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“The Sala delle Asse is a masterpiece whose power to fascinate has as much to do with Leonardo’s initial conception as with the stories its Renaissance and 20th century patrons tasked it to tell.”
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The Duke’s Trees
One of the distinctions of this stimulating study is its use of historiographical and archival information to show how the Sala delle Asse changed its symbolic significance while also replaying a nationalistic ideology at two different historical moments: the fifteenth-century, when Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, commissioned the paintings and the late nineteenth-to-early-twentieth century when the Sala was re-discovered and subjected to a major restoration.
The architectural and pictorial alterations ordered in 1893 to prepare the room for public view shifted attention away from the Sala’s fifteenth-century circumstances and transformed it into a key component of the ambitious restoration scheme that had been formulated for the Sforza Castle as a whole. This was a scheme that supported a nationalist agenda and post-Risorgimento cultural ideologies. In the fifteenth-century, Leonardo was similarly called upon to help shape a civic identity for the Sforza family through commissions such as the Last Supper, a twenty-four-foot equestrian horse and the Sala delle Asse. Although the Sala was never completed, it provides a fascinating window into the court’s commissioning practices, Leonardo’s interactions with a wider community of artists, and the role of Milanese art in the Renaissance canon.
This book contains over 100 color plates in addition to black and white archival photos. It concludes with an extensive Register of Documents containing transcriptions of important 15th-, 19th-, and 20th-century documents for the Sala delle Asse.
“The Sala delle Asse is a masterpiece whose power to fascinate has as much to do with with Leonardo’s initial conception as with the stories its Renaissance and 20th century patrons tasked it to tell.”
-Patrizia Costa