Shadow Devices

In those years looking at the picture, I puzzled over a little anomaly, a strangely dark curlicue in that vast landscape at her back. There, over her right shoulder, a sunlit dirt road winds toward the water’s edge. There where the road stops, across that inlet’s rift of blue, there hangs the shape of an almost-circle, or tilted C with rounded tips. Up from it a ribbon of shadow curls over the mountain steeps, loops and vanishes under the frame of the picture. A shadow that is darker than other shadows. Giorgio Vasari said that Leonardo ‘sought for blacks which might make deeper shadows and be darker than other blacks’.1 Something strange in the background there, speaking in the dark.  

Puzzling over it took years. Seven things pieced it together. Leonardo’s notebooks on shadow. A gossipy cardinal’s book on court devices. A Florentine’s description of a feast in 1512. Giorgio Vasari’s anecdotes about a 1513 festival in Florence. A secretary’s diary entry from 1517. Old medals. A letter in the archives.2 What I found placed the picture in a brief epoch: half a year in Florence, from November 1512 to May 1513; a time of promise which came to nothing, which the victor’s history cancelled as though it had never been. The discovery helps to explain why Leonardo still had this masterpiece with him towards the end of his life and who it might be supposed to be, smiling there from behind the frame’s bullet-proof glass.

Leonardo’s Notebook and the Exactness of Shadows

The artist wrote a book of shadows, in seven parts. His plans for the work survive. Diagrams, jottings, reminders, exact descriptions, written into those little notebooks he carried about with him always, sometimes following a stranger all day to catch some trick of a face. He climbed the Monta Rosa and saw space, an ‘immense darkness’: how the blue of the sky was like lead-white painted thinly over black.3 He saw how all things swam in atmosphere, how the air was filled with endless images, and ‘a shadow may be infinitely dark’—

He wrote, ‘Shadows appear to me to be of supreme importance in perspective’. Because they make things in pictures look round, touchable there. Because they are dark mirrors tinged with the colours they receive from air. He wrote, ‘The sun has never seen any shadow’; you the painter, though, he said, see what the sun doesn’t see. He noticed shadow exactly, exhaustively, seeking the reason for each particularity:

He saw that shadow is part of what he called ‘the perspective of disappearance’, how the painter can invent distances opening out a hundred miles behind the flat surface of a picture. ‘At a considerable distance all shadows of different colours will appear of the same darkness.’ His diagrams found the logic of shadow, marking in angled lines how different kinds of shadows fall, simple shadows and derived shadows: the shadows light casts directly; those that throng air out of the sun’s eye. To shadow he brought such precision of attention. The notion that this dark shape in the shadows of his landscape was an accident, was something painted carelessly, subconsciously, haphazardly—it seemed unlikely.

Giovio’s Book and the Medicis’ Diamond Ring

To me that winding shadow looked like a banderole, one of those windblown ribbons, hung in air, binding a motto to a symbol, together composing a ‘device’—a kind of personal logo, part of that era’s proliferating language of signs. Emblems, enigmas, anagrams, rebuses, ciphers, pictures on medals, wax seals, liveries...5 Families handed down their coats of arms; a device was something someone chose.6 It said who they were and what they sought, or meant—to those who could read it.

A lost language now, then it was everywhere. Topic by topic in his Emblemata (1531; 1548) Alciato offered a compendium of poems and symbols—pictures of women dressed as cities or virtues, of an eye in the palm of a hand, of claw-footed harpies, lions in harness, knights with cupids, a chameleon ‘feeding on thin air’—for anyone who wanted to invent their own device.

Also badges for caps and devices for shields. ‘Let’s each of us learn to write in secret symbols,’ Alciato says. ‘May great Caesar give you precious medallions and rare works of ancient hands:/ I, a poet, will give a poet paper’.8

The rediscovery of hieroglyphs started a craze for these devices. Antiquarians had read about that ancient speech of signs—Lucan, for instance, says that ‘the priests of Memphis, carving symbols upon walls [...] preserved the secrets of their magic art’.9 Then a priest named Cristoforo Buondelmonti left Florence in search of things from the old myths. ‘In my soul I longed to see the islands of the archipelago [...] discovering things I’d read about in books.’ In 1419, on the island of Andros, he found the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo and carried it back to Florence. It spelt out meanings for the ancient signs:

In Rome, the antiquarians found hieroglyphs buried under the half-ruined city’s rubble and scrub.10 They read it guessingly, this speech of things.11 ‘They carved an Eye,’ said Alberti, ‘by which they understood God; a Vulture for Nature; a Bee for King; a Circle for Time; an Ox for Peace, and the like.’12

Secrecy was part of it: if you knew how to read it, you could step out of ordinary time into the wordless meaning of the world. Or, a closed circle of initiates, at least. Kings, princes, captains asked their artists and antiquaries to invent signs like that for them.13 In Genoa King Louis XII went about in golden robes embroidered with his device, a king of bees in a circle of worker bees. Its motto: ‘The king whom we obey needs no sting.’14 Soon everybody was embroidering their clothes with gold and silver, showing the devices of their captain on their fronts and backs.

A gossipy cardinal, Paolo Giovio, wrote a book about this new fashion of devices. Giovio had studied philosophy in Padua, medicine in Pavia; he wrote the life of his patron Giovanni de’ Medici, Pope Leo, the first Medici pope. And yes, he said, he dressed his characters in gold, brocade or ordinary cloth, according to what they paid him. He lived to see the tyranny of the dukes in Florence, the sack of Rome, its tortures and murders, the exile of the Medici dukes, their early deaths—syphilis, poison, stabbing. But in his book A Dialogue about Military and Amorous Devices (1555; 1559) Giovio looked back to the beginnings.

He gives five rules for devices:

In Giovio’s book I found (I believe) the device painted into the shadows of Leonardo’s painting: the Medici device they called il diamante. Giovio remembers how, from the time of Cosimo the Elder, the House of Medici used three devices: il giogo (the yoke); il diamante (the diamond ring); il broncone (the broken laurel with its green shoot). Over generations, the sons and daughters chose among these, claiming affinity with one ancestor or another, adapting the old devices to their new purposes—

In old Cosimo’s device of the diamond, three rings were intertwined—sculpted into the room where the children slept, and their children’s children. Botticelli painted it, black embroidery on the pale silk dress of Pallas. ‘I’ve slept in that room too,’ said Giovio, ‘Yet, to tell the truth, despite every effort, I was never able to discover precisely what those rings meant’. Deo amante: God-loving. Il deo amante: Loved by God.

Next, Cosimo’s son Piero ‘the Gouty’ took as his emblem a falcon clutching a single diamond ring in its talons. Meaning, all things should be done out of love for God. In Bronzino’s posthumous portrait of Piero di Cosimo, the device of the diamond is stitched in gold along the trim of his crimson velvet coat. ‘A choice all the more apt,’ said Giovio, ‘because the diamond signifies indomitable strength against fire and hammer’—meaning, for Piero ‘the Gouty’, surviving the Pittis’ attempted coup.

Piero ‘the Gouty’ ordered a birth salver to mark the birth of his son Lorenzo. A round picture, two-sided, like a medal. On one side, a Triumph of Fame; on its reverse, the device of the diamond ring with its floating banderole. For Lorenzo the banderole binds three ostrich feathers through the ring in the colours of Faith, Compassion and Hope. On its banderole is written the motto SEMPER [‘ALWAYS’]. All his life, il Magnifico Lorenzo kept that salver on his bedroom wall.

With il diamante, the poets said, il Magnifico Lorenzo sealed his promise to Florentia, the city personified: ‘Beautiful lady, rest still and with grateful / Virtue serve so fine and beautiful a diamond’.16 Il diamante carved that promise into the windows of the Medici palace on the via Larga, the shrines of the Medici chapels in San Miniato and Santissima Annunziata, and the marble basins, majolica plates, crystal vases, chests, manuscripts; forged it in iron gates and doorknockers; painted it into Gozzoli’s frescoes, Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation—17

Lorenzo’s salver is faded now. The dark outline of the ring and its banderole resemble the device painted in the far-off landscape of La Gioconda, where the broken edge of a cliff juts in and out of its own shadow, bound to the dark circlet hung in air over blue water—its diamond, missing now, perhaps once a flash of light on the crest of a breaking wave. A device not pressed onto the landscape but painted into its shadows there as though it had formed of itself, this instant, in agitated water and windblown leaves, as though the place itself spoke that name in its quickenings—

The Feast and Giuliano’s Claim to Il Diamante

Lorenzo was long dead when the artist painted that picture. But, although Giovio doesn’t mention it, in November 1512, at a feast in the Medici palace, Lorenzo’s son Giuliano—Leonardo’s last Italian patron—claimed that device of the diamond ring for himself.

Giuliano was the youngest of three brothers. The first was foolish, said their father, and the second clever; the third was good. Their father died young. Piero ‘the Foolish’ tried to take his father’s place but he lacked tact. He’d married a Roman aristocrat; he once asked Michelangelo to make him a statue of snow.

In 1494, the French army marched into Italy and camped at Sarzano, near Florence. Without counsel, without consultation, Piero rode out to strike a deal with the French king. A bad deal, an outrageous deal—Florence ordered the family into exile.

Giovanni, the clever brother, was already a cardinal. Seven when they shaved his head, he was sixteen when they gave him the red cap. That Sunday morning the cardinal prayed in a window of the Medici palace while Piero and Giuliano, fifteen years old, fled the city on horseback. When he had given them enough time the cardinal got up from his knees, disguised himself in the cloak of a monk and walked out through the singing crowds.18 The city had put up a poster: two thousand ducats for his brother and a thousand ducats for him, dead.

Eighteen years in exile: in Venice, Urbino, Mantua, selling the jewels of their father, learning how to live in other people’s houses. Giuliano was a captain in his brother’s wars, a captain and diplomat for Cesare Borgia, ‘Il Valentino’, son of the pope. Piero ‘the Foolish’ died fighting for the French at Garigliano; he drowned in a river. In his youth a horoscope had warned him to beware of water.

At last, in 1512, in the last days of summer, the two brothers—one clever, one good—rode with the Army of the Holy League down the hills of the Mugello towards Florence. Florence refused them. For that, their army’s Viceroy Cardona set the Army of the Holy League loose on Prato. If stones could speak, said Michelangelo in a letter to his father, they’d tell what the Medici did in Prato.19 Thousands slaughtered in the streets, people tortured for ransom money, girls raped in the sanctuaries: the news from Prato terrified Florence. The city surrendered; its leader Piero Soderini fled.

On the next day, the first day of autumn, Giuliano stepped back through the gates of his city. He was dressed in the rose-coloured lucca of the citizen. He had shaved his beard in the manner of a citizen. He walked in the streets with two or three of his friends, like a citizen, while in Prato the crows still circled over the dead.

For two weeks Giuliano met with the council in Florence, planning a new republic, planning a senate. Then the cardinal rode in with his captains and soldiers through the city gates. For two nights the cardinal slept in the palace of his childhood. Then his armed men broke into the council room. The cardinal hand-picked his Balià and Florence elected Giuliano its leader while the soldiers milled about the square.

That November, month of their exile, il Magnifico Giuliano called the sons and heirs of his father’s friends, and his grandfather’s friends, to the feast in his palace. The Florentine merchant Bartolomeo Cerretani tells the story.20 They were thirty-six at table, eating from silver plate brought back from other people’s houses—on pain of the gallows, the House of Medici had ordered the return of all its ransacked goods.

At that feast Giuliano made a speech. He reminded them of how happy they had been in the time of festivals, in the city of their childhood. That time would come again, he said. He claimed for himself his father’s device of the diamond ring. He asked and urged them all to join his Company of the Diamond, to prepare for a festival in three months, when they would make songs and parades under the sign of the diamond. Only his nephew Lorenzo, son of the foolish brother, refused to join Guliano’s Company of the Diamond. His rival company—the Company of the Broncone—took the device of the dead laurel tree with its one green shoot. Its motto: As one dies, another takes its place.

For three months the Company of the Diamond and the Company of the Broncone busied themselves about the festival. Lorenzo heard how his uncle’s Company of the Diamond was making three floats. We’ll make seven, he said. The works they made were full of signs and wonders. The songs they wrote addressed the city as a woman, Fiorenza. She was more cheerful now, they said. Più gioconda.21

On Ash Wednesday eve, 1513, the Company of the Diamond held its festival. Four hundred riders, in the livery of the diamond; their ranks of torch-fire threaded the early dark of the city streets. Andrea Dazzi had come up with their theme, The Three Ages of Man. Meaning, first Giuliano and his frateschi; later the nephew and his palleschi. Alamanni wrote the poems for it. The orphan Pontormo painted the artworks for the chariots. Those two had helped the old painter Piero di Cosimo create a Triumph of Death once: vast Death enthroned on a coffin-heap, his carriage dragged by black buffaloes through the city. At street corners Death’s carriage stopped. His skeletons, opening their carriage lids, sang: We were like you, you’ll be like us. That whole thing was a prophecy about the Medici, Alamanni said now: how they’d come back from exile one day as if from the dead. For the Company of the Diamond, in pale greys on deep black, Pontormo painted the old gods—their flesh like marble in the torch light, their hands almost touching, yearning in the stone. Under his pictures the humans sang: young boys under the sign, We Shall Be; powerful men under the sign, We Are; old men under the sign, We Were. Singing, Round and round go the years, months, hours, round and— Youth in its greenness, wasting time, how soon it dies— Such a sad song for festival, and it took so long.22

But the Return of the Golden Age was the nephew’s theme. In the seven carriages of the Broncone, old Piero di Cosimo showed those Roman triumphs they called peace and carved into stone. The chariots went from the age of gold to the age of iron, back to gold again. The seventh carriage raised a vast globe of the world with a dead man splayed across it, face down in rusted armour. Suddenly, from a trapdoor in the dead man’s back, up climbed a golden child.23 ‘I should not fail to mention,’ said Vasari, ‘that the gilded boy, son of a baker, died shortly thereafter from the pain he endured to earn ten scudi’—

Filippo Strozzi took the nephew Lorenzo’s side. He got Piero di Cosimo to make Lorenzo a picture: Perseus Delivering Andromeda from the Monster. Lorenzo’s broncone is planted at the centre of its landscape: the cut-off laurel tree sprouting new green shoots. Piero di Cosimo painted time into the picture: before and after, to the left and right of that device. Off to the left Perseus (Lorenzo) is killing the Monster (Spanish Army), the leering beast with its long tusks. On the right Andromeda (Florence) is free and the citizens are jubilant, waving green branches.24

Perhaps il Magnifico Giuliano commissioned a picture of his own at this time—one with his device il diamante naturalised inside its landscape.

A Diary Entry from 1517 and Giuliano’s Commission

Four years after that festival, Leonardo was living in France, at Cloux, near Amboise. He had left Italy for good, taking his paintings with him on a mule ride over the mountains. He was old, he was drawing pictures of a flood at the end of the world, he had a pension from the king of France. There, in October 1517, an Italian cardinal and his secretary came to visit the artist in his studio.

This cardinal d’Aragona was on a grand tour, riding about with sword and retinue. People said he’d ordered the death of his sister the Duchess of Amalfi, her husband and their children too. Matteo Bandello wrote a story about it—as a child this Bandello sat at the artist’s feet, watching him paint The Last Supper on a wall.

The cardinal’s secretary Antonio de Beatis kept a diary of his travels with the cardinal. ‘This painter’s seventy years old,’ he wrote. ‘His right hand doesn’t work, he gets the assistant to do his colouring.’ The painter showed them his Book of Anatomies, his Book of Shadows, his Book of the World and its Waters. From the studio the painter’s assistant brought down three paintings, all connected with Florence. A picture of the city’s saint, Saint Anne holding Our Lady and the Infant Christ in her lap. A picture of the city’s saint John the Baptist. And a third picture: ‘uno di certa dóna Firétia facta di naturale ad instantia del quódam Magco Juliano de’ Medici’.25 ‘One of a certain Florentine woman’. Or, perhaps, ‘one of a certain female Firentia painted from life at the behest of the quondam Magnifico Giuliano de’ Medici’—

Medici Medals and the Meaning of Florentia

In Florence in 1512, Giuliano’s brother the cardinal had also claimed a device for himself, promising peace to the people of Florence; he had it printed on coins. Giovio remembered it as ‘the most beautiful’ of all the devices adopted ‘not only by the princes of Italy but even by his own forebears’—

The cardinal invented that device himself, says Giovio, although he took the idea of the yoke from Cosimo the Elder. When he was a child, the cardinal had studied Greek with Fra Urbano, the old man who walked his way through Egypt, Arabia and Palestine—poor and happy all his life, he was forever talking about the images on antique coins and Egyptian hieroglyphs. When towards the end of his life Pierio Valeriano wrote his masterpiece Hieroglyphica—‘an inheritance, so to speak, from my uncle Urbano’—he included the device of a pyramid-cut diamond resting on an anvil, unbroken.26

To mark his return to Florence, in 1512 or 1513 Giuliano de’ Medici also had a medal struck. His face on one side, Florentia on the other.

Giuliano was following the tradition of his family. His great-grandfather Cosimo the Elder had commissioned a medal to mark his return to Florence after his years of exile. His face in profile on one side, on its reverse FLORENTIA is dressed in allegory. In her left hand she holds peace as an olive branch, in her right she holds an orb.27 Her chair rests on Cosimo’s device of the yoke, at rest on her name. Printed about her is the promise: PAX LIBERTAS QUE PUBLICA [‘PEACE AND LIBERTY FOR THE PEOPLE’].

Giuliano’s father il Magnifico Lorenzo also had a medal struck. On its reverse FLORENTIA sits in profile inside the sketch of a garden, its little space inside the bracket of her name. A rock for a seat, a laurel tree. ‘You, well born laurel,’ Poliziano wrote in his poem for Lorenzo, ‘under whose shelter happy Florence rests in peace’. With her left hand she holds flowers in her lap; in her right she holds the city’s lily.

Giuliano’s medal takes up that iconography—only in his medal Florentia has stepped down from the antique chair in profile. Now she rests on cut stone in a garden, leaning against the Medici shield, a laurel at her back. Her hair is loose in the manner of a bride, recalling how with il diamante the Medici promised themselves to the city.28 Here, Florentia sits inside the ring of Giuliano’s promise: RECONCILIATIS CIVIBUS MAGNIFICENTIA E PIETATE [‘FELLOW CITIZENS REUNITED WITH MAGNANIMITY AND DUTIFUL LOVE’].29 Florentia turns her face towards us. She is smiling. Più gioconda.

This was something new: a woman looking out from the medal’s abyss; something new in Leonardo’s portraits, too, of Ginevra de’ Benci and La Gioconda, who is smiling.

In the medal, Florentia’s face is worn with touching. Is that medal of Florentia what the statue of Giuliano holds in its stone hand, in Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel, where the uncle and nephew sit forever across from each other in that round stone room? The nephew looks down, his face forever in the shadow of his helmet carved with the lion’s head, the power of Pope Leo. Day and Night. ‘He, dead, has taken the light from us’—Michelangelo grieved for Giuliano, and his promise to the ‘fellow citizens’ of Florence.30

A promise that didn’t last long.

A Letter to the Cardinal and Il Diamante’s Brief Epoch

The nephew’s friends thought Giuliano was weak, too soft, with his talk of the republic, his consideration for old enemies; it was dangerous. Paolo Vettori wrote a letter to the cardinal—

There was this rift in the family. The nephew’s mother Alfonsina sent him a letter, counting who was on whose side. On Giuliano’s: his sisters Lucrezia, wife of Jacopo Salviati, and Contessina, married to Piero, nephew of Giovanbattista Ridolfi—wanting a republican Florence. On our side, however, Alfonsina said, there’s you, me, Giuliano’s cousin Giulio di Giuliano, Giuliano’s sister Maddalena and her husband Franceschetto Cybo—agreeing that only force could hold Florence for the Medici. ‘There are more of us,’ Alfonsina said, ‘and we are wiser’.32

In February 1513, right after the festival, the cardinal discovered—some say, invented—a conspiracy against il Magnifico Giuliano. In Rome the pope was gravely ill. In Florence Pietro Paolo Boscoli had dropped a piece of paper with a list of names. Someone took the list to the cardinal. Twelve citizens were arrested, Machiavelli among them, tortured with the strappado. Machiavelli wrote his prison sonnets to Giuliano: ‘I have, Giuliano, a pair of shackles on my legs, / with six hoists of the rope upon my shoulders; / my other miseries I do not want to talk about / as this is the way poets are treated’.33

The pope died. The cardinal set off for the conclave, carried to Rome on a litter because his anal fistula was hurting too much for him to sit down. The next day, before sunrise, Boscoli and Agostino Capponi had their heads cut off in the courtyard of the Bargello.

Giuliano intervened to save Machiavelli. Rusticated, Machiavelli started writing an advice book for leaders, On principalities. It was going to be dedicated to Giuliano, he wrote in a letter. ‘It should be welcome to a prince, especially a new prince—’34    

Then Giuliano’s brother the cardinal was elected pope.

The pope chose the name Leo, he said, because his mother, when she was pregnant with him, dreamed that she was giving birth to a lion.

In May, Pope Leo summoned his brother to Rome. There the brothers argued a long time over whether Giuliano or their nephew Lorenzo should lead Florence. Vexed, disheartened, at last Giuliano handed the responsibility to Lorenzo—something he always regretted, said Nerli.35

Machiavelli decided to dedicate The Prince to the nephew, who was twenty-one.36

The Pope had plans for his brother. He would keep him in Rome. He would make him gonfalonier of the church. He would marry him off to the daughter of the king of Spain. He would carve out a new state for him, in the north—

That September (a year since their return to Florence) the pope held a festival for Giuliano and the nephew: citizens of Rome. A wooden theatre, painted to look like marble, propped on the stones and animal tracks of the Capitoline Hill—on its stage a boy playing the woman embodying Rome sang. Afterwards Roma went riding about in a carriage between Justice and Fortitude. Cybele (Magna Mater, Rome’s protector) came on stage in a carriage pulled by lions. Her globe of the earth split and out stepped Roma again, dressed in gold now. A young boy playing the woman embodying Florence came on stage in a golden carriage. Florentia was weeping. She walked to il Magnifico Giuliano where he sat in the audience; she was weeping still. Luckily Cybele brought Roma and Florentia together and cheered Florentia up. Dante had written that Florentia was Roma’s beautiful daughter.

The pope had ordered a new medal for his brother; it had Roma on its reverse. There were cheap copies made of it, thrown to the crowds.

The nephew didn’t make it to the ceremony.

Some time that summer il Magnifico Giuliano summoned the artist to Rome.

They had known each other a long time, had been at the court of Milan together. Perhaps they met in Venice in 1500. Skin and bone after the siege of Bibbiena, il Magnifico Giuliano had just been ordered to Venice. Leonardo had fled there with the mathematician Fra Pacioli—back in Milan, Trivulzio was interrogating their friend Giacomo Andrea. Leonardo and Pacioli had written about Andrea in their book, how he was like a brother to them, their Vitruvian Man: he was killed in the square, his cut-up corpse left for the birds.37 Perhaps Leonardo and Giuliano met in Venice at the palace of Bernardo Bembo, one-time ambassador to Florence; perhaps it was Bembo ushering Leonardo to the Venetian senate, ready to inspect the Isonzo river to see whether they could flood it against attack from the Turks. In 1502 Leonardo and Giuliano had met in Imola, part of Valentino’s entourage. They must have met at Mantua, also: Isabella d’Este, repeatedly asking the artist for a painting, was Giuliano’s friend. And at Urbino: il Magnifico Giuliano was among the friends in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier; Bembo was there too, talking till dawn. They talked about devices; they talked about artists.38 ‘Yes, Leonardo,’ they said, ‘first painter in the world’—only sometimes he grows tired of painting.

Leonardo jotted a date in his notebook. ‘I left Milan for Rome on the 24th day of September 1513 with young Francesco Melzi, Sali, Lorenzo and il Fanfoia’. And the notebooks, the pictures, the drawings, the paint, the instruments, the mechanical lion, the machines, the furnaces: half a tonne of stuff. 180 miles to Florence: they stayed there a little while, put some money in the bank. Then Rome: il Magnifico Giuliano had set aside rooms for them in the Belvedere, its high view over scrub and pale mountains. All the rooms needed work. More light. Tiled floors for the furnaces. A big table for grinding colours.39

In Rome the painter was planning to figure out the truth about the moon. (‘Invent an eyeglass to see the moon large.’ ‘Make studies of the ashen glow of the moon.’) He was going to study how living images float above concave mirrors. (‘Machines for making concave mirrors.’ Sketches to find the focal point of concave mirrors.) He was going to complete his Book of Anatomy, recording an infant closed in a round of flesh like a bird in its shell. Also, finish the paintings for il Magnifico—

But the noise—

The painter liked a clean room, pictures on the walls, somebody reading poetry maybe, or playing music. Not this hammering. Not this Giovanni of the Mirrors, filling the whole of the Belvedere with his workshops and labourers, this backstabbing know-it-all, this spy. His steel mirrors, everybody loved them—so large and so true. Il Magnifico Giuliano sent one to Isabella d’Este. ‘One of the most precious things I have,’ she wrote back to him,40 sending him perfume made with her own hands—

Leonardo was finishing his picture for il Magnifico Giuliano, cooking up oils for the glazes.41 From the beginning the artist had planted devices inside his portraits. There was the portrait he’d made of Ginevra de Benci for Bembo: her bright face set before a needle-net of juniper at her back. Juniper: Ginepro: Ginevra. So young, married at sixteen to a widower. She was a poet; one line survives, trapped in it is a tiger, pacing up and down the syllables. On the painting’s reverse, trick porphyry, a painted palm is tied to the laurel wreath: Bembo’s device. A banderole winds through it, binding a sprig of juniper, the tree that says her name: its dream at the back growing wild inside the picture’s landscape.42 In his portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, too, Leonardo set a living device inside the picture. Galle, Greek for the ermine which Gallerani holds in her hands: symbol of purity, the creature who will die, say the bestiaries, rather than muddy its pelt.

Old bestiaries and fables, the device-maker’s sourcebooks, are copied down in Leonardo’s notebooks alongside riddles, prophecies, allegories, costumes, rebuses, and sketched devices.43 He has il broncone sketched there: ‘A felled tree which is shooting again. I am still hopeful’. He made a device for Cardinal Ippolito d’ Este, Isabella d’ Este’s brother. Her secretary spells out its meaning. A falcon holds in its beak a ‘tempo’, that little metal rod which metes out time in a bell clock. Fa(l) con tempo: do it in good time.44 An impresa whose motto is a rebus—its soul contained in its body—like Leonardo’s sketch of musical notes sounding out ‘love delights me’.

A diamond ring in the shadows of La Gioconda—perhaps Leonardo was thinking of the design for Giuliano’s medal: Florentia smiling, turning to face us, a picture taken from life. He had learned some things from Hans Memling’s portrait of Bembo holding an antique medal in his hand. In Memling’s picture Bembo turns to face us. His eyebrows are exact, even to the single hairs. At his back a landscape opens: morning, widening over the blue hills, clouds edged in light. Behind Bembo, Memling painted a lake into the landscape. Inside the landscape this painted lake contains a mirror landscape, its near shore bright where morning’s far-off light sways in the shallow water. Above Bembo’s left shoulder Memling has painted a palm tree—the body of his device, growing wild in the landscape there. VIRTUTEM FORMA DECORAT [‘BEAUTY ADORNS VIRTUE’]. Closer to us, two laurel leaves have started to spread from the frame into the picture, outgrowing the frame’s painted wreath of palm and laurel leaves. Perhaps the shadow-banderole which stops now at the picture’s edge of La Gioconda met a pattern of devices carved into its original frame.

Perhaps Leonardo was thinking of his old portrait of Monna Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo. Around 1503 he’d started his portrait of her. He worked on it for years, said Vasari. In 1503, in Florence, in the margin of a manuscript, somebody jotted a note about how Leonardo was working on it, perfecting the face and hands first, leaving the landscape unfinished.45

Monna Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo would have been well cast as Florentia—a Gherardini, married to a citizen—because of what Dante said about the family, and Machiavelli, writing a history the Medici commissioned. Dante set the Gherardini in the fifth sphere of his Paradise, a place like cloud. (In Milan once Leonardo made a machine for the stage, a version of the Paradiso.) There, in crossing beams of light the souls flock back and forth forever. There, like a face speaking out of a mirror, the poet’s ancestor spoke to the poet, remembering Florence as it once was—a modest city, still at peace. Like a woman coming unpainted from a mirror, he said. But you, he warned the poet, you’ll be exiled, you and those Gherardini together. Tasting the salt of other people’s bread, trudging up and down the steps of other people’s houses.

In this fifth sphere of Paradise God works like a painter, said the poet. As he watched, the souls formed words in air, letter by letter, from the Book of Wisdom: DILIGITE JUSTITIAM QUI JUDICATIS TERRAM [‘LOVE RIGHTEOUSNESS, YE THAT BE JUDGES OF THE EARTH’]. Then, over the M of that last word, in streaks of light, like torches at night, they painted the head of an eagle over the two outspread wings of the letter: the Gherardini crest, painted in bright souls there. (And an M like the Medici, the Medici might have thought?) As Machiavelli wrote the history of it, the Gherardini were exiled aristocrats who gave the city its republic when they came home. Also, Monna Lisa’s husband lent money to il Magnifico Giuliano, five-hundred gold florins.46

But it was all too late.

A New Device and Turning Fortune

The device il diamante, painted in the shadows of the landscape, sets the painting of La Gioconda in that brief epoch when Giuliano led Florence. Because in Rome he took up a new device, cryptic and strange.

Giovio didn’t think much of it—

A soul without a body. Letters inside an upside-down triangle. A pyramid-cut diamond turned into a spinning top. A word carved into the marble of Santa Maria Trastevere. SIVOLG: si volg[e]: it turns, meaning Fortune. Reversed here: meaning a reversal of fortune? Giovio’s among those courtiers only guessing at what else the letters might mean.

Then il Magnifico Giuliano’s fortune turned again.

Leonardo wrote a note to himself. ‘Il Magnifico Giuliano de’ Medici left Rome on the ninth of January 1515, just at daybreak, to take a wife in Savoy, and on the same day fell the death of the king of France.’

Il Magnifico Giuliano had married Filiberta of Savoy, seventeen years old—now suddenly aunt of the new king of France. The pope had promised Giuliano and his wife lands in the north. Now the new king claimed those lands for himself.

The pope made Giuliano lead the papal army against his new wife’s nephew. Giuliano started to feel unwell. He was in Florence writing in secret to Filiberta’s brother, asking him to make peace; but Filiberta’s brother was already guiding Trivulzio and his army along a mule track over the Col d’Argentière, unfolding bridges over chasms, blasting through stone. Giuliano started coughing blood. His brother the pope appointed their own nephew leader of the army. So young, said Alfonsina, paying the nuns of Sant’ Orsola to pray for him.

That same year Monna Lisa and her husband ordered some pictures for Sant’ Orsola; their daughter had gone into the convent there.47 They found a new artist, Leonardo di Francesco di Lazzaro Malatesta—unpretentious and he worked fast; he painted their crest into the picture. Filippo Strozzi wrote a letter to his brother-in-law, the nephew. He was gossiping about the Monna Lisa—remembering how they’d joked about wanting to fuck the uncle’s La Gioconda, maybe? (Monna Lisa had six children; the eldest was about Lorenzo’s age.48) How Monna Lisa’s son caught some garbled version and told his father. How Monna Lisa’s husband went to Strozzi and apologised that his wife had turned him down. How Strozzi explained to the father that the son was more his type. How Monna Lisa’s husband was still afraid that Lorenzo would punish him for his wife’s refusal.49

Monna Lisa spent her last years in the convent where her daughter lived; some say her bones are buried there.50

At Marignano the soldiers slept on the field of the dead, woke the next day and fought again. ‘All the battles I’ve ever fought in were child’s play to this!’ cried Trivulzio. The nephew had waited well back from the battle ground. He was guarding Parma. The French king, victorious, took the northern states for himself. He handed titles to Filiberta and il Magnifico Giuliano. In Fiesole Giuliano lay in bed, moving his arms and legs a little; he was Duke of Nemours now. In Bologna the pope met the new king on the day of the Concordat. For the triumph, Leonardo’s mechanical lion walked a little way, bowed, opened its heart with a claw and spilled out fleur de lis.

Giuliano started to feel a little better. That March he died. The painter took his pictures with him over the mountains to France, and the new king. In his notebooks he wrote, ‘The medici made me and destroyed me’—

Mirror Portraits and a Lion in the Stone

The shadow-device il diamante darkens in a mirror’s light. Leonardo used mirror-writing. ‘Painters!’ he said, ‘I say again that when you paint you should have a flat mirror and often look at your work in it.’ In Rome he worked in secret on his mirrors.

I wonder whether La Gioconda is a mirror portrait, like that portrait of Elisabetta Gonzaga which Castiglione kept hidden ‘behind a beautiful large mirror, anyone who knew the trick could open it and close it’.51 Over time, over years, seeing his face age in the mirror, Castiglione could slide his mirror sideways and find her there still, waiting inside the mirror-portrait’s single instant, its bluish landscape, the waking sleep of her eyes. Castiglione had that secret mirror-portrait made for him in Rome after he came to live there in 1513. Maybe he’d seen Leonardo’s picture of La Gioconda in the studio—

I need to tell you about this box the Medici had, wrote Machiavelli’s grandson. ‘On its front panel it had the Medici devices’—you slid that panel sideways to see the hidden picture.52 Frames that worked with the secrets of devices. Leonardo hid a portrait behind a veil once. It seems he wrote a warning for the frame’s cartouche: ‘Do not draw this veil if liberty is precious to you. My face is the prison of love’. Veils, painted panels over mirrors, sliding covers over portraits, painted allegories sliding sideways on rails—like Giorgione’s picture for Vendramin of the old woman holding the motto col tempe (with time) in her hands; how her face slid sideways out of the frame, showing beautiful youth dressed in black leather waiting behind her in the dark, until her face slid back again.53

This calls to mind that strange poem Leonardo wrote in his notebook:

In an angled mirror, it is also easier to see how the shadows cast on that bare cliff alongside il diamante remake themselves into the form of a lion crouched in stone.

He wrote, ‘Blink your eye and then look at it again: what you see was not there at first, and what was there is no more’. Perhaps this image of the lion alongside il diamante is the Marzocco of Florence, resting at peace in stone there. Until the shadows changed.