festival, to gaze in amazement at the marvels he had created.”
    Fra Pietro Novellara, vicar-general of the Carmelites , wrote a description of the drawing: “An infant Christ, of about one year old, almost escaping from the arms of his mother. He has got hold of a lamb and seems to be squeezing it. The mother, almost raising herself from the lap of St. Anne, holds onto the child in order to draw him away from the lamb.”
    Here, as in the “Benois Madonna,” Leonardo was prefiguring the Passion. But unlike that early work, this time, mother and child both know what the lamb means; he is embracing his fate, while she is dreading it. This scene changed repeatedly in the ten years it took Leonardo to finish it. Another drawing shows Mary on her mother’s lap holding her son, who is playing with an infant St. John. Vasari described a drawing that had St. John playing with a lamb while Christ gazed at both of them, but if that version ever existed, it has disappeared. The only indisputable fact is that it took a long time for Leonardo’s vision to fix itself – and that yet another altarpiece wouldn’t be delivered.
    Though Leonardo escaped the daily urgings of Isabella d’Este, she had hardly given up on him; she wanted not only her portrait, but a larger painting for her gallery. Isabella asked the Carmelite Novellara for a report on what Leonardo was doing and whether he intended to produce something for her. In his response, he described the “St. Anne” drawing, saying it was the only work Leonardo had done since coming to Florence and added a discouraging word: “From what I understand Leonardo’s life is extremely irregular and haphazard, and he seems to live from day to day.” Apart from the drawing, Novellara wrote, Leonardo had only added a few touches to copies of his works done by