Leonardo da Vinci at the Milanese Court
Leonardo da Vinci left Florence for Milan around 1482 and stayed seventeen years, the longest settled period of his life. He went with a letter of application to Ludovico Sforza that is among the most quoted documents of the Renaissance. It lists ten capabilities: portable bridges, methods of draining moats, ways of destroying fortresses, covered chariots, mortars, catapults, and ships — and only in the tenth paragraph, almost as an afterthought, does he mention that in time of peace he can do architecture and painting as well as any man. He was thirty and had left several Florentine commissions unfinished. Ludovico employed him as a military and hydraulic engineer, as a designer of court pageants and costumes, and as a painter. He worked on the Virgin of the Rocks and painted Cecilia Gallerani as the Lady with an Ermine. The great commission was the bronze equestrian monument to Ludovico's father Francesco, for which he made a clay model over seven metres high that was admired throughout Italy. The seventy tonnes of bronze reserved for it were used to cast cannon in 1494, and the model was destroyed by French crossbowmen using it for target practice. The Last Supper was painted on the refectory wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie between about 1495 and 1498, in an experimental tempera and oil technique on dry plaster that let him work slowly and that began deteriorating within twenty years. The notebooks of these years cover anatomy, flight, optics, water and fortification. He left when the French took Milan in 1499.
- Year: 1482 CE
- Category: Cultural
