Da Vinci's Ghost by Toby Lester Page A

ranging from the mild (public humiliation, the payment of fines) to the extreme (branding, execution).
    Prostitution, illicit sexual practices, backstabbing anonymous accusations, investigations by the morality police, a tawdry arrest, public humiliation: this was the seamy underbelly of big-city life, and Leonardo now had firsthand experience of it. He can’t have taken the charges against him lightly. Fortunately, in the summer of 1476 he and the others were absolved of the charges against them—not necessarily because they were innocent but simply for lack of a witness willing to testify against them. Leonardo must have been greatly relieved, but by then his reputation had suffered a blow. In the aftermath of his arrest, some of those closest to him even seem to have shunned him. “As I have told you before,” he wrote to a leader of the Florentine guilds in a petition for support, “I am without any of my friends.”
    Later in life Leonardo composed a fable that captures the turn his mood seems to have taken after the Saltarelli affair.Written in a high-allegorical mode, the tale exudes nostalgia for the country life Leonardo had left behind in Vinci—and a powerful sense that he regretted ever leaving home at all.
    A stone of good size , washed bare by the rain, once stood in a high place, surrounded by flowers of many colors, at the edge of a grove overlooking a rock-strewn road. After looking for so long at the stones on the path, it was overcome with desire to let itself fall down among them. “What am I doing here among plants?” it asked itself. “I ought to be down there, with my own kind.” So it rolled to the bottom of the slope and joined the others. But the wheels of carts, the hooves of horses, and the feet of passersby had before long reduced it to a state of perpetual distress. Everything seemed to roll over or kick it. Sometimes, when it was soiled with mud or the dung of animals, it would look up a little—in vain—at the place it had left: that place of solitude and peaceful happiness. That is what happens to anyone who seeks to abandon the solitary and contemplative life to come and live in town, among people of infinite wickedness.
    B Y 1477 L EONARDO had struck out on his own.
    The details are murky. Sometime that year—perhaps now out of favor with Verrocchio because of the Saltarelli affair—he seems to have set up an independent studio. According to one of his earliest biographers , sometime in the years immediately afterward he lived and worked in the service of Florence’s de facto ruler, the wealthy and powerful art patron Lorenzo de’ Medici. The claim is improbable: no other source mentionsthis relationship, which would have provided Leonardo with considerable renown and income, and nothing, not even a passing mention, survives of any work that Leonardo ever did for Lorenzo. But there’s little doubt that by the late 1470s, primarily because of his affiliation with Verrocchio, Leonardo had been exposed to the world of the Medici—the rarefied world of Florentine humanism, that is, in which art was beginning to be thought of as something far loftier than a mere craft.
    One person above all others had created the first stirrings of this transformation: the remarkable Leon Battista Alberti, born in 1404. A figure of prodigious classical learning, wide-ranging practical talents, and apparently boundless energy, Alberti was one of the leading lights of the early Italian Renaissance. While working by turns as an architect, cartographer, civil engineer, cryptographer, grammarian, memoirist, satirist, and surveyor, he also wrote influentially on the theory of art—and by the time of his death, in 1472, several of his treatises had become virtually canonical in Florentine art circles.
    The most influential of these was
On Painting
, a work he composed in the 1430s, hoping it would help bridge the gap that had long existed in art between theory and practice. No longer, he believed,