IV
Since Leonardo had left Florence in 1507, he had been enrolled as court painter in the service of the French King, Louis XII. He had no fixed salary, but relied on the royal bounty. The treasurers frequently forgot him altogether, nor was he able to call opportune attention to himself by his productions, for as years increased upon him he worked less and less. He was consequently, as of old, in continual straits and entanglements; he borrowed wherever he could, and contracted new debts before he had paid off the old. He wrote the same timid, clumsy petitions to the French Viceroy and Treasurer as formerly to the officials of Ludovico Il Moro.
'Not wishing to fatigue your Excellency's generosity, I permit myself to request that I may receive a regular salary. More than once have I addressed your lordship on this subject, but hitherto have been vouchsafed no reply.'
In the ante-chambers of his patrons he quietly waited his turn among other suppliants, though with advancing years he increasingly knew—
'How salt another's bread is, and the toil
Of going up and down another's stairs.'
The service of princes was as bitter to him as had been the service of the republic; everywhere and always he felt himself a stranger. Raphael had become rich and splendid as a Roman patrician; Michelangelo was hoarding money against the evil days; Leonardo was still a homeless wanderer, not knowing where he could lay his head when he came to die.
Wars, victories, the defeat of his friends, changes in governments and laws, the enslaving of peoples, the chasing forth of tyrants—all that to the generality seems important, was to him as a whirl of dust to a wayfarer on a high road. With equal indifference he fortified the Castle of Milan for the French king against the Lombards, as once he had fortified it for the Duke of Lombardy against the French.
Trivulzio, the ambitious general, was intriguing against Massimiliano, and Leonardo saw the fate of the father, Il Moro, threatening Il Moretto. Wearied by these monotonous and arbitrary political changes, sickened by the manufacture of triumphal arches and the mending of the wings of the trumpery angels, he determined to leave Milan and pass into the service of the Medici.
In Rome, however—for Giovanni de Medici, having become pope, with the style of Leo X., had nominated his brother Giuliano as Gonfaloniere of the Holy Church. He had already gone to Rome, and it was arranged that Leonardo should join him in the autumn. He was to be both painter and 'alchemist' in Giuliano's service.