The Lost Battles Read online

  The next three speakers—Lorenzo dalla Volpaia, Biagio d’Antonio Tucci, and Bernardo di Marco della Cecca—all agreed with Sangallo. Then Leonardo da Vinci spoke.

  Had Leonardo really spent the meeting up to that moment sketching Michelangelo’s David in his notebook? He was certainly to add a feature that makes visible sense of what he said when called to speak about the statue. As with the other artists, the transcript records Leonardo’s actual words about Michelangelo’s youthful masterpiece. And what insidiously aggressive words they were: “I confirm that it should stand in the Loggia, where Giuliano has said, but on the little wall, where they hang the tapestries on the side of the wall, with decent ornament and in a way that will not spoil the ceremonies of the officials.”

  Leonardo went out of his way to stress the need to hide the David away, to keep it at the edge of things. There isn’t much love for Michelangelo or his work in his words. Andrea il Riccio had already let the cat out of the bag and suggested that in the shade of the Loggia the potent statue could be kept under control. Leonardo similarly betrayed his desire to hide it away, to marginalise it literally: to shift it from the heart of the Piazza as it were an afterthought, an interloper in the public life of Florence. But that was not his most outrageous suggestion. He added that the statue should have “decent ornament,” “ornamento decente.”

  If we miss the meaning of these words it is only because we no longer live in a shame-filled society. Until very recently the primary meaning of “decency” was the Christian one of modest covering and behaviour. In calling for David to be given ornamento decente, Leonardo meant that its genitalia should be decently concealed. This was a curious concern for a man who dissected human bodies and who, in that same year, in his sketches for his battle cartoon, drew a man on horseback in which he observed that the rider had an erection. But any doubt of his meaning is erased by the drawing of the David in his notebook. There he gives Michelangelo’s statue metal underpants, drawn in ink to resemble bronze.

  Magic hung in the air that day. The First Herald had opened the meeting with talk of witchcraft and star signs; Il Riccio revealed that he saw the David as an entity with demonic aspects that might “come to see us.” Leonardo cast a spell of his own, a spell that worked by using the right words at the right time. In Tuscan the word for “spell” was incanto. Like an incantation or a talisman placed in the foundations of a building, Leonardo’s introduction of the phrase “ornamento decente” into the discussion sought to change reality by precise intervention. His words entered the transcript and were perhaps repeated in other discussions, maybe as he showed his drawing of what the statue would look like with a metal modesty-belt. No one else had used such language. No one else at the meeting took up Leonardo’s idea. But it stayed there malevolently.

  To veil the statue’s nudity was an attack on its power. It resembled what witches did. The late-fifteenth-century demonological work Malleus maleficarum specifies male impotence and even the destruction of men’s penises as a crime of witchcraft. Perhaps that was what was in Leonardo’s mind. As if he were a witch, he cursed David, seeking to neuter Michelangelo’s statue—a statue that was a passionate expression of its maker’s own being. This assault on his rival’s virility was just as vicious as anything Michelangelo said outside Palazzo Spini.

  On the night of 14 May 1504 Michelangelo’s statue was slowly rolled out of the Operai del Duomo, standing upright, suspended in a mobile scaffold devised by the Sangallo brothers. A team of forty men laboriously moved it forward on fourteen oiled tree trunks which had to be hefted in rotation to maintain the effect of a conveyer belt. To get the “marble giant” out of the workshops they had to smash the wall above the door. That night, the statue had to be guarded from mysterious assailants who threw stones at it.

  Statues in motion are curious entities. In religious festivals which still take place in some Italian cities, a sacred statue—for example, the Virgin of Trapani in Sicily—leaves its home one night a year to move through the city streets, carried by devout young men. The effect is genuinely unearthly: the statue moves, it has come to life. The stillness of stone is suddenly animate. The crowd, at first onlookers at a spectacle, become increasingly involved and emotional. On its return the statue is applauded. It has proved that it is more than a dead thing.

  Michelangelo’s statue did not, does not, need to prove its vitality by actually moving. His achievement is, precisely, to make David seem alive. That is magical—understand the word as you will. But as it moved through the streets, slowly, majestically, the colossus suddenly stopped being a work of art. The men who met to speak of it in January had been artists, and only Andrea il Riccio—and, coolly, Leonardo—realised that this work was somehow more potent than any other statue, more than an aesthetic curio. Its progress turned it into a popular legend. It entered the city’s soul. The apothecary Luca Landucci wrote in his diary of this extraordinary event, and it is he who calls the marble man “the giant.” Yet only at the end of his enthusiastic account does he say it was carved by one Michelangelo Buonarroti. For him it was more than art. This ordinary shopkeeper and member of the Great Council was constantly writing of sacred statues and paintings of the Virgin—for him the important images in the streets and churches of Florence were sacred idols like the Virgin of the Annunziata. He wrote of “the giant” in the same way.

  When it finally reached the Piazza della Signoria the statue had to be painfully, slowly manoeuvred out of the Sangallos’ contraption onto its pedestal. In July, when all that had been done, it stood in front of the main entrance to the government Palace. The First Herald had after all been speaking for Soderini and Machiavelli. The artists’ advice to the contrary had no effect. Perhaps their spite was too obvious. Donatello’s Judith was moved, and the David took her place.

  Only one thing said at the meeting in January, after the First Herald spoke, had any effect. Perhaps it was directly because of what Leonardo said, or perhaps he simply read the Republic well, but before Michelangelo’s David was installed outside the Palace, on whose wall it cast a long shadow, it was fitted with a brass thong very like the device in Leonardo’s drawing, with twenty-eight copper leaves to make it decente.

  As the city assimilated its new symbol and took David to its heart as a marvellous being, the small victory of emasculating it was turning to dust for Leonardo, however. He had yet to start painting his battle scene in the Great Council Hall, the vast room just through the Palace past Michelangelo’s colossus. The young sculptor had conquered the public heart of Florence. He had projected his emotional life outward in a unique way. In carving David he imagined acting in the world: and the statue acted in the world. When it took up its grand vigil outside the Palace it instantly reshaped the public identity of Florence—transfigured the Republic’s self-esteem. Florence now had the greatest statue in the world as its symbol, a work that eclipsed even the Dome of the Cathedral as a universal icon. It does, to this day.

  Luca Landucci’s awed account of the statue’s journey through the nocturnal city provides an insight into how ordinary Florentines immediately recognised this public sculpture as something intended for them. But it is more precisely significant than that. This pious shopkeeper and Great Council participant had watched the Hall being built, had stood in it in grief-stricken silence listening to the officers read out Savonarola’s confession. He represents the target audience for Soderini’s plan to decorate the Hall—and his diary bears witness to the fact that when it came to popular art, in Florence in 1504, it was Michelangelo who had the magic touch.

  FIVE

  The Ascent of Art

  On 4 May 1504, just days before the journey of Michelangelo’s David out of its birthplace in the Cathedral workshop, Leonardo da Vinci went to the Palazzo Vecchio to see Niccolò Machiavelli. It was an uneasy meeting. Leonardo had some explaining to do. He had been commissioned to paint his battle scene in the Great Council Hall the previous October. Nearly six months on, he hadn’t even fini
shed his full-size cartoon. Machiavelli now signed, on behalf of the Republic, a new contract that tried to impose some order on the process. Negotiating the terms of your employment with the author of The Prince does not sound a cosy prospect, yet there’s no hint of Machiavellian ruthlessness in the piece of paper they both signed. On the contrary, it was the artist who befuddled his patron. You can almost see the sweat run on Machiavelli’s brow as he tries to keep up with the complex, ambiguous movements of the mind of Leonardo, the devious intricacy of the artist’s explanation for not having begun his painting.

  The document points out peevishly that “several months ago Leonardo, the son of Ser Piero da Vinci, and a Florentine citizen, undertook to do a painting for the Hall of the Great Council.” It notes that “this painting [had] already been begun as a cartoon by the said Leonardo” and also that he had been paid thirty-five fiorini larghi in gold (the highest-valued denomination of Florentine currency) since he’d accepted the job. It stresses that matters are getting urgent: the Signori and the Gonfalonier desire “that the work be brought as soon as possible to a satisfactory conclusion.” But the measures the contract takes to ensure this are gentle and consensual, accepting the validity of Leonardo’s slow and thoughtful way of working. It agrees to go on paying him for his work on the cartoon at Santa Maria Novella, provided he finishes that in reasonable time: “The previously mentioned magnificent Signori … have decided etc. that the said Leonardo da Vinci must have entirely finished the said cartoon and carried it to its complete perfection by the end of the next month of February … without excuse, or argument or delay: and that the said Leonardo will be given in payment each month 15 fiorini larghi d’oro …” The contract threatens that after February, if he hasn’t finished the big drawing, he may have to pay back all the money and forfeit whatever portion of the cartoon has been completed by then, presumably so another artist can finish it and decorate the Great Council Hall.

  The next paragraph reads as if Leonardo has already thought of a delaying tactic. Of course, if the artist should start painting in the Hall in the meantime, he can have longer to finish the cartoon. A final thought reassures him and protects his work: so long as Leonardo does keep to the contract, “the painting of this cartoon will not be allocated to another, nor will it be taken away in any manner whatever from the said Leonardo without his explicit consent …”

  The contract shows no desire to strip Leonardo of his commission. It evinces every eagerness on the government’s part to see a masterpiece by him materialise in the Great Council Hall. He is a genius, after all—the new Apelles, as Machiavelli’s colleague Agostino Vespucci put it. Indeed, his inability to finish his works resembles that of Apelles, commented Vespucci. The contract that Machiavelli signed with Leonardo in May 1504 seems on the whole a sympathetic document.

  What happened next was, however, punitive. It was clever, too. If you had to give a name to the tactic the Florentine government now applied, you might say it was Machiavellian.

  In the summer of 1504, the young Michelangelo was invited to paint his own mural in the Great Council Hall to rival Leonardo’s putative picture. It seems he was to work at the opposite end of the very same huge wall that Leonardo was decorating. Only the Gonfalonier’s Loggia would stand between them. By this intrigue the Republic was undermining Leonardo without seeking direct confrontation. Perhaps the shock would goad him to finish, and if that failed there would in any case be a work by Michelangelo.

  And so a competition was born.

  Vasari’s account of the origin of Leonardo’s commission is faithful to the detailed evidence of letters, annotations, payment records, the contract. This is his version of what transpired next: “It happened that, while that rarest of painters Leonardo da Vinci was painting in the Great Council Hall, as narrated in his Life, Piero Soderini, then Gonfalonier, because of the great ability he saw in Michelangelo, got part of that Hall allocated to him; which was how it came about that he did the other façade in competition with Leonardo [a concorrenza di Lionardo] …” It would be impossible for anyone to mistake Michelangelo’s commission for anything except a directly competitive response to Leonardo for one simple reason. He was not simply required to paint a mural in the same room but to depict a second Florentine battle—a pendant to Leonardo’s picture, a mirror of its martial theme. He was to paint, on the same grand scale as Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari, a narrative of another famous Tuscan conflict.

  Michelangelo’s subject was to be the Battle of Cascina, a collision between Florentine and Pisan forces in 1364. There were many other things the Republic might have required of him if it simply had wanted to add a work by Michelangelo to the planned glories of the Great Council Hall. It could have asked him to make a sculpture for the vast room—a new work in the art of which he was so evidently a master. One speaker at the meeting to site David had in fact suggested placing the biblical colossus in the Hall; an alternative would have been to order a new work in stone or bronze, like the bronze David commissioned as a diplomatic gift. Or, if Soderini really wished Michelangelo to try and paint, there was the option of getting him to finish the altarpiece originally commissioned from Filippino Lippi, who had since died. Michelangelo’s previous paintings that survive include two unfinished religious panels, The Entombment and The Manchester Madonna.

  All these options would have fitted more logically into Michelangelo’s career so far than getting him to paint a mural. There was, however, an urgent reason for pushing him into the new territory of painting on a wall, and the reason is made explicit by the fact that his subject was a direct reflection of Leonardo’s. The doubling makes it clear that this parallel commission was intended as a competition.

  From the fourteenth century onwards the idea of competition was fundamental to the culture of creative brilliance we call the Italian Renaissance. Artists in Italy began to stand out from those of other European countries in the age of Dante and Giotto. Just as Italian writers and scholars began in the 1300s to develop a new “Humanist” style of thought, based not on dogma but on the close reading of texts, so artists began to search for a new reality, an art that mirrored nature. As soon as artists began to experiment, they began to compete. Dante writes of it in the Divine Comedy:

  In painting, Cimabue thought that

  he held the field, and now Giotto has the cry,

  so the fame of the other is obscured.

  This is in the early 1300s, when Italian artists are just beginning to raise their status from that of mere craftsmen, and the idea of a famous artist is novel. By the time Leonardo and Michelangelo trained to be artists, the lessons they imbibed in Florentine workshops reflected two centuries of rivalrous excellence. Everyone knew the shining bronze gates at the east entrance of the Florentine Baptistery facing the Cathedral, with their sophisticated reliefs cast by Lorenzo Ghiberti, and everyone knew the story of how Ghiberti got the job. The Arte della Lana guild staged a formal competition to choose an artist (initially for the north doors); the competitors were challenged to make a single panel portraying the Sacrifice of Isaac. To this day, the rival Sacrifices cast by Ghiberti and his fellow competitor Filippo Brunelleschi remain on display in the Bargello Museum in Florence. It says something for the tastes of the judges that even after nearly six centuries of changing artistic values we can see Ghiberti’s is better.

  Exactly why it is better repays a moment’s thought. Ghiberti’s panel is more organised and disciplined in its use of space: the relationships between the figures are more dynamic and realistic. In other words, when it comes to making a pictorial relief in metal, he was more advanced than Brunelleschi along the road of progress and improvement which Renaissance artists aspired to blaze. Their competitiveness was linked to this faith in progress. The most explicit statement of it is Vasari’s Lives. Beyond all his anecdotes, over and above his responses to particular works, Vasari presents a coherent history of the ascent of art. In the fourteenth century, he argues, artists first turned from dry B
yzantine dreams to look at nature; in the next century they started to invent perspective to give depth to their pictures and to depict bodies with real volume in space. The early Renaissance was still, in his eyes, a period of research, and however innovative artists such as Uccello, Masaccio, Brunelleschi, and Ghiberti were, they were too obviously straining for technical mastery. Finally, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, artists attained total control, total ease. Art became beautiful and sublime in ways unimaginable before. The first artist of this “modern” age, according to Vasari, was Leonardo da Vinci, and its ultimate genius, Michelangelo.

  Vasari didn’t create his grand theory out of thin air. It grew directly out of the sayings and potted histories that circulated in all the workshops in Florence. The idea that artists should aspire to originality, even to transform art itself, was inseparable from the culture of rivalry. Artists wanted to excel, which meant, literally, outdoing others. As Leonardo said, “Sad is the disciple who does not progress beyond his master.” This acute way of putting it is far more direct, somehow, far more cutting, than Vasari’s general theory. Every artist in the Renaissance had a “master.” Artists learned their craft in apprenticeships to qualified masters in a system regulated by the painters’ guild. Leonardo lived as a teenager in the house of his master Andrea Verrocchio with rivals like the young Pietro Perugino. He never forgot the experience. He says in another note that it’s good for young artists to work alongside others, precisely because this inculcates the competitive spirit: “I say and say again that to draw in company is much better than working alone, for many reasons, the first of which is that you would be ashamed to feel inferior to the other students, and this shame will make you study well; secondly good envy [la invidia bona] will stimulate you to be among the number who are more praised than you, and the lauding of the others will spur you on …” There’s a harsh social vision at work here, a tough and realistic anthropology that was learned the hard way, in the workshop. Leonardo postulates “good envy”; a vice become virtuous; envy is bona if it makes you work harder, think harder, strive to catch up with the others. This useful invidia, the gnawing pain of competition, can stimulate the artist to excel.