May 2, Leonardo da Vinci.

 

It was a cloudy spring day in Milan, 1490. A ten-year-old boy stood at the door of a workshop. His name was Gian Giacomo Caprotti. From the village of Oreno, the son of a peasant. He carried nothing in his hands, and barely had shoes on his feet. 🌫️

The door opened. A man looked down at him. A painter of thirty-eight. Curly hair, a long beard, a flamboyant pink tunic. The whole city knew his name. The boy did not. He had no idea that the door he had just entered was a door into history itself.

On his very first day, the boy stole money from his master. The next day, a guest's silver stylus. Then a piece of leather. Then a fellow apprentice's clothes. The master wrote in his notebook:

"Thief. Liar. Obstinate. Glutton."

And he gave the boy a nickname. Salaì — the little devil. 😈

Common sense would have thrown him out. But the master did not. Instead, he bought him clothes. A rose-colored tunic, a silver-trimmed cloak, twenty-four pairs of shoes. Luxuries a peasant's son would never have touched in a lifetime. The other apprentices whispered. Why was this one so special?

The reason may have been simple. Salaì was beautiful. Golden curls, long lashes, an androgynous face. The master sketched his profile absent-mindedly in the margins of his notebooks. Once, twice, dozens of times. The androgynous smile of Saint John the Baptist, the sensual curve of Bacchus — they all wore that face. Salaì was the model, the muse, and something more. ✍️

Years passed. Salaì grew into a painter himself. His talent was modest. Most of what he produced were copies of his master's work. Still, the master never sent him away. From Milan to Florence, from Florence to Rome, from Rome back to Milan — wherever the master went, Salaì went too. Thirty years.

The master was a man of secrets. His notebooks were filled with mirror writing, legible only when held up to a glass. He angered the Pope by dissecting corpses, failed to cast a great bronze horse, and once, in a public square, quarreled openly with a rough sculptor of the same city. The sculptor shouted at him: "Explain it yourself, you who left it unfinished!" The master said nothing.

Salaì watched it all from up close. The glory and humiliation of genius, the cheers and the despair. He was a thief, but for thirty years, he never left. 🕯️

In 1516, the master crossed the Alps. The King of France had summoned him. Salaì went too. Clos Lucé in Amboise, a chamber overlooking the river. But Salaì did not stay long. After two years, he returned to Milan. There was a vineyard waiting for him there, a gift from his master. Was it a parting? Or simply a return home? No one knows.

And then came May 2nd, 1519.

On that day, in a small castle in Amboise, an old painter took his last breath. Sixty-seven years old. His right arm had long been paralyzed, no longer able to hold a brush. At his bedside sat his faithful noble pupil, Francesco Melzi. Legend says the King of France held him in his arms as he died, but that is only a romantic embellishment of later ages. 🥀

The will was opened. The notebooks, the tools, most of the paintings — all to Melzi. But there was one line. Half of the Milan vineyard — to Salaì.

That was not all. After Salaì's own death, an inventory of his estate listed names that defied belief. Saint John the Baptist. The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. And a single portrait of a woman. A smiling woman. The one said to be the wife of a Florentine silk merchant.

La Gioconda. The Mona Lisa.

How these works ended up in Salaì's hands, the records do not say. Were they gifts? Inheritance? Or had the little devil stolen one last time? In the end, the smiling woman passed into the hands of the French king, and Salaì received money in return. Some scholars whisper that her face bears a strange resemblance to Salaì's own.

Five years later, in 1524, Salaì was killed by a crossbow bolt. He was forty-four. Whether it was a duel or a murder remains another mystery. The little devil was a shadow in life, and a shadow in death.

The name of the old painter he stayed beside for thirty years — everyone knows it now.

Leonardo da Vinci.

That the closest companion of the greatest genius was a thief and a liar — was that coincidence, or fate? Perhaps every genius needs a little devil at his side, someone to keep him tethered to the human world. 🖋️