The Lost Battles Page 16
There was a way to legitimise the decision. Leonardo transferred the slow and meditative process that had created The Last Supper to the drawing of a cartoon. He had already impressed Florence with the one he had exhibited at the Annunziata. Now, he set out to draw a full-scale cartoon for The Battle of Anghiari. The contract of May 1504 reveals that he was still working on this preliminary design and planned to complete it before he even started to transfer or copy it onto the wall. His drawings had aroused wonder in Florence at the start of the sixteenth century. Now he was contemplating a truly gargantuan drawing, and before he even started work in the Palace, his battle picture could be admired in the monastery.
Yet even the execution of the cartoon was not straightforward. Before beginning it, he needed to do some research.
When Leonardo carefully stashed his books at the monastery, he put with them a series of drawings he had done in 1503–4 from his base at Santa Maria Novella. His inventory lists “a book of horses, sketched for the cartoon” (“un libro di cavalli, schizati pel cartone”)—an entire notebook full of studies of horses that he considered essential to designing his painting of a battle. After all the years in Milan observing horses in the duke’s stables and mapping their proportions in order to design his bronze colossus, he still felt the need to make fresh studies before he could draw the full-scale cartoon for his mural.
Leonardo obviously cared for horses and loved to look at them as well as after them—the 1504 inventory includes a book of horse medicine—but he also found in the horse a majestic natural metaphor. All the forces of nature could be encapsulated in its elegant yet potent form. A horse can look gentle and dangerous, expressive and remote, tame and wild. In all his scientific work Leonardo remained loyal to the medieval idea of microcosm and macrocosm. In this traditional view of the cosmos, everything is a token of everything else: the same elements that compose a human being compose a tree, and unexpected analogies can be discerned by the knowledgeable mind in things apparently quite different. In his most spectacular demonstration of this essential phenomenon, Leonardo reveals (in a drawing done in the early 1490s) how the layers of fatty tissue and bone in a bisected human head exactly match the layers of an onion. The drawing depicts a halved onion next to a diagram of a head in profile, and his note explains that just as you can see the inner rinds of an onion laid bare when you halve it, so the bisection of a human head reveals the outer hair and muscles, then the pericranium, the cranium, the pia and dura mater, the rete mirabile, and the bone.
Brilliant as this anatomical observation is, it is also a statement of a pre-modern, and by later scientific standards mystical, conception of nature. Leonardo expressed his belief in microcosm and macrocosm theoretically: “Man has been called by the ancients a little world, and certainly the name is well given, for if a man is made of earth, water, air and fire, so is this body of the earth; if man has in him bones that hold up his flesh, so the rocks hold up the earth; if man has in him a lake of blood, where the lungs increase and decrease in breathing, the body of the earth has its ocean which similarly rises and falls …”
When he compared a bisected head with an onion, Leonardo was becoming increasingly fascinated with the human microcosm. His account of the layers of flesh and bone beneath the scalp follows on from a series of drawings of the human skull that he made in 1489: these are his first great anatomical studies, the beginning of what would become his most outstanding contribution to science. Drawn with a fantastic, steady strength, and so sensitive to anatomical realities that they include details not observed by medically trained anatomists until centuries afterwards, these drawings date from the time when Leonardo was renewing his concentration on the bronze horse. It is not a coincidence. As he clarified his sense of human anatomy he also became increasingly confident in his vision of the horse; instead of a rearing steed bearing a warrior, he advanced his idea, and built his model, for a majestic, colossal animal standing riderless, like a scientific model.
If humanity was a “little world,” the horse was something more: both a microcosm and, in its strength and power, an image of the macrocosm. The horse was big enough to bridge the gap between flesh and the abstract elements: it was the living personification of air, fire, earth, and water. When the Florentine Republic commissioned Leonardo to paint a battle scene in the Great Council Hall, it unwittingly offered him an opportunity to return to a favourite theme. War was fought by men on horses, and no battle scene could be contemplated without the spectacle of rearing, galloping, charging, and falling steeds. They teem in the battle scenes carved on Roman military sarcophagi preserved in Pisa’s Campo Santo. The Florentine sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni in about 1473 distilled the essence of these ancient battles in a bronze archetype of conflict: his battle includes waves of horses ploughing down barbarians. Leonardo saw a licence to make a brand-new scientific study of a creature that embodied his fascination with the natural world.
Leonardo da Vinci, the layers of the brain and scalp compared with the layers of an onion, early 1490s. Leonardo illuminates the cosmology of microcosm and macrocosm by showing how a head is like an onion. (illustration credit 7.4)
He embarked on a study of horses from life, scrutinising them now not for their proportion and grace when they stood still, but for their display of energy and movement. His sketches “for the cartoon” went far beyond essential preparatory work. They constituted an entirely new project, an analysis of motion in horses that anticipated, by several centuries, the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge and the Impressionist racing pictures of Degas. The “book of horses sketched for the cartoon” has long since been dismembered. Pages survive in the Royal Library at Windsor, however, that were undoubtedly made in preparation for The Battle of Anghiari and almost certainly come from the very notebook mentioned in the inventory. They are among the greatest evocations of movement in the entire history of art. They don’t anticipate merely Muybridge and Impressionism, but Futurism into the bargain. Movement, something that had obsessed Leonardo ever since he had tried to catch the blur of a cat’s squirming limbs in an early drawing, is here clarified as a theme with blood-red intensity.
Drawn in red chalk, very fast, from life, a horse is going wild, shaking its body with frenzied abandon as Leonardo dares himself to capture its changing form. Its rear legs, firmly planted on the earth, and its muscular rump possess a densely shaded solidity: this very solid, sculptural sense of mass gives the animal, which after all is just a flat chalk sketch a couple of inches tall, compelling reality. It is not simply that Leonardo finished this part of the drawing and then was forced to sketch the rest more quickly when the horse started to rear and rave. Rather, centuries in advance of the disjunctive multiple glances of Cubism, he drew the horse from two viewpoints, as if it were two creatures in one: while its rear half is impressively fixed and detailed, its front legs, head, and neck—everything forward of its ribcage—shake and shudder. It has three front legs clawing at the air, as Leonardo uses a deliberately grotesque device to record motion. Its neck, bent achingly back, starts as detailed study and becomes a tangle of brutal lines and curves tracing its panicky movements. Its head, with a dark, round eye, is a whirl of curves and glimpsed nostrils, as fluid as a cloud of electrons. In this drawing Leonardo goes beyond the fictions most art settles for: he recognises the mobility of nature, the fluency of life, and—this is what makes the drawing so profound—the limits of eye and brain in assimilating the true complexity of reality. It is almost as if the horse were a composite monster, a half-human centaur: in that doubleness, Leonardo reveals two ways of seeing anything, as matter and as energy. All this in a sketch of a horse.
Leonardo challenged himself to see and record things that are impossible for the naked eye to see and record—or are they? His drawings from the book of horses convey the power of speed not just suggestively but through his sincere attempt to record it: he was, manifestly, looking at actual horses and trying to capture their fleeting passage. In
one amazing small sketch in Windsor, on a torn sheet that surely must have come from the book of drawings that he left in the monastery, he is visibly trying to delineate a horse and rider as they whiz past him: and he does it magically, by abandoning detail and drawing a quick caricature of the animal’s long head thrust forward like a torpedo, perfectly horizontal and streamlined, its mane seeming to pull back in a great arch of effort, the rider just a ghost on its back, its two front legs off the ground. Doubtless in embarking on his intense study of the horse in motion in 1503–4, Leonardo was going beyond what any other artist might consider necessary preparation for a painting. Once again, as Freud might say, the “investigator” in him was preempting the painter. But no one who looks at these sketches can believe he was wasting his time.
Michelangelo, A Male Nude, 1504–5. The ready and waiting energy of David bursts into motion in drawings for The Battle of Cascina. (illustration credit 7.5)
Michelangelo was daunted by all this. He not only imitated the frenzy of Leonardo’s battle composition but even tried to draw horses in the stable; an ink study of one in the Ashmolean Museum reveals him for once in his life flailing. It looks flat, un-anatomical, and rigid, even without Leonardo’s stupendous horses for comparison. But Michelangelo was learning fast. Soon he would liberate himself from the weight of emulation, discover what a battle might mean to him in his heart—and fight passion with passion.
EIGHT
Naked Truth
The young men hang around talking, some of them sitting on the stone wall, others leaning against it nonchalantly. One of them playfully pulls away his companion’s colourful robe so he will be as naked as everyone else. Tousle-haired and louchely muscular, the youths have nothing on at all apart from the decorative draperies slung over their arms like towels. That hint of bathers by the pool is not an anachronism. In about 1506 Michelangelo included this gang of five nude men disporting themselves in the background to his heroic circular picture The Holy Family. While a powerfully masculine Mary raises Christ aloft towards the bright, wise dome of his father’s, Joseph’s, head, and an infant John the Baptist in wild-animal fur looks up from behind a grey parapet, these relaxed nudes have no obvious reason to be chatting in the middle distance. They function almost as a signature of the artist, who was at that moment the revolutionary prophet of the nude. But naturally, interpreters interpret. Perhaps they represent the pagan era that Christ’s coming brought to an end.
Perhaps. But sometimes, even in a painting by Michelangelo, quotidian experience intrudes. These nudes look as if they are at the baths. The communal bathhouse was an important part of Renaissance life and had an obvious connection with the art of the nude. That connection was certainly not lost on Leonardo da Vinci. “Go every Saturday to the baths where you will see naked men [nudi],” he reminds himself. He doesn’t specify that his reasons are artistic. A woodcut by Albrecht Dürer portrays a public bath in a German city in the late 1490s: six undressed men stand and sit under a wooden canopy in the open air. Two lean against a stone wall reminiscent of the architecture in Michelangelo’s painting, and indeed the entire scene is like a down-to-earth pendant to his group of nudes in his painting of the Holy Family often called, after the collector who commissioned it, the Doni Tondo. Dürer jokes on the relationship between this very real bathing scene and the ideal art of antiquity: a fat bather drinks from a huge German beer stein but also resembles Silenus, the foolish companion of Bacchus in classical myth, while two men play musical instruments like shepherds in Arcadia. Their fulsomely incised bodies exist between the real and the ideal, the naked and the nude. Dürer puts them in tiny thongs that unconvincingly hide their shame, but one of them just happens to stand behind a suggestive water tap.
Going to the baths was an important social ritual, a chance to speak with the powerful on terms of intimacy. Bertoldo di Giovanni, who supervised the artists at Lorenzo de’ Medici’s sculpture garden, got a chance both to see nudes and to talk to his employer when he accompanied Il Magnifico to the baths. Bathing establishments could be as elaborate in Renaissance Italy as in ancient Rome or the spas of the eighteenth century: in the Studiolo of Francesco de’ Medici in Florence is Girolamo Machietti’s painting of the baths at Pozzuoli, where numerous ailing men enjoy the naturally heated water of the volcanic Flegrean Fields near Naples. Uniformed servants bring towels; the spa has a grand colonnaded loggia. In Machiavelli’s play La Mandragola the hero plots to meet the woman he’s in love with at a spa, where anything might happen.
Only the super-rich, on the other hand, could afford a private bathroom. Raphael designed a luxurious one for Cardinal Bibbiena in Rome, and one for his own house. These were rare sybarites. For most people going to the baths meant stripping naked in front of other men or women. In Florence, you didn’t even need to visit the bathhouse to see men undress. In the panoramic fifteenth-century view of the city called the “Chain Map,” youths are fishing in the Arno in their trunks.
Naked bodies are naked bodies, then and now. The word “nude” has taken on pretensions over the centuries. Eighteenth-century connoisseurs sought to distinguish the nude in art from pornography, to stress its lofty intent. But in early sixteenth-century Italy nudo simply meant “naked.” When Michelangelo depicted a gathering of undressed youths apparently at the baths, he was daring people to point out this banal similarity. The fact that apparently no one did is proof of the extraordinary triumph of his vision in Florence in 1504: the triumph of the nude.
“Chon ornamento decente”: Leonardo’s suggestion that before going on public exhibition Michelangelo’s statue of David should be made modest was like pointing out that the emperor had no clothes. Michelangelo’s statue stands alert and energetic, a work of tremendous and manifest importance: it communicates its seriousness so absolutely that to see its nudity as in any way carnal seems blasphemous. Leonardo’s words are not prudish—they are lewd. For in pointing out the need for ornamento decente he was reducing David to the one thing Michelangelo’s art never seems to be: mere fleshy depiction. He was caricaturing the statue in words just as he caricatured it in his notebook drawing, where the statue becomes much more meaty and earthly: its heroic transcendence of the ordinary is refused. To display such a thing without covering its membrum virile was surely scandalous.
Michelangelo was getting away with something: breaking the rules of his society and being celebrated for his transgression. His outrage was a mirror of Leonardo’s own, for which the older man had been persecuted.
The question of male nudity gets us to the most intimate layer of their relationship: close to the heart of the onion. Leonardo and Michelangelo had something intimate in common: both had a strong sexual preference for men. In modern language, they were gay—but of course there was no such terminology in their world. Without modern terms for homosexuality, is it an anachronism even to speak of such an experience? The history of private life is a history of images and words. Emotions, the most fleeting of human realities, can be known only through their cultural forms. This makes the sexualities of Leonardo and Michelangelo rather more interesting than if we simply said they were homosexual. It’s much more singular than that. They themselves spoke openly about, and visually explored, desire, and the very different ways in which they did so reveal self-definition at the heart of their hatred.
Michelangelo wanted to defeat Leonardo. At Santa Maria Novella the older man was painstakingly making an immense drawing. Michelangelo too prepared to make a cartoon. In October and through to Christmas, records of payments show that workmen were helping to paste together a gigantic sheet of paper for the young artist to draw on.
Taking on Leonardo in drawing was the most foolhardy thing Michelangelo had ever done. Drawing was the essence of Leonardo in the same way that sculpture was the essence of Michelangelo. If Michelangelo found himself when he picked up a chisel in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s garden, it was in his very first drawings—a landscape of the Arno, a head of a warrior, a child with a cat—th
at Leonardo revealed his uniqueness. No other fifteenth-century artist drew with his abandon and diversity; no one else so passionately put drawing at the very heart of his enterprise. Unifying all his interests, infinitely adaptable—a drawing can be anything from a tiny sketch to a vast finished cartoon, can be done in the workshop or in the street—it was Leonardo’s true medium. And he revolutionised its techniques, pioneering a kind of free-form scribble to generate ideas and, beginning in the 1490s, to use beautiful, tender red chalk to create supple, living shades, adding a new weapon to his graphic repertoire.
Michelangelo’s early drawings are crisp, bold, cross-hatched designs, but nothing to compare with the incredible graphic output Leonardo preserved in his notebooks. It was by looking at the older artist’s red chalk horses and rivers that Michelangelo, in 1504, suddenly discovered this sensual, evocative medium. He still made ink and silverpoint drawings, whose power increased enormously as he quickly absorbed Leonardo’s revolutionary lessons that drawing is an art in itself, and that the experience of making one can be as intense as the carving of stone. But he also made big, expansive sketches in chalk, in which he worked with tremendous freedom and strength, all of a sudden a great, a stupendous, draughtsman. Whatever he learned from Leonardo’s technique—and he learned a lot, very quickly, from his rival in 1504—it was not mere method that took Michelangelo in a few months to the same heights in drawing he’d already reached as a sculptor. It was the clarity with which he recognised himself: the courage with which he decided to concentrate on the most personal subject matter at his command. It was the season of the nude. His giant David stood now at the heart of Florence, and if you ignored the ridiculous metal underpants, it was a defiant statement of the beauty and perfection of the human form—which for Michelangelo meant the body of a man. In preparing to draw his cartoon for the Great Council Hall he relentlessly took this as his theme: he threw himself passionately into drawing the male nude. Even the dignity of David was to be outdone by the mountainous backs and twisting muscles he put on paper.