11-14 April 1935. The Stresa Front to stop Adolf Hitler.

 April 11th 1935, eighty years ago. Benito Mussolini disembarked – jumping down from a speedboat he was steering – on the Isola Bella, facing Stresa, North Italy and entered Palazzo Borromeo with his usual quick steps. The highest political representatives of Great Britain and France were expecting him, while Adolf Hitler wasn’t invited. The debates ended three days later with the signature of an important agreement that created what was defined as Fronte di Stresa or the Stresa Front. We’re convinced that no one in our days will remember such anniversary, yet it had a worldwide resonance and its failure, aroused by the cowardice of Great Britain, brought the world straight into WWII. In Italy books about this ephemeral agreement are still waiting to be written, neither essays are available offering a dispassionate historical analysis dedicated to it and to its tragic developments. Yet we can say that those days marked the apogee of the prestige and the fame of Mussolini, much more than Munich in 1938. The best study devoted to this intricate subject is due, in our opinion, to Rosaria Quartararo, a brilliant student of historian Renzo De Felice; or to French historians, here I mention only Léon Noél Les illusions de Stresa, L’Italie abandonée a Hitler published in 1975, while little has been written by English historians, perhaps because they don’t know how to free themselves from their superiority complex, enforced by their victory in WWII which in reality it should be attributed primarily to USSR and secondarily to the United States: and perhaps it is for this reason that they continue to see the frantic diplomatic efforts put up by Mussolini to save Italy from ruin as the work of a clown. The Stresa Agreement, according to conservative American historian and journalist Pat Buchanan, in his bestseller Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary war, was the most important attempt ever made in Europe to stop Adolf Hitler before WWII. Buchanan even underlines the fact that it was sheer madness, few months after Stresa, for Great Britain to vote against Italy for the application of punitive sanctions and trade embargo for invading Ethiopia, pushing her into Hitler’s arms. France, on the other hand, accepted Italy’s sovereignty over Ethiopia as a price to pay for preserving the unity of the Stresa Front: a further demonstration of its importance. Italy and France at that time longed for an alliance against Hitler, after he had restored (March 16th 1935) the compulsory conscription and he stated his will to greatly increase the number of divisions of the German army thus tearing apart the Versailles treaty. The winners of WW1 lodged a protest, however the most noticeable error was made by Great Britain: John Simon and Anthony Eden went on to Berlin as scheduled, instead of having their trip cancelled in protest, as if nothing had happened. Benito Mussolini at the start laid out various matters to be discussed; however the necessity of avoiding the Anschluss of Austria was at the core of those talks. He commenced by demonstrating his knowledge of the situation in Vienna, telling the representatives of Great Britain, Ramsay Macdonald and John Simon and to the French Pierre Laval and Pierre-Etienne Flandin, that the conscription in Austria would spell the end of its neutrality, since all the young Austrians were pro Nazis. Mussolini didn’t want Germany at the Brenner Pass and he hoped that Austria would remain a buffer state and, in addition, he wanted to have a guarantee which would allow the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. Today we would say that the occupation of Ethiopia was to vindicate the shame of the 1896’s Adowa defeat, which was part of his electoral platform… Although Mussolini didn’t explicitly speak of the invasion of Ethiopia, he made some weighty allusions, offering in exchange for those African lands he would support the other European powers against Nazi Germany. No one objected or warned him not to dare to carry on the invasion. If they had done so, we doubt that Mussolini would have moved the Italian army. As the then French Prime Minister Pierre-Etienne Flandin, once put it, if Great Britain would have been clearer, it wouldn’t have inflicted a burning humiliation on Mussolini, adding that: “Dictators don’t accept humiliations.” An evidence of the propensity to compromise by Mussolini was the fact that he was willing to accept the subsequent Pact of Hoare-Laval, before it leaked to the press and was made public, causing outrage throughout Europe. Thus Great Britain, the country with the most colonies in the world, voted for the sanctions of Italy over Ethiopia who wanted to have it since the previous century as her colony. As the permanent Secretary of Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart once said: “With this fiasco we lost Abyssinia, we lost Austria, we created the Axis, and we made the coming war with Germany inevitable.” Great Britain – the nickname perfidious Albion, at least in this case, seems well deserved – had a very ambiguous behaviour in those years, thinking it could successfully appease Hitler.

Soon after Stresa, on June 18th 1935, succumbed to the lures of the Nazis; Great Britain signed a naval agreement with them and without informing neither France nor Italy, which put a direct proportion to Germany and Britain by number and tonnage of warships, in fact renegading the agreements of Stresa, as well as those of Versailles of 1919. Benito Mussolini was furious when he heard the news and, unfortunately for Italy, convinced himself that Hitler couldn’t be stopped anymore and that, therefore, he had to ride the tiger.

(Translated by Gino Paratico)

 

An Italian version of this article was published on Dino Messina’s blog for the Corriere della Sera newspaper on the 10th of April, 2015. http://lanostrastoria.corriere.it/2015/04/10/11-aprile-1935-il-fronte-di-stresa-cosi-mussolini-tento-di-fermare-hitler/?fb_ref=Default

31 March 2015 it’s ‘International Hug a Medievalist Day’

Next Tuesday will be International Hug a Medievalist Day but I’ll be leaving to Italy and unfortunately – since I consider myself a Medievalist – I’ll not be available to dispense hugs but I wish that everyone will be able to find another Medievalist to hug in Hong Kong, for good luck and good health. I would like to add that usually Medievalists not only delight in discovering hidden details in caudexes but possess an excellent, albeit slightly weird, sense of humour, which becomes unbearable when they drink ale in pubs. They feel slightly awkward with excessive alcohol (ah, there is an Arab word!) then try to convince people around them to sing hymns in Latin. They look foolishly happy, like children, only when they are able to host a medieval-themed party. It is a tradition, I mean International Hug a Medievalist Day, which had begun only in 2012 and I have strong doubts about the usefulness of hugging Medievalists since International Hug a Medievalist Day is a Facebook concoction. So far, there are 5,000 attendees on the invite page (including me), and basically everyone is posting comments with digital hugs in them + also of course some fine medievalist humour. Who would I like to hug on that day if a true Medievalist could be resurrected? I think Francesco Datini, the merchant of Prato – a sort of Li Kashing in his days – and one of the fathers of modern banking. I am sure he would find Hong Kong rather unsurprising since he had already envisaged a similarly structured Eastern trade city in the XIV century, while he was busy setting up his trading posts in north Europe.

King Richard III will be re-buried today at Leicester.

The Most Rev Justin Welby will be joined by local senior clergy and representatives of world faiths for the service at 11:30 GMT.
Even if Richard III was a Catholic and out of respect he should have buried in a Catholic Cathedral with a Catholic Archbishop officiating the mass.

Sophie, Countess of Wessex and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester are also among the guests.

The king’s remains were found beneath a Leicester car park in 2012. Thousands of people had lined the streets as the last Plantagenet King’s funeral procession.

I am re-posting here an article published by the SCMP on July 8th, 2013.

Finding King Richard III’s body a triumph of science and scholarship

Scholarship, determination and 21st century science lay behind the discovery and authentication of English King Richard III’s remains

The discovery of the mortal remains of England’s King Richard III under a car park in Leicester will be remembered as one of the greatest historical scoops in modern times, a wonderful combination of science and historiography.

The heroine of this story is a woman, Philippa Langley, a screenwriter and a Ricardian to the core, that is to say a person convinced that a great injustice was done by the Tudor usurper to Richard III, the last of the Plantagenet kings. Historians and playwrights seeking the favour of the Tudor depicted him as a repulsive monster, a fate strikingly similar to the posthumous damnatio memoriae suffered by the Roman emperor Nero. Ricardians are members of the Richard III Society, created in 1924 and with affiliated members all over the world. Over the years Langley had assembled a mass of historical data about Richard III. Using old maps, she had guessed that the British monarch’s remains would be found in a certain spot in Leicester city. The unlucky king was interred in Leicester on August 24, 1485 inside the Greyfriars church of the Annunciation of Mary the Virgin. His body was cut down after he was left naked, hands tied, in public view in the city square to show that he was really dead. He had been killed two days earlier at the battle of Bosworth Field.

The Franciscan church was demolished in 1538, like many others religious temples, by order of the son of the man who had defeated him, king Henry VIII. The land was then sold and transformed into a large garden, so large that in the following centuries only a part was built over and the rest was covered in tarmac and used as a car park.

Langley had raised sufficient money by 2011 to start using a ground-penetrating radar but the digging began on 24 August 2012 right under a white letter R, which was what remained of the sign ‘Reserved Car Park’. She hit gold on the first day, because there stood the choir of the church and there she found human remains – the backbone of a skeleton that showed signs of scoliosis. The feet were missing – probably due to construction work done in Victorian times – two mortal blows had shattered the skull, and a small rusted barbed arrow laid close to a scapula. She knew in her heart that she had found Richard III but she also knew that further tests were needed to convince all the people that had disagreed with her search.

In the meantime another Ricardian, the historian John Ashdown-Hill, had discovered through studying archival records, a direct female line running between Anne of York, sister of Richard, and a lady living in Canada, Joy Ibsen, a 17th- generation descendant with a son, Michael Ibsen, living in London. A test of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) passed from mother to daughter could be arranged. Later another female line was discovered and even some descendants via the male line – they all requested anonymity; for the male line Y chromosomal DNA, paternally inherited, was to be tested.

The department of genetics at the University of Leicester was ready to help, and was wonderfully equipped for that. It was there that in 1984 Sir Alex Jeffreys discovered techniques of DNA fingerprinting. They extracted mtDNA from one of the teeth and the match was soon after confirmed with Michael Ibsen and with the other descendants. The skeleton belonged to Richard III beyond any reasonable doubt.

Interdisciplinary study of the bones revealed more matches: 10 battle-related injuries, some probably inflicted after death and some before; his height of 170cm; his age; and radiocarbon dating also placed the mortal remains to the right period. That man had had a diet rich in fish, the bone analysis revealed, a sign of wealth in his times. But there was no sign of a withered arm, a proof of one of the many not-so-innocent lies spread by Shakespeare and other literati.

The king had fought valiantly but lost against a usurper who had no legal claims to the throne. Henry Tudor, who was crowned King Henry VII, had invaded the kingdom with an army more than half of which was French; only 1,000 knights on his side were English, the rest being Welsh and Scottish. Richard III had a larger army, but shameful treason and a clever tactical deployment by the Earl of Oxford, the commander of the Tudor army, won the day.

Oxford was following a book of strategy written in 1410 by a Venetian woman, Christine de Pizan, whose title was The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry, in which she applied to modern warfare the precepts of the Roman strategist Vegetius as well as those of a friend of her father, John of Legnano.

De Pizan (1363-1430) was herself an extraordinary character: she challenged misogyny and stereotypes about women which were prevalent even in the most civilised late mediaeval capital of Europe, Paris, where she had spent most of her life. She became the first professional woman writer in European history.

So we may say that a woman contributed to Richard III losing the battle and his life, but also that it was a woman who finally found him.

 

 

 

On the next 3rd of April Fr Gaetano Nicosia will turn 100!

B39 has almost completed a documentary on the life of Fr. Nicosia. It will be released in May 2015.

April 3rd, 2015 will be the birthday of Fr. Gaetano Nicosia, of the Salesian Order, who will turn 100. His elder brother, still living in Sicily is 104 years old.

Nicosia’s father was killed in the trenches during WW1 – Italy had joined the fray on 24 May 1915 – leaving his mother alone to raise their children. He grew up in his native Sicily and one day, going through the pictures of a magazine showing Chinese lepers, he felt the urge to help them. Because of this he entered the Salesian order founded by Don Bosco in Turin and afterwards he demanded to be sent abroad to assist lepers. He landed in Hong Kong in 1935, moving then to Macau.

When WWII broke out in 1941, Macau was spared the actual fighting but people suffered enormously because the Japanese Army controlled the supply of food. After the war he helped to build an agricultural school in Coloane for the orphans and for the refugees who were moving in from mainland China. In 1963 he started the Salesian Mission for the Hansenians in Macau, and in Coloane  the Missao de Nossa Senhora das Dolores. In 1984 he founded the Escola D. Luis Versiglia de Ka Ho, close to that village.

About one hundred lepers lived in the Ka Ho leprosy, in the island of Coloane; but they were abandoned to themselves, and in urgent need of care. The situation was so desperate that people began to commit suicide. In fact, the colony was located near a cliff, and several of them threw themselves off it.

Between 1963 and 1980, Fr. Nicosia lived in Ka Ho together with his lepers. It is still a mystery how leprosy spread, perhaps through droplets emitted by people sneezing, but not all people can be infected and Nicosia was spared. The village was isolated, and it could only be reached by boat but even boatmen refused to disembark, and provisions were pulled ashore with a rope. With his arrival, the village underwent a drastic transformation: real doctors and nurses were called in to visit the infected people. The diet became adequate, the environment became clean and tidy and the huts were completely restored. Everyone received a task not to remain idle: the colony’s inhabitants became carpenters, mechanics and drivers. It was then that the village became self-sufficient; with a large water tank and electricity.

By 1970, according to a report published by the Catholic Herald, forty people had been healed and reinstated in society, and another seventy remained in the Ka Ho village. Fr Nicosia endeavoured to find work and financial support for those who had been completely healed and were leaving the leper colony. But unfortunately all were considered outcasts, some not even accepted back into their own families. Hence, a good number of them requested to be allowed back. One of them told to Fr. Nicosia: “This place has been turned from an Inferno into Paradise!” Other people started to visit the leper colony. Bishop Tavares, for instance, elected it as his special resort in which he sought rest and where he could meditate and pray. The same for Fr. Allegra, translator of the Bible in Chinese, a good friend and a Sicilian like Nicosia, used to visit and stay at regular basis. Also the Canossian sisters offered their help, while the Italian architect Oseo Acconci, father of our friend Arnaldo and the Soler Music Band, built a wonderful church, dedicated to Our Lady of Sorrows, right on the edge of the Ka Ho’s village. A famous Italian sculptor, Francesco Messina, donated the wonderful bronze crucifix that towers over the church façade.

Fr. Gaetano Nicosia was never afraid to be infected, he kissed and embraced his lepers, sharing their daily life and remaining at their side, always full of optimism and hopeful in the Divine Providence. He is now living at St.Mary’s Home for the Aged, Aberdeen, Hong Kong and he is proud above all of the fact that the grown up children of his lepers enjoy a prestigious status in society. Among them there are professors, doctors, solicitors and skilled professionals, all living a good life with their family, because Hell had been pushed back by this saintly little priest.

Happy Birthday, Father Nicosia!

 

Pellegrino Artusi’s Experience in Finding a Publisher.

Pellegrino Artusi (1820-1911) is the author of what is known as the ‘Bible of Italian cuisine’: La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene.

Pellegrino Artusi was born Forlimpopoli, Romagna, which at that time was part of the Papal States. His father was a middle class merchant and a grocer by profession.
On 25 January 1851, together with his family, Pellegrino was the victim of a famous episode of kidnapping by the Passator Cortese. All the richest people of the town were at the theatre following a comic opera but at the beginning of II Act. a large group of bandits appeared on the stage pointing their weapons to the spectators, demanding all their money and gold. Stefano Pelloni, known as il Passator in Romagna, was at their head. In Romagna he is famous in popular lore as a sort of Robin Hood but he was not more than a violent murderer.
The sister of Pellegrino was raped during the two hours and half stand off and went mad afterward, dyeing in a mental asylum.
It was then the Artusi family decided to move to Florence where they felt safer.
Pellegrino in in 1865 Florence decided to quit the trade of his father and pursue his main passions: gastronomy and literature. He authored a biography of Ugo Foscolo and then a critique of some letters written by Giuseppe Giusti, at that time very popular in Tuscany.
His two self-published books did not sell well.

In 1891 he published a book on cuisine, which after a difficult start became a best seller. It is a collection of recipes and it is a written in good Italian, which is full of Artusi’s typical dry wit and bonhomie.

When Pellegrino passed away in 1911 his book had gone through 14 editions and it is still in print today in several countries where it is known simply as The Artusi having been translated in English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian.

Here is what Artusi tell us about the publication of his book, in the introduction of his work. It is a story which would sound familiar – and hopefully offer some consolation – to thousand of frustrated would be authors.

I had just completed my book, when a learned friend came to visit me in Florence, nonetheless than Francesco Trevisan, a teacher of Italian Literature at the Scipione Maffei Institute in Verona.
He is a learned doctor for studies on Ugo Foscolo and had been elected a member of the committee formed to erect a monument to the poet of the “Sepolcri.’

I had the pleasure to have him as my guest in our house and I just though proper ask him an opinion about my culinary book. But, poor me, after having examined the fruits of my labour for so many years, he passed this sentence: ‘This is a book which will sell very little.’

I was stunned but not fully convinced of his opinion, and in fact it rekindled my desire to let the public judge it. I then asked to a famous publisher in Florence, hoping that remembering that I had spent a large amount of personal money to print some other publications and having very friendly relations with them, they would cast a benign eye on my work. To encourage them I propose to them that I would participated to the expenses of the publication and, to demonstrate my culinary abilities, after sending my manuscript, I invited them for supper at my home.

Vain hopes, because one of them, after having meditated a long time on my proposal came back to say that: “If you work had been written by Doney, then, yes we could speak about it with some concreteness.”
I answered him that “If really this was a work of Doney, probably no one would understand a thing, like for his large opus ‘The King of the Cooks’ while with my practical manual if one know how to held a ladle in his hand, he would manage something out of kitchen.”

We should remember that an editor doesn’t care if a book is good or bad, useful or obnoxious, to them it is only important that it sell well and to this end they look for a famous name on the cover hoping that, under his wings, it will fly very far.

Knowing another important publisher in Milan I wrote to them, since they were publishing every kind of stuff. I had hopes that in their farrago of titles they would find also a sub-section for my modest book. You will understand how humiliating was to receive their dry answer: “We don’t trouble ourselves with kitchen books.”

“Let’s end this story!” I told to myself “I don’t want to beg their help and let’s go on and publish it all at my risk.”
Soon I went to the typography of Salvatore Landi but while I was discussing the conditions I had the idea of offering it to a larger publisher.
And being more suited to such kind of publications, I found him more well disposed than the others, they offered me 200 lire to give away my copyrights. This I mention just to show how low in estimation books on cuisine had fallen in Italy! On receiving such miserable proposal I lost my temper and decided to go back to Landi and had it printed at my risk. I was afraid of a fiasco so I decided to publish only 1.000 copies. Soon after publication there was a fund-raising fair in Forlimpopoli, my native town, and a friend wrote to ask if I could send two copies of my book on Ugo Foscolo but since I had exhausted all copies I sent two copies of my ‘Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well.’

What a mistake! They told me that those who won those two copies were so displeased that went right away to sell them to a tobacco shop. That was not the last upsetting news because, having sent a copy to a magazine in Rome – I was a subscriber – asking them to review it but instead of my review I found it only in the list of the books received with the title misspelled.
After so many cudgel blows on my head finally a man genius came forward and he took up my cause: Paolo Mantegazza. He found with his typical great intuition that my work had some merit and could be useful in the kitchen of several Italian families, for he wrote me saying: “Giving us this book you have done a great service and therefore I wish 100 editions of it.”
“Too many!” I answered “Two editions will be more than enough for me!” and then he spoke about my book in two of his conferences, praising it to sky. 

I then took courage and because copies were selling I wrote a stern letter to my friend in Forlimpopoli complaining about the two people who had resold it to the tobacconist. The first edition slowly sold and then, but always hesitantly, since I was not myself convinced, I reprinted again only 1000 copies. It sold faster and then a bit emboldened I ordered a third edition of 3000 copies and then a fourth and fifth again, always of 3000 copies. Then on a short distance of time six more editions of 4.000 each. With the passing of time my manual was becoming popular so I decided to print the next 3 editions to a level of 6.000 copies each, having reached the number 52.000 copies sold. When I discovered new recipes I inserted them right away (since the culinary art knows no end). This sales were greatly comforting because I saw even important professors buying a copy of it. Happy about the results I wanted to offer to the public some editions which were more and more elegant and having received the impression from my printer that he did not care much about it, one day I told him: “It seems that also to you my work taste bad, and now I tell you with a aching heart, with the tendency of our century to move more and more towards hedonism, I can tell that there will be a day, not so far, when books like mine – which are light to the mind and nourishing to the body – will be sought after and read more than the work of great scientists.”

Blind those who can’t see it coming! The world of the anchorites and of the seducing ideals is at the end; the world is rushing towards – indeed more than it should – to the springs of pleasure, but if one could temper this mad rush with some moral temperance he will be the winner.
I end it here my jabbering thanking the publishers Bemporad of Florence which are now in charge of publishing and distributing my manual.

Pellegrino Artusi

 

Alex Lo of the SCMP presents my book on Leonardo

My Take

– Alex Lo
published: Saturday, 21 March, 2015, 12:21am.

Alex Lo
alex.lo@scmp.com

The Chinese discovered America. The Chinese inspired the Italian Renaissance. The Chinese invented calculus. Oh, by the way, Leonardo da Vinci was half Chinese.

As much as I take pride in being Chinese, I don’t really buy those theories, amusing as they are. The last one comes from my old friend Angelo Paratico, the most prolific and erudite writer I know in Hong Kong, having published at least one book a year over a decade.

I especially like his translation from the Latin of an unorthodox biography of the Roman emperor Nero by Girolamo Gardano, the 16th century Italian polymath. Confession: I wrote the foreword to that book. Angelo told me if you write one book a year, eventually one would catch on. His latest, Leonardo da Vinci: A Chinese Scholar Lost in Renaissance Italy, has attracted a fair amount of attention, including the wires, most of the London broadsheets and the website Huffington Post.

On Angelo’s telling, da Vinci’s mother, Caterina, was a Chinese domestic slave. As a young girl, she was captured by Mongol raiders, sold as a slave in the Crimea and shipped to Venice to serve as a servant. Her fate was not unusual. Apparently oriental slaves were a common sight in places like Tuscany.

Leonardo’s father, Ser Piero di Antonio, was a successful notary in Florence. He ended up owning Caterina and bedded her. After she gave birth, he ignored his son and engineered her marriage to one of his handymen.

“Ser Piero Da Vinci appeared to be a profiteer with few scruples who abandoned his son and left him exposed to abuse,” Angelo wrote. “It is therefore reasonable to assume that Leonardo spent his youth close to his mother and adoptive father in their house.”

How does Angelo know all this? Well, the great Sigmund Freud famously declared that Mona Lisa was da Vinci’s mother.

Just look at her oriental features and the Chinese landscape in the background of the painting. Furthermore, Leonardo was left-handed and a vegetarian. That was very rare among Europeans of the time, according to Angelo, characteristics he attributed to the Chinese influence of his mother.

Farfetched? It is! But Angelo has been a highly imaginative novelist and his new book is a great read.

 

Leonardo’s Mona Lisa was painted in 1478. Not in 1504 nor in 1514.

In a previous post we were discussing about the possibility that Leonardo’s Mona Lisa could have been painted much earlier than thought.

Not in 1503/1504 – during Leonardo’s second stay in Florence – following a commission received by the merchant Francesco del Giocondo for his wife, but Leonardo may have painted the “head” of Monna Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, which has since been lost. Vasari – who had not seen either one – seems to be confused on this point.
Leonardo did not even paint the Mona Lisa later, around the year 1513-1514 and while in Rome, following the Pacifica Brandani’s hypothesis, presented by Carlo Pedretti and Roberto Zapperi in his book Monna Lisa Addio (2012).
Our idea is – and we are the first to formulate it – is  that Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa in 1478, the year of the murder of Giuliano de’ Medici. And the lady represented here could be one of Giuliano’s favourite lovers: Fioretta Gorini, who died at childbirth, delivering Giulio de’ Medici.

Our reasons are summarised below:

-Leonardo told Antonio De Beatis, on 10 October 1517, that the Mona Lisa was: “A paiting of a Florentine lady, commissioned by the deceased Magnificent Giuliano”. The Magnificent Giuliano was Giuliano de’ Medici, brother of Lorenzo de’ Medici, not Giuliano de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours, as all art critics and historians had since thought.
-The Mona Lisa is on poplar wood, like all the earlier paintings by Leonardo who, after moving to Milan, switched to walnut wood.
-There are no preparatory sketches left in his pages about the Mona Lisa but we have an important landscape: the View of the Valdinievole kept at the Uffizi Museum, in Florence, dated 5 August 1473, which could be seen as the starting point for the landscape we see behind the Mona Lisa. See our graphic elaboration. If we transform the castle in the drawing into rocks, then we seem not far from the background of the Mona Lisa hanging at the Louvre.
-Pascal Cotte has discovered, using light technology, some conspicuous differences beneath the Mona Lisa but not in the landscape, which looks unchanged.

a. http://beyondthirtynine.com/a-new-hypothesis-on-leonardos-mona-lisa-was-she-fioretta-gorini/
b. http://beyondthirtynine.com/an-old-mona-lisa-beneath-the-visible-mona-lisa-according-to-the-bbc/
c. http://beyondthirtynine.com/il-celebre-paesaggio-di-leonardo-da-vinci-del-5-agosto-1473-rappresenta-la-valdinievole/

Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vineyard in Milan

When Leonardo Da Vinci was in Milan, painting his The Last Supper, he received as payment a large vineyard, measuring 52 mt. wide and 160 mt. long – from Ludovico Sforza, known as The Moor. It was located after Porta Vercellina, near the Borgo delle Grazie, close to today’s Via Grassi.

Such vineyard was already marked as belonging to him in 1498 and Leonardo was very proud and happy of it, so much so that in his notebooks we find notes about improving the quantity of wine produced there, even explaining to the farmer working on it how to adopt some new methods, already used in France, which should guarantee a larger output of wine.

 

When the French army with King Louis XII at its head invaded the Dukedom of Milan, forcing Ludovico to flee to Innsbruck, Leonardo moved to Mantua, Venice and then to Florence. In 1502 the vineyard was confiscated and assigned to a man named Leonino Biglia but then, in 1506, the French Governor, Charles d’Amboise, wanted Leonardo back to Milan and agreed to re-assign the vineyard back to him and the official act  is recorded on 20 February 1507.

When Leonardo died, in May 2nd, 1519 at Amboise, with his testament he left half of the vineyard to his loyal servant Battista De Villanjs and half to Salai, his favourite disciple, who had already built a house on it.

In 1534 De Villanjs sold it to the nearby Monastery of San Girolamo.  In 1788 it was part of the property of the Taverna’s family.

In 1919 Ettore Conti bought a house close to the vineyard and allowed Luca Beltrami, architect and brilliant historian of Leonardo, to visit and shoot some extraordinary photos there, which were later included in his essay dedicated to the history of Leonardo’s vineyard. Luca Beltrami had been instrumental, years before, in saving the Sforzesco Castle, reduced in ruins and using his influence together with the architect Cantaluppi, once more he was able to convince Ettore Conti to save at least a part of vineyard within his garden.

The photo above is a last shot of what remained of the vineyard, and it was taken around 1941. Unfortunately American bombs and a fire in 1943 destroyed the little that was left of it.

 

To know more about this and other subjects, in about 2 weeks my book on Leonardo will be published.

 

 

Leonardo Da Vinci’s Early Schooling

If you would like to know more about this subject, see my book Leonardo Da Vinci. A Chinese Scholar Lost in Renaissance’s Italy, due to be released on 27th of March, 2015 in Hong Kong by Lascar Publishing.

Two weakness leaning on each other create a strength

That’s why half of the world leaning on the other half is more solid.

Leonardo Da Vinci – Cod. Atl. 244v.

It is likely that Leonardo’s elementary schooling was at Vinci, his birthplace, not in Florence and it seems that he did not receive, even in the following years, any type of formal education, perhaps that’s why he then called himself omo sanza lettere or an illiterate man. Giorgio Vasari, his not always reliable biographer, wrote that he attended for a few months a school of abacus but then he posed such difficult questions to the point of confounding his teacher: a clear sign of his precocity and bright intelligence. Certainly he did not go to school, as we intend today. This can be gleaned from the fact that he used his left hand to write. In Italy this hand is still associated with the devil and, up to a few years ago, was corrected by forcing children to switch to the right. I remember one of my classmates in high school who could write with both hands.  His name is easy to remember: was the same of one of the main character in Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Pietro Crespi, well I remember that Pietro told me that he had been compelled to switch to the right hand when small at the elementary school, getting badly smacked by the teacher.

Leonardo, the left-handed boy was left unchecked, so much so that he was even allowed to develop mirror writing, a thing natural in some left-handers and not originating from his desire to be secretive, as most people still think. Indeed Leonardo could also write with his right hand as well as with his left hand but going from left to right in a somewhat clumsy way. A further proof of the absence of regular schooling is the fact that he never really mastered Latin and Greek, even if he could read some passages of Latin when the subject attracted his interest. We still see Leonardo in his notebooks, already over 40 years old, trying to do exercises of Latin grammar and making some simple mistakes.

Benvenuto Cellini wrote that King Francis I of France told him that Leonardo had some knowledge of Latin and we can also see that he possessed some very elementary notions of Greek.[1] But not only was his Latin not good, even his Italian was insufficient as we can glean, once more, from his notebooks, especially in the Codex Trivulzianus kept in Milan, where he is constantly trying to enrich it by adding new words to his vocabulary.

Lack of good Latin in the end proved a blessing more than a curse forcing Leonardo to enhance direct observation, instead of blindly follow the words of the old masters, like Aristotle, Pliny and Plato. Only during his maturity he had access to ancient learning, when more and more works were made available in vernacular Italian, with the spreading of the printing presses.

Another interesting point worth noting is that he seems not to have received any regular religious training, which had always been mandatory for schoolchildren. Hence the notation reported by Giorgio Vasari in the first edition of his biography, dated 1550, that

Leonardo was of such heretical frame of mind that he did not adhere to any kind of religion, believing that it was perhaps better to be a philosopher than a Christian.[2]

This sentence was censored in the second edition of 1568 but there we can still find the following one, which possesses a strong Buddhist flavour:

Walking around in places where they were selling birds, he was buying them paying the price, to set them free, giving back their freedom.[3]

The possibility that he may have been taught by his mother, Caterina, not to harm all living creatures and not eating meat should also not be discounted.

Francesco Melzi, Leonardo’s most trusted pupil, in the draft of Leonardo’s Treatise of Painting had noted down a list of 18 notebooks by Leonardo but half or more of them are missing,[4] and we cannot rule out new surprises in the future.

The Codex Madrid I and II, containing 192 pages of his writings and sketches dealing with mechanic and geometry were rediscovered only in 1966 at the National Library in Madrid were they had been sitting, mislabelled, for two hundred and fifty years.

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[1]  Cellini B. I trattati dell’Oreficeria e della Scultura Florence 1857. p. 226.

[2] Vasari G. Vite degli Architettori Pittori et Scultori Part III, Florence 1550.

[3] Vasari G. Vite degli Architettori Pittori et Scultori Part III, Florence 1565.

[4] Vezzosi A. Sabato A. Leonardo Florence, 2006.

Leonardo Da Vinci in India

An excerpt from my next book, dedicated to Leonardo Da Vinci and the East.

The manuscript F of Leonardo Da Vinci is a pocket notebook kept at the Library of the Institute de France in Paris and there we find the following puzzling note on the back of the cover.

Map of Elephanta in India which has Antonello the heberdasher. (I)

Several hypothesis were advanced in the past to interpreter it but the one which is widely accepted today is that Leonardo was referring to a place called Elephanta. And a place with that name really exists in India: it is the small island of Garapur in the bay of Mumbai, which the Portuguese named Elephanta because of a colossal sculpture of an elephant placed in front of a temple which was in 1814 placed in the Victoria Gardens of Mumbai while several statues dating from the VIII century were destroyed by Portuguese zealots.

Where Leonardo heard about it? Well it is known that Leonardo was not much interested in America but he was very keen to know anything connected to the East and he knew several explorers who had travelled to India and China. So much so that we are aware of another reference on India made by Leonardo where he wrote about the habits of distributing to the faithful some wooden fragments of miraculous statues to be then consumed.

One of Leonardo’s acquaintance was Andrea Corsali (1487 – ?) an explorer from Empoli in Tuscany who sent letters to Giuliano de’ Medici, son of Lorenzo il Magnifico and brother of pope Leo X. His first letter from Cochin is dated 6 January 1515 – but it was actually 1516 – because the Florentine calendar was starting ab incarnatione meaning that the beginning of the new year was falling on 25 march, therefore all documents bearing a date from 1st of January until 24 March must be moved one year ahead – Corsali should have know well Leonardo Da Vinci because he wrote about his vegetarianism. Incidentally Giuliano De Medici was also the patron of Leonardo and, while recalling the customs of the inhabitants of Gujarat, on the North-West coast of India, Corsali had this to say:

Between Goa and Rasigut there is a land called Cambaia, where the river Indus flows into the sea. There live pagans called Gujarats, great merchants. Part of them wear ‘ascetic’ clothes and part Turkish. They don’t eat anything with blood, neither let anybody harm any living creature, like our Leonardo da Vinci. They live of rice, milk and other inanimate things. Because of this nature, they have been conquered by Moors, and their actual suzerain is a Muslim King who owns a stone that when you put it in water or in the mouth quickly win over all poisons.

They were Jaina in the Indian region of Guajarat, and they were known for their complete rejection of violence. We don’t know the end of Corsali but seems to have been detained in Ethiopia, a country were all travellers were welcome but…they were not allowed to leave.

Another Florentine had been put in charge of the trade with India by the Portuguese. His name was Francesco Corbinelli and he was born in Florence in 19 June 1466, he moved to Portugal first, marrying Maria Marchionni, daughter of the powerful Florentine trader Bartolomeo Marchionni and a trade partner of Giuliano del Giocondo – brother of Francesco, the husband of the Gioconda, the supposed model for the Mona Lisa – Leonardo Nardi and Girolamo Sernigi. Then Corbinelli moved to Goa where he wrote a famous letter dated 22 August 1503 in which he described the second voyage of Vasco de Gama, collecting the impressions of the sailors of the Santo Antonio he had met few days earlier. We know of the friendship of Leonardo with another Florentine traveler Benedetto Dei (1418 – 1492) a spy for the Medici,  as they had made a short trip together to Milan at the beginning of 1482 and he was in fact the recipient of the report, written in 1487-88 by Leonardo, about a trip to the Syria and Armenia and another letter to the Diodario di Soria (the governor of Syria). Leonardo Da Vinci wrote of a trip he made to the East in the Codex Atlanticus, where it appears that he had traveled as far as Syria, and an attempt was made by J.P Richter in 1883 to prove that he had been there just before 1483, but this hypothesis was demonstrated impossible since 1925 by Calvi. The letter was addressed by Leonardo to the Diodario or Diwādar of Syria, lieutenant of the Sultan of Babylon (according to the usage of the time Babylon was Cairo). In it Leonardo describes in the first person his experiences in Egypt, Cyprus and Istanbul. The falling of a mountain, the submerging of a city followed bya deluge and his words are accompanied by wonderful sketches. Carlo Pedretti and Kenneth Clark consider Leonardo’s letter to the Diodario as part of a fantasy written, perhaps, with the intention of writing a novel in the form of a travelogue similar to those we find described in books appearing into Leonardo’s personal library, like Mandeville or in the Metaura d’Aristotile Volgare, Prisciano’s De Situ Orbi and Plinius’ Naturalis Historia. Even in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili we find something similar even if Leonardo did not own a copy of Colonna’s book. Recent dating of such composition puts it to 1508. Sigmund Freud in his famous essay on Leonardo (II) rightly took such notes of his travels as childish pranks, because according to him, Leonardo remained a playful child for all his life, never growing up. Even if, when dealing with Leonardo, surprises can never be ruled out. Also the drawings for a bridge to be built in Istanbul in one of his notebook were taken for a prank at the beginning, until a note was found in 1957 in the Sultan’s archive, proving that a correspondence on the subject had been indeed exchanged. Franz Babingher, an Orientalist at the University of Gottingen and Munchen, author of a book on Mehemet the Conqueror discovered in the archive of the Topkapi Palace of Istanbul a note in Turkish of a letter sent by Leonardo Da Vinci in 1502 to Sultan Bāyezīd II proposing to build over the Bosporus a single span bridge, 240 meters long and 24 meters wide. Another possible source of information for Leonardo was Giovanni da Empoli( 1483 – 1518) who died in Canton, in October 1517 while on a Portuguese ship commanded by Peres de Andreade who was taking the ill-fated delegation of ambassador Tomé Pires to Peking, looking for commercial concessions. Waiting for the permission to carry on with their travel they disembarked but they were somehow infected, probably by typhus, which killed him and his two fellow Florentines, Raffaello Galli and Benedetto Pucci.

Notes:

1. Piata d’Ellefante djndia chella Antonello/merciaio.

This pocket notebook was stolen in 1795 by Napoleon and never returned to the Ambrosiana Library of Milan.

2. S. Freud Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood Norton 1964.

This article has been published in Italian on the Blog of Dino Messina/Corriere della Sera: http://lanostrastoria.corriere.it/2014/10/13/leonardo-da-vinci-e-lindia/