Read Online Leonardo Da Vinci by Kathleen Krull - Free Book Online Page A

three years into his battle scene. He struggled to convey all the horrors of war. But while he was experimenting, trying to achieve the most brilliant colors possible, the paint on the wall ran and . . . well, he never actually finished the painting.
    Leonardo also worked on several portraits during these years. The only one that survives is one he never titled. We call it the Mona Lisa . Leonardo seems to have had a special affection for the picture, for he never sold it, taking it with him on all of his subsequent travels.
    Leonardo’s worries would have been eased had he been able to count on a family inheritance. But when his father, Piero, died in 1504, Leonardo’s meddling half brothers and sisters arranged to deprive their illegitimate sibling of any part of the estate. Then, a few years later, his favorite uncle, Francesco, died, specifically leaving everything to Leonardo. His siblings fought him on this as well. After a year in the courts, Leonardo prevailed and wound up with a small piece of land and money.
    For a while he worked for King Louis XII of France, who was then living in Milan. Leonardo’s job was building mechanical toys and other entertainments. Until he was an old man, Leonardo kept his love of toys, pranks, and riddles. Part of him remained childlike, playful, and open.
    When asked to design a garden, Leonardo came up with a Renaissance Disneyland. It had musical instruments powered by water, a copper aviary for birds overhead, and miniature lakes with waterfalls to keep wine chilled. It even had playful sprays of water, “if one wanted to sprinkle the ladies’ dresses for fun.”
    He and his intellectual friends gathered for dinners where they talked about science—and also fashioned paintings and sculptures entirely out of food. He met seventeen-year-old Francesco Melzi, the well-educated son of an aristocrat. Melzi was interested in everything Leonardo was doing and wanted a career as an artist. He joined Leonardo as a pupil and stayed with him for the rest of his life. At times, Leonardo lived on the Melzi family estate near Milan, sketching the dramatic countryside and designing improvements to his hosts’ deluxe villa.
    All this time, of course, Leonardo was continuing to fill the notebooks. And he felt ever more pressure to put his work in some kind of order before he died. He was racing against time to arrange the information in one grand encyclopedia that people could read and learn from.
    But the more he looked at the results of his years of investigation, the more dismayed he was at the chaos. The labor needed to sort out the bundles of unrelated papers was overwhelming.
    So he put it off.
    Organizing was a type of busywork that didn’t really fit his personality. He reveled in flashes of insight. The actual cataloging of his insights would have cramped his style. And it wasn’t as if the disorganization prevented him from carrying on. He had an extremely high tolerance for confusion—said to be a trait that many geniuses share.
    Also, by 1515, no books could be printed in many regions without church permission, and he may have dreaded the process of censoring his notebooks in order to satisfy others.
    Perhaps he lacked confidence in his ability to write proper scholarly books. He definitely wasn’t up to writing effectively in Latin. He must have been nervous about his writing in general, because he sometimes asked friends to write important letters for him. At times in the notebooks, he worried about being laughed at. Perhaps he was plagued with depression, with bouts of sadness that sapped his energy. In any case, the notebooks remained notebooks. “I have wasted my hours,” he mourned.
    In 1509, Leonardo’s great friend Luca Pacioli died. From 1513 to 1516, Leonardo lived in Rome with the pope for a patron. Pope Leo X, the son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, installed him in a comfortable suite of rooms in the Belvedere Palace inside the Vatican. Leonardo’s duties were minimal,