Here and there in Leonardo’s interrupted memoirs one comes across signs of the passionate curiosity with which the indefatigable experimentalist used to watch over the precious soul of his young friend. He had no secrets from him, for he desired to contribute by all the means in his power towards increasing the accumulated forces of his soul so as to render its future action in a wider field more efficacious. He noted down for remembrance: “Speak to Volturara about a certain way of shooting a dart.” And again: “Show Volturara ways of raising and letting down bridges, ways of burning and destroying those of the enemy, and the ways of placing mortar pieces by day and by night.” Or: “Messer Alessandro wishes to give me Valturio’s De re militari, and the Décades, and Lucretius’ Delle cose naturali.”
He used to be struck by the terse, proud sayings of the young man, and noted down some of them: “Messer Alessandro says one must grasp fortune firmly from the front, since behind she is bald.” And again: “As I was working at the book on dividing rivers into numerous branches, and making them fordable, Volturara said boldly: Truly, Cyrus son of Cambyses understood all that when he chastised a river in that very way for carrying away a white horse of his.”
One day—so I imagine—they had both been invited to the magnificent house of Cecilia Gallerani; and Leonardo had transported the souls of all present by his performance on a new lyre of his own manufacture, made almost entirely of silver, in the shape of a horse’s skull. During the pause which followed the applause, the second Sappho ordered a beautiful little casket, richly inlaid with enamel and gems, the Duke’s gift, to be brought to her; and she showed it to those present, and asked them what object was, in their opinion, sufficiently precious to deserve to be kept in it. Every one expressed a different opinion. “And you, Messer Alessandro?” asked Madonna Cecilia, with a soft glance. And he replied audaciously: “Alexander of old chose the most precious casket among all the treasures of Darius, that which was richer than aught that eyes had ever beheld, as a shrine for Homer’s Iliad.”
Da Vinci immediately noted down this answer in his memoirs, and added: “One can see that he feeds on the marrow and nerves of lions.”
Another day they had both been invited by the same hostess to her garden; and Alessandro, after an argument with some of those “famous spirits,” drew apart, to follow out some new thought which the heat of the discussion had generated in that pregnant intellect. The beautiful Bergamese Countess called him several times, but it was long ere he turned round, for it was long ere he heard the call. Met by a gracious reproof, or perhaps a stinging remark, he answered, smiling: “He who is fixed to a star does not look round.”
In the evening Da Vinci noted down this answer also in his memoirs, and to it added his prophecy: “Soon he will take his first flight, fill the universe with wonder, fill all writings with his renown, and confer eternal glory on the place of his birth.”
Perhaps it was that very evening, as he meditated on the intensity and versatility of that youthful temperament, that his mind, ever inclined to the mysterious significations of emblems and allegories, hit upon that beautiful symbol of the pomegranate, including and bearing upon one stalk the fruit, the pointed leaf, and the flaming flower.
But on the 9th of July in the year 1495, three days after the battle of Fornovo, he noted down: “Volturara died on the field, as was meet for one like him. Never did blind steel cut off a brighter hope for the world.”
Thus lived and died the young hero in whom the purest essence of my warlike race had seemed to be concentrated. Thus fully was he revealed to me in the faithful likeness handed down to his distant heir by an artist who might be called Prometheus.
“O thou,” he seemed to say to me, as with his magnetic glance he took possession of my soul, “be what thou oughtest to be.”