1466.

The Da Vinci Notebooks at sacred-texts.com

1466.

On the 3rd day of January.

Benedetto carne on the 17th of October; he stayed with me two months and 13 days of last year [4] ⁷⁹⁶ , in which time he earned 38 lire, 18 soldi and 8 dinari; he had of this 26 lire and 8 soldi, and there remains to be paid for the past year 12 lire 10 soldi.

Giodatti (?) came on the 8th day of September, at 4 soldi a month, and stayed with me 3 months and 24 days, and earned 59 lire 14 soldi and 8 dinari; he has had 43 lire, 4 soldi, there remains to pay 16 lire, 10 soldi and 8 dinari.

Benedetto, 24 grossoni.  ⁷⁹⁷

Footnotes

441:796 : 4. Lorenzo. See No. 1351, l. 10 (p. 408). Amoretti gives the following note in Mem. Stor. XXIII: 1505. Martedi-sera a di 14 d'aprile. Venne Lorenzo a stare con mecho: disse essere d'eta d'anni 17 .. a di 15 del detto aprile ebbi scudi 25 d'oro dal chamerlingo di Santa Maria nuova. This, he asserts is derived from a MS. marked S, in quarto. This MS. seems to have vanished and left no trace behind; Amoretti himself had not seen it, but copied from a selection of extracts made by Oltrocchi before the Leonardo MSS. were conveyed to Paris on the responsibility of the first French Republic. Lorenzo, by this, must have been born in 1487. The sculptor Lorenzetto was born in 1490. Amoretti has been led by the above passage to make the following absurd observations:

Cotesto Lorenzo, che poi gli fu sempre compagno, almeno sin che stette in Italia, sarebb' egli Lorenzo Lotto bergamasco? Sappiamo essere stato questo valente dipintore uno de' bravi scolari del Vinci (?).

Il Fafoia, perhaps a nickname. Cesare da Sesto, Leonardo's pupil, seems to have been in Rome in these years, as we learn from a drawing by him in the Louvre.

441:797 : 1466. This seems to be an account for two assistants. The name of the second is scarcely legible. The year is not given. The note is nevertheless of chronological value. The first line tells us the date when the note was registered, January 3d, and the observations that follow refer to events of the previous month 'of last year' (dell' anno passato). Leonardo cannot therefore have written thus in Florence where the year was, at that period, calculated as beginning in the month of March (see Vol. I, No. 4, note 2). He must then have been in Milan. What is more important is that we thus learn how to date the beginning of the year in all the notes written at Milan. This clears up Uzielli's doubts: A Milano facevasi cominciar l'anno ab incarnatione, cioe il 25 Marzo e a nativitate, cioe il 25 Decembre. Ci sembra probabile che Leonardo dovesse prescegliere lo stile che era in uso a Firenze. (Ricerche, p. 84, note.)