The Lost Battles Read online

  He was riding along the river sketching views of its environs, marking the positions of towns, not as preparation for a painting—although you can’t help wondering if the journey through the Arno valley fed into the watery, rocky vista behind the Mona Lisa—but as a mapmaker and engineer. The roughly sketched map dated 22 July 1503 shows the course of the river from Pisa eastward, including Cascina and the fortress La Verrucola. More maps in the same notebook, polished and coloured, show the river, its tributaries, and canal routes in refined detail. He is making a careful study of this river, of what might be done with it. On the 22 July map he has written, “Levelling of the Arno.”

  Not even Leonardo da Vinci claimed to have the technology to shift Capraia and Gorgona and block the river to drown all Pisans. Dante’s apocalyptic vision was, however, informed by the real menace of the Arno. A fast river rising from mountain torrents, it regularly burst its banks. Even in modern times flooding has devastated Florence—works of art damaged in the floods of 1966 were still being restored in the twenty-first century. If the river could do such harm without warning, on its own, what if it were harnessed? Might not some revised version of Dante’s scenario help win the Pisan war?

  A plan was concocted in 1503 to divert the Arno away from Pisa, depriving it of its life-giving connection with the sea. Piero Soderini and Niccolò Machiavelli were its most enthusiastic proponents; Machiavelli thought it a brilliant stratagem that might break the wretched deadlock. In 1502, he and Leonardo were both at the court of the notorious Cesare Borgia. Chances are it was here that these two provocative thinkers met; if so, it may have been his acquaintance with the Second Chancellor that led to Leonardo’s involvement in the plan.

  The Pisan war demanded some kind of bold action. Machiavelli, a specialist in boldness, advocated changing the course of the river. Did he get the idea from conversations with Leonardo? It’s a seductive possibility, yet Leonardo doesn’t ever seem to have been the chief engineer on the project, which surely he might have been if the idea was his. Machiavelli had good cause to know he was a skilled engineer as well as an artist—for Borgia employed him as such, and Machiavelli revered Borgia. It is known that they were both with Borgia at Imola in central Italy in 1502, although no correspondence or notebook entry proves they even spoke to one another there. Why, if they were friends (as many would love to believe), would Machiavelli not have given Leonardo responsibility for the project? On such awkward questions any simplistic belief that Leonardo and Machiavelli collaborated to divert the river founders. The relationship between Leonardo and reality is never as straightforward as that. But his notes make it hard to resist the conclusion that he played an important part in dreaming up the scheme. Madrid Codex II explicitly mentions “levelling” the Arno, as we have seen. The notebook reveals him considering options, moving meditatively through the landscape, studying the river, proposing the best places to dig a diversion.

  Leonardo’s drawings of river beds done in 1503 and 1504 are never only technical solutions to an immediate problem. Practice may be the soldiery, but theory is the captain. In a series of sketches in the Codex Arundel he appears to be very specifically trying to work out how to change the course of a river using rocks: “It is possible to change the flow of a small river with a big stone.” His drawings of boulders piled onto a river bed and changing the flow of water might look like studies for the Arno diversion. Yet they are scientific experiments. In a proposed book on water he planned to have a section about “obstacles.” It’s the simplest experiment you can do in a shallow river—place rocks in it and see what the little dam does to its flow: a game a child might play, that Leonardo himself might have played when he was growing up near the Arno. The bed of the river in summer is broad, and there are rocky shoals. Clambering on these, picking up rocks and testing how obstructions made waves and ripples and weirs around themselves, was Leonardo’s idea of science. It was a beautiful idea of science.

  He made a rough map showing the river’s approach to Pisa, marking Cascina and other towns and forts, at the front of Madrid Codex II. As he travelled along the Arno he drew views and made quick maps of the towns and the river’s course. And he drew two hypothetical diversions. He had a grand idea for a shipping canal that would divert the river from just west of Florence in a great geometric curve through northern Tuscany, giving the Republic a navigable route to the sea. On one of the maps in Madrid Codex II and a sheet in the Royal Collection he carefully charts this canal. By contrast his ideas for the Pisa diversion are marked much more abruptly on these two maps in rapid, rough strokes showing how channels could be dug from the river between Cascina and Pisa towards the Stagno, a large pool to the south. This is in fact broadly the plan that would be finally attempted by hydraulic engineers working for the Florentine Republic in the autumn of 1504.

  Which suggests that Leonardo’s mapping of the Arno in July 1503 did indeed play a significant part in planning the madcap scheme to win a war with water. His theory would be put into practice by others the following year. But there is more. In that summer of 1503 he made another map in Madrid Codex II that concentrates exclusively on the Arno and its canals in the vicinity of Pisa. This map is specifically concerned with what interested the Florentine army—the waterways around the enemy city. It is finished and coloured, and Leonardo has written place names in conventional left-to-right script, rather than using the right-to-left mirror script with which he kept many of his notes secret. It is intended to be shown to others; it is part of a discussion. On it he has sketched a new canal that could be dug from just west of Cascina to connect the Arno with the Stagno. What could the purpose of such a canal be, if not to divert the river?

  This map shows how badly Pisa’s life could be disrupted by a diversion, describing the network of canals and pools around the city, all of which would be damaged if the Arno changed its course. On his rough sketch map on folio 1 verso of the Madrid notebook, the one that’s dated 22 July 1503, he also focuses on the Pisa region—this is where he is “levelling” the Arno. The place names that keep reappearing in the topographical sketches in Madrid Codex II are of fortresses and towns close to Pisa where he was looking in detail at the lie of the land and the flow of the river: Caprona, Verrucola, Dolorosa, Cascina. In other drawings, the river looks like a bloody cluster of arteries, its bed mapped in soft red chalk. A map in the Royal Library at Windsor is a great shadowy organic veil, the river like a serpent sloughing its skin.

  These drawings are at once real and dreamlike—if Florence truly did rely on them as advice, it was allowing itself to be lured into a twilight zone between the possible and the impossible, history and utopia. The plan to divert the Arno was a Faustian fantasy of limitless power over nature—no true marriage of science and politics, instead a dangerous liaison.

  The rich and evocative portrait Madrid Codex II paints of a summer mapping the Arno lends enormous weight to the idea that Leonardo did indeed give Florence crucial advice about diverting the river. It fleshes out the record in the Archivio di Stato that in July 1503 the Florentine Republic paid him “to level the Arno near Pisa,” and even contains tantalising clues to conversations between him and Machiavelli. His topographic drawings in this notebook are at once practical mapmaking research and beautiful landscapes. He stood at Cascina, drawing what his note calls the “veduta,” the view. Cascina is a low-lying town, and his drawing looks up from this spot towards nearby hills. In the dedication of The Prince, as if remembering Leonardo that summer, Machiavelli reaches for an artistic image: it may seem presumptuous for a lowly man like him to offer a ruler advice, but “it is as if one who wants to draw countrysides puts himself down on the plain to consider the nature of mountains and high places and, to consider the low places, will put himself on the mountains …” There were not many artists in early sixteenth-century Italy who went drawing in the countryside—Leonardo was ahead of his time in his enjoyment of landscape for its own sake.

  On 24 July 1503 one Francisco Ghuiduc
ci wrote a report from the Florentine military camp near Pisa—“ex castris”—informing the Palazzo della Signoria about a visit by Leonardo da Vinci and other wise heads. They looked at drawings and plans and, “with many discussions and doubts,” approved the work “whether the Arno was turned here, or remained in a canal …” Ghuiducci signs his letter “from the field against Pisa”—it is a dispatch from the front line. That is where Leonardo was, close to the walls of the enemy city behind which children were going hungry and old people and paupers dying off, in the misery of siege.

  There are more ways than one to fight a war. Leonardo was clearly involved in planning the Arno stratagem in the summer of 1503. The Florentine Republic did not, however, put the venture in his charge when it was finally attempted more than a year later. Instead it commissioned him, in October 1503, within months of his Arno journey, to decorate the Great Council Hall. His patriotic battle scene would inspire the assembled citizens to vote taxes to pay for the Arno diversion and any other stratagems that Soderini and his military expert Machiavelli judged necessary. What is crucial to understand is that when Leonardo started to design his battle picture that autumn, war was not an abstraction for him. It was urgent and immediate. He had been in the countryside where Florence was fighting Pisa, had mapped the river close to where peasants were ruining crops and being ambushed. He knew the reality of warfare—a reality that even before this he had described with dreamlike precision in a note on how to paint a battle: “Make first the smoke of the artillery, mixed in the air with dust thrown up by the movements of horses and combatants … And if you make anyone who has fallen, mark the place where he has slipped and been dragged through the dust and bloody mud, and in the half-liquefied earth show the impression of the footprints of men and horses who have passed, make also a horse trailing his dead master, and show the mark of the dragged body in the dust and mud …” Leonardo’s scientific attempt to analyse smoke and describe the effects of gunfire from the point of view of a painter gives way to a horrible scene. He dwells on the morass of battle, the mashing of everything into a landscape of pulped flesh. It’s the same nightmare battle we see in the three compositional drawings for The Battle of Anghiari in Venice: the world become a bloodstain.

  SEVEN

  The Genius in His Study

  Michelangelo’s earliest surviving lines of verse can be found on drawings connected with the Great Council Hall competition. One is especially enigmatic: “dolce stanza nell’ inferno”—a sweet room in hell. It is sharply inscribed in ink on a small, square sheet of paper, above a sketch of a bloody battle scene. In the battle, mounted knights charge one another with lances, men on the ground fall or struggle against the horses, and at the heart of the chaos a horseman raises his sword or club above his head, preparing to bring it down savagely on one of the riders’ arms as he struggles with a lance.

  The scene is strangely familiar to anyone who has been looking at Leonardo da Vinci’s designs for The Battle of Anghiari.

  Michelangelo’s commission for the Great Council Hall directly confronted the never-ending war with Pisa. In 1364 too the Florentine Republic had been at war with the nearby rival city. In his History of Florence—the book that was Michelangelo’s source—the Humanist Leonardo Bruni tells how, late in that summer campaigning season, a Florentine army was camped at Cascina:

  Michelangelo, A Battle Scene and other studies, 1504. The struggle in this drawing is very like Leonardo da Vinci’s horse battle. (illustration credit 7.1)

  The summer heat was immense, and many of the soldiers were weaponless or lying in their tents or bathing in the nearby river. At this time there was no care or anxiety about the enemy. Then unexpectedly the enemy rushed the fortifications, hoping with its first impetus to overcome the camp and subdue unarmed men caught at leisure … When the Florentines had thronged together from everywhere … they were not content to merely defend the fortifications, but bursting forth fell upon the enemy, compelling him to take flight.

  The enemy that day was led by Sir John Hawkwood, the English mercenary who later worked for Florence and got his equestrian portrait posthumously painted in the cathedral. He was not a foe to take lightly. The Florentines nonetheless won the battle.

  This is one version of the story. The chronicler Villani tells it differently: according to him, the army were not surprised by Hawkwood but tested by one of their own captains, who gave a false alarm to save them from their torpor.

  Michelangelo’s first designs for his battle scene do not rise to the possibilities of this story. They are derivative. He had evidently seen Leonardo’s explosive sketches—and they had impressed him, almost too much.

  Michelangelo, architectural sketches and poetry, 1504. Michelangelo seems to have started to compose poetry at the time of his rivalry with the notebook-filling Leonardo. (illustration credit 7.2)

  Michelangelo had never been near a battlefield. His drawings of rampaging horsemen and frenetic close combat seem—brilliantly—cerebral; studies of weight, movement, but with very little heart. It’s not him, this theme. He won’t win the competition by aping Leonardo. It seems fitting that a poem—his first—on the reverse of his little square battle scene expresses anxiety about the fragility of reputation:

  After living happily for many years, in one

  oh-so-brief hour you lament and suffer;

  or someone who fame or ancient lineage

  illuminates, is darkened in a moment.

  There is no moving thing under the sun

  death does not conquer or fortune change.

  One question this and related drawings—including a still more manifestly Leonardesque battle in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford—invite is how he knew his rival’s work so closely. Either he or a spy must have visited the amazing workshop Leonardo da Vinci created for himself in a Florentine monastery.

  On 24 October 1503 Leonardo picked up the keys to the Sala del Papa and other rooms off the Great Cloister of the Dominican monastery and church of Santa Maria Novella. This was where he was to live at the expense of the state while he worked on his cartoon for the Hall in the Palace. It was here that, a year later, he would store the clothes listed in his inventory as being “in a chest at the monastery.” And it was from here that he had to walk every time he needed to visit the Palazzo della Signoria, to collect his monthly pay, ask for funds for paper or wood and carpenters to build the machinery he said he needed, or explain why the entire project was proceeding more slowly than his employers would have liked. The marble façade of Santa Maria Novella overlooked a broad piazza in the north-western part of the city close to the gardens and palace of the wealthy Rucellai family. The Rucellai in the fifteenth century had favoured the gifted architect and polymath Leon Battista Alberti, a true Renaissance man who had anticipated Leonardo in his intellectual appetite—writing books on painting, politics, and family life as well as designing imaginative reinterpretations of ancient Roman buildings. In the 1450s Giovanni Rucellai, who was at that time with Cosimo de’ Medici one of the two richest men in Europe, commissioned Alberti to design his house: its use of flat pilasters evenly spaced reproduces a particularly graceful antique effect yet makes it slightly surreal. At nearby Santa Maria Novella, the same architect created—with Rucellai’s money—a great vertical plinth of green and white marble with scrolls on its curved upper storey like engravings lifted out of the frontispiece of a book. This façade is the most classical of any church in Florence; it promises an interior like that of a Roman temple or perhaps a library.

  Façade of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, architect Leon Battista Alberti, probably begun about 1458. With his writings on architecture, painting, politics, and morality Alberti, like Leonardo, was a Renaissance man. (illustration credit 7.3)

  This is a deception. Alberti’s modern façade was added on to a medieval church with a tall, simple Gothic nave, a great barn of a place that originated in the struggles between orthodoxy and heresy that had gripped thirteenth-century Europe. It
was built by the Dominican preaching order, founded by St. Dominic to combat the Cathars and other religious subversives. Dominic was a giant of Catholic orthodoxy and Santa Maria Novella the outpost of the Papal Curia—the Pope’s court—in medieval Florence. When the Pope visited the city in days gone by, he had stayed here. On the west side of the church stood a complex of monastic cells, big meeting and dining halls, and comfortable guest chambers built around two square cloistered courtyards. The Sala del Papa and its connecting rooms where Leonardo was now to be based were—as the name implies—built for the Pope’s use, but by 1503 there were far more salubrious residences where Florence could put up important guests. The Sala del Papa had been allowed to decay. The first thing Leonardo did when he saw it was to ask for carpenters to mend the leaky roof. The repairs started before Christmas 1503 and were still going on in January, so the rooms allotted to Leonardo must have been in a shoddy state.

  At least it was peaceful. The monastic atmosphere of the cloisters with their square gardens and shady walks provided space in which to think. Leonardo loved places like this; it was reminiscent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where he’d spent so much time slowly painting The Last Supper. His workplace was situated off the Great Cloister. The nearby Green Cloister was decorated with green-tinted paintings by Paolo Uccello, including his powerful Deluge, with doomed sinners still fighting one another viciously as they cling to bits of flotsam beneath the floating fortress of Noah’s Ark. As for the church itself, it was a veritable museum of Florentine painting, with chapels and side altars decorated by painters including Masaccio, Ghirlandaio, and Filippino Lippi (who had only recently, in 1502, completed his paintings in its magnificent Strozzi Chapel).

  What would Leonardo’s new studio have looked like? It’s a fair guess it would have held a lot of books and papers. As workmen repaired the roof of the Gothic Sala del Papa, it wasn’t just painting materials that Leonardo was preparing to install there.