Leonardo da Vinci: the story behind his link with perfumery
2024 . 09 . 05 |
Leonardo da Vinci: Renaissance man par excellence who immersed himself in painting, drawing, science, anatomy, engineering, aviation, military strategy and even astronomy.
Who knew that this man of many talents also dabbled in perfumery?
Drawings of stills and alembics along with recipes for essences and scents found in his many Codices are well documented, but now new research suggests his mother may have exerted an important influence on his life and his work. To find out more, I went to the immersive exhibit at the Chateau du Clos Lucé in which Givaudan was given the task of creating olfactory experiences. Come with me to sniff out the whole story!
The Stuff of Legends
It is a tale that could have come from the Arabian Nights: a young Circassian princess is abducted, taken across the Black Sea to Constantinople where she is sold into slavery for the first time. Her name was Caterina. Her forced journey brings her to the slave quay of Venice where she is sold again before eventually being placed in the home of cabinet makers in Florence. While there she catches the eye of the notary, Piero da Vinci, and Leonardo is the child of their union.
Historians have long debated the identity of Leonardo’s mother, and now Professor Carlo Vecce, a specialist in Renaissance civilization, scholar of Leonardo’s life and work and one of the curators of the exhibit, has found unpublished documents that led him to these conclusions. His fictionalized account of Caterina’s story is the subject of the novel, “Il sorriso di Caterina” which puts forth the scandalous thought that Leonardo was only half-Italian. He further posits that “She is the one who passed on to him a respect and veneration for life and nature.”* Indeed this hypothesis plays out in the exhibit which moves across the major places and times in the lives of mother and son.
From Byzantium to Venice, then to Florence
Coming from a region that lay on the Northern end of the ancient Silk Road, Caterina’s homeland was characterized by mountains and forests where wild herbs, plants, flowers and resins were used in the creation of simple fragrances. It is probable that she brought with her traditions and rituals including fragrance recipes that utilized basic principles of distillation, maceration and enfleurage techniques.
From her time spent in Constantinople she was surely exposed to the exotic fragrances traded in the spice market where cinnamon, black pepper, musks and incense permeated the air. And of course, this city and Venice were linked by trade.
“Different trade routes all passed through Venice and different ingredients came from each route. Venice was the epicenter for spices, ingredients, refined goods. » Nicola Pozzani**
Caterina arrived in Venice in the mid-15th century, the golden age of the Venetian republic which was a hub of perfume production. The spezieri sold spices and raw materials to the muschieri who in turn made perfumes, having learned methods and techniques from the Byzantine and Arab worlds. Craftsmen also perfected the art of making perfumed gloves. Clearly this accessory held great importance to the nobility as paintings depicting the sitter holding a pair of what must be scented gloves are present throughout the exhibit.
For those who couldn’t shop from a muschieri, recipe books, such as the Notandissimi secreti de l’arte profumatoria by Giovanventura Rosetti, made it possible to concoct scents, treatments and cosmetics. As a slave, surely Caterina was aware of the Venetian love of luxury and opulence. Certainly she was exposed to the art of perfumery, and perhaps she was even making her own concoctions?
Caterina finally comes to Florence where she is placed in the household of one Donato di Filippo del Tinta, a Florentine cabinet maker who produced the cassoni, or wooden chests used to hold clothing and linens. Here she meets Piero da Vinci, who by some accounts was a notary and by others a lawyer, but we do know he was Leonardo’s father. How she made it to Vinci, a small town west of Florence where Leonardo was born in 1452, is unclear.
From Vinci to Florence
Growing up in the hills of Vinci as an only child, we can assume little Leonardo wandered through the fields, gathered wildflowers for his mom, and spent time with farm animals in a rustic environment. It was here that he developed his curiosity about nature, and where he first experimented with extracting scent from flowers and plants. Perhaps he also experienced the smells of his fathers’ business: paper, ink, wax, and parchment. He was barely a teenager when he began his apprenticeship in the Florentine workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, a painter, sculptor and goldsmith who was the mentor to many Renaissance artists. We can imagine that the workshop must have smelled of oil paints, varnish, canvases, stone, marble, turpentine and resins.
As a young man Leonardo established his own workshop where he was able to work on his commissions as well as pursue his personal interests and studies. Here he installed his own alembics which he used to test oils, paints and varnishes but also to distill citrus-based perfumes. He went on to experiment with simple fragrance production techniques of maceration and enfleurage. Researchers have found many recipes using plant-based ingredients such as orange flower, elderflower, jasmine, juniper and even cypress in his manuscripts, including this one in which he explains a process commonly followed in Venice at the time.
“Add peeled almonds together with the flowers of bitter orange, jasmine, privet or other fragrant flowers and change the water each time you have to change the flowers, so that the almonds do not take on a musty smell. Solvents. Remove the ammonia.” (Codex Atlanticus, fol. 195v)
Ever the engineer, Leonardo continued to tinker with his own designs for stills, some using glass, others employing copper, always searching for a way to improve the distillation process.
The Sforza Court of Milan
The next major move in Leonardo’s life occurs when he accepts the patronage of the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, becoming his official painter and military engineer. Leonardo encounters a world of courtiers and courtesans, the wealthy nobility who are keen on using perfume to scent their clothing, their gloves and even their shoes. The nobles also used scented beads as shown in Leonardo’s famous portrait of Ludovico’s mistress, Cecilia Gallerani, Lady with an Ermine. These paternoster beads, sometimes used as a rosary, were comprised of small balls of perfumed materials.
While in Milan, a certain Caterina becomes a member of Leonardo’s household.*** Was she just a servant, or could she have been his mother? In any event, this stage in Leonardo’s life is quite prolific and diverse: he begins work on The Last Supper at the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie. He creates his first drawings for a flying machine. He continued his anatomy studies during which he came to understand the mechanics of how our nose smells. He even made correlations between our sense of smell and memory, deducing that we catalog scents in our memory based on their importance to us.
The French court of François I
The year was 1516. A Venetian embassy came to the court of King François I offering luxurious perfumes, a treasured diplomatic gift. It was a tradition of the time, and repeated by the French king who commissioned his own perfumer, François d’Escobart, to create a perfume gift for the King of England, none other than Henry VIII.
During this period, fragrance was used in many different ways: to scent clothes and table linens, to perfume the ambient space, to be used inside pomanders to ward off bad smells and plague.
Leonardo arrived at François’ court this same year at age 64. The monarch, who was a patron of the arts and a Renaissance man himself, had great respect for the Italian who lived out the last years of his life at Clos Lucé, a small chateau adjacent to the king’s palace and accessible by underground passage. We can imagine king and commoner engaging in strategic or philosophical conversations while walking the tranquil grounds of the compound, dressed in perfumed garments, occasionally inhaling the spicy odor from a pomander.
A note about the exhibit
A fragrant adventure awaits the visitor, an olfactory immersion into the times of the Renaissance, and the lands and locations where Caterina and Leonardo lived. With the precious participation of Givaudan, the curators decided to incorporate scent into the tour route, be it the recreation of fragrances from Leonardo’s recipes, as well as scents of raw materials including plants, flowers, resins and gums, woods and even animalics (reconstructed synthetically, of course).
On the day of my visit I was impressed by how people were engaged. Children were curious to smell everything, people really spent the time to read the signage, to look at the displays and to share their thoughts with each other. It’s just one more example of how fragrance can enhance an experience and make it even more memorable.
What would Leonardo think about that?
Leonardo da Vinci and the Perfumes of the Renaissance, through 15 September, 2024, Chateau du Clos Lucé, https://vinci-closluce.com/en/events
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Il sorriso di Caterina, by Carlo Vecce (currently only available in Italian)
Leonardo da Vinci and the perfumes of the Renaissance, exhibit catalog
SOURCES
The Circassian Mystique and Its Historical Roots - GeoCurrents
*** https://www.sparknotes.com/biography/davinci/timeline/
And many thanks to Caro Verbeek, scent historian at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for her support.
Photo Credits for Leonardo da Vinci: the story behind his link with perfumery
Map of Ottoman Empire: Willem Janszoon Blaeu, Turcicum Imperium (Empire Ottoman) ©
Château du Clos Lucé - Parc Leonardo da Vinci
Carlo Vecce: © Fondazione Pordenonelegge.it
Exhibit space © Château du Clos Lucé - Parc Leonardo da Vinci - Photo Léonard de Serres
Portrait of a Woman by Morando Paolo dit Cavazzola, © Fondazione Accademia Carrara,
Bergamo
Portrait of a Woman with Dog Francesco Beccaruzzi, © Fondazione Accademia Carrara,
Bergamo
Gloves, late XVIth century-early XVIIth century © Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Firenz
Concocting scent © Château du Clos Lucé - Parc Leonardo da Vinci - Photo Léonard de
Serres
Giovanventura Rosetti, Notandissimi secreti de l’arte profumatoria, fol. 51v-52r ©
Bibliothèque Sainte-G
A recreation of Leonardo's still © Château du Clos Lucé - Parc Leonardo da Vinci - Photo
Léonard de Serres
Immersion into distillation © Château du Clos Lucé - Parc Leonardo da Vinci - Photo Léonard
de Serres
Léonard de Vinci, Drawing of Flowers . Leonardo da Vinci, Floral composition, views on the
usefulness of glasses, Codex Atlanticus, fol. 663r © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana /
Metis e Mida Informatica / Mondadori Portfolio
A recreation of Leonardo's Lady in Ermine with amber bead necklace, Château du Clos Lucé
- Parc Leonardo da Vinci Photo Leonard de Serres
Pomander, sphere with hinged opening and eight compartments for storing spices ©
GrandPalaisRmn (musée de la Renaissance, château d'Ecouen) / Jean-Gilles Berizzi
The court of François 1er © Château du Clos Lucé - Parc Leonardo da Vinci - Photo Léonard
de Serres
Additional photos courtesy of Augustin Lejeune, Shutterstock or author’s own