THE AUTOMATIC LION

Leonardo built an automatic mechanical lion which was presented as a sign of homage to the new King Francis I of France, for the occasion of his solemn entry into Lyon in 1515. A printed document mentioned in a letter from Iacopo Morelli to Giuseppe Bossi in 1807, which had gone unnoticed for over a century (with the exception of a reference by Galbiati in 1920), enables us to shed light on the circumstances of the commission. This document was a description by Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger of a banquet for the marriage of Maria de’ Medici and King Henri IV of France, published in Florence in 1600. It describes the moment when a fierce lion appeared to guests which “as it moved, and rose in two parts, the chest opened and one could see that it was full of lilies” (p. 10). Buonarroti took care to specify that it was “a similar concept to that which Leonardo da Vinci produced for the Florentine nation in the City of Lyon for the arrival of King Francis”. Buonarroti, in writing “for the Florentine nation”, intended that Leonardo’s client was the governor of Florence, Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, the nephew of Pope Leo X and Giuliano de’ Medici, the Pope’s brother. On 9 January 1515, the day of Louis XII’s death, Giuliano left Rome, as Leonardo himself, who had been his guest at the Vatican, recalls. Giuliano was on his way to marry Filiberta of Savoy, the aunt of the future King Francis I. It was the first gesture of a policy of getting closer to France by the Medici Pope, which would later lead to a meeting between the Pope and Francis I in Bologna, in December of the same year. In July 1515, the new King made his triumphal entry into the city of Lyon, and he was particularly warmly welcomed by the substantial Florentine community of bankers and merchants. This explains the intervention of the governor of Florence, Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, who was a financial backer of the Florentine community in Lyon, and for whom Leonardo, again in 1515, planned a magnificent palace in Florence, opposite that of Cosimo the Elder, the old Palazzo Medici.
Leonardo’s technological masterpiece was devised and created in Florence, and later sent to Lyon.
No reference to the extraordinary event remains, however, in the manuscripts of Leonardo. The in-depth research that I carried out in the Municipal Archive of Lyon does not enable us, on the other hand, to establish if the automatic device was presented on the occasion of the King’s first entry into Lyon, on 12 July 1515, or later the same year in Lyon or Bologna, or even in 1517, in the context of the solemn entry into the city of Francis I’s wife, Claude of France. According to documents published by Solmi in 1904 (and again in 1924), a mechanical lion, probably the same as Leonardo’s, appeared again on 30 September 1517 for the occasion of Francis I’s entry into Argentan, and again when he entered Amboise in 1518. The appointment of “meschanicien d’estat”, the King’s mechanic, when Leonardo was buried on 12 August 1519, was surely also a recognition of his last technological marvel in honour of France.
There is other historical evidence of Leonardo’s mechanical lion, but none of it specifies the occasion for which it was built. Besides the curious mention by Vasari (1550 and 1568), Lomazzo recalled in 1584 what he had heard from Francesco Melzi, the pupil who followed Leonardo to France: “once, in front of Francis I, the King of France, he made a Lion, made with a marvellous mechanism, walk from its place in a room, and then it stopped and opened its chest, which was completely full of lilies and other flowers”. Lomazzo also recalls (1590), among the technological virtuosities of Leonardo, “the way of making Lions move using wheels”, or rather a system of cogs.

This study is the first conjectural reconstruction of Leonardo da Vinci’s lion. It is based on the study of the mechanisms of French automatons from the period, among which one can suppose that the memory of Leonardo’s renowned automaton may have been noted. Its destiny can be followed in the creation of automatic machines in France, up to the end of the eighteenth century. In particular, our attention was focused on the mechanism of Maillard’s horse of 1733. All the cogs used in that creation were already well known at the end of the fifteenth century, and many of them can be found in drawings in Leonardo’s manuscripts.

During the last three months of 1513, Leonardo was in Florence where, behind Palazzo della Signoria, the menagerie of lions was located. For this reason, the road that leads from Piazza San Firenze to the Logge del Grano is still called Via dei Leoni. On a sheet of paper from the French period, in Codex Atlanticus, 249 r-a (673 r), next to a small plan, the words “room of the lions of Florence” can be read. It is therefore extremely likely that it was in Florence where Leonardo was able to study the movements of lions closely, in order to emulate them mechanically in an effective way.
It is possible to reconstruct precisely the route of Francis I’s procession to Lyon, culminating in the surprise presentation of the mechanical lion. In the far north of the city was the “Vase Gate”, which opened to let in the royal procession as it arrived from the North of France. A heraldic lion was sculpted on the gate, and for this reason it is sometimes referred to as the “Lion’s Gate”. The pediment bears the motto from the beginning of the sixteenth century: “One God, one king, one faith, one law”. The arms of France were painted on this gate in 1490 by Jean Perreal, the famous painter who was also well known for his relationship with Leonardo. The three angels and a lion, carved around the shield, were sculpted by Nicolas Leclerc (Archives Municipales de Lyon, cote BB 19 and BB 20). The royal procession continued along one of the main roads which crossed the city from North to South, which are well marked on the map of Lyon in 1547. The first road developed on the right bank of the River Saône, along Borgneuf, between the hill and the river, before crossing the larger neighbourhoods of Saint-Paul and Saint-Jean. The procession was then reunited in rue Mercière, before going along rue Confort, and across Saint-Nizier square and rue Grenette towards the near centre, thanks to the bridge over the Rhône, where the royal procession stopped in the second main road, today known as cours Lafayette. The procession consisted of the King with Queen Claude, the Constable, René of France, and the Marshal of France, Trivulzio. They were preceded by a long procession of bishops, mitred abbots, the seneschal, the twelve councillors of Lyon, the procurator, the notables and lastly the bourgeois bearing gifts for the King, including the Florentine merchants dressed in crimson with precious gifts, probably including Leonardo’s mechanical lion.
The goldsmith Jehan Lèpere created the golden lion given to Francis I in 1515, as well as the golden cups given to Queen Claude and the Queen Regent (Archives Municipales de Lyon, cote BB, 35, cc 638-63g). The golden lion was seated and held the shield of the city of Lyon in its paws.
It seems that Jean Perreal, the official court painter, played a marginal role in Francis I’s solemn entry into the city of Lyon in 1515. Only a year later, however, on 30 October 1516, the Council elected to organise the entry of the Queen, which included many Florentines and was known as Consulate, gave Perreal the task of producing the decoration and stage design for the solemn entry of Queen Claude, on 2 March 1517, across the bridge over the Rhône.

Serious financial difficulties made it hard for the city of Lyon to prepare a suitable solemn entry for Francis I in 1515. However, the will to preserve the privileges given to the city by Charles VIII led the Lyonese community to made a great effort. The decorations were entrusted to Jean Yvonnet and Jean Richier. There were seven big decorations and eight little ones, while around fifty actors were involved in the procession. Guillaume Le Roy, who is the likely author of the miniatures in the manuscript L’entrée de François I, Roy de France, en la cité de Lyon le 12 juillet 1515, was among the artists who took part in the entry. The manuscript, preserved in the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, is missing a few pages, but it has miniatures which illustrate the most salient moments of the King’s entry. Unfortunately there is no image of Leonardo’s lion.

The automatic lion with its complex evolutions (it walked, sat on its hind legs, and opened its chest with lilies coming out of it) made a great impression on its contemporaries. The role of the Florentine colony in the organisation of the celebrations for Francis I explains the choice of the lion, as an explicit reference to the motherland: the lion, known as “il Marzocco” is the symbol of Florence, and it was made famous by Donatello’s sculpture. The choice of lilies, or fleur-de-lis, was not incidental either, as the flower was both the coat of arms of France, and of Florence. The involvement of the Florentine colony in the celebrations for Francis I also had a specific political significance. They were paying homage to the powerful monarch, with whom the Medici Pope, Leo X, hoped to form an alliance. It was not by chance that the Lyonese celebration took place, as has been mentioned, between the marriage of the Pope’s brother, Giuliano de’ Medici to the King’s aunt, at the beginning of 1515, and the Pope’s meeting with Francis I in Bologna at the end of the same year. Probably, when the automatic lion was set in motion in front of the King, a poem was recited for the occasion, based on what has been reported (Guigue, L’Entrée de François Premier… en la cité de Lyon, Lyon, 1989) which says:

It was very wise,
To set up a Rampant Lion,
Since the love which surrounded it
Had been chosen separately,
A gesture in the most suitable age
Which it could have had among one hundred.
(Fort fut la sagesse / Pour percer ung rampant / Car amour qui la gesse / L’avoit choysie à part, / Traict a l’age plus décent / Avoit entre cent.)

As well as inducing wonder and amazement, the lion invented by Leonardo is also important in the history of science for two reasons. These are: The counterbalance mechanism of the automaton, and its “escapement”, the two inventions necessary for making it work. Both are drawn in separate figures in the codes of Leonardo. (Fig. 1 and 2). Therefore they were known by Leonardo and may have been used by him together in order to create his lion, as I conjecture in my reconstruction.

Conceptually, this shifts backwards, and attributes Leonardo with the invention of the pendulum clock, which needs an escapement and counterbalance in order to work. The invention of the pendulum clock is traditionally attributed to Christian Huygens, in 1673 (see Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics).
It is also true that we have no surviving drawings by Leonardo which show the combined use of a counterbalance mechanism and an escapement for the creation of a pendulum clock. Also for our reconstruction of the lion, we used the escapement and the idea of counterbalance separately (in two different system orders).
However, the idea of the pendulum clock, which dominated science during the following centuries, came from Leonardo (1), at least in embryonic form, and this intends to emphasise the present study.
The concept is also supported by Boffito in Gli strumenti della scienza o la scienza degli strumenti (The instruments of science or the science of instruments), in which he writes: “In Leonardo’s opinion, the constant aim of his research was to achieve a more suitable division of time, and a more accurate measurement, neither of which were permitted by the clocks which were then in use, which functioned using sand, water or wheels. He realised that if the old methods of escapement were used to moderate those objects, so that they did not run down excessively quickly, they did not set the time. He showed how it was possible to avoid jars and applied a balance wheel. Or rather, for a moment, as various sketches in Codex Atlanticus show, he had the lucky intuition of making use of a pendulum. Since elsewhere he returns to certain links between these and other clocks, we must not exclude the possibility that, in some way, he went further.

Recently, in January 2006, Jill Burke published an article («Oxford Art Journal», 29 January 2006, pp. 77-91), in which she examined a document found in the Biblioteca Nazionale (National Library) in Florence about a mechanical lion which Leonardo created in 1509 for the entry of King Louis XII into Milan. The document says (Fondo Principale II.IV.171):
“For the King’s entry into Milan, as well as other performances, Leonardo da Vinci, the famous Florentine painter, devised an intervention. He created a lion, above the gate, which was lying down, and then stood up as the King entered the city: with its claws it opened its chest and drew out some blue spheres full of golden lilies, which it then threw down and scattered on the ground. Then it dragged out its heart and pressing it, made more golden lilies come out. The «Marzocco» of the Florentines symbolised by that animal had its innards full of lilies: the King stopped in front of this performance, which he found very pleasing, and it made him very cheerful”.
This appears to be the description of an earlier, different lion, invented by Leonardo, which did not walk, and which was probably equipped with a more simple mechanism. From a lying down position, the lion appeared to rise up onto its hind legs, thanks to a cylinder-shaped rod which rose from the ground level, and moved the front part of the lion’s body upwards. A similar mechanism is illustrated in the next figure of an automaton from 1600, preserved in an English museum.
When the King entered Milan, the entire city was full of hope and enthusiasm for the man who had conquered the Venetians, who had been the undefeated enemies of the Milanese for a long time. After his victory at Agnadello, Louis XII made his entry on 1 July 1509. In addition to the lion, he also saw painted stories and buildings and roads which were decorated for a feast. It seems that these decorations were carried out by Leonardo, as Oltrocchi concluded from the following Latin text by Bernardino Arluno, in the Storia de Bello Veneto (History of the Venetian War): “ Erecti quippe triumphales arcus recolendum maiestate sua Ludovicum, rerumque magnificentia gestarum admirabilem, dum sese Jovis in arcem ex delubro Virginali recipit triviis compitisque progressum excipiebant: ibi totius belli series disposta, effigiataeque levibus penicillis imagines intervivebant: digesta membratim per tabulas forosque con glutinati belli materia discernebatur: reflorescebant vegeti spiritus redivivaque Ludovico ferocitas insolescebat, cum sese tanto apparatu totque legionibus oppositum hosti terra marique potentissimo pictura planiore relegeret: […] Suos inibi Proceres de re bellica disserentes omnemque suscepti finiendique belli rationem diligentius explicantes admirabatur: se quoque medium inter eos sedentem exigentemque de re dubia singolorum opinionem […]. Incredibili voluptate spectabat: nec procul insertis pontis compage fluminisque traiectu restrictos hostes attonitosque proruentium impetu Gallorum conspicabantur horrentem Livianum immitique picturae vultu praeferocem cunctatorem Petilianum, prudentesque togatos inter bellatores ducturesque fortissimos agentes cernebat […] Ludovico vero consiliis eorum insultabundus adversabatur, in ipsaque picturati staminis lecitone cuneis omnibus impulsis suaque ad mota acie diffusam hostilem militiam imprimebat, scindebat, sternebat: artificum praedoctae manus tantoque opere exaequando laboriosae suspensas miris modis lineas inducebant, conflectebant, dirrigebant: tum vivis coloribus et spirante fuco diversarum formarum imagines speciesque rerum mollissimas in ipsos motus palpitantibus venis ac membris connitentibus animabant; crederes equos tinnire, plangere solum, sanguinem fluere ; praecipites hinc Gallos, ruentes illinc venetos, distentis telis, excitisque viribus concorrere, permisceri, confligere: adeo exacta omnia, suisque finibus terminata, insuflato coloribus spiritu fervens pictura vegetabat […]. At in ipsa spetaculorum serie praeculto pollice digesta omnia viventibusque lineis effigiata multo lumine corruscabant .longo esamine spaciosisque marginibus illustria viri facinora censebantur et cum admiranda omnia spectatores olim audissent nunc omnia cominus admirabiliora cernebant, atque cum singula magni Ducis acta prospicerent, tantoque sudore, ac sanguine madido set irrorantes artus intuerentur captivum protinus et ad pedes Regis stantem Livianum suspiciebant […] exinde profugi milites confusaeque omnium bellatorum turmae tanti viri captura, tantoque abisso Duce ex ipsis picturae claustris amentes alienique protinus erumpebant […]. Harum tali erat rerum species talique adumbratae artificis ministerio figurae colribus infusis viventes agebant: allectabat animos voluptate titillantes miraculorum speciosa lectio. Sed inter omnes Rex ipse magno singulis spectaculorum intersticiis affectu distinebatur: tum vero laetitiis omnibus incessit extimuitque pleno dilatatus impetu, cum ad ipsam Jovis arcem deventum est. Ibi caelo moles educta stabat, arcuque conflexa triplici fornicabatur: bipartenti capacissimoque Regem adita gratanter excipiens universus terrarum orbis axe commuto tremefactisque cardinibus adventanti Ludovico patebat, imperantique praecelso troni sui fastigio parere reverenter acclinarique cuncta videbantur. […] Haec variis impressa praescriptaque figuris Ludovicus seriatim perlegens, omnemque summa cum voluptate picturam ex alto perlustrans flaccidi set inanibus oculos nutrimenti pascebat”.
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