The main source of increasing knowledge about him was his surviving notebooks and drawings, amounting to some five thousand pages, which gradually became available, and from various documents that are not always easy to interpret. Given his celebrity, it isn’t surprising that in past centuries a very large number of paintings have been credited to Leonardo most of which have subsequently been eliminated from his oeuvre. Poussin, who provided illustrations to the first edition, is said to have remarked that everything of value in the book could be written in large letters on a single sheet of paper. Largely thanks to his fame the text was frequently republished, although it is open to question whether painters of the 17th and 18th centuries found much to interest them in the ideas of an artist born in 1452. A new insight into his activity was provided by the publication in 1651 of his so-called Treatise on Painting, a work produced after his death by combining different passages from his notebooks. The one place where it was possible to see authentic pictures by him, other than the ruined Last Supper, was outside Italy, specifically in the French royal collection, which included five pictures acquired at different dates: the Mona Lisa, another female portrait, La Belle Ferronnière, Virgin and Child with St Anne, the first version of Virgin of the Rocks and St John the Baptist. As it happens, despite Leonardo’s fame his activity as a painter was largely mysterious. None of the other works mentioned by Vasari were on public display at the time, except an altarpiece in Florence by Leonardo’s teacher, Verrocchio, in which Leonardo supposedly painted one angel, and most of them cannot be identified with any degree of certainty. This was abandoned unfinished because of problems with the technique he had attempted, and the composition is known today only through copies. Leonardo was equally unfortunate with his other major wall painting, the Battle of Anghiari, for the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. It was already deteriorating by 1517, within twenty years of its completion. The 1568 Life had already been printed before Vasari went to Milan in 1566, and the only passage relating to Leonardo’s work that can be credited to him is the statement, later in the book, that Leonardo’s most famous painting, The Last Supper, was then only an ‘indistinct smudge’. Although it was the most significant work by Leonardo in Florence, it had not been mentioned in the first edition. He may also be the source for a brief passage about the unfinished Adoration of the Magi, now in the Uffizi. Vasari seems to have made some contribution, notably in adding references to drawings by Leonardo in his possession. The expanded biography published in the second edition of the Lives (1568) wasn’t much of an improvement. As a consequence, many of the details provided about Leonardo’s life are demonstrably wrong. More surprising is the fact that no serious attempt seems to have been made by the author to consult people in Florence who had known Leonardo while he was working there, although this was done for other artists. (Although Leonardo did indeed die at Amboise, Francis was not there at the time.) There is no clear indication that the author of the biographical account, the style of which is unlike that of Vasari himself, had actually seen any paintings by Leonardo, so it’s understandable that the comments about Leonardo’s influence on later artists are extremely vague. Thus the statement about his death was enhanced by the claim that he died in the arms of Francis I, an episode that became an indispensable part of the Leonardo legend and was later depicted by Ingres. Almost all this material was taken from various manuscript sources then circulating in Florence, but embellished in the retelling. The earliest published account of his life, in the first edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550), is largely devoted to comments about his personality, charm, extraordinary range of interests and, perhaps surprisingly today, his reluctance to concentrate on painting. His reputation, already very high in his lifetime, continued to grow after his death, and he regularly appeared in lists of outstanding modern painters. Then came a second period in Milan, a few years in Rome at the invitation of the pope and finally a summons by Francis I to France, where he died in 1519, aged 67. After a brief spell as a military engineer for Cesare Borgia, he returned to Florence. Following his training in Florence he moved to Milan, where he worked for the duke, Ludovico Sforza. L eonardo’s work has always been in demand.
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