Sublime

Gian Giacomo Caprotti est âgé de 10 ans lorsque Léonard l’accueille. C’est le fils d’un paysan pauvre du village voisin d’Oreno. Léonard lui attribue rapidement un surnom bien mérité, Salaï, le diablotin7. Doux et indolent, la chevelure bouclée et le sourire malicieux, il apparaît dans des dizaines de dessins et esquisses tracés dans les carnets de

The Adoration was commissioned in March 1481, when Leonardo was twenty-nine, by the monastery of San Donato, which was just outside the walls of Florence. Once again his father helped. Piero da Vinci was a notary for the monks and bought his firewood from them.

Pope Alexander VI, also during Leonardo’s lifetime, had multiple mistresses and illegitimate children, one of whom was Cesare Borgia, who became a cardinal, commander of the papal armies, an employer of Leonardo, and the subject of Machiavelli’s The Prince.

In trying to complete this painting and make it stick to the wall that summer of 1505, Leonardo could feel the presence of a younger man looking over his shoulder, both literally and figuratively. Preparing to paint a competing mural in the room was the rising star of Florence’s art world, Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Leonardo may have gone to work with Borgia at the behest of Machiavelli and Florence’s leaders as a gesture of goodwill, similar to the way he had been dispatched twenty years earlier to Milan as a diplomatic gesture to Ludovico Sforza. Or he may have been sent as a way for Florence to have an agent embedded with Borgia’s forces. Maybe it was both.

There are two key differences that distinguish Leonardo’s version of Vitruvian Man from those done around the same time by his two friends, Francesco di Giorgio and Giacomo Andrea. In both scientific precision and artistic distinction, Leonardo’s is in an entirely different realm (fig. 44). Rarely on display, because prolonged exposure to light wou