“… promete finirla per tuto Septembre”: Leonardo in the Sala delle Asse
Italiano
by Maria Teresa Fiorio
16 April 2016
Vinci, Teatro di Vinci
“That part of the tree’s foliage that is seen against the shadow of a background is all of one tone, and wherever the trees or branches are thickest they will be darkest, because there are no openings for the light to penetrate. But, where the branches are against other branches, the bright parts seem lighter, and the leaves lustrous from the sunlight falling on them.”
In this brief note beneath a drawing in the Windsor Collection (RL 12431v), Leonardo explains how to represent a tree in relation to the direction of the light and how to render the difference between branches in shadow and leaves illuminated by the sun. The drawing and the written word complement each other on this folio, where, however, what he writes is made evident above all in the drawing, which for Leonardo was an essential tool of all inquiry. The folio dates to the years between 1498 and 1502, and so can be read in parallel to the large-scale but ill-fated decorative project undertaken by Leonardo in the Sala della Asse.
Having finished the Last Supper in 1498, Leonardo embarked on a new and no less demanding endeavour: the vast room in the north tower of the Castello Sforzesco was to be decorated in such a way as to seemingly remove the screen of the walls and create the illusion of an exterior in the interior. In this absorbing naturalistic scene, the branches of sixteen mulberry trees were to have been interwoven on the vault, forming a pergola with the ducal arms of Ludovico Sforza “il Moro” standing out in the middle. But adverse political circumstances, culminating in the duke’s flight from Milan, interrupted the work at some unknown phase of the painting’s execution. What remains today are two extraordinary monochrome fragments that can definitely be traced to Leonardo, while the rest of the decoration perhaps only reflects what must have been the original conception.
The restoration currently under way, besides freeing Leonardo’s original work from salts that were threatening to damage them seriously, may be able to clarify the nature of the pictorial text that has come down to us, enabling us to distinguish between what has survived of the original painting and the various modern reworkings.
The Sala delle Asse remains in any case a fascinating text, where the political, celebratory theme – the exaltation of the prince through the presence of the mulberry, belonging to the Morus genus and hence alluding to Ludovico – is tied in with an unusually powerful natural spectacle, posing the question of the sources that may have influenced it.
