Recently I’ve been doing some research for my other projects and I came across this painting by the French master Ingres, The Death of Leonardo. I knew that the Renaissance Italian connoisseur Giorgio Vasari would surely have something on the subject, see below:
At last, having become old, he lay ill for many months, and seeing himself near death, he set himself to study the holy Christian religion, and though he could not stand, desired to leave his bed with the help of his friends and servants to receive the Holy Sacrament. Then the king, who used often and lovingly to visit him, came in, and he, raising himself respectfully to sit up in bed, spoke of his sickness, and how he had offended God and man by not working at his art as he ought. Then there came a paroxysm, a forerunner of death, and the king raised him and lifted his head to help him and lessen the pain, whereupon his spirit, knowing it could have no greater honour, passed away in the king’s arms in the seventyfifth year of his age.
This passage from Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists inspired Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (J.-A.-D. Ingres (French painter)) to paint his 1818 work, titled The Death of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo is depicted wearing a long beard, as in the Uffizi portrait.
Following Leonardo’s death, Francesco Melzi wrote to the painter’s brothers:
I understand that you have been informed of the death of Master Leonardo, your brother, who was like an excellent father to me. It is impossible to express the grief that I feel at his death, and as long as my bodily parts sustain me I will feel perpetual unhappiness, which is justified by the consuming and passionate love he bore daily towards me. Everyone is grieved by the loss of such a man whose like nature no longer has it in her power to produce…
View the excellent cover of 1568 edition of Vasari’s work; and read extracts at Fordham University’s website.