Leonardo da Vinci

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Leonardo da Vinci and his assistants along with the train of mules carrying his personal belongings, furniture and paintings, one of which is the Mona Lisa which he is still working on, arrive in the Château de Clos-Lucé in the summer of 1516. It has been a long and arduous journey of a thousand miles which has included hurriedly crossing the Alps before the winter set in.

This is the first time in his long life – he is sixty four but with his long grey hair and beard looks much older – that he has left his native Italy. His previous patrons have provided him with work in the various city states of Italy, initially in Florence, then Milan and most recently in Rome where he was lodged in the Belvedere Villa, a recent addition to the Vatican with sweeping views across the city. Here he was employed by Pope Leo X, but found himself struggling to compete with the fame of the younger Michelangelo, riding a wave of admiration following the completion of the Sistine Chapel ceiling after four years of effort.

It was as part of the Pope’s entourage that set out in late 1515 to meet François 1 in Bologna to discuss peace terms, following his anointing as Duke of Milan, that Leonardo met his final patron. In advance of the meeting, the Pope had commissioned an invention from Leonardo that would amuse the young king of France and could be given as a gift. This turned out to be a mechanical lion, two meters high and three meters long and made of wood, that was able to move by way of a single spring and cogs that controlled its motions. It could take a few steps forward, move its tail and sit up on its hind legs. Having done this, a compartment would open up in its chest and a bouquet of lilies would be presented. Lilies were part of the Medici coat of arms, and the Pope had been Giovanni de Medici prior to being anointed as the last ‘non-priest’ to become leader of the Catholic church.

François was already an admirer of Leonardo through his knowledge and admiration for the Italian renaissance, and this must have been the ideal opportunity to offer him security in his old age, as the uncertainties due to the Italian wars continued. Despite his fame, Leonardo is illegitimate and not a rich man by birth so he relies on commissions, many of which he has not completed due to his unstoppable curiosity in everything around him. The title they agree on is “First Painter, Engineer and Architect to the King” and the job comes with a grace and favour home near to the French Court’s summer residence in Amboise, and a decent pension.

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Lisa Camilla Gherardini is born in the summer of 1479 into an ancient family from Tuscany that has fallen on hard times and is living in a rented house in the centre of Florence. She grows up with olive skin, fine dark hair, long eyelashes, full eyebrows and something about her manner which, at the age of 16, attracts the attention of Francesco del Giocondo. He is fourteen years older and has been married before, but his wife has died leaving him with the sole care of a young son. His offer of marriage has pleased Lisa’s parents as he is a highly successful and wealthy man, being a Consul of the Silk Guild, one of the seven Greater Guilds in Florence. Members of his wider family are silk producers with control over its supply from ownership of the mulberry trees that provide nutrition for the silkworms, to workshops which transform the raw fibres into dyed cloth, and then to the sale of the highly sought after silks to the upper echelons of Florentine society and beyond. Along with his brother, Francesco owns two shops and rents a third, and one of his best-selling lines is a silk fabric woven with gold thread – a silk cloth of gold. The marriage, and Francesco’s career, progress well and he and his second wife have an additional son and daughter – Piero and Piera – but Piera dies at the age of two. In 1503, when Francesco decides to commission a portrait of his twenty-four-year-old wife, they have another daughter Camilla¹.

By this time, Leonardo da Vinci’s reputation as a painter is well established and he has completed most of his major works including the Last Supper and Salvator Mundi. His patrons have been the most powerful men from the leading families of the independent Italian states, including the Medici, the Sforza and the Borgia – he is currently in the employ of Cesare Borgia as his military architect and engineer. Therefore Francesco achieves something of a coup in securing Leonardo’s agreement, although Leonardo’s father is a neighbour and has, in his capacity as a notary, drawn up several deeds for him, and it has to be said may have had an influence. Following the sitting, Leonardo continues to work on the small portrait, that measures only 77x53cm², as time allows since he has received another much larger commission – to paint a mural for the council hall in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, which is to measure 17×7 metres³.

Five years go by and Leonardo leaves Florence for Milan in 1508 at the request of the French Governor, and by extension the French King Louis XII, having failed to complete either the larger or smaller commission, claiming ‘technical difficulties’ with his paints. Once he has left Florence, he abandons any attempt to deliver the portrait of Lisa Del Giocondo, and therefore never receives any payment for his work. It becomes for him a type of ‘work in progress’ on which he experiments over the years with fine layers and subtle touches with the goal of achieving the ultimate ‘sfumato’⁴ appearance he has in mind.

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It was not always the case that Leonardo da Vinci was recognised first and foremost as the polymath ideal of the renaissance man, as for many decades after his death his fame had more to do with his artistic genius, since his paintings and murals were there on the walls of galleries and churches for all to see, whilst his notebooks lay gathering dust in an attic.

Leonardo’s notes, sketches, observations and musings are made on loose sheets of paper of differing sizes, using ‘mirror writing’ which he writes with his left hand, from right to left. For the casual observer this makes them difficult to decipher, or even makes them think he is writing in a foreign language. In addition, his spelling is sometimes inconsistent, and he uses abbreviations. When he dies, and bequeaths them to Melzi, there are over 7,000 sheets that he has not organised into any recognisable filing system.

Melzi feels the weight of responsibility and history – his first decision is to make a catalogue of what he has inherited to ensure its preservation, but this is an almost impossible task in that he is the only person who is accustomed to Leonardo’s unique writing style and can transcribe the notes more or less accurately, so help is in short supply. He then plans to organise the pages into a chronological order, since in that way the reader could follow Leonardo’s train of thought, and the development of his ideas, and how one interest might have led to another. But it is soon obvious that this will also be impossible because there are few dates and not enough other indications of timings. He wonders – how can someone who had the most amazing intellect, who could converse knowledgeably and charismatically on almost any subject, have such an unorganised method of written communication, as if the notes were only for him and not for humanity. So he concludes that the next best option is to organise by subject matter.

Knowing that Leonardo had expressed a desire, once again unfulfilled, to compile a treatise on painting in which he would pass on his learnings to other artists and make the case for painting as a science not an art, Melzi starts by bringing together all of the pages which support this objective, transcribing, making notes as he goes and compiling a large manuscript, that will become known as the Codex Urbinas¹ and ends up in the Vatican Library. This alone takes many years and he is still working on it into the 1540s. His aim that in his remaining lifetime he will achieve what Leonardo did not, that is to publish his work, will not be fulfilled, although he does gather some of the separate sheets into notebooks, and manages the relatively more achievable objective of completing a number of paintings that were left unfinished at Leonardo’s death.

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What makes a genius? Is it a natural gift bestowed by a fortunate combination of a father and mother’s DNA, in other words genetics and heredity, or is it an acquired state based on environment, education and experience? Or a combination of both? The same could be asked of any exceptional trait, such as charisma, or evil dictatorship.

A cross-disciplinary team of international specialists – including genetic scientists, microbiologists, genealogists, anthropologists, and art historians – have created a venture, known as The Leonardo Project, with the aim of creating new insights into Leonardo da Vinci’s genius that will combine scientific technologies with state-of-the art research techniques. First, they plan to confirm that the remains in the chapel of Saint-Hubert are indeed genuine, using DNA sequencing. Leonardo’s family tree has already been updated – tracking a continuous male line from his grandfather across six hundred and ninety years, down twenty-one generations and five family branches, to identify fourteen living relatives – so that a match might be made. Other potential sources for Leonardo’s DNA and biometrics have been proposed including: hairs that might be found, stuck within the mixture of pigments, walnut oil and amber resin, on the surface of his paintings, or trapped in the folds of his notebooks; and fingerprints left behind as he softened the tones and layers. All this assumes of course that the current owners are in agreement to allow their priceless possessions to be investigated so intrusively.

Following endorsement (yet to be confirmed) of the identity of the bones, they suggest that using the same methods already developed to re-create faces from fossilised skulls, they could even create a computerised version of his face, although this would seem to call into question the accuracy of the many self-portraits that Leonardo painted during his lifetime.

There are at least a couple of observations here. Today we need a cross-disciplinary team of researchers, whereas Leonardo embodied many disciplines in his one person in his day. Furthermore, the project team finds itself effectively dissecting and analysing his body and its genetic content, much in the same way that Leonardo used dissection to inform the anatomical accuracy of his drawings.

From all of this this yet-to-be-gathered data, The Leonardo Project team hopes to find out more about his physical appearance, the state of his health, and his diet. But this does not sound as though it adds up to a recipe for genius? Is there a gene for genius?

Software engineers may have already found an answer – it is not a gene, but an algorithm. A start-up based in Florence, obviously, has used artificial intelligence technology to develop an App that has been trained on data points derived from Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings.

As might have been predicted, building the genius algorithm was not straightforward, since Leonardo did not draw a shape and fill it with colour, but the shapes emerge from the layers of colour themselves. So extensive research was required to develop a new approach to the standard ‘neural style transfer’ technique that copies the visual style of one image onto another. This resulted in a model with 500 million parameters linked to machine learning algorithms. All of this effort produces, within two minutes, your selfie in the style of the Mona Lisa.

We should not need to remind ourselves that such a feat is not generating a new genius – which may yet come about – but that those millions of data points represent, somewhere in the physical innards of a server, the vast scale of the genius of Leonardo himself.

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