PERSONAL LIFE OF LEONARDO DA VINCI

OUTSTANDING BEAUTY AND INFINITE GRACE

Leonardo became known in Milan not only for his talents but also for his good looks, muscular build, and gentle personal style. “He was a man of outstanding beauty and infinite grace,” Vasari said of him. “He was striking and handsome, and his great presence brought comfort to the most troubled soul.”

Even discounting for the effusiveness of sixteenth-century biographers, it is clear that Leonardo was charming and attractive and had many friends. “His disposition was so lovable that he commanded everyone’s affection,” according to Vasari. “He was so pleasing in conversation that he attracted to himself the hearts of men.” Paolo Giovio, a near contemporary who met Leonardo in Milan, similarly remembered his pleasant nature. “He was friendly, precise, and generous, with a radiant, graceful expression,” Giovio wrote. “His genius for invention was astounding, and he was the arbiter of all questions relating to beauty and elegance, especially in pageantry.”1 All of this made him a man with many close friends. In the letters and writings of dozens of other prominent intellectuals in Milan and Florence, ranging from the mathematician Luca Pacioli to the architect Donato Bramante and the poet Piattino Piatti, there are references to Leonardo as a valued and beloved companion.

Leonardo dressed colorfully, sometimes sporting, according to the Anonimo, “a rose-colored cloak, which came only to his knees, though at the time long vestments were the custom.” As he grew older, he grew a long beard, which “came to the middle of his breast and was well-dressed and curled.”

Most notably, he was known for his willingness to share his blessings. “He was so generous that he sheltered and fed all his friends, rich or poor,” according to Vasari. He was not motivated by wealth or material possessions. In his notebooks, he decried “men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of the desire for wisdom, which is the sustenance and truly dependable wealth of the mind.”2 As a result, he spent more time pursuing wisdom than working on jobs that would make him money beyond what he needed to support his growing household retinue. “He possessed nothing and worked little, but he always kept servants and horses,” Vasari wrote. The horses brought him “much delight,” Vasari wrote, as did all animals. “Often when passing the places where birds were sold, he would take them with his own hand out of their cages, and having paid to those who sold them the price that was asked, he let them fly away into the air, restoring to them their lost liberty.”

Because of his love for animals, Leonardo was a vegetarian for much of his life, although his shopping lists show that he often bought meat for others in his household. “He would not kill a flea for any reason whatsoever,” a friend wrote. “He preferred to dress in linen, so as not to wear something dead.” A Florentine traveler to India recorded that the people there “do not feed on anything that has blood, nor will they allow anyone to hurt any living thing, like our Leonardo da Vinci.”3

In addition to his prophecy tales that include dire descriptions of the practice of slaying animals for food, Leonardo’s notebooks contain other literary passages assailing meat eating. “If you are, as you have described yourself, the king of the animals,” he wrote of humans, “why do you help other animals only so that they may be able to give you their young in order to gratify your palate?” He referred to a vegetable diet as “simple” food and urged its adoption. “Does not nature bring forth enough simple food things to satisfy your hunger? Or if you cannot content yourself with simple things can you not do so by blending these simple foods together to make an infinite number of compounds?”4

His rationale for avoiding meat derived from a morality based on science. Unlike plants, animals could feel pain, Leonardo realized. His studies led him to believe that this was because animals had the ability to move their bodies. “Nature has given sensibility to pain to living organisms that have the power of movement, in order to preserve those parts which might be destroyed by movement,” he surmised. “Pain is not necessary in plants.”5

SALAI

Among the young men who became Leonardo’s companions, by far the most important was the scamp known as Salai, who arrived on July 22, 1490, when Leonardo was thirty-eight. “Giacomo came to live with me” is the way he recorded the event in his notebook.6 It is an oddly elusive formulation, in contrast to saying that the young man had become his student or assistant. Then again, it was an oddly elusive relationship.

Gian Giacomo Caprotti was then ten years old, the son of an impoverished peasant from the nearby village of Oreno. Leonardo would soon be referring to him, for good reason, as Salai, or “Little Devil.”7 Soft and languid, with angelic curls and a devilish little smile, he would feature in dozens of Leonardo’s drawings and notebook sketches, and for most of the rest of Leonardo’s life, Salai would be his companion. He was the one, as noted earlier, described by Vasari as “a graceful and beautiful youth with fine curly hair in which Leonardo greatly delighted.”

It was not unusual for a servant boy to go to work at age ten, but Salai was something more. Leonardo would later occasionally refer to him as “my pupil,” but that was misleading; he never was more than a mediocre artist and produced few original paintings. Instead he was Leonardo’s assistant, companion, and amanuensis, and probably at some point he became a lover. In one of Leonardo’s notebooks, another of the students in the studio, perhaps a rival, drew a coarse caricature showing a large penis with two legs poking toward an object on which “Salai” is scribbled.

In an unpublished “Book of Dreams” written in 1560, Lomazzo, who knew one of Leonardo’s students, imagined a dialogue between the ancient Greek sculptor Phidias and Leonardo, who confesses to loving Salai. Phidias asks bluntly whether they had engaged in sex. “Did you perhaps play with him that backside game that Florentines love so much?”

“Many times!” Leonardo merrily responds. “You should know that he was a most beautiful young man, especially at about fifteen,” which is perhaps an indication of when their relationship may have become physical. “Are you not ashamed to say this?” asks Phidias.

Leonardo, or at least Lomazzo’s fictionalized version, is not. “Why ashamed? Among men of worth there is scarcely greater cause for pride. . . . Understand that masculine love is solely the product of merit [virtù] which joins together men of diverse feelings of friendship so that they may, from a tender age, arrive at manhood as stronger friends.”8

As soon as he moved in with Leonardo, Salai began earning his nickname. “The second day I had two shirts cut out for him, a pair of hose, and a leather jacket, and when I put aside some money to pay for these things he stole the money,” Leonardo recorded. “I could never make him confess, although I was quite certain of it.” Nevertheless, he began taking Salai to dinner parties as his companion, which indicates that he was more than a sticky-fingered assistant or student. Two days after he arrived, Leonardo took him to a dinner at the home of the architect Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara, where he proved unmannerly. “[Salai] supped for two and did mischief for four, for he broke three cruets and spilled the wine,” Leonardo wrote in his notebook.

Leonardo, who rarely revealed much of a personal nature in his notebooks, mentioned Salai dozens of times, often in tones of exasperation that also betrayed amusement and affection. This included at least five times when he stole things. “On the seventh day of September he stole a stylus worth 22 soldi from Marco, who was staying with me. It was of silver and he took it from his studio, and when Marco had searched for it a long time he found it hidden in the box of Giacomo.” During the wedding pageant for Ludovico Sforza and Beatrice d’Este in 1491, Leonardo noted, “When I was in the house of Messer Galeazzo da San Severino to arrange the festival for his tournament, and certain footmen had undressed to try on some of the costumes of the savages which were to appear at the festival, Giacomo went to the wallet of one of them as it lay on the bed with other clothes and took out whatever money he found there.”9

As the tales pile up, one can be amused not only by Salai but also by Leonardo for continuing to tolerate and record his transgressions. “Maestro Agostino of Pavia gave me a Turkish hide in order to make a pair of boots, and Giacomo stole it from me within a month and sold it to a cobbler for 20 soldi and with this money, by his own confession, he bought aniseed candy,” reads yet another example. The lines of accounting are written in a small, impassive hand, but next to one entry Leonardo’s words in the margin are twice as big and scrawled in annoyance: “Thief, liar, obstinate, greedy.”

Their bickering would persist over the years. A shopping list that Leonardo dictated to an assistant in 1508 dissolves into “Salai, I want peace, not war. No more wars, I give in.”10 Leonardo nevertheless continued, throughout his life, to indulge Salai and dress him in colorful and dandy clothes, many of them pink, the costs of which (including at least twenty-four pairs of fancy shoes and a pair of stockings so expensive they must have been jeweled) would routinely be recorded in his notebooks.

DRAWINGS OF OLD AND YOUNG MEN

Even before Salai moved in with him, Leonardo began what would be a lifelong pattern of juxtaposing sketches of an androgynous, curly-haired pretty boy facing a craggy older man like the one on the “theme sheet,” with a jutting chin and aquiline nose (fig. 24). As he later instructed, “In narrative paintings you should closely intermingle direct opposites, because they offer a great contrast to each other, especially when they are adjacent. Thus, have the ugly one next to the beautiful, the large next to the small, the old next to the young.”11

The pairing was a motif that he picked up from his mentor Verrocchio, who specialized in virile old warriors and pretty boys, and facing off the two types became a regular feature in his sketchbooks. Kenneth Clark described the combination:

Most typical of such creations is the bald, clean-shaven man, with formidable frown, nutcracker nose and chin, who appears sometimes in the form of a caricature, more often as an ideal. His strongly accentuated features seem to have typified for Leonardo vigor and resolution, and so he becomes the counterpart of that other profile which came with equal facility from Leonardo’s pen—the epicene youth. These are, in fact, the two hieroglyphs of Leonardo’s unconscious mind, the two images his hand created when his attention was wandering. . . . Virile and effeminate, they symbolize the two sides of Leonardo’s nature.12

Leonardo’s earliest known pair of such profiles appears on a notebook page from 1478, when he was still in Florence (fig. 29). The old man has a long pointed nose curving down, a sunken upper lip, and an exaggerated jutting chin curving up, forming the nutcracker facial type Leonardo often used. The head of wavy hair hints that Leonardo may be drawing a caricature of his older self. Facing him, rendered in a few simple strokes, is a rather featureless slender boy who gazes up languidly, with a subtle twisting of his neck and bending of his body. The lithe and boyish figure, reminiscent of Verrocchio’s statue of David that Leonardo likely modeled for, hints that Leonardo may have, consciously or not, been drawing a reflection of his younger self, juxtaposing his boyish and manly sides. There was also a hint of companionship in these face-offs. It is on this page from 1478 that Leonardo inscribed the words “Fioravante di Domenico of Florence is my most beloved friend, as though he were my . . .”13

After Salai moved into his household in 1490, Leonardo’s doodles and drawings began to feature a boy who is softer, fleshier, and a bit more sultry. This character, who we can safely assume is Salai, slowly matures over the years. A good example is a version of the craggy jut-jawed man facing a young boy that Leonardo drew in the 1490s (fig. 30). Unlike in his 1478 version, this time the young boy has bountiful curls, pouring like a deluge from his head and cascading down his long neck. The eyes are big but more vacant. The chin is fleshy. The full lips are shaped into what may be, on second glance, a Mona Lisa smile, though a bit more mischievous. He looks angelic yet also devilish. The older man’s arm reaches to the boy’s shoulder, but the forearm and the torsos are left partly blank, as if the two bodies are melding. Though not a self-portrait of Leonardo, who was then only in his mid-forties, the older man seems to be a caricature he uses over the years that conveys his own emotions as he faces the prospect of aging.14

Throughout his career, Leonardo would repeatedly and lovingly draw Salai. We see him age slowly while remaining, at each stage, soft and sensuous. When Salai is in his early twenties, Leonardo draws him with red chalk and pen, standing in the nude (fig. 31). His lips and chin are still boyish, his hair exuberantly curled, but his body and slightly spread arms have the musculature that we will see in Vitruvian Man and some of the anatomical drawings. Another full-length nude drawing, this one from behind, also shows him with arms and legs spread, his body strong with just a hint of fleshiness (fig. 32).

A few years later, around 1510, Leonardo made another chalk drawing of Salai’s head in profile, this time facing to our right (fig. 33). It has all of the same features, from the swanlike neck to the fleshy chin and languid eyes, but he is now portrayed as just a touch older, though remembered as still boyish. His top lip is full and thrusting, his lower one soft and receding, forming yet again that hint of a devilish smile.

Even in the last years of his life, Leonardo still seemed to be mesmerized by the Salai image. In one drawing from about 1517, he created a tender sketch of a remembered youthful Salai in profile (fig. 34). His heavy-lidded eyes are still sultry and slightly vacant, his hair is still tightly curled in the way, as Vasari reported, “in which Leonardo greatly delighted.”15

Leonardo’s many drawings of an old and a young man juxtaposed in profile are evoked, in a telling way, in a haunting allegorical drawing that he made of figures representing Pleasure and Pain. The young character depicting Pleasure has some of Salai’s looks. He is standing back-to-back and intertwined with the older man, who is the depiction of Pain. Their bodies merge as their arms entangle. “Pleasure and Pain are represented as twins,” Leonardo wrote on the drawing, “because there never is one without the other.”

As usual with Leonardo’s allegorical drawings, there are symbols and puns. Pain stands on mud, while Pleasure stands on gold. Pain is dropping little spiked balls known as tribolo, a play on the word tribolatione, for “tribulation.” Pleasure drops coins and holds a reed. Leonardo explained why the reed evokes the “evil pleasures” that are the source of pain: “Pleasure is here represented with a reed in his right hand which is useless and without strength, and the wounds it inflicts are poisoned. In Tuscany they are used to support beds, to signify that it is here that vain dreams come.”

His notion of “vain dreams” appears to include sexual fantasies, and he went on to lament that they can distract a person from getting on with his work. “It is here that much precious time is wasted and many vain pleasures are enjoyed,” he wrote of a bed, “both by the mind in imagining impossible things and by the body in partaking of those pleasures that are often the cause of the failing of life.” Did this mean that Leonardo believed that some of the vain pleasures he indulged or imagined while in bed were a cause of his own failings? As he warned in his description of the phallic and “useless” reed that Pleasure holds, “If you take Pleasure know that he has behind him one who will deal you Tribulation and Repentance.”16

Notes 

1 Paolo Giovio, “A Life of Leonardo,” c. 1527, in Notebooks/J. P. Richter, revised edition of 1939, 1:2.
2 Codex Atl., 119v-a/327v; Notebooks/J. P. Richter, 10.
3 Lester, 2014; Nicholl, 43.
4 Notebooks/J. P. Richter, 844; Notebooks/MacCurdy, 84.
5 Paris Ms. H, 60r; Notebooks/MacCurdy, 130.
6 Paris Ms. C, 15b; Notebooks/J. P. Richter, 1458.
7 Leonardo first refers to him as Salai in 1494; Paris Ms. H, 2:16v. The term is usually translated as “little devil,” but it has the connotation of someone a bit unclean as well as devilish, like a little rascal or scamp. It derives from a Tuscan word meaning “limb of the devil.” His name is sometimes written Salaì, with an accent creating a third syllable, thus making the pronunciation sah-lie-yee. The name comes from a demon in Luigi Pulci’s epic poem Il Morgante, a work that Leonardo owned; in the poem, the name is given as Salai, without an accent on the i.
8 Pedretti, Chronology, 141.
9 Paris Ms. C, 15b; Notebooks/J. P. Richter, 1458; Notebooks/Irma Richter, 291.
10 Codex Atl., 663v/244r; Pedretti Chronology, 64; Notebooks/Irma Richter, 290, 291; Bramly, 223, 228; Nicholl, 276.
11 John Garton, “Leonardo’s Early Grotesque Head of 1478,” in Fiorani and Kim; Notebooks/Irma Richter, 289; Leonardo on Painting, 220; Codex Urb., 61r-v; Jens Thus, The Florentine Years of Leonardo and Verrocchio (Jenkins, 1913).
12 Clark, 121.
13 Uffizi, Florence, inv. 446E; Notebooks/J. P. Richter, 1383.
14 Pedretti Chronology, 140.
15 Windsor, RCIN 912557, 912554, 912594, 912596.
16 Leonardo, “Allegorical Drawing of Pleasure and Pain,” c. 1480, Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford; Notebooks/J. P. Richter, 676; Nicholl, 204.

Written by Walter Isaacson "Leonardo Da Vinci", Simon & Schuster, New York, USA, 2017, excerpts chapter VII. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

(Walter Isaacson is an University Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time Magazine.)