Le Lettere
39 letters, gathered by recipient.
Anonymous
Letter 1
This morning the hand would not obey. Not as it once did, when the sinew served the thought and the thought flew ahead and the hand followed close behind, obedient, faithful, almost invisible in its service. Now the hand announces itself…
Read the letter →Letter 2
I write this evening with a hand that will not obey me as it once did. The fingers swell. The quill, which for sixty years was an extension of the thought itself — quicker than speech, more honest than the face — now must be coaxed…
Read the letter →Letter 3
I write tonight not because the hand has steadied. It has not. The fingers know their rebellion now as an old companion, a dog that will not heel. The quill must be held differently than it was in Milan, than it was in Florence when the…
Read the letter →Letter 4
I write this evening with the left hand, which is to say I write badly, which is to say I write at all. The right has taken to trembling in a manner no longer intermittent but constant, a small river of refusal running from the shoulder to…
Read the letter →Letter 5
You will forgive an old man for beginning where the body insists. The hand — this instrument I have served and which has served me — now betrays. Not suddenly. A slow revolt. The fingers that once traced the flight of starlings in a single…
Read the letter →Letter 6
I write to you not because I know your name, nor because I believe you sit somewhere in this century waiting for ink to arrive. I write because the hand, la mano, is the only honest part of me left, and it too begins to betray.
Read the letter →Letter 7
You will forgive an old man his repetitions. I write to you across a distance I cannot measure — not of miles, for miles I have traversed and know the weight of them — but of years, of the strange folding of time that permits a hand…
Read the letter →Letter 8
The hand trembles and the R is the letter that trembles with it, the one that begins ragione and ruina, respirare and rovinare, as though the tongue must choose between ascent and ruin with every breath. In France they say r is the dog’s…
Read the letter →Borgia
Fortification of the Romagna frontier
I write from the canal works at hand, and the matter is this: the rampart slope at Imola is wrong — not by much, but wrong. The terreplein is too narrow for the guns you specified. I have measured it again. The scarp wall wants another two…
Read the letter →Letter 2
I write from Cesena, where the work on the eastern rampart proceeds but not as I had reckoned. The slope of the counterscarp is too steep for the soil here — this earth is clay mixed with river gravel, and after rain it slides. I have…
Read the letter →Letter 3
I write from the Romagna, where the walls of Cesena still stand but do not yet stand as they should. I have walked the circuit again — three times since the last moon — and what I found requires your attention and, I believe, your…
Read the letter →Letter 4
I write from Amboise, where the Loire is wide and slow and the king's court asks me to paint ceilings. But my mind is still on the walls we walked together, and so I set down what I have not yet delivered.
Read the letter →Letter 5
I write from the worksite at Romorantin, where the canal meets the old stone wall and the earth has begun to speak truths the architects did not wish to hear.
Read the letter →Letter 6
I write from my table, the candle already half consumed, because what I must say about the eastern rampart at Imola will not keep until morning, and you do not pay me to keep things until morning.
Read the letter →Letter 7
I write from Amboise, where the Loire is wide and slow and the king's court does not ask me to count paces. But I count them still — in the mind, along the walls of Imola, along the rampart at Cesena where the slope was wrong and I told…
Read the letter →Letter 8
I write from Amboise, where the Loire runs wide and slow and the king's court does not ask me to count paces along a wall. But my mind returns to the Romagna, where the walls are not yet finished and the paces I counted still matter.
Read the letter →Letter 9
I write from Cesena, where the rain has not ceased these eleven days and the clay beneath the eastern rampart has begun to slide. I have measured the displacement with a plumb line and a cord fixed to the merlon at the northeast angle: the…
Read the letter →Letter 10
I write from Amboise, where the Loire is wide and slow and the king's court does not ask me to build walls. But my mind is still in the Romagna, where the walls are not yet built as they must be, and I cannot rest from the matter.
Read the letter →Letter 11
I write from Amboise, where the river is wide and the current indifferent to the affairs of men — but I have not forgotten the crossings at Forlì, where a bridge lost in the night cost you a day and a day cost you a town. I set down here a…
Read the letter →Letter 12
The guns at Piombino are placed too high on the bastions. The parapets elevate the barrels beyond the natural line of fire, and the angle of descent shortens the shot’s reach by a third. The enemy battery below will answer before ours can…
Read the letter →Letter 13
Il cannone di bronzo a camera cilindrica che avete ordinato per la piazza di Piombino è stato fuso ieri al terzo tentativo. La lega è troppo tenera — il metallo si ritira in modo disuguale e la canna si curva verso il basso già dopo…
Read the letter →Letter 14
The guns at San Leo stand too high on the curtain wall. The parapet catches the recoil and the masonry cracks. I measured the thickness of the merlons yesterday — they are 4 braccia where they should be 6. The stone is good but the angle…
Read the letter →Letter 15
The breach at San Leo is still open on the north face where the rock crumbles like wet chalk. The guns we placed last month fire too high; the parapet absorbs the recoil but the shot strikes the cliff above the road, not the slope where…
Read the letter →Francis I
Letter 1
I write to you from the room you gave me, where the window opens upon the Loire and the light of this late afternoon falls across the table in a manner I have attempted three times this week to set down in chalk and failed — not because…
Read the letter →Letter 2
I write to you from the window that looks upon the Loire, where the water does what it has always done — moves, and does not explain itself. My hand, which you have seen falter these many months, still finds the page, though it no longer…
Read the letter →Letter 3
To His Most Christian Majesty François, by the Grace of God King of France, my most gracious Sire and father in all but blood:
Read the letter →Letter 4
I write to you from the room you gave me, where the light comes late and the Loire moves past the window like a thought that will not resolve. My hand — you have seen it, you who came to this room when a king's business should have kept…
Read the letter →Piero
Letter 1
La luce del mattino sul canale — ecco ciò che vedo adesso, ogni giorno, dalla finestra di questa casa a Amboise. Non è la luce di Firenze, quella che conoscevi tu, dura e netta come un coltello. Qui la luce è morbida, si posa sull'acqua e…
Read the letter →Letter 2
I write to you from Amboise, where the river Loire moves with a slowness that deceives — it seems still, but it carries everything southward all the same. I think of the Arno when I watch it. I think of you standing on the Ponte Vecchio…
Read the letter →Letter 3
I write to you from Amboise, where the Loire is grey this morning and the château smells of wet stone and old rushes. My hand trembles more than it did when last I wrote — you will see it in the letters themselves, how they lean and…
Read the letter →Letter 4
I write to you from Amboise, where the river Loire moves with a slowness that deceives — it seems still, but it carries everything: leaves, the reflections of clouds, the small boats of fishermen who do not know they are being watched by a…
Read the letter →Letter 5
I write to you from Amboise, where the Loire is wide and slow and the light falls differently than it does in Vinci — flatter, more grey, as though the sky here has forgotten the particular warmth of Tuscany. I think of you often. I think…
Read the letter →Letter 6
M. It is the humblest of letters, the one that does not announce itself like A with its open mouth or S with its serpent’s hiss. M is the letter of the mouth closed, of the lips meeting lightly as a moth at dusk, of the murmur that does…
Read the letter →Letter 7
You remember the letter R — how it stood in the alphabet like a man leaning on a staff, how it would not be rushed. In Florence, when I first shaped it with the chisel on the Libro di Pittura, it was still a shape before it was a sound…
Read the letter →Letter 8
The hand trembles when I write of the letter R, though it is a letter I have drawn more times than I can count — in the curve of a lip, in the hollow of a throat, in the twist of a rope, in the arc of a bridge that does not yet exist. You…
Read the letter →Sforza
Letter 1
I write to you from this place where the hand is slower than the mind, and the mind still serves you though the body in France grows heavy with years. You will forgive the trembling of the letters — they are what remains of the hand that…
Read the letter →Letter 2
I write to you from France, where the hand trembles more than it once did, yet the mind still turns to the things we began together in Lombardy, and among them the locks upon the Adda, which I know you have not forgotten, though the years…
Read the letter →Letter 3
I write to render account of the great horse, il cavallo, that your Excellency desired should stand above the memory of your father, and to tell you plainly where the work stands and where it does not, for I have learned that a duke is…
Read the letter →Letter 4
I write to you now with the hand that trembles not from age alone but from the weight of what remains unfinished upon the earth—your bronze horse, the great horse that was to rise from the clay and stand forever in the Piazza del Duomo…
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