Louis XII

 

Summary
  • Contemporary of Leonardo, King of France 1498-1515, and for a while an employer of the Maestro in 1506 and 1508-13.
  • Louis XII toppled Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo's patron, and captured Milan obliging Leonardo to leave seeking a new patron. Milan's siege and capture was the reason why Leonardo's equestrian monument, described by Janeway as "the great bronze horse in Milan", was never finished.
  • Louis' successor was Francis I, who convinced Leonardo to move to France in 1516. Holo-Leonardo leaves for France at the end of [79 Concerning Flight].
  • Louis XII left France prosperous, and proved posthumously correct that his successor "would ruin everything".

 

Born 1462, ruled France as King Louis XII from 1498 until his death (conveniently for historians keeping chronological records, on 1st January, being the very start of a year) in 1515.

To attempt to make good his claim to the duchy of Milan, Louis XII commanded several invasions of Italy. He successfully secured Milan in 1499 from his enemy Ludovico Sforza, the then patron of Leonardo da Vinci. Milan remained a French stronghold until 1511, when Pope Julius II (the successor of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, who was father of Cesare Borgia) formed the Holy League to oppose French territorial ambitions in Italy. The French were eventually driven from Milan by the Swiss in 1513.
Louis XII

Janeway refers to the "great bronze horse in Milan" in [79 Concerning Flight] when she admonishes Holo-Leonardo for not finishing things (she has the benefit of historical hindsight, of course).

Janeway: "Your beautiful painting of the Adoration, the great bronze horse in Milan, the Battle of Anghiari - unfinished, all of them. You were going to publish your notebooks. You never did. You have given up, abandoned your most important works."
audio clip


Janeway as Catarina, Holo-Leonardo's apprentice, castigates the Maestro
[79 Concernng Flight]


Francesco Sforza, intended commemorative subject of Leonardo's "great bronze horse" monument in Milan		 The equestrian statue that Ludovico Sforza known as "Il Moro", his patron, commissioned from Leonardo (probably in 1485) to celebrate his father Francesco Sforza, did not get finished. Enormous technical problems delayed the monument's construction. The full-scale model of the horse in clay was unveiled in November 1493 in the courtyard of the Milan fortress. But in 1499 the metals set aside to make the monument were instead turned into cannons to defend against the besieging French. When the French captured Milan, without a fight, and toppled Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo stayed until one morning when he discovered French crossbowmen using his clay model of the monument's horse for target practice.

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"the great bronze horse in Milan" - the Sforza monument

Leonardo left Milan with Salai (his apprentice and intimate and ultimately a beneficiary in his will), along with his friend Luca Pacioli, going to Mantua for two months then to Venice where Leonardo was hired as a military engineer, then returning to Florence at the end of April 1500.

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polyhedra - includes information about Luca Pacioli


above: In the centre, Leonardo's sheet from Codex Madrid I, folio 149r shows, from above, the hollow for casting the Sforza monument with the horse head down. There can also be seen the outer negative mould and channels to the furnaces through which the bronze is to be poured in. Two rectangular and two round furnaces surround the smelting hollow. The sketch of the horse seen from the side shows that it was to be cast head down. The sketch dates from c.1493, and was executed as pen and ink on paper measuring 21 x 15 cm, and is located in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid in Spain.

In 1506 Leonardo da Vinci returned to French-occupied Milan and stayed there for three months at the insistence of the French Governor, Charles d’Amboise. Leonardo was appointed artist and engineer to King Louis XII. The Maestro returned to Milan again, now in the hands of Maximilian Sforza after Swiss mercenaries had driven out the French.

Louis XII sired two daughters but no sons. By France's Salic Law which forbade women from inheriting the throne, his cousin's son Francis was his heir-presumptive who eventually succeeded him. In 1514, Louis XII married Mary Tudor (1496–1533), the daughter of Henry VII the King of England, in an attempt to conceive an heir to his throne but this failed.

Louis XII was a popular monarch. He left his country properous and with reduced taxation. He was called "Father of the People". In his old age, Louis XII had worried that Francis his heir-presumptive, as he put it, "would spoil everything" and was posthumously proved correct.

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Francis I successor of Louis XII

The End. Click for the DA VINCI INDEX.

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