On 13 January 1490, the rooms of the castle at Porta Giovia, Milan, were brightly lit to celebrate a feast that would be chronicled as one of the most elegant of the Italian Renaissance, and certainly the most elegant at the Sforza court. Ludovico [Sforza, known as] il Moro, who had ruled Milan with an iron fist for over a decade, wished to honour the new duchess, Isabella of Aragon, granddaughter of the king of Naples, who had married Gian Galeazzo Sforza one year earlier: a legitimate heir to the duchy, yet deprived of all power by his uncle. The feast and its golden decorations were intended to silence the rumours that had circulated for over a year in the corridors of European courts regarding Gian Galeazzo’s failure to deflower young Isabella, who was as pure and virginal in Milan as she was when she left Naples.

A hundred young maidens from the cream of Milan’s noble families had been selected for the evening, accompanied by as many knights. In the palace chapel a tribune had been constructed to accommodate the guests and, facing it, a small stage, decked in satin cushions like a throne, where the ducal family sat with its most honoured guests. A powerful, hard-working city like Milan had not dedicated many occasions to such luxurious display in the past years, but now Ludovico il Moro intended to follow the example of his friend, Lorenzo de’ Medici, who had transformed festivities of this kind into an instrument of government.

This goes some way towards accounting for the amazement of the guests who, having climbed the stairs, found themselves in a room brightly illuminated by candles and whose walls were embellished with precious fabrics and verdant festoons interlaced with ribbons. At the back of the room a closed hemispherical object was just visible, raised on a platform. Many speculated that it was a huge egg, cut in half and covered over with a satin cloth. Curiosity stimulated glances and speculation among the guests, who were dressed in their finest attire. When the room was full, the pipes and drums struck up as the young duchess made her appearance (or perhaps it would be more apt to say her apparition), dressed in a white silk cloak that covered her gold brocade gown.

Giving everyone the time to admire her, Isabella took her place on the small throne. She wore such ornate jewels that the ambassador of the Este [rulers of Ferrara], whose account of the feast has survived, reported that he thought he was looking at the sun, such was the beauty of her figure and the magnificence of her ‘Spanish’ elegance. When the music struck up again she danced two very graceful dances with three young women from her retinue and for a few minutes she successfully rivalled the great Ludovico himself as the focus of attention. In honour of the duchess and of the Neapolitan court, he, too, had dressed in Spanish style, wearing a dark red velvet doublet trimmed with ermine and a black cloak lined with gold brocade on a white backing. It was an outfit that must have cost many thousand scudi, as many of the guests remarked.

The dancing continued for two hours, giving both Ludovico and Isabella time to savour the triumph of the occasion in full. Even the ambassador of the Grand Turk, who had ridden on horseback into the room and then sat on cushions at the foot of the throne, after the custom at his own court, delivered a message of good wishes and stressed that the Ottoman sultan did not usually send dignitaries to festivities organized by infidels, but that a special honour had been granted to the court of Milan and that of Naples.

Excitement among the guests reached a climax when the duke silenced the musicians and turned to look at the back of the room – where, as if by magic, the silken cloth slipped off the enormous hemisphere, revealing a mock cavern lined with gold and stars, in imitation of the celestial vault. Cries of amazement rose from the room as the guests watched the seven planets in the sky light up with the signs of the Zodiac. It was a representation of paradise, whose beauty outshone the inventions of any painter who had previously tried to imagine it in colour. Starting with Jupiter, the planets were celebrating the young duchess’s virtues in verses composed by Bellincioni, the court poet. Many in Milan found his compositions too flowery and specious, but that evening even courtiers with more sophisticated tastes found nothing to criticize. Even the expensive garments and jewels of the noble citizens faded into insignificance in an instant, as general attention was gripped by a scenic machine that appeared to be nothing short of miraculous.

Not that mechanical equipment of this kind was a novelty at Italian court festivities. For example, every Good Friday a representation of Christ’s Passion had been enacted in Rome, at the Colosseum, for as long as anyone could remember, during which angels flew around a cross suspended from pulleys and chains that were prepared months in advance by the ingenious members of the confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato. But the mechanisms had always been quite visible in such plays, while at the Castle in Milan that evening nothing seemed prepared, no wheels jammed, the complex mechanics of the whole apparatus were so clever and so well concealed that their naturalness was disturbing. Many of the guests looked around the room, searching for the inventor of that extraordinary stage machine and the equally stunning masquerades.

The man responsible smiled quietly, satisfied at the astonishment he had kindled among guests of all ranks and from all parts. The inventor’s name was Leonardo and he had been born 38 years earlier, in a small village near Florence. He had the body of an athlete, a physique as harmonious and well muscled as a Greek statue. His face was handsome, with exquisite, large eyes and a straight nose below evenly arched brows and a high forehead framed by hair whose well-tended curls fell onto his shoulders in tight ringlets. He took great care of his elegant appearance and, during his eight-year stay in Milan, he had already been noted for the grace and originality of his knee-length garnet robes and the coloured stockings that emphasized his muscular legs. His reputation made him the best known foreigner in Milan, although no one knew his exact role at Il Moro’s court. In the rigid hierarchy of the time, he was recorded as a member of the painters’ guild, first in Florence and then in Milan.

Leonardo da Vinci, who was savouring his first public success in Milan that evening, was musician, engineer, sculptor, architect and painter, and it was in this capacity that he had offered his services eight years earlier to the duke of Milan, with a letter from Lorenzo the Magnificent, lord of Florence and his first patron. Over the past years he had won over the court and the city. Here he had created paintings of unparalleled beauty and hydraulic projects that would rationalize the canals around Milan; he had offered ideas for a new lantern tower [tiburio] over the city’s cathedral, as well as designs for war machines that were still to be tested and machines of various kinds, designed to lift and transport heavy weights. His anatomical drawings and physiological studies lay in untidy piles; they were mainly written with his left hand and back to front, but in Milan they had already attracted their first admirers in these golden years. His, too, was the clay model of a huge monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico’s father, which he was preparing in the large courtyard of the castle in order to cast the statue in bronze.

He alone possessed that acute spirit of observation that drove him to investigate every natural phenomenon, which he did often with confused and contradictory methods, but firm in his conviction that a single law must govern the universe and everything in it, small and large, whether it was water or women’s hair, blood circulating through veins or lymph circulating through a tree’s branches. His knowledge did not look down upon any field of application, and he had created the stage machine representing paradise in this magnificent ceremony with the same care he put into designing machines to throw bombards and to fly above the ground. That evening Milan, too, was his, and very soon letters would be dispatched post-haste to the other Italian courts lauding the marvellous mechanisms of paradise.

Happy in the wake of this celebrated and acknowledged success, Leonardo was already preparing a new theatrical machine for a comedy that would be staged in Mantua, Orfeo by Angelo Poliziano, during which he would terrify the audience with a cavern that opened effortlessly to reveal Pluto emerging from the underworld, balancing on a sphere. His knowledge of weights and levers found in these theatrical machines an ideal way to impress the public at large. He succeeded in devising them by using his discoveries of how to balance weights and create mechanical cogs, because he made no distinction when applying this knowledge: the stage was as good as the battlefield as a foil for his genius. He moved like a magician between science and art, exploring with the same insatiable thirst for knowledge the mysteries of nature and those of the imagination, and in his omnivorous mind even he was perhaps not fully aware of the extent to which the former fuelled the latter.

His reputation as a painter was already well established in Italy, given that three years earlier Giovanni Santi, the father of Raphael – a young artist who would later come to rival him – had written a chronicle that singled Leonardo out as one of the greatest Italian painters. But by 1490 he already felt constrained by that reputation, and the atmosphere in Milan, so cultured and refined in every field of knowledge, was rapidly spurring him to delve deeper into many, perhaps all, of those fields, including mathematics – a new departure for him and a subject on which he would expend much of his energy from now on. Unfortunately the wondrous machines that amazed all Italy were among the few mechanical inventions that contemporaries had a chance to appreciate among the many he devised, imagined and partly created, in a process to which he devoted much of his life. Other inventions were intended to improve water flow and weightlifting, and many, the majority, were never even given tangible form: in the end the sum of his scientific genius proved dispersive and inconclusive. For the most part his mental exertions were confined to endless sheaves of paper that he never published, let alone ordered, before his death and that were largely dispersed soon afterwards. But, despite himself – perhaps precisely because during his stay in Milan he ‘lost patience with his brush’ [impacientissimo al pennello] – between an anatomy session and an hypothesis for a helicopter, Leonardo found time to paint a number of images that were so extraordinary as to embed his memory forever in the minds of subsequent generations. Since the volumes containing his studies were lost and forgotten immediately after his death, it was these images, overlooked during his lifetime, that kept his memory alive until the time when, centuries later, his studies were again rediscovered and published. His codices had such an impact on European scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth century that they soon laid the foundations for a formidable myth, which is still growing today.

It is a myth that has overshadowed the often troubled life of Leonardo, the man and the painter, who attempted to verify all forms of institutional knowledge against direct experience and was more diffident than many towards the academic establishment, with which he never identified himself. Leonardo provocatively proclaimed himself in his writings ‘an unscholarly man’ [omo sanza lettere] in order to highlight that a pathway to knowledge of the real could be found even outside the universities of the time, which continued to teach uncritically a form of knowledge codified by antiquity and by the church.

On 15 April 1452, in the tiny hamlet of Vinci, not far from Florence, the peasant farmers were enjoying the scents of plum and apple blossom carried by the early evening breeze. In one of the roughly built stone and brick houses, a young country girl named Caterina was about to give birth to a boy who would be christened Leonardo.

By ten o’clock in the evening (‘three hours of the night’, as was said at the time), when her labour was over and the child was well, the midwives presented him to his grandfather, Antonio di Ser Piero da Vinci, an 80-year-old notary who was not wealthy but was nonetheless affluent enough to be the most notable citizen in the village. Antonio was the descendant of a family of notaries who had enjoyed prominence since at least 1333. He and his relatives owned a respectable house in the centre of Vinci, with an adjoining vegetable garden and a farm with some ten stadi of land nearby. From his tax returns [denunzie catastali] it appears that he also owned other, smaller farms that produced wheat, oil and wine. His total wealth, 1,400 gold florins, was deposited with the Monte Commune of Florence and yielded enough interest for a decent lifestyle. Antonio was happy with his new grandson. At his age he did not have many years for seeing his descendants, and he hastened to record the event in his family memoirs.

15 April 1452. My grandson was born, son of Ser Piero, my son, on 15 April, a Saturday, at 3 hours of the night. He was given the name Lionardo. The priest Piero di Bartolomeo da Vinci baptized him in the presence of Papino di Nanni Bantti, Meo di Tonino, Piero di Malvolto, Nanni di Venzo, Arigho di Giovanni Todescho, monna Lisa di Domenico di Brettone, monna Antonia di Giuliano, monna Niccholosa del Barna, mona Maria, daughter of Nanni di Venzo, monna Pippa (di Nannj of Venzo) of Previcone.¹

However joyful the event and however welcome the birth of a baby boy, matters had not gone exactly as he had hoped: the child was not the son of the right woman and would remain ‘illegitimate’, a descendant who could not aspire to have full rights to the family inheritance, whether material or ideal. The previous summer his eldest son Piero, who was then a little over 20, had started his career as a notary in Florence, where he lived in a rented house. He had then come to spend the summer months at home in Vinci, and during those lazy hot days he had met and seduced a young peasant girl, Caterina, whose only defect, apart from being poor, was that she was exceedingly beautiful.

Piero had taken advantage of her without any qualms: she was, after all, a peasant and he was due to marry a Florentine woman of suitable social standing, Albiera di Giovanni Amadori. The sole justification for the passing affair was the couple’s youthful exuberance and the beauty of those summer evenings in the cypress-scented countryside. Moreover, the seduction of a poor girl by a well-to-do young man was such a frequent occurrence in the countryside around Florence that it hardly deserved a mention. Indeed Ser Piero had married Albiera that same year.

For her part, Caterina received perhaps, in compensation, a small dowry from the old notary and was married to a local man about whom we know very little, but whose name did not bode well for a comfortable future. The man was called Acchattabriga [‘Troublemonger’] and was the son of Piero della Vaccha – names that indicate humble origins and tricky temperaments. After her marriage, Caterina walked away from the da Vinci family and, judging by the silence of the sources, also from young Leonardo’s life. However, not straight away: as was customary, she breastfed her baby son, whether in her home or in the da Vinci household, for at least a year or two – just enough time for her to grow to love her son and then to suffer when he was taken away, because after that first stage the boy was completely entrusted to his father’s family.

Leonardo was cared for by old Antonio, his 59-year-old wife Lucia, and his second son Francesco, who was just 17. Another daughter, Violante, had already left home to marry a certain Antonio from Pistoia. As an illegitimate son, the boy did not receive a normal education, which in a Florentine bourgeois family involved learning, from the age of seven, Italian grammar, basic mathematical skills, and above all Latin, which was essential for an administrative career and for access to classical books and manuscripts (all of these were still in Latin at that time). However, this lack of formal education, which undoubtedly affected Leonardo later in life, was a source of happiness in his early childhood, since he was freed from the burden of strict learning as laid down by the rules of scholastic institutions. The boy’s rather eccentric upbringing at the hands of his grandparents and young uncle stimulated unusual avenues for his creativity and helped him to develop a lifelong curiosity for the natural world.

Leonardo spent his childhood in that house deep in the countryside, living with his aged grandparents and young uncle Francesco, who was uninterested in work of any sort, as Antonio noted in a later tax return: ‘he lives in the country and does nothing’. Francesco’s lazy lifestyle was a stroke of luck for the child, who benefited from much of his uncle’s extensive free time because life in the tiny hamlet of Vinci did not offer many other distractions and also because, as the notary’s son, Francesco was not expected to work on the land, like others of his age.

We know from later documents that Francesco was the only relative to have loved Leonardo (apart from his grandparents), so much so that he was even willing to challenge the strict laws governing inheritance for the sake of his nephew. It was probably he who taught Leonardo to read and write, indeed the latter’s handwriting retained the typical notarial script of fifteenth-century civil servants, whereas school pupils at the time were already taught to write with the rounded hand whose flowery style epitomized the enthusiasm for humanist studies that had become so fashionable in mid-fifteenth-century Tuscany. School pupils were taught this well-formed handwriting with the same rigour as they were trained in the rhetorical art of grammatical compositions – another trait that Leonardo’s prose would never acquire, despite the artist’s later efforts to fill the lacunae in his self-taught education. Leonardo’s writing, learned at home in an isolated village, far from any school, lacked discipline. Moreover, although quite capable of writing with his right hand, the boy preferred to use his left and to write from right to left, something that only the Jews did at that time. If he had attended any ordinary school, this habit would have been punished and corrected, but as an illegitimate son he did not have to live up to any intellectual expectations and no one wasted time correcting him: writing was a game for him and his grandparents did not think that he would use it much in life.

As time passed the boy’s upbringing became increasingly unusual and unorthodox. Occupied by his new marriage and by his career as a notary, Leonardo’s young father had little time to spare. Moreover, the mere presence of the boy was a constant reminder of a painful problem that Ser Piero now faced: the lack of children. Albiera could not conceive and Leonardo’s presence was an unspoken denunciation of her sterility. The years passed and Albiera and Ser Piero would have no legitimate heirs until Albiera’s death in 1465, after 13 years of what cannot have been a happy marriage. In Florence as in the rest of Italy during the fifteenth century, marriage was above all a financial transaction that served to consolidate social alliances and to ensure the continuity of private wealth and family honour. A childless marriage was a useless marriage and the fault always lay with the woman, who was held to be responsible for the couple’s sterility. However distant and confined to the small village of Vinci, the boy, who was growing up to be strong and handsome, was a source of sadness for Albiera and of embarrassment for Ser Piero: family reunions could not have been easy, either for the couple or for Leonardo. For the same reasons, the fact that the grandparents knew that another heir would not arrive soon increased their love for Leonardo, who grew up in their sometimes overly affectionate care.

The conditions in which the child was raised were very unusual. On the one hand, the absence of other children in the grandparents’ household meant that he was alone much of the time; on the other, this was not helped by the gulf between him and other boys in the village, which was due to the fact that the da Vinci family had to defend its standing in the rural community and certainly could not send this young grandson to work in the fields, like all the other boys of his age. Even if illegitimate, Leonardo was the son and grandson of respected notaries and, as such, stood apart from other village boys. A life of ease, freedom and solitude, albeit not lacking in basic education, was an ideal medium in which he could nurture a growing sense of curiosity in the surrounding world. But, on the other hand, what was certainly a painful relationship with his father and stepmother served as an equally necessary condition for the child’s creative introspection to develop, shielded as it was in the arms of his grandparents, who undoubtedly loved him even if they failed to discipline him.

Vinci was a world suspended between domesticated and wild nature. The village lay on the edge of the wooded ravines of the foothills to the Tuscan Apennines, where farmed countryside gave way to large areas of wilderness. Olive groves, vineyards and fields of wheat occupied part of the hillsides between the crags, while the soft outlines of the woods were broken by rows of cypresses. The rest of the surrounding countryside was full of narrow gorges excavated by streams as they flowed downhill to join the Arno, the majestic river whose sediments had moulded the valley over thousands of years and presented the boy with landscapes of extraordinary beauty. Fascinated by the wilderness, Leonardo started to explore it during his solitary childhood. Later, in early adolescence and during the heady phase of puberty, he undertook these explorations of the world around him with growing enthusiasm, and his observations became more systematic.

There was something else that the strange family could offer almost in spite of itself, something that would mark the rest of the boy’s life: this was paper, a material that was not lacking in a notary’s household. Large quantities of paper were purchased by the da Vinci family, as is borne out by a credit note dated 1451 and signed by grandfather Antonio, which mentions, among other debts, the 12 lire that Piero owed the cartolaio Giovanni Parigi.² That paper, so precious to the notarial profession, must have been invaluable for the boy’s solitary games and adventures. Paper was not readily available, especially not to poor children, but Leonardo must have had access to considerable amounts, if only in the form of waste paper and cut-offs.

By a lucky coincidence, the best circumstances conspired to develop the boy’s genius: freedom, solitude and scraps of paper, the material on which he could give tangible expression to his thoughts and with which, early in childhood, he established a relationship that would remain unchanged for the rest of his life. Paper would become the principal medium through which he communicated with the rest of the world. Leonardo entrusted every observation, every memory to paper: whether in note form or as a sketch, his mind would project onto paper as if that were his alter ego, an extension of his self, a fetish that he could not be free of and with which he would be burdened to the end, passing from scraps to sheets of drawing paper and then to notebooks, and finally to the voluminous codices. His relationship with paper certainly stems from his unusual childhood in Vinci and paper was the best gift the family could have given him, much better than the social legitimacy his father would always deny to him.

Paper and ink became the boy’s playthings and companions, and then a precocious marker of his talent as he gradually began to reproduce on paper the shapes of what he observed during his long, lazy days. The story told by Vasari about the dying Leonardo contains a kernel of truth that counterbalances and confirms the insight offered by his grandfather’s accounts.

Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that he worked at so many different things, he never gave up drawing and working in relief, pursuits which appealed to him more than any others. When Ser Piero saw this and considered the level of his son’s genius, he one day took some of his drawings and brought them to Andrea del Verrocchio, who was a very good friend of his, and urgently begged him to say whether Leonardo would profit from studying drawing. Andrea was amazed when he saw Leonardo’s extraordinary beginnings, and he urged Ser Piero to make Leonardo study this subject; and so Piero arranged for Leonardo to go to Andrea’s workshop, something that Leonardo did very willingly.³

In this passage Vasari cleverly transforms the moment when Piero makes a derogatory choice for his illegitimate son: the choice of a ‘mechanical’ career of painter instead of a ‘liberal’ career of notary, which would have been open to Leonardo if he had been legitimate. Leonardo’s experience offers a parallel to that of Michelangelo, who was also born into a very affluent family, but in his case the family had fallen on such hard times that they could not afford a liberal career for their son. In both cases Vasari turns a derogatory choice into one dictated by the forceful manifestation of talent, even if years were to pass before this talent would become public. At all events, what emerges from Vasari’s account is that the drawings showed Ser Piero the direction of his son’s career. The drawings that the boy had first experimented with on scraps of notarial paper opened the way to the workshop that would set him on his future path.