Alex Parsons - The Lost Diary of Leonardo’s Paint Mixer

But I have been inside, delivering sculptures and paintings, and I can tell you, their wealth is knee-buckling.

Florence, 1472

The young Leonardo is not just a painter of pretty faces. He wants to know how everything works and then make it work better. Take the dome of Florence Cathedral, for example. The workshop has a commission to sculpt a golden sphere to fit right on top of the cathedral dome.

Instead of spending time sculpting in the workshop, Leonardo is poring over the plans of the cathedral with the architect Brunelleschi. He’s made hundreds of drawings of the cranes being used to hoist up the stones. His sketchbooks are full of gears, axles, rollers and pivots. I think he’d rather be an engineer than an artist.

Leonardo also spends a lot of time gazing at a fresco *in the Church of Santa Maria Novella. All the painters in our Workshop have an opinion about this painting of The Trinity. The artist, Masaccio, drew the vaulted ceiling in the background using mathematics , not guesswork like the rest of us. It’s spooky because it makes everything look so real.

This may well be the way art is going. Artists today are talking about being real and using real models and all that kind of stuff. It’s the fashion to sniff at the artists of the past and put them down as primitive decorators. I can sniff with the best of them.

Florence, Winter 1475

Leonardo and I went out for a drink after work the other day and I got to know our resident genius a bit better. He was born in Anchiano, a little village near Vinci. His mother, whom he has never met (to speak to, I mean), was a peasant girl called Caterina. His papa is Piero da Vinci, a successful lawyer who works here in Florence. Obviously Papa da Vinci is a bit of a ladies’ man as Leonardo’s already had four step-mothers, all of them lavishing love and attention on him, so he’s a bit of a Momma’s boy four times over.

Leonardo’s a very charming bloke, no doubt about it. Easy to talk to, and generous too. And he certainly stands out from the crowd. Everyone else wanders around town in long beige robes, but not Leonardo. He wears short velvet doublets *and bright blue tights, a very colourful chap. He doesn’t seem to have much interest in girls, which is a bit odd. I found myself mentioning my wife Giulia rather a lot and banging my tankard about in a manly way.

Florence, 1476

Have I got a problem! Leonardo is leaving The Master’s workshop and has asked me to go with him to work as his assistant.

Now, I could stay here at this painting and sculpture factory for the rest of my life: the hours are long, the people nice but dull, the boss a bit moody, the work hard, but it’s regular pay.

Or I could put my life in the hands of this eccentric genius, who will either amount to nothing or become the most famous painter in the world. And if he does, my diary will become a world-beating bestseller the minute someone sorts out printing.

Hmmm. And Leonardo does hang out with a rather colourful bunch of people. What will my friends think? Oh well, you only live once!

Let me tell you something about rivalry. You wouldn’t believe the flouncing that goes on when the Colourful Set meet up at the marketplace.

“Hey guys!” I am tempted to say. “Who do you think you are? And as for your patrons *, they may not know art when they see it, but they know what they like.”

Florence, January 1477

I will say this for my new master, Leonardo. He does know his paints. He knows how to grind up rocks and stones and mud to make his colours. He knows how to prepare a canvas, or a panel of wood, or a plaster wall. He knows how to cast bronze and to make armatures *. He knows his geometry and his chemistry. In fact there’s very little he doesn’t know.

And I’ll tell you something else about him. He starts a million jobs and FINISHES NONE OF THEM! I can see this may well drive me mad.

He’s very keen on oil paint at the moment. This is a method of mixing paints with a mixture of boiled linseed oil and nut oil so that pictures dry in the shade. Normally, you see, we put them out in the sun to dry, which can often make the wooden panels split.

Though I say it myself, I am very good at mixing paint. But it is not an easy job. For blue, I have to pound up lapis lazuli (it comes in lumps of precious blue stone). For red I squeeze roots of the madder plant and grind up the mineral vermilion. For yellow I use the urine of Indian cows fed on mango leaves, and I’ve heard some colourmen (that’s the official name for my profession) make a brown using ground-up Egyptian mummies. But not me.

Leonardo says my oil paint makes skin tones luminous and hair like silk, and gives him total control over light and shade, plus you don’t see the brush strokes. So I dash about like a mad thing, pounding rocks, mixing oils, burning charcoal, making glue and stirring varnish. And what’s he doing? Helping with all the mad activity that he’s started? No, he’s gazing into the middle distance looking for inspiration. Inspiration! What use is inspiration when the glue pot’s boiling over?

Florence, Spring 1477

The models are a bit of a pain in the posteriore. Leonardo gets all kinds of people to pose for him, and I thought I’d be having a happy time draping beautiful girls in skimpy bits of silk. But, needless to say, most of his models are beautiful young men with curly hair. And between ourselves, they’re a stroppy lot.

But that’s not the worst part. He’s also taken to filling the studio with toothless old peasants. He gets them to come in and sit about having a laugh. When I’ve pushed the last old crank out of the door, he gets out his sketchbook and draws frantically from memory. I don’t know why he bothers. How many altarpieces or portraits of important people have you seen with a gaggle of grinning peasants in the foreground? None. Art patrons don’t want to see the rough side of life. They just want painters to make them look good in portraits and paint the usual religious paintings to make them feel holy.

There is a bit of a change in the air. When Florence’s artistic set gather round for a bit of a natter, the talk is not of how many metres of mural they can knock out in a month, but how they can bring real emotion and feeling into their pictures.