A sad picture of Leonardo's life in Rome
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 "On the 24th of September 1513", says Leonardo, "I left Milan for Rome, with Giovanni Francesco de' Melzi, Salai, Lorenzo and il Fanfoia." Like many other artists he was attracted there by the notorious liberality of Giovanni de' Medici, who in the preceding May had become Pope Leo X. After stopping in Florence, Leonardo arrived in Rome towards the end of the year and was installed in rooms in the Belvedere of the Vatican, specially prepared for him by Giuliano de' Medici, the Pope's brother. So the favour which Lorenzo the Magnificent withheld from Leonardo was given to him by Lorenzo's sons. Giuliano, weak and unstable though he was, combined interest in art and science in a manner which should have made him an ideal patron for Leonardo. But there seems to have been a fate against his relations with the Medici, and contemporary documents give us a sad picture of Leonardo's life in Rome. The solitary old exquisite, who had lived for so long according to his fancy remote from the world, found himself quartered among half the leading artists of Italy, crowding, criticising, jockeying for positions. Raphael, with his troupe of ambitious youths, must have been frequently in the Belvedere to study the fragments of sculpture collected there, but we ask in vain if he visited the master from whom he had borrowed so freely. Worst of all, Michelangelo was in Rome, having gained by his work on the Sistine ceiling a position of unassailable authority. No wonder that Leonardo felt too weary to engage with such formidable rivals, and withdrew further into a melancholy and mysterious solitude. Vasari gives an account of his occupations worth quoting at length, since it shows how his scientific researches appeared to the eyes of his contemporaries.He formed a paste of a certain kind of wax, as he walked he shaped animals very thin and full of wind, and, by blowing into them, made them fly through the air, but when the wind ceased they fell to the ground. On the back of a most bizarre lizard, found by the vine-dresser of the Belvedere, he fixed, with a mixture of quicksilver, wings composed of scales stripped from other lizards, which, as it walked, quivered with the motion; and having given it eyes, horns, and beard, taming it, and keeping it in a box, he made all his friends, to whom he showed it, fly for fear. He used often to have the guts of a wether completely freed of their fat and cleaned, and thus made so fine that they could have been held in the palm of the hand; and having placed a pair of blacksmith's bellows in another room, he fixed to them one end of these, and, blowing into them, filled the room, which was very large, so that whoever was in it was obliged to retreat into a corner; showing how, transparent and full of wind, from taking up little space at the beginning they had come to occupy much, and likening them to virtue. He made an infinite number of such follies, and gave his attention to mirrors; and he tried the strangest methods in seeking out oils for painting, and varnish for preserving works when painted.
It is interesting to notice that the story of Leonardo frightening his friends with a counterfeit dragon which occurs at the beginning of the Life, is repeated, in a different form, at the end. We cannot doubt that it is true and typical. But the only part of Vasari's account which can be confirmed is the reference to mirrors. Leonardo was probably at work on optical toys, such as the camera obscura, which during his Roman visit had occupied the attention of his precursor, Leon Battista Alberti, over eighty years earlier. It seems that Leonardo had been given the services of a craftsman to carry out his designs, named Giorgio Tedesco. This man gave him infinite trouble and we have several drafts of long and angry letters on the subject which Leonardo addressed to his patron, Giuliano de' Medici. Giorgio was dissatisfied with his pay, worked for others, would not follow Leonardo's drawings, would not learn Italian, and went off shooting in the ruins with members of the Swiss Guard. Worst of all, he came under the influence of a fellow-countryman known as Giovanni degli Specchi, a manufacturer of mirrors who had his workshop in the Belvedere. This man was jealous of Leonardo's influence with his patron and engineered a quarrel over their accommodation. Finally, he found a means of reporting Leonardo's studies of anatomy to the Pope and having them stopped. It is ironical that the first instance of ecclesiastical interference with Leonardo should be due to Leo X. And I may here digress to contradict a belief, once commonly upheld, that Leonardo wrote backwards in order to conceal his thoughts, and did not publish his conclusions for fear of ecclesiastical persecution. This is completely unhistorical. In Leonardo's time the Church allowed far more dangerous and directly subversive opinions than his to go unchecked. His scientific researches were carried out with full cognisance of religious institutions. His dissections were made in ecclesiastical hospitals such as Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. If his notebooks contain occasional gibes at the clergy these are less frequent and less severe than in most literature of the period. Leonardo wrote backwards because he was left-handed, and he did not publish his researches because he could not bring himself to try to put them in order. We have, in fact, no evidence that Leo X was concerned with Leonardo's opinions except in this instance, but Vasari records that the Pope was distressed by his dilatoriness. "It is said that a work being given him to execute by the Pope, he immediately began to distil oils and herbs in order to make a varnish: whereupon Pope Leo exclaimed 'Alas! he will never do anything, for he begins by thinking about the end before the beginning of the work. Oimè!! Costui non è perfar nulla, da che comincia a pensare alla fine inanzi il principio dell' opera.'"
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