Le Lettere
60 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 →Letter 9
Let me speak to you of the letter M, that hump-backed twin of arches, the mouth that does not open yet shapes the air before sound is born. It is the consonant that bends the tongue like a bow drawn to loose an arrow it will never loose…
Read the letter →Letter 10
You who read without needing to hear the tremor in my hand, who do not flinch at the ink that bleeds like a slow tide across the page, consider the letter M — emme — the hum of the mouth before the word forms, the shape that is both wave…
Read the letter →Letter 11
I have been thinking of the letter R, of its two legs and the belly that joins them, of how it is the only consonant that is also a small drawing of a man who walks. In the mirror it becomes a P, which is the same man but reversed…
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 →Letter 16
This is to report that the earth rampart raised at Piombino against the Florentine guns is insufficient in slope and cohesion. The angle of repose is too steep—men walk the crest and the sod cracks beneath their boots like stale bread. The…
Read the letter →Letter 17
The new battery at Piombino stands where the cliffs drop to the sea, but the guns do not cover the northern mole as contracted. The elevation is too high; the shot passes over the mole and falls in the shallows, where the Sienese boats may…
Read the letter →Letter 18
The breach at the north curtain of Piombino’s walls is wide enough for two culverins to speak at once if the embrasures are widened three palmi and the parapet lowered one. The gunners at Imola know the recoil will throw them against the…
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 →Letter 5
To François, by the Grace of God Most Christian King of France, Duke of Milan and of Orléans, Count of Provence and Forcalquier, and Lord of Genoa, my most Serene and Invincible Sovereign and Father,
Read the letter →Letter 6
Sire, Vostra Maestà, per grazia di Dio Re di Francia e di Polonia, duca d’Aquitania e conte di Valois, il vostro servo Leonardo, che scrive con mano che non è più sua, vi offre queste parole come si offrono le mele tardive dell’autunno —…
Read the letter →Letter 7
Sire, Vostra Maestà, per la vostra infinita cortesia che non ha mai chiesto ciò che non era necessario, io scrivo questa lettera non per offrire un disegno né per recare notizie, ma per trattenere un suono che altrimenti volerebbe via come…
Read the letter →Letter 8
Mi chiedeste ieri, con quella gentilezza che non si aspetta da un re, perché continuo a scrivere su questi fogli benché la mano tremi e la luce della candela non sia più quella di un tempo. Vi rispondo ora, non perché abbia trovato la…
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 →Letter 9
The M of the hand that trembles is the same M that draws the canals of Milan when the water is still enough to hold a reflection, and the same M that does not hold when I try to sign my name at the bottom of a page. I have been thinking of…
Read the letter →Letter 10
La lettera r mi si è posata nella bocca come un sasso levigato dal fiume, e non la sputo fuori né la ingoio. La sento nella gola quando parlo, nella penna quando scrivo, nel respiro che si fa corto con gli anni. Mio padre, che mi avete…
Read the letter →Letter 11
The hand trembles when I write of the R. Not because it is hard to form—though my fingers betray me—but because this consonant carries more weight than the others. It is the sound of the canal’s current resisting the lock, the rasp of the…
Read the letter →Letter 12
The hand trembles more each morning now, as though the years have decided to shake loose what the flesh would keep. Not always—sometimes it holds steady when I least expect it, when the pen meets the page and the line flows as it did in my…
Read the letter →Letter 13
It is the letter R that has been turning in me these weeks, the one that rolls like the carts on the bridge at Vinci when the clay comes down from the hills and the river runs high and the women call to one another over the water. Not the…
Read the letter →Letter 14
scrivo con la mano che trema — la stessa che da ragazzo disegnava gli angeli nella bottega del Verrocchio, e che voi, ricordo, guardavate in silenzio, senza troppo lodare ma senza distogliere lo sguardo. Oggi trema. Non per febbre né per…
Read the letter →Letter 15
I write to you of the letter R because it is the tongue that rolls in the throat like a small river stone, and because it is the letter that begins the name you did not give me but that I carry anyway — Leonardo — and because when I draw…
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…
Read the letter →Letter 5
Eccellentissimo Signore mio Duca, in the name of Him who shapes the clay and breathes the fire into the hollow of the lungs, I write to you now with a hand that trembles less than yesterday but still writes what the eye cannot hold whole…
Read the letter →Letter 6
I write to you with the hand that trembles, yet still holds the chisel’s memory, and the weight of bronze that should have been flowing into the mould of the great horse by now. The delay is not one of will but of the earth’s refusal to…
Read the letter →Letter 7
It has been many years since I ate at your table, and I write now not from the Castello but from a room in France where the Loire moves slowly under a low sky; the hand that once drew the machines of your defense now trembles over this…
Read the letter →Letter 8
Io scrivo a Vostra Eccellenza con la mano che non più obbedisce come un tempo, ma il pensiero non si placa per questo, anzi si affila nel silenzio della notte quando gli altri dormono e solo la cera stilla sul foglio e la memoria si fa più…
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