The Lost Battles Read online

  At least one other artist was in the running to make it: the Florentine painter and sculptor Antonio del Pollaiuolo drew a design for an equestrian monument with a man in armour on a mighty horse. The rider’s face is that of Francesco Sforza. This artist definitely knew how to cast bronze: in the 1480s, when Pollaiuolo drew this design, he was working on the formidable bronze tomb of Pope Sixtus IV, a fifteen-foot-long metal box on which the Pope sleeps above florid leaves, grotesque feet and heads, and allegorical personages. Pollaiuolo’s proposal for the Sforza monument is equally ambitious: it depicts the mighty, mercenary duke on a horse that rears up, its front legs suspended in space, above a fallen enemy. In a cunning technical ploy, the screaming, naked fallen man raises his arm defensively and it acts as a support for the rearing horse above him, as do cloth hangings which in reality would have functioned as metal scaffolding. In Leonardo’s early drawings for the Sforza horse he imagines exactly the same rearing pose. Pollaiuolo seems to have been offering a practical design to give reality to Leonardo’s vague fancies. Two drawings by Leonardo, done sometime between the mid-1480s and 1489, also make practical attempts to give this statue strength. In one, a conveniently placed tree stump connects with one of the horse’s raised hooves. In the other, a fallen warrior’s shield supports one of the legs.

  Leonardo proposed to outdo statues that survived from ancient Rome and to trump the modern works of Donatello and Verrocchio. Having a horse stride forward with one foot in the air was nothing: his would rear up, its two front legs soaring. Ludovico Sforza apparently doubted this was feasible, and the drawings by Leonardo himself and by Pollaiuolo try to make it more practical. To support the horse in that pose you’d have to introduce some support which, however ingenious, would ruin its spectacular liberty. Only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would European sculptors develop means to cast rearing horses on a colossal scale. When Leonardo took up his grandiose scheme again in 1490, he would still try to have two feet off the ground—but this time it would be one front leg and one back leg as it strode purposefully on its plinth above the amazed populace.

  “On the twenty-third day of April 1490 I commenced this book and recommenced the horse,” notes Leonardo in a manuscript in Paris. In the 1490s he made more dedicated efforts on his great work than ever before, building a full-scale clay model that captivated all who saw it. This model, recorded the mathematician Luca Pacioli in 1498, stood twelve braccia, or almost twenty-four feet, tall, the height of four tall men standing on each other’s heads, without the plinth, which might easily have added another ten feet. So it was to be a true colossus, a fantastically imposing creature of metal. Yet, in 1498, it still existed only as a giant clay model, and the bronze mass of 200,000 libbre that Pacioli calculated for it remained purely notional.

  Witnesses to Leonardo’s life in Milan saw the horse as the centre of his labours—he appeared to be working on it constantly for nearly two decades. A revealing note suggests that this is how he too saw his time in that city: “You can see in the mountains of Parma and Piacenza a multitude of perforated shells and corals still stuck to the rocks, of which, when I was making the great horse at Milan, a large sack was brought to my workshop by certain peasants who had found them in that place.” In this glimpse of his life in his workshop in the Corte Vecchio, beneath the gargantuan building site of Milan’s Cathedral, the model of the horse is at the centre of everything: it makes sense of who he is and what he’s up to, because it is where his art and science meet. The mind that local peasants knew would find fossil shells fascinating was engaged and intrigued by every aspect of the cavallo. It was a work apparently without end that justified his passion for research.

  Leonardo was licensed by his great sculptural project to study horses up close, draw them and measure their proportions. He became a regular visitor to the castle stables. On a sheet with a sketch of a horse’s foreleg, marked all over with measurements of the lengths and widths of its different parts, he notes, “The Sicilian of Messer Galeazzo.” In other words, this drawing done in the 1480s is an observation of a particularly fine horse in the Sforza stables, in whose excellent physique Leonardo was seeking general rules of proportion. He believed, following Vitruvius, that beauty was a quantifiable fact, the perfect proportions of a human or a horse measurable. Another drawing of a finely proportioned horse covered in scribbled dimensions is marked, “The big jennet of Messer Galeazzo.”

  Leonardo’s visits to the stables were not just cold academic exercises. He always kept horses himself, claims Vasari. Perhaps it was concern for the animals’ welfare that made him design, in the late 1480s when he was making his studies of perfection in horses, a hi-tech stable with hay storage above the stalls that are served by a proper drainage system to take away waste. He didn’t like to see these beautiful creatures living in filth.

  The cavallo di bronzo was a symbol of nature, a monument no longer to Francesco Sforza but to the power and grace of animal creation. When Leonardo went to look at an ancient equestrian statue in Pavia, what impressed him was its suggestion of movement and life: “The movement more than anything is to be praised … the trot is almost of the nature of a free horse.” What he wanted to create was an imitation of a living horse, a scientific simulacrum of organic, vital nature. This scientific ambition—to model life—is revealed by the strange slip that occurred as his design evolved.

  Francesco Sforza vanished. From drawings in which a rider in armour controls his rearing horse, Leonardo progressed to designs of eerie purity in which, to clarify the horse’s lines and concentrate all eyes on its form, he did not encumber it with a rider or saddle. It is a “free horse.” Since he never did cast it, perhaps this was always left ambiguous in conversations with Ludovico Sforza, but in none of the later drawings for the horse and its casting machinery is there any hint of a plan to add Sforza’s father. The model was accepted and praised on these terms—as the cavallo, a self-contained and unique thing. It became a wonder, a marvel, a legend—the Horse of Bronze.

  It took all of Leonardo’s science to calculate how he might cast the horse. Once his design was perfected and its colossal scale established, he started inventing machinery to make it. He studied how giant cannon were made in Milan’s foundries, and developed a complex way of casting modified from the ancient lost wax technique. From the giant clay model—the one stage he actually completed—he planned to create a hollow outer mould; this would be lined with wax, and against the wax he would build a strong inner sculpture of fire-resistant clay. After the central wax was melted out, the molten bronze could be poured into the gap. Leonardo invented pulleys and cranes for lifting the horse and its mould, a system of underground furnaces to melt the huge amount of bronze he planned to use. He gave Renaissance Italy its most captivating display of technological ambition.

  Leonardo da Vinci, studies for the casting of the Sforza horse, early 1490s. The enormous bronze horse was at the heart of Leonardo’s thinking in Milan, yet was never cast. (illustration credit 5.1)

  The loveliest relics of this effort are red chalk drawings in his notebook Madrid Codex II. A gigantic form for the horse’s neck is held inside a latticed iron frame: its sheer size and strength become poetic in this great drawing. Another red drawing in the same sequence shows the horse’s abstract-seeming mould, a gigantic cylinder on top of tubular legs, held within its wooden scaffolding like a rocket on a launch pad. The drawings are not just aesthetically ecstatic but minutely detailed: if Leonardo had any doubts that he could make this machinery and cast this horse, his drawings conceal them. It really looks as if, in the first years of the 1490s, he was on the verge of manufacturing his marvel. Beside his drawing of the neck’s vast mould in its latticed armature he wrote instructions that exude all the practicality of real plans for a real process:

  These are the pieces of the forma of the head and neck of the horse with their armatures and irons. The piece of the forehead, that is, of its capa which has the thickness within of wax, must
be the last thing to be secured, so that the male part can completely fill this window, that goes in the head, ears, and throat, and is surrounded by the wood and iron of its armature … In the muzzle there will be a piece, that will be fastened on both facets with 2 forming pieces of the upper cheeks. And below it will be fastened to the forma of the forehead and the forma under the throat. The neck must be held by 3 forming pieces, 2 of the parts and one in front, as is demonstrated in the drawing above.

  He says in one note that the notebook will record “everything related to the bronze horse presently being executed” and dates this statement 1491. But three years later the great operation was still gathering steam.

  In fact, a mass of bronze had been set aside for the horse, but Ludovico Sforza was as ambitious in his political schemes as Leonardo in his study of the natural world. Ludovico, in a stratagem that went badly wrong, encouraged the French king to pursue an old claim to the crown of Naples. In his attempt to use the French as a weapon in his own power struggle with Naples, he grotesquely miscalculated. When the French army came through the Alps in 1494, their train of cannon immediately threatened the security of Milan itself, just as the invasion would end Medici rule in Florence. The bronze set aside for the cavallo was sent to Ludovico’s relative Ercole d’Este of Ferrara to cast urgently needed artillery pieces. Leonardo, meanwhile, was given a new public commission sometime between 1493 and 1495: to paint a mural of the Last Supper in the monks’ refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. Yet he did not stop working on his design for the horse. Matteo Bandello remembers in his Novelle how as a young monk he would see Leonardo move meditatively between his two great monumental projects, “departing in the afternoon from the Corte Vecchia where he was creating his stupendous clay horse, and coming straight to the Grazie, ascend the scaffolding and give one or two little brushstrokes to one of the figures …”

  In 1499 the clay model was used for target practice by Gascon bowmen after the French, five years after their first incursion, toppled Ludovico Sforza and seized Milan. That December, Leonardo left the city. “Of the horse I will say nothing because I know the times,” he had written to his prince after the disaster of 1494. Yet the model was, in its earthen beauty, a living project right up to the moment of Sforza’s fall and Leonardo’s flight. In about 1500 a Milanese armourer engraved a memory of it on a breastplate now in the Stibbert Museum, Florence. Even after the model was destroyed the horse lived on as legend.

  “You explain it yourself, you who designed a horse to be cast in bronze but couldn’t cast it and abandoned it in shame”: Michelangelo’s words outside the Spini Palace make him one of the first critics ever to express what has since the sixteenth century been seen as the paradox, even the tragedy, of Leonardo da Vinci. Here was a mind of unparalleled beauty and sublimity, cavernous in its creativity, awe-inspiring in its abundance and plenitude of promise. And yet, for all the ambition and richness of Leonardo’s ideas, for all the unparalleled excellence of his abilities, how many works did he ever finish? The horse is the emblem of a life strangely lost in its own genius, a creator whose creations seem largely to have stayed in his own mind, recorded for posterity—mercifully—in the private world of his notebooks. “Truly marvellous and celestial was Leonardo,” says Vasari in the undercutting second paragraph of his—at first sight so enthusiastic—“Life.” “And he was outstanding in erudition and in the principles of letters, in which he would have done very well, if he had not been so changeable and unstable. For he tried to learn many things and, having begun them, abandoned them.” The bronze horse was the ultimate example of this: “He proposed to the Duke that he would make a marvellously big horse of bronze, in order to put the image of the Duke on it as a memorial. And so grandly did he begin it and develop it that to bring it to a conclusion was not possible. And there is an opinion of Leonardo, as with other things he did, that he began it without ever intending to finish it …”

  It is precisely this strange inability to complete his works—or lack of interest in finishing them—that Sigmund Freud proposes to explain in his 1910 book Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. Even in the artist’s own lifetime, marvels Freud, this prodigy mystified people. Although he created masterpieces, his investigative spirit was constantly preying on his time and energy and distracting him from painting. Freud argues that Leonardo’s immense curiosity about everything ultimately became pathological. He was compelled to endless research on every subject because he was in reality sublimating a child’s sexual curiosity: not only was he homosexual, says Freud, but he was celibate, and the erotic side of his nature was transferred to a passion for research.

  Long before Freud attempted to understand it, Michelangelo pointed out the strange disparity in Leonardo’s nature between infinite aspiration and limited public achievement. At the Spini, while the crowd listened amazed and Leonardo stood in red-faced silence, the young sculptor accused his elder of designing the horse, finding himself incapable of casting it, and giving up through “shame,” vergogna. The same manuscript compiled in 1540s Florence that relays this insult adds: “And again Michelangelo wishing to bite Leonardo, said to him: ‘And those capons of Milanese really believed in you?’ ”

  This is a still more pointed remark. The bronze horse, by implication, was one of Leonardo da Vinci’s cons. Yet of course, it was nothing of the sort. It was not even a failure.

  In the long white room, the soul is stilled by that same clear, lofty vision. The work that Leonardo did finish in Milan breathes softly, like a cool breeze in the hot Lombard afternoon. If pigment on plaster could flutter, it would be fluttering ever so gently in the motions of air that seem to emanate from its depths.

  Of no other painting in the world is it so appropriate to say “depths.” So much of The Last Supper is lost, peeled away, smothered by restorers, peeled again. There are beauties here that are lost to us. What survives is the painting’s space, its creation of a world that is the sublime mirror of our own. Other paintings describe illusory worlds, but theirs are cheap tricks in comparison with the precisely calculated perspective of this room that recedes into the wall with such baffling conviction. Its surface is a shattered skin, a mosaic of fragments. Its colours don’t seem right. But the spatial illusion of The Last Supper is incontrovertible.

  Thirteen men are seated at table. A terrible announcement has interrupted their simple repast. Christ’s declaration that one of the disciples gathered in an upper room will betray him has them all rise or stare or jolt back in horror, fury, fear. But the drama is suspended. It is held in this silent moment. As Christ looks down, the room behind the long white-clothed table rushes away towards its vanishing point. A coffered ceiling creates a grey grid that maps the diminishment of appearances with distance like a diagram above the disciples. Doors and hangings, faded badly, count down the shrinking walls towards zero. That zero is a cool quiet northern Italian landscape seen through an open window.

  The vaulted hall that holds this fragile treasure was the refectory of a monastery. The monastery still functions; in its cloisters, the noise of modern Milan feels a long way off. Leonardo painted a scene to divert and chasten the monks at their meals, and his eye-fooling space is part of the serious joke. The room painted on the upper part of the wall that leads to the kitchens is as real as this one, yet it is a place where the carnal is transfigured. The grace of Leonardo’s composition makes flesh and pain equally ethereal. In that room, the horror of life is elevated into tragedy. As the disciples raise their hands and cry out, voiceless, pain is held and contemplated. It is a philosophical painting: it distils the chaos and frenzy of existence into measured intervals, visual music. The figures are essences of figures, their passions at once universal and abstract.

  Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, circa 1495–7. The High Renaissance ideal of classicism was first and most purely stated in this calm distillation of drama. (illustration credit 5.2)

  Call it mathematics, call it a new grasp of th
e principles of classical Greco-Roman art and architecture learned in his studies of Vitruvius and his conversations with the architect Bramante, but this painting at once grasps the richness of reality and finds order in the universe. Christ’s prophecy, his revelation of his own coming death and the treachery of Judas, is horrible, shocking. The company react accordingly. But they inhabit a lofty realm, a theatre of heroes. So massive are their forms, so sedate their hysteria, that suffering itself becomes a thing of perfection. The Last Supper offers the beholder an elevated experience. You are invited in. But it does not come out to you—does not come down to you. To experience it fully you must accept its philosophical rapture.

  Leonardo worked on it like a philosopher developing an idea. Matteo Bandello watched: “I saw and observed him many times, going in the morning at a good hour and climbing his scaffolding, for the Last Supper is high up; often, I say, he would not put down his brush but would paint from dawn to dusk, forgetting even to eat or drink. Then for two, three or even four days he might not put his hand to it, but every day for one or two hours just contemplate, consider, examine and judge his figures.” This is a telling account of how Leonardo mulled over and pondered the picture, for its quality of meditation is what calms, and mystifies, in the refectory. Art that strives to induce meditation, to liberate the mystical impulse, often favours big, empty images. The large, calm face of Christ painted by the Russian icon master Andrei Rublev is a majestic example. The Last Supper too exploits scale and simplicity to free the mind. Its figures are almost like great blots of colour. Leonardo is expressing his ability to stand back from the immediate. It is a monastic work, in the end.

  The Last Supper, like the bronze horse, is monumental. It achieves a grandeur that had not been seen in art since ancient times. You would have to go to the Parthenon in Athens—which was not accessible to Renaissance travellers—to find its like. Or to Rome, to see the youthful works of Michelangelo.