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The Staging of a Besieged Fortress IN HIS seminal paper on Leonardo’s last years in France, Edmondo Solmi, in 1904 (and again in his Scritti vinciani of 1924, pp. 337-359), published a long letter that Stazio Gadio wrote from Amboise to Francesco Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, on May 16, 1518, containing a full account of a festive special event organized at Amboise following the celebrations for the for the baptism of the Dauphin and for wedding of Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, nephew of Pope Leo X, with Maddalena de la Tour d’Auvergne, niece of King Francis I. A concluding event in honor of the young King was to evoke his victorious “fatto d’arme di Marignano” of 13-14 September 1515. This spectacular re-enactment, which Gadio describes as “la battaglia del castello”, took place on Friday, May 14, and Saturday, May 15. “Your Excellency”, writes Gadio, “has to imagine a large piazza, on a side of which there is a sort of fortified circuit, the height of a man on a horse and with battlements covered inside by painted drapes to simulate the stones of a wall”. The description goes on giving every detail of the fortified place that had transformed the piazza into the various levels of an embankment with terraces suitable for the emplacement of the besieging artillery, which is described as “mortari de ligno cerchiati di ferro, che tiravano, con la polvere e col focho, con gran strepito, baloni sgonfiati in aere, quali cadendo sulla piazza balzavano con gran piacer di ogni uno e senza danno” (iron-rimmed wooden mortars firing air-inflated balls with great blasting and smoking effects, and these balls, falling on the piazza, bounced off all over at everyone’s delight and without any damage). “Cosa nova e ben condutta ingegnosamente” (a new thing and ingeniously well conducted), concludes Gadio. It is here that Solmi detects the possible conception and direction of Leonardo, then aged 64, who shortly later, on June 19 of the same year, was to stage at Clos Lucé a new edition of his celebrated Feast of Paradise, first produced at the Sforza Castle in Milan in 1490. In support of his intuition Solmi adduced Vasari’s anecdote of Leonardo’s moral prank played in Rome a few years earlier to equate virtue to the expanding form of balloons made of animal guts which, from their initial little space, come to occupy a large room in the process of being inflated. In discussing the Gadio document with me, Carlo Pedretti has rightly pointed out that no such air-inflated “cannon balls” could possibly be fired by a mortar, whether by wood or iron, without exploding or catching fire immediately. There must have been some kind of technological device to convey such a special effect as described by Gadio, perhaps a machine set up just behind the mortars to propel balls that would appear to come out of the dense smoke of each conflagration as if fired by the wooden mortars. Unfortunately there are no technological studies in any in the several sheets of Leonardo’s manuscripts identified as dating with certainty from after 1517, when Leonardo was in France. The only exception, brought to my attention by Pedretti himself, is on the verso of a large sheet of geometrical studies in the Codex Atlanticus, f. 106 r-a & 106 v-a [294 v], which is closely related to f. 103 r-b [284 r] dated May 22, 1517, by Leonardo himself.
To my knowledge, the only authors who have considered this sheet are Augusto Marinoni in his edition of the codex (Vol. IV, 1976) and Carlo Pedretti in his chronology of it (Vol. I, 1978). Their comments are as follows: [Marinoni] “Tutto a matita. Nella metà inferiuore grande ruota e vari disegni meccanici. Nella metà superiore dominano gruppi di palle sovrapposte di varie dimensioni. Alcuni numeri sparsi e due brevi scritte. [Pedretti] Black chalk. Rough sketches of mechanical devices, perhaps for a stage set. A tentative explanation of these sketches is given in the publications listed below. Of particular interest are Pedretti’s remarks in his book on the Romorantin Palace of 1972, pp. 318-319: The sketches are so rough and slight that it is impossible to undestand what they represent. One shows a pyramid of balls and is inscribed “ogni palla / si posa sopra / 3 altre palle”, but it may illustrate just a principle of mechanics. Below is the note “ecciesso decciesso”. The other sketches show the framework of a round platform, with a system of pulley and cables. One may suspect that they refer to some stage apparatus because of the diagram of steps, which can be interpreted as the structure for the spectators, seats (one such structure is clearly shown in Codex Atlanticus 286 r-a [778 r], c. 1497-1500). The drawings do not necessarily refer to the mechanical device for the Paradiso play that Leonardo may have organized in Amboise in 1518, but they can be considered at least his latest known technological studies”. At Pedretti’s instigation I have therefore approached the problem of interpreting those studies to find out that they could well pertain to the staging of the besieged fortress organized in Amboise on May 15, 1518, as described by Stazio Gadio. According to such a description the feigned cannon balls eventually succeeded to open a breach in a fortress made of wood and canvas, and this in spite of their bouncing all over with the exhilarating effect of a massive artillery fire, where the thick smoke of firing mortars was to conceal the effective performance of ingenious catapults hidden behind each mortar.
may help to grasp the ingenuity of the simple but most effective device. In order to produce a functioning model careful consideration was to be placed on the choice of the wood as well as on the thickness of the single parts to conform as closely as possibly to Leonardo’s faint sketches. Hence the sketches of triangular groups of circles, which have been taken to represent the supplies of piled-up balls.
Ancient and Automata - di Luca Garai - Via Belle Arti 3a - 40126 Bologna |
