To his half-brothers in Florence Leonardo left his property at Fiesole and four hundred ducats. To his faithful friend and companion, Francesco de’ Melzi, nobleman of Milan, Leonardo willed his notes, drawings, and paintings. Battista was given the income that Louis XII had granted Leonardo from the tolls of the canal at San Cristoforo near Milan. Mathurine was granted the “good black cloth, trimmed with leather” and two ducats. Moreover, Leonardo outlined in detail the plans for his own funeral, right down to the use of ten pounds of candles.
Too weak now to stand any more, Leonardo was confined to his big four-poster bed with the canopy. From it he could see the tracery of the Chapel of Saint-Hubert against the pale, foreign sky through the little window in the corner. The vicar of the church of Saint-Denis was called, with two priests and two Franciscan friars, and Leonardo received the last sacraments at his bedside.
An entry in his notes reads, “While I thought I was learning to live, I have been learning how to die.” But death was not easy for him. With tears rolling down his sunken cheeks for “his wasted life,” he died on May 2, 1519—fighting even this final interruption to all his work.
King Francis I, who was at St. Germain-en-Laye with his court, wept when the news was brought to him. Francesco de’ Melzi was so overcome with grief that he waited until June before writing to the half-brothers of Leonardo of the Master’s death. He wrote, in part, “He was to me the best of fathers, and it is impossible for me to express the grief that his death has caused me. Until the day when my body is laid under the ground, I shall experience perpetual sorrow, and not without reason, for he daily showed me the most devoted and warmest affection.”
And in a closing paragraph Francesco added these words: “His loss is a grief to everyone, for it is not in the power of nature to reproduce another such man.”
When Leonardo died his notebooks began their separate journeys into obscurity. They traveled to different lands and became parts of widely disparate collections. It has only been within the last fifty years that efforts were made to bring them all together between the covers of one volume—a dream that Leonardo himself entertained but never realized. As the manuscripts and drawings were brought to light, translated and published, the extraordinary scope of Leonardo’s scientific explorations was revealed.