Sforza / Borgia / da Vinci / Imola...?

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

Remember that I said that Lucrezia Borgia was unlikely to have written the 
VMS? Well, it's possible that her *father* may be more a likely candidate 
than I thought...

Caterina Sforza's land (ie, Imola and Forli, which were both given to her 
as a dowry in 1477) ended up, for a while, under the control of Cesare 
Borgia. Imola fell to his forces in 1499: Caterina Sforza retreated to 
Forli, trying to hold out in her Ravaldino fortress there, before finally 
surrendering in 12th January 1500.

In previous emails, I mentioned that the castle in the VMS "map" foldout 
page is an excellent match for the castle in Imola. It turns out that the 
reason historians are so confident about the structure of Rocca Sforza 
around then is that, in 1502, Leonardo da Vinci - having not long before 
decamped from the now-out-of-power Sforza court in Milan - was invited to 
Imola by Cesare Borgia to draw a map of the town... and he did a pretty 
good job of it, laying down the basis for the entire modern field of 
cartography in the process. :-)

Cesare Borgia asked him in because, in the 1499 siege, the fortress had 
been damaged and required fixing, and he wanted his advice how to go about 
it. The two continued to collaborate for some years on matters military and 
cartographic. Leonardo went on to develop an entire city plan for the 
redevelopment of Imola, a novel two-tier plan with the aristocracy on the 
upper tier, and everyone else on the lower tier. Perhaps fortunately, this 
never "got off the ground". :-/

Leonardo's 1502 map is now in the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle (MS 
12284): here's a decent sized image (though I'd still like to see it at 10x 
the resolution [or for real] to see the individual houses etc):-

	http://www.stanford.edu/~mgorman/leonardo/images/imola2.jpg

In the top right, you can clearly see the castle, with an extra turret on 
the far side on the (grey) moat, which is actually the black blob just 
below the castle on the CopyFlo. This is the same one as depicted in the 
"Castelli, roche, e torri di Romagna" book as a half-turret, but this would 
appear (on the face of it) to be inaccurate - Leonardo's diagram clearly 
shows a *full* turret, which would be consistent with the VMS.

BTW: this jpg was put on the web with a huge collection of other images of 
Leonardo's work by Michael John Gorman, as part of his Stanford course on 
Leonardo da Vinci. Note that (unfortunately) many of his class' projects 
have disappeared, flickering too briefly to make it onto 
http://www.archive.org/ - though the Mona Lisa Party (including Mona Piggy) 
is still intact. :-)

	http://www.stanford.edu/~mgorman/leonardo.html

Interestingly, the same person is one of the key players behind rehousing 
the Athanasius Kircher Correspondence research project at Stanford:-

	http://193.206.220.68/kircher/index.html

In summary: if, as I suspect, the prerequisites for VMS authorship are (a) 
interest in recipes (including poisons), (b) extreme wealth (because of the 
complexity of the code and the maiolica), and (c) strong association with 
Rocca Sforza in Imola around 1490-1510, then we have *two* major candidates 
to evaluate - Caterina Sforza and Cesare Borgia.

If wealth is not a prime prerequisite (?), Leonardo da Vinci certainly fits 
the same template. :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....