The Lost Battles Read online

  It was not wealth or taste or intellect that made Florence more creative than other cities, thought its inhabitants, but its rabid competitive individualism. Vasari tells many stories about artistic competition, but perhaps the most piquant is his tale of why Donatello chose to return to Florence after he had been welcomed by the people of Padua: “He was held to be a miracle by every intelligent person there, but he decided he wished to return to Florence, saying that if he stayed there, being so praised by all, he would forget everything he knew; and that he wished to return to his homeland, where he would be continually blamed; for that blame was a reason to study and consequently achieve greater glory.” It was the backbiting rivals denouncing his works that Donatello missed, the mean-minded critics he couldn’t do without. In this view even Michelangelo’s harsh words to Leonardo outside the Spini—“you who tried to cast a bronze horse …”—come straight from the bitter creative furnace of Florence.

  Machiavelli, who was so closely involved with the Great Council Hall competition, fully shared this belief that Florence benefited from its surplus of antagonisms. In his Florentine Histories he chastises previous annalists of the city for suppressing its many feuds and factions in their glowing accounts. This is to miss the whole point of Florence, he says. No city has seen so many civil disorders, so much hate, and yet the mayhem goads its citizens on. The talents of Florence grew well on bloodied earth, insisted Machiavelli and Vasari alike.

  Leonardo, meanwhile, fulfilled his own criterion for the “happy” pupil. He outstripped his master. He did it in public and with devastating finality, and for the ages. Every visitor to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence can see the divided nature of Verrocchio’s painting The Baptism of Christ (1470–5), can see profound variation in the quality of different parts of it. Verrocchio’s style is bony and harsh, effective at showing muscles but lacking vibrancy, lacking life—at least when you compare it, as how can you not? with the hand that painted the angel in profile at the left of the picture. Glowing with delicate warmth, the angel’s face has the softness of real flesh, remote from Verrocchio’s sinewy rigour. Its golden curls sign it as a Leonardo. Vasari relates that Verrocchio gave up painting, and stuck to sculpture, after this embarrassing defeat: “Leonardo painted an angel … and did it in such a manner, that the angel by Leonardo was much better than the figures by Andrea [Verrocchio]. This was the reason that Andrea no longer wanted to touch colours, ashamed that a boy know more than him.”

  Leonardo had been Verrocchio’s apprentice as a child and teenager; in 1472, when he was twenty, he joined the Guild of St. Luke and became a painter in his own right. When he worked on The Baptism with Verrocchio, he seems to have been back in his old master’s house, “staying” with him, according to a court document. So it was while living with Verrocchio that he intervened in this painting and established once and for all that he had progressed beyond his teacher’s capacities.

  In 1504, however, he was the mature master, and it was young Michelangelo who was going out of his way to knock him off his pedestal. Michelangelo was just a few years older than Leonardo had been when he painted the angel in Verrocchio’s Baptism. And Michelangelo was consciously, explicitly inviting comparison with the older man. It was no coincidence that when he insulted Leonardo in the street he drew attention to the unfinished project for a bronze horse in Milan. Yet this could never be a simple case of the pupil outstripping the master.

  In the model of emulation and transformation of which Leonardo’s contribution to The Baptism is such a famous example, the older artist has long ago mastered a style. The youth absorbs this style and then mutates it: adds new insights and unexpected, unprecedented dimensions. Change happens, art grows, competition begets creativity—and age gives way.

  Leonardo da Vinci, however, was not the practitioner of a settled style. He was still experimenting, still making discoveries. He was a rootless, courageous intellectual adventurer. And he was developing a new idea of art. He was making it bigger, in effect: making it clearer in its scope, grander in its imaginative reach. The curious thing is that Michelangelo was embarked on a very similar quest. A coincidence of biography had allowed them to develop along comparable paths, quite separately. Because Leonardo left Florence and worked as a court artist in Milan from the early 1480s until 1500, his art did not impose itself on Michelangelo when the younger artist was growing up. So Michelangelo thought himself to be unique when he independently began to enlarge his conception of art.

  The grandeur of Michelangelo’s art hardly needs stressing. Here was an artist who started carving marble when he was a child and who worked naturally on a colossal scale. David, however, was not the first colossus of the Italian Renaissance. It was merely the first to be completed.

  They sit high on their horses, the warriors and conquerors, bestriding the earth, crushing the defeated. In Rome, the statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, cast in the second century A.D., surveys the city from the Capitoline Hill on his great bronze horse, hand outstretched graciously. In Venice, the fifteenth-century mercenary commander, or condottiere, Bartolommeo Colleoni, cast in bronze by Verrocchio in imitation of such ancient works, glares menacingly, eyes in shadow beneath his helmet, body massive in armour, while his horse walks proudly forward through the sky.

  Before the coming of modern warfare, the horse served in battle as tank, armoured car, and fighter jet. Cavalry were the aristocracy of war. In the ancient world, horses pulled chariots and carried soldiers on their backs. In the Middle Ages, to be a knight meant by definition to be mounted. In art, the horse from very early times has been the mobile throne of the ruler, the living engine of triumph. On a box decorated with shell, red limestone, and lapis lazuli in Mesopotamia in about 2000 B.C., known as the Royal Standard of Ur, military triumph is embodied by warriors in chariots: their horses, in an image that will be repeated again and again down the centuries, crush fallen enemies beneath their hooves. In ancient Egypt too, pharaohs were portrayed in their chariots riding roughshod over enemies—the king towers over the defeated in a relief of Seti I at Karnak, his chariot surging forward behind mighty rearing horses.

  This ancient Middle Eastern and North African tradition was taken up in classical Greece and Rome, where the chariot is often displaced by a mounted warrior in the imagery of triumph. The figure of a cavalryman on a rearing horse with a fallen barbarian beneath his hooves appears, as an archetype of conquest and power, on military tombstones all over the Roman Empire. At its most sculpturally ambitious this becomes the lifesized equestrian figure, confident and graceful, his command of his elegant and powerful horse the physical manifestation of authority. In Renaissance Italy the equestrian statue was revived by artists determined to emulate the skill of ancient Greek and Roman sculptors. It was the most complex type of bronze figure that survived from antiquity: to cast a lifesized horse in bronze was a formidable technical challenge, to give it beauty and life even more difficult.

  Equestrian statuary had not disappeared with the fall of Rome even though its grace had. In eighth-century Baghdad an automated statue of a warrior on horseback, armed with a long lance, stood atop the Green Dome of the royal palace at the very centre of the circular city. This image is identical to the way William of Normandy’s knights were portrayed on the Bayeux Tapestry in eleventh-century Europe. Lifesized stone statues of mounted warriors were carved for tombs and city squares from Magdeburg to Milan. The thirteenth-century Magdeburg Rider is very similar to Verona’s fourteenth-century equestrian statue of Can Grande della Scala and Milan’s mounted figure of Bernabò Visconti; all three stone horses stand rigid as wooden dolls, with all their legs firmly planted on the ground.

  The challenge for sculptors in the early Renaissance was to transcend such gigantic inanimate toys and to revive the lifelike bronze equestrian art of antiquity. Florence cheated when it came to raising an equestrian monument to the fourteenth-century mercenary commander John Hawkwood. This fearsome English warrior who had a contract to comma
nd the armies of Florence was promised a marble statue. Instead, when he died in 1394, the painters Agnolo Gaddi and Giuliano Pesello painted a mounted Hawkwood in Florence Cathedral—a picture of an equestrian monument in place of the real thing. When Paolo Uccello repainted it in the fifteenth century, he created a dreamlike illusion of a real statue: using green pigment to suggest bronze, and making brilliant use of the new art of perspective to impart tremendous depth to the round, geometrical flanks of the horse and the rectangular masses and cornices of the imaginary statue’s classical base, he gave the dead soldier a robustly graceful equestrian monument. The fact that it is merely the painted illusion of a statue is overcome by the sheer power and naturalness of the depiction. And there is a very important innovation: this bronze horse has one hoof off the ground, breaking with the caution of the Gothic artists, reviving the sense of actual movement that ancient Greek and Roman horses have. This is not just a fantasy; it is a design for how such a bronze horse might—in Florence, where the arts of antiquity were being so brilliantly revived in Uccello’s time—be cast.

  Uccello’s painting, done in 1436, was a challenge to Florentine sculptors. His contemporary Donatello took it up. Seven years later, in Padua in northern Italy, this Florentine artist cast a bronze statue of the Venetian mercenary commander Erasmo da Narni, nicknamed “Gattamelata,” or Honeyed Cat, on a mighty horse. This potent sculpture rivals the mounted emperors of the ancient world and in truth outdoes them in expressiveness, as Gattamelata’s tough face towers above the piazza and his horse strides almost angrily forward, as if eager to charge into battle. Just like the horse Uccello had painted in Florence Cathedral, this one raises a hoof and bends its other legs in lifelike movement—but Donatello really did cast his dynamic horse in bronze, a task at the cutting edge of late-medieval technology. In about 1481 Leonardo’s master Verrocchio—whose career as a sculptor survived Leonardo’s defeat of him as a painter—took on the commission to cast a bronze mounted monument to Colleoni in Venice that would rival Donatello’s masterpiece. At just the same time, his most gifted pupil wrote to the new ruler of Milan asking for work.

  Ludovico Sforza, nicknamed “Il Moro” (the Moor), was the son of the mercenary commander Francesco Sforza, one of the most brilliant and dangerous soldiers in early fifteenth-century Italy, who achieved the dream of all mercenaries: instead of dying an unloved stranger, reliant like John Hawkwood on a city that had never really trusted him to provide a monument to his pride and strength, Sforza became the ruler of a city-state of his own—and not just any city. Milan was one of the biggest and most industrious cities in Italy, an ancient Roman town that still had early-Christian basilicas and classical gatehouses, and that rivalled Venice for dominance of the whole of northern Italy. Set on the Lombard plain in sight of the Alps, it resembled German and French cities both culturally and economically—its great arms-and-armour industry matched those of northern Europe, and its art was full of Gothic exuberance, expressed at its wildest in the vast Cathedral, whose spires and pinnacles were being raised in Germanic style even as domes and colonnades were transforming the appearance of more southerly Italian cities.

  When Francesco Sforza made himself duke of Milan, he established despotic rule over this big, booming city. To this day the Sforza Castle from which he and his family wielded power dominates a large area at the centre of Milan, its massive round towers and long curtain walls concealing a wide outer courtyard leading to more enclosed, shaded spaces. In its vaulted inner chambers, the Sforza presided over a magnificent court. Ludovico was a usurper who seized power from his own nephew and would only, much later, become duke when the nephew conveniently died: if illegitimate, he was also a cultured ruler, determined to bring artists and intellectuals to Milan. Leonardo was to make many friends there, including the architect Bramante and the mathematician Luca Pacioli. But it’s impossible to walk around the menacing and formidable Sforza Castle without intuiting that Milan was a militarised city, a place ruled by the sword. The tournaments and banquets, masques and intrigues of the court took place behind stern walls: the civilisation inside the castle was sustained by arrogant might. “The House of Sforza has been and will be hurt more by the castle of Milan built by Francesco Sforza than by any disorder in that state,” warned Machiavelli, because stone walls were no substitute for the people’s love. Behind their castle walls the rulers of Milan were hated, pointed out Machiavelli—when their time came they would depart unmourned.

  You still sense this today, in the way the castle seems to push the city’s life away from it, to skulk behind its outer walls like a recumbent giant. Leonardo da Vinci saw this too, and in the early 1480s he addressed Ludovico Sforza—for whom he would design his doomed bronze horse—as a man he assumed must be more interested in war than culture. In his letter, Leonardo did not offer his services primarily as an artist, but as an inventor. It was the first time he promoted himself as scientist, engineer, polymath. But it was exclusively military science over which he claimed mastery:

  Having, my illustrious Lord, seen and sufficiently considered the works of all those who claim to be masters and makers of instruments of war, and that the inventions and operations of these instruments are no different from what is in common use: I will try, without denigrating anyone else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing you my secrets [li secreti mei] …

  1. I have a type of very light and strong bridges, adapted to be most easily carried, and with these you can chase and at any time flee the enemy, and others safe and indestructible by fire and battle, easy and convenient to carry and place; and ways of burning and destroying those of the enemy.

  2. I know how, when a place is besieged, to drain the moat …

  3. If because of the height or strength of a place and its position it is impossible during a siege to use the method of bombardment, I have ways to destroy any rocca or other fortress, if it were built on a rock etc.

  4. I have again types of bombard that are very convenient and easy to carry: and with these I can hurl small stones almost like a storm; and with the smoke of these can cause great terror to the enemy …

  He went on to list his methods of mining underneath a fortress; his “covered chariots” (carri coperti); his guns “far from the usual type”; his catapults, mangonels, and indestructible ships; his “unusual and marvellous machines.” Only at the end of this work-seeking letter did Leonardo offer his talents as an artist, after adding that “in times of peace I believe I can give excellent satisfaction and equal any rival in architecture and the composition of public and private buildings: and in conducting water from one place to another.”

  It suddenly makes sense, reading this letter, that Leonardo was still “staying” with his old teacher when he was in his mid-twenties and that he made no urgent effort to complete early works in Florence such as The Adoration of the Magi. He offers Ludovico Sforza a long list of military inventions—he must have spent time thinking about them. It seems likely he was already living, in Florence in his twenties, as he later would live: surrounded by notes, playfully conducting experiments, dreaming up inventions.

  The position of court artist was perfect for Leonardo. It meant being someone the ruler could consult on all the arts, much as he might consult his astrologer on all matters relating to fortune and the heavens. It was, in other words, a chance to show off Leonardo’s infinite variety. Once in Ludovico’s employ, a lot of his ingenuity was dedicated to entertaining the court, designing fanciful tournament costumes, constructing elaborate stage machinery. His scientific research was released, not held back, by frivolity. Experiment and play are never far apart in his notebooks. Yet at the heart of his efforts in Milan was a single great project that welded together art and science, imagination and technology, the palace of beauty and the workshop of war. It was to be the summit of all his projects for nearly twenty years, to consume and justify enormous efforts of research and experiment, to tantalise his public and ultimately to remain a dream.

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sp; Leonardo offers to work on it in his letter to Ludovico at the start of the 1480s: “Again work could be taken up on the horse of bronze [cavallo di bronzo], which will be to the immortal glory and eternal honour of the happy memory of the lord your father and the illustrious house of Sforza.”

  There were already plans to create an equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, to give Milan its rival to other horse statues in northern Italy. It made sense for Ludovico to raise a “horse of bronze” as a memorial to Francesco. As a usurper who could not yet claim the title duke, it would stress his lineage.

  Leonardo did work on the design for the metal horse, but it was to become a utopian venture, a kind of myth. In 1489, when he had already been in Milan for at least six years, the Florentine ambassador there wrote to Lorenzo de’ Medici to say that Ludovico wanted to remember his father with an enormous equestrian statue. Although Leonardo had been entrusted to create a model, says the letter, can Lorenzo suggest a couple of artists who might be good at such work? In other words, six years or more after he offered to take it on, Leonardo’s progress on the cavallo di bronzo was not such as to fill his employer with confidence.