Leonardo da Vinci - Kathleen Krull [24]
Francis, a great supporter of the arts, considered Leonardo the smartest man alive and gave him the respect due a wise old grandfather. An underground tunnel connected his residence to Leonardo’s, and Francis would drop in often, for long nights of stimulating conversation.
Here was the perfect patron—at last.
By this time, Leonardo’s beard was long and white, and all his teeth were lost. His right hand seems to have gone numb, perhaps from a stroke. But he did not slow down. “I will continue,” he wrote at age sixty-six.
He spent little time on painting or designing contraptions for warfare. He poured all his energy into science, trying to show how the universe operated under orderly laws. The world was rational, not magical; it could be understood.
“That science is the most useful whose results can be communicated,” he reminded himself. He seemed aware that by keeping his work under wraps, he was failing to provide “shoulders” for others to stand on. But he could see that the task of sorting through thirty years of scientific notes was hopeless.
He decided to give it his best shot—to focus on organizing the information on water, painting, optics, and anatomy.
He worked in between visits from distinguished figures. One of his last visitors got a privileged viewing of presentable parts of the notebooks. The pages had to be turned for Leonardo, since his arm was now paralyzed. The visitor raved, “All these books . . . will be a source of pleasure and profit when they appear,” even though, unfortunately, they were written in that “vulgar” tongue, Italian.
Leonardo listed chapter titles—some 120 just for anatomy alone—and gave himself deadlines. He scolded himself for not sticking to the task at hand: “The mind that engages in subjects of too great variety becomes confused and weakened.”
At the same time, he was thinking more about his faith. Certain church practices had bothered him, especially the selling of indulgences—a way to receive pardon for one’s sins in return for giving the church money. In 1517, the year Leonardo moved to France, Martin Luther condemned this same practice in Germany. Thus began the Protestant Reformation—and more than a century of violent wars over which religion would get a person to heaven.
Leonardo died at the very beginning of the movement. He never wrote about heaven. But before he died, he dictated that his last rites and burial be carried out according to Christian practice.
The end came in 1519, at age sixty-seven. As Melzi, his most loyal friend, nursed him, Leonardo died, no doubt while describing his symptoms and diagnosing his condition.
His will gave half of a vineyard to Salai, a fur coat to his housekeeper, and Uncle Francesco’s property to his half brothers. Leonardo left everything else to Melzi—including the notebooks.
CHAPTER TWELVE
What Happened Next?
THE FATE OF the notebooks is not a happy tory.
Francesco Melzi dutifully brought the thousands of notebook pages back to Italy. But as much as Melzi idolized his friend, he didn’t fully comprehend the meaning of all that he’d inherited. He did hire two assistants to assemble Leonardo’s theories on painting. However, the book of theories was not published until 1651.
Melzi tried to organize the rest of the notebooks for publication, but with little to show for it. Instead, he set aside a special room at his family’s villa just for the notebooks, where invited visitors could view them. The visitors sometimes took pages with them as souvenirs—and so it began.
The notebooks gradually . . . disappeared.
After Melzi’s death in 1570, it got worse. Having no idea of their importance, or not caring, his son Orazio stashed Leonardo’s drawings and manuscripts randomly in chests in the attic. The Melzi family tutor made off with thirteen books for himself. Word spread that the family was giving sheets away or selling them cheaply. Strangers showed up at the Melzi front