Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo’s places

Leonardo lived in Vinci with his grandfather Antonio until around 1469. Even after he moved to Florence, various archival documents show that he maintained a regular relationship with Vinci and Montalbano.

The enormous legacy of drawings and manuscripts, including the two volumes of the Madrid Codices discovered in 1967, certainly documents Leonardo’s productive relationship with the entire Montalbano area.

Kept in the Uffizi, his famous youthful landscape drawing – the first landscape drawing in the history of European art – was drafted by Leonardo on 5 August 1473 for the feast of the Madonna della Neve in Montevettolini. It accurately identifies the fortified settlement of Montevettolini, the hill of Monsummano Alto, and the flooded plain between these two points, as seen from the wall of the Poggio del Belvedere. He thus portrayed this very fascinating area of Montalbano using a technique of representation perspective (such as the contraction of the visual angle) derived from contemporary Florentine cartographic experiments. The adult Leonardo’s cartographic processes originated from this view study, in which Leonardo’s poetics of nature also finds its origins.

A group of drawings from 1506-7 recorded a construction project for a dam and a water catchment area to power a mill in Serravalle, just east of the village of Vinci.

Another folio from the Atlantic Codex shows Leonardo’s interest in mill technology, where, again around 1506-1507, Leonardo designed a plan –accompanied by some notes – of the “Doccia di Vinci mill”, which existed at the time in the Doccia area in the far north of the village.

However, in those years, Leonardo was mainly traveling far and wide throughout the entire Arno valley and the area encompassing Montalbano and the Fucecchio Marshes as well as that of Lake Bientina and Monte Pisano.

Two famous Leonardian maps, the Map of northwestern Tuscany (Madrid Codex II, f. 22v-23r, circa 1503) and the Arno Valley with the proposed route for a canal, (Windsor, RL 12685, approx. 1503-1504), describe in exceptionally minute and precise detail the entire Montalbano complex and its location between the Arno valley and the Valdinievole. The second map famously documents the idea of circumventing the obstacle represented by the narrowing of the Arno River between Signa and Montelupo, which made it unnavigable.

Leonardo: his life

Leonardo was born 15 April 1452 in Anchiano, a small outlying area of Vinci. His mother was named Caterina and his father was the notary Ser Piero da Vinci. He spent a happy childhood in the Tuscan countryside around Vinci in close contact with nature. His artistic talent was very soon revealed. In 1469, he entered Verrocchio’s workshop, where he began his apprenticeship along with Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Pietro Perugino, and Lorenzo Credi.

His first work dates to 1473, a drawing known as “Landscape of the Arno Valley”, today interpreted as a view of Montevettolini and Monsummano executed from the slopes of Montalbano. In this same period, he painted “The Annunciation” (Uffizi, Florence) and the beautiful portrait of the noblewoman “Ginevra de’ Benci” (National Gallery, Washington). A high point in his Florentine experience is “the Adoration of the Magi” carried out in 1481 for the convent of San Donato in Scopeto, which remained unfinished.

At the age of thirty, Leonardo moved to Milan, to the court of Ludovico il Moro, presenting himself as an engineer, architect, sculptor, painter, and even musician. In Milan, he worked mainly as a painter, creating one of his masterpieces, the first version of the “Virgin of the Rocks” (Louvre, Paris). The second version (National Gallery, London) followed in 1494. Meanwhile, he worked on the colossal equestrian monument in honor of Francesco Sforza.

In 1495, he began painting the “Last Supper” for the refectory of the Convent of S. Maria delle Grazie, finishing the work in 1498. When Ludovico il Moro’s duchy fell to Louis XII’s French armies in 1499, Leonardo left Milan and headed to Venice by way of Mantua. In 1499, he joined Cesare Borgia as an architect and military engineer, following him in his military campaigns in Romagna.

In the early years of the 16^th century, Leonardo returned to Florence, where he devoted himself with new energy and a renewed commitment to painting, carrying out for the Florentine Republic the “Battle of Anghiari” in Palazzo Vecchio. The famous portrait of the “Mona Lisa” (Louvre, Paris) and the lost “Leda” also are from this period.

In 1506, urgently requested by the governor of Milan, Charles d’Amboise, he returned to Milan where he studied the flight of birds and resumed his studies in anatomy, urban planning, optics, and hydraulic engineering.

In 1513, Leonardo decided to move to Rome, staying in the Vatican under the protection of Giuliano dei Medici and continuing his mathematical and scientific studies.

In 1517, he accepted the invitation of the King of France, Francis I, and moved to Cloux Castle, near Amboise, where he held the post of “first painter, architect, and engineer of the King”. He again became involved in hydraulic engineering and sketched the plans for a royal residence in Romarantin.

He died on 2 May 1519 at his residence in Cloux; he was buried in the Church of St. Valentine in Amboise.

Leonardo’s birthplace in Anchiano

Leonardo’s birthplace is in the Anchiano area, about 3 km from Vinci. Open to the public when the museum’s is open, it obvious complements a visit to the Leonardo Museum.

Leonardo’s birth on 15 April 1452, in this farmhouse set in the open countryside, is attested by an ancient tradition as well as accepted by the historian Emanuele Repetti.

The building, still bearing the Da Vinci family coat-of-arms, is framed by a landscape even now similar to the one Leonardo also saw in his childhood.

Inside, there is a permanent educational exhibition, with reproductions of drawings with views of the Tuscan countryside and a map of the Valdarno drafted by Leonardo.

Montalbano in art and sculpture after Leonardo

In his paintings, Leonardo left us many depictions of “his” countryside. The background in the Baptism of Christ by Verrocchio, on which he worked between 1471 and 1476 (Florence, Uffizi Gallery), may be a happy youthful reference to the relationship between the mount and the valley spreading towards the Fucecchio Marshes.

A reference to Montalbano’s vegetation is seen in the painted trees connecting the distant landscapes with the foreground figures defining the scene and the story.

Likewise the structure in the Adoration of the Magi painted between 1481 and 1482 (Florence, Uffizi Gallery), is depicted as removed from the actual context, almost a fragment or a ruin, appearing as lively backdrop with people in action. Many authoritative scholars have explained this as a reinterpretation of Giuliano da San Gallo’s staircase in the Poggio a Caiano villa, under construction at that time.

If Leonardo is the undisputed genius who, from Vinci, filled the entire world with his breathtaking artistic vision and his scientific and technical curiosity, Montalbano gave birth to other illustrious artists, with Jacopo Carucci known as Pontormo (1494- 1519) first and foremost.

His artistic similarities link him to Rosso Fiorentino and to the most famous of his students, Agnolo Bronzino. Pontormo’s works are in the world’s main museums, from the Uffizi in Florence to the Metropolitan in New York, from the Fine Arts in Boston to the Louvre in Paris, and from the National Gallery in London to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Pontormo left on Montalbano two genuine masterpieces from the period between 1519 and 1521: the frescoes in the Medici villa of Poggio a Caiano, with such pagan-inspired figures as Vertumnus and Pomona, and the Visitation to St. Elizabeth in the Church of San Michele in Carmignano.

Written in the last years of his life, his Diary (the manuscript is kept in the National Central Library in Florence, ms. Magl. VIII 1490) confirms Vasari’s opinion of a restless, innovative personality in pursuit of perfection.

After Leonardo’s death, a well-known sculptor was successful on Montalbano. Known as Baccio da Montelupo, Bartolomeo Sinibaldi (1469-1535) had, like Pontormo, trained at the school in San Marco’s Garden. Furthermore, he is considered by critics as the transitional artist bridging the 15^th-century sculpture linked to Donatello and that of Michelangelo.

The work that represents him in his maturity is the statue of St. John the Apostle, commissioned in 1514 by the Silk Guild for one of Orsammichele’s niches in Florence, all the expressive power of the gesture and the face appears in this work.

Ten years after Leonardo’s death, his nephew, Pierino, also known as “da Vinci“, was born. An accomplished sculptor, he had studied with Tribolo and was a friend of Pontormo, Bronzino, and Cellini. During his 1547 stay in Rome, he learned about and studied the work of Michelangelo, learning from it the techniques of twisting forms and the richness of Michelangelo’s language. The engineer and humanist Luca Martini required him in Pisa where Pierino carried out some of his most significant works. Among the works to be mentioned are River Divinity (Paris, Louvre, image to the side), the bas-reliefs on the XXXIII Canto of the Inferno from Dante’s Divine Comedy (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, image below), and Abundance and Pisa Restored (Rome, Vatican Museums).

Ventura Vitoni is worth mentioning. This skilled wood carver became an architect at the end of the 15^th century. He played an important role in the Pistoia area and Giuliano da San Gallo’s protégé. His first work was the presbytery complex of Santa Maia delle Grazie in Pistoia, followed by the Church of the Convent of Santa Chiara (1494-1499) where he skillfully applied Leon Battista Alberti’s “rules”. and

The 1950s were decisive for the mythology of Leonardo’s places. Leonardo’s “birthplace” was opened to the public. The plaque commemorating the genius’s birth was placed in the church’s new baptistery. The Museum of da Vinci Machines opened in the fortress of Guidi castle (1953).

Since then the places in Leonardo’s landscapes have become features suited to describing Vinci and Montalbano’s historical image by conveying to visitors and citizens of the world a country dreamed (and imagined) by this universal genius.