The Da Vinci Women

I

CHILDHOOD

HE IS THRIVING. He is well fed, alert, and loved. The surprisingly large infant is sitting naked on a comfortable velvet cushion. His mother has such a firm, secure grasp on his back that her fingertips leave an impression in his baby fat (Plate 1).¹ No harm can come to him—or so it seems. His left leg is kicking out, as if he wanted to try his strength against an imaginary opponent. But there is nobody there, just the two of them in their dark, almost cave-like, palazzo with round-arched windows that reveal the view of a shimmering blue mountain landscape. Warm light falls on the plump body of the infant, emphasizing his muscular torso and almost hairless head, but more particularly it sculpts the bright face of the young mother and the low neckline of her dress. She is beautiful, with reserved, still-girlish features, a small mouth, and lowered eyelids under high, fair brows. And she has made herself look beautiful. It must have taken hours to braid her hair like this with not a single strand falling over her forehead and carefully controlled blond ringlets tumbling out on either side of her cheeks from under a narrow veil, framing her angelic face. Her deep blue robe is fastened with a transparent, shimmering rock crystal, and below its trimming of gold-embroidered braid, it gathers in wrinkles over her small breasts, which the infant is presumably still suckling.

However, unlike the child, the mother is fully clothed. Under her mantle she wears a high-fastening red gown with gathered sleeves, and she has a patterned silk shawl draped around her shoulders and back and hanging down to her lap. The many lengths of fabric seem slightly antiquated, as if the late fifteenth-century wearer were longing to be back in the ancient world. However, this is of no interest to the little boy. She is his mother and she is there for him. He is happy to join in the game she is proposing. She has the stem of a carnation in her left hand, holding it where he can see it. He stretches out both hands, concentrating and trying to grasp the red flower, without touching it immediately. It seems as if he knows what he is doing; as if he is determined to look at the carnation—his destiny—and take possession of it. He is much too serious for his age. How could it be otherwise? His name is Jesus Christ, and he will not outlive his mother but will die for humankind in less than thirty-three years, before the eyes of the people, crucified with nails that are almost as large and long as the stalk of this carnation. The blood-red flower tells of the love of God, his father, which will eventually lead to the Passion of the son, who is Mary’s only child. Yet, despite everything, the young mother in the painting shows no fear. She is enjoying her intimacy with the vigorous boy, her own beauty, and the peace of the palace. This moment belongs to her and her baby.

But not entirely. However much Leonardo da Vinci imagined himself in the position of his protagonists when painting this little work from Florence, he was also thinking of the people who would look at this painting, both in his own day and at any time in the future. One of the first was Giuliano de’ Medici, the younger, somewhat impetuous brother of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler of Florence. Their family emblem was five red balls and one blue ball on a shield; the inconspicuous glass balls dangling from the boy’s cushion may be a reminder of these. Also, the modern window arches in the painting are similar to those of Giuliano’s Palazzo Medici. In the bottom right of the painting is a delicate vase of flowers—a symbol of Mary’s purity—that particularly appealed to Leonardo’s biographer, the sixteenth-century Renaissance painter and writer Giorgio Vasari. He reported that the painting had come into the possession of Pope Clement VII, an illegitimate son of Giuliano de’ Medici, who had probably ordered it directly from the artist. A commission from the Medici might explain Leonardo’s extravagance: the gold, the fine layers of paint, and the care he took.²

This image of the Madonna is one of the first paintings known to be from Leonardo da Vinci’s own hand. At the time of its creation around 1475, the artist was a young man in his early twenties with long, curly hair and was already a full member of the Florentine painters’ guild. He was still living and working at his master’s studio, either out of loyalty or because he was not receiving enough commissions on his own account in a city teeming with art and artists.

Leonardo’s master, Andrea del Verrocchio, ran a flourishing workshop in the Via Ghibellina, just a short walk away from the city hall, the Palazzo Vecchio. The district was bustling with craftsmen and traders offering their services in the narrow streets. Artists usually worked in a large windowless room on the street; the door would stand open, inviting passersby to look in. For cooking and sleeping, the artists’ families and apprentices would withdraw to the back rooms or the upper floor.

Andrea came from a family of brickmakers, and for him art meant a rise in social status. Before devoting himself first to sculpture and then to painting, he trained as a goldsmith. He was so grateful to an elderly master of this craft that he adopted his surname of Verrocchio. By the time Leonardo arrived, the rich and powerful were regular visitors to Verrocchio’s workshop. Andrea, Leonardo, and the other assistants could turn their hand to anything. They carved in wood and stone, cast bronzes, made armor, painted, and supplied decorations for banquets, theater scenery, and complete interior furnishings for noble palaces. For important commissions Andrea collaborated with masters who joined with him, including the young Sandro Botticelli, who would soon become famous.

The Medici and other noble lords were regular customers of the workshop. In the Via Ghibellina, a bagful of gold could buy you everything you might need for a stylish life and death, from traditional birth plates to marriage chests and gravestones. The only art Verrocchio would not touch was fresco painting, the specialty of Andrea’s rivals, the Pollaiuolo brothers, who were smarter than the sculptor in this area.

Images of the Madonna on poplar wood were part of Andrea del Verrocchio’s standard repertoire, but none of those emanating from his workshop was as refined as the young Leonardo’s Madonna of the Carnation. His model was probably the same girl who sat for Verrocchio, or at least he adopted the latter’s ideal of beauty of a feminine young woman seen face-on, with her hair artistically braided. Like all Andrea’s pupils, Leonardo had spent years copying his master’s drawings of female heads in pencil and ink on paper or with metal styli on cheap wood (see also Ill. 35).³

Yet despite all the elegantly proportioned girlishness, despite all the desire for harmony, Leonardo’s Madonna is different. Her emotions are restrained; she is strikingly pensive, yet she knows precisely what she wants when she gives the boy the carnation. The painting is not a mere snapshot; it illustrates a whole story, an interaction between two beings who are intimately connected yet have independent feelings.

In parts of the painting the artist experimented with oil paints, which dry very slowly, unlike classic tempera pigments bound with egg yolk. This makes it possible to apply a further layer of color on the wet paint, so that the shades merge into one another. This small painting was highly experimental as, although the Florentines already knew about oil paints and occasionally used them, the technique there was nowhere near as well developed as in Flanders.

Leonardo was delighted with the natural effect of paints bound with oil. In this painting of the Madonna, one of the techniques he developed was the art of gentle transitions between light and dark. However, he was not yet certain how much oil he needed to use when mixing the paints. His master, Verrocchio, could not tell him, as he had only just begun painting himself and preferred to keep to the long-established Florentine technique of tempera painting. As a result, Leonardo chose the wrong mixture, and the Madonna soon developed deep furrows that still make the surface of the painting look rough today.⁴

Leonardo used this soft shadow play to place mother and son in the here and now of the palazzo, freeing them from the sense of remoteness that often envelops older images of the Madonna. They are enclosed in a dark, protective space, yet it is not in any way a prison, as it reveals a view of the distant brightness of God-given mountain peaks, of a kind rarely found in Tuscany, but probably plentiful in the artist’s imagination. Distance and nearness are interdependent, in the same way as light and shade, life and death, nature and art. Leonardo was a young man, not yet worldly wise, but with a conception of the world as a whole that is reflected in the ordinary individual.

Leonardo later wrote, “A good painter is to paint two main things, namely, man and the intention of man’s soul.”⁵ However, “man” in this context is definitely not always male as far as Leonardo is concerned. Quite the opposite. In the 1470s and 1480s it was mothers on whom he first tested out his fundamental conviction that the emotions of the soul and the spirit are expressed in the movements of the body.

With a few strokes of the pen, the artist committed to paper a youthful mother walking along with her braided hair fluttering as she goes. She has to use her upper body to counterbalance the weight of the sturdy infant in her arms. The child has spotted something on the road in front of them and is looking and pointing down at it. The mother does not want to dampen the child’s curiosity, but she has her own purpose in mind and counteracts gravity as kindly as she can.⁶ A child wants to move and must do so; it may be small, but it has a mind of its own (Ill. 1).

In the Renaissance period and for a long time after that, babies were bound so tightly in swaddling bands that they could no longer move their arms and legs. That was evidently not to Leonardo’s taste. He advised painters to take an affectionate look at the clumsiness of small children: They should paint “[l]ittle children, with lively and contorted movements when sitting, and, when standing still, in shy and timid attitudes.”⁷ He was fascinated by unbound boys discovering the world from the safety of their mothers’ arms.

In another drawing, the world is a domestic cat, not dangerous, but not easy to control (Ill. 2).⁸ A boy is trying to hold on to it, but the cat has no intention of being a plaything and has half escaped from his unwelcome curiosity. His smiling mother holds both of them on her lap, which is shaded by strong hatching. She does not intervene; the child must experience things for himself and discover that the world does not always do what one wants. From his mild gaze, it seems that the boy has now realized that he must be as patient with the self-willed cat as his mother is with him.

Only those who experience love can love others. This was not considered a matter of course in Renaissance times. Lively debates about whether women were capable of loving at all were still raging in the sixteenth century. The tendency was to say that they were not. They could only coolly refuse or humbly accept; the full range of emotions was reserved for men. However, as well as the few eloquent female writers who raised their voices later in the High Renaissance, there were always male humanists who contradicted the prevalent view and considered that women were capable of loving.⁹

In painting there was at least one feminine feeling that could not be questioned: motherly love, which was extolled in an image of the Madonna on the wall of almost every home. Besides its religious meaning, this most beloved of all subjects also had an educational purpose. Boys should model themselves on the boy Jesus and the young John the Baptist, take pleasure in them and emulate them. Girls should learn from Mary’s chastity and bear in mind her future role as a mother, which was a woman’s true purpose in the world of Renaissance thought. Brides were given Jesus dolls at their wedding, in order to practice motherhood.¹⁰

In many paintings (and not only in Leonardo’s milieu) the baby Jesus is suckling at his mother’s breast.¹¹ Both priests and humanists avowed that breastfeeding established the bond between mother and child. It was said that the father left his mark on the body and mind of his offspring through his seed, whereas the mother’s contribution was to nourish the child, first in her womb and then, after giving birth, with her milk. According to the beliefs of the time, this was produced from the menstrual blood that had collected in her body during pregnancy; even Leonardo continued to accept this medieval misinformation for a time.

However, the joint responsibility of parents for the child remained largely theoretical. In practice, the role of the mother counted for very little, whereas the father’s contribution was everything in a society where male succession was absolute and women had no rights over their children. The fine words about the “tender emotions” of the Mother of God while breastfeeding and her “delight” at feeding her son (according to a thirteenth-century preacher) went unheeded.¹²

The majority of prosperous Florentine women did not breastfeed at all. Instead, their husbands made agreements with the spouses of the wet nurses who took over this task. Fathers were concerned that their wives’ milk might be polluted by having sex and, above all, by a new pregnancy. They wished however to become fathers again soon, as having several children increased their chances of having future heirs. It was important for men’s social status to have many legitimate offspring, whereas an intimate mother–child relationship in early years seemed to many of them to be of secondary importance. The rich fathers expected the parents of poorer families to abstain from sexual intercourse and inform them immediately if the wet nurse got pregnant again, which would result in the termination of the agreement.¹³

In the fifteenth century the custom of handing babies over to a wet nurse soon after they were born, contrary to all good advice, was followed not only by the very rich but also, according to their account books, by lawyers, artists, merchants, and doctors. The only question was what kind of wet nurse they could afford—whether she would live in the family home, as was usual in rich families, or elsewhere, and whether she had just recently given birth (which was considered an advantage) or whether it was a long time previously. The economic pressure on the families of the wet nurses was so great that many of them entrusted their own newborns to an even poorer wet nurse or gave them away to the Foundling Hospital in Florence that was opened in 1445. A merchant’s wife from Prato who arranged wet nurses for the newborns of wealthy families cruelly boasted that she had forced a woman to promise to become wet nurse to a strange child on the very night that her own baby had died.¹⁴