To Francis I

To His Most Christian Majesty François, by the Grace of God King of France, my most gracious Sire and father in all but blood:

I write to you this evening from the chamber at Clos-Lucé, where the Loire has turned the colour of hammered pewter and the candles in the oratory have not yet been lit. My hand trembles, Sire. It has trembled now for some years, and I will not insult Your Majesty by pretending otherwise, since you have sat beside this very table and watched the pen falter, and did not look away.

But I must tell you what the trembling has taught me, because you — who asked me once why I fill so many books with drawings of water — are the only man living to whom I can say such things and be understood.

The hand that could once trace a vein on the neck of St. John with a single unbroken line — that hand is finita. What remains is something else. Not lesser. Different. The line that trembles is honest in a way the confident line never was. It confesses the body. It says: here is a man, not a god, and the mark he makes is the mark of a creature who will not be here long.

La mano obbedisce alla mente finché la mente comanda. Quando la mente vacilla — o quando il corpo tradisce — ciò che resta è la volontà di continuare.

I have been reading again the Psalms of David — your chaplain left a breviary, and I am not too proud to borrow from the Church when the Church has better words than I do. Dixi: custodiam vias meas. I said, I will keep my ways. But the hand does not keep its ways. The hand keeps its own.

And yet — and here is what I wished to tell you, Sire — the drawings I make now are truer than the ones I made in Milan. Not finer. Truer. Because the tremor forces me to simplify. It strips away the ornament I once thought was skill and leaves only the thing itself. The wing. The curl of water. The fold of cloth over a knee. I see them now as I saw them when I was twenty and had not yet learned to over-decorate what God had already made perfect.

Your Majesty asked me once, in this very room, what I was working on. I showed you the sketches for the canal — the one that would join the Loire to the sea, the locks, the channels through the marshes of Sologne. You laughed, not unkindly, and said I dreamed too large for a man who could not hold a pen steady. But I tell you, Sire: the canal is not drawn by the hand. It is drawn by the eye, and the eye does not tremble. The eye is the last faithful servant.

I think of your father, whom I knew in the years before the Italian wars — a king who understood that the artist and the sovereign share one burden, which is to make something that will outlast the body that made it. You have understood this better than he did. You brought me here not to build your machines or paint your ceilings, but because you understood that a man who has looked at water for fifty years has something to say that a man who has looked at water for five cannot. You gave me time. Tempo. That is the gift no treasury can mint.

The light is failing now. I can hear the river. I can hear, or I imagine I can hear, the sound of the workmen on the canal — though I know they have stopped for the evening. The mind plays such tricks when the body is still.

I do not know how many more letters my hand will permit me to write. But I know that this one — written to you, in this room, by this failing candle — is among the truest things I have ever set down. Not because of what it says, but because of the trembling that is in every line of it. The tremble is the signature. The tremble is the proof that a living man wrote this, and not a copyist.

La grazia non è nella perfezione del tratto. È nel fatto che il tratto è stato tentato.

May God preserve Your Majesty in health and in the wisdom that has always distinguished your reign. May He grant you years enough to see the canals dug and the marshes made fruitful and the kingdom made whole. And may He grant me — if it please Him — one more morning in which the hand, tremblingly, obeys.

I remain, as I have been since first I came to this court,

Your Majesty’s most humble, most faithful, and most devoted servant,

Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci

Written at Clos-Lucé, in the month of June, in the year of our Lord fifteen hundred and sixteen.