The Lost Battles Read online

  Out of this haze comes a harshness. Leonardo portrayed an intimate friendship between Christ and St. John. In Michelangelo’s tondo, Christ is virtually leaping out of his mother’s arms to fly away from John: in place of closeness there is revulsion. This infant Christ is the most finished part of the work, his little body precisely hewn, right down to the small baby’s penis. Michelangelo insists on Christ’s full humanity as he tries to escape his terrible destiny. At the same time he offers a dynamic, explosive contrast to Leonardo’s massive, organic whole—and displays an ingenious physical possibility all his own, of a Christ who does not stay in Mary’s arms but who becomes a kind of flying putto, soaring out of the pictorial group into three-dimensional reality. Sculpture, claims this work, trumps painting.

  In the painted tondo he created for Agnolo Doni, designing a richly carved wooden frame for it, Michelangelo defies Leonardo’s cartoon of the Virgin and St. Anne even more unequivocally. Leonardo had created a doubly maternal group—Christ’s mother and grandmother, intertwined—but in this circular painting Michelangelo does the opposite. His Holy Family is dominated by Joseph, a choice radically at odds not just with Leonardo but with the Florentine culture to which the Annunziata cartoon strongly appealed. For Leonardo knew what he was doing, exhibiting a beautiful image of Mary and her mother at the Annunziata, which was famous all over Italy for its precious relic, the miraculous painting of the Annunciation kept there in a tabernacle designed by Michelozzo. Like other medieval Italian cities, Florence adored the Virgin—the city was full of icons of her, and she was prayed to almost as a mother goddess. Leonardo jokes about this in his Prophecies:

  Of Christians.

  Many who hold the faith of the son only

  raise temples in the name of the mother.

  Michelangelo is driven in his tondo to attack Florentine popular culture in order to attack Leonardo. It’s reminiscent, oddly, of the First Herald Francesco’s criticisms of Donatello’s Judith—it is not good for the woman to kill the man, and it is not good, implies the Doni Tondo, to depict a Holy Family dominated by women. In Michelangelo’s painting Joseph gets his due: a good old man, strong and sensitive, he towers over his young wife (clearly modelled on a boy), who is doing the correct thing and presenting Christ to him. And the arrangement of human forms is spectacular: Mary kneels, twisting around to raise up Christ, her arms arcing in space. Not only does Michelangelo strive to create a more exciting physical complication than the one Leonardo imagined in his St. Anne studies; in the kneeling Mary, he sets out to improve on the kneeling Leda whose form Leonardo had invented as his riposte to Michelangelo’s nudes.

  Yet there is more to these reconfigurations of Leonardo than a cool comparison of styles. Michelangelo finds fault not only with his rival’s art but with his life. There is something very personal in his vision of the Holy Family. Michelangelo loved his father. Ludovico was a good Christian man, old-fashioned in his ways, his son told Condivi, and in Michelangelo’s letters his efforts to be loyal and solicitous to a man who actually seems to have been tetchy and dependent are moving. Not only did Michelangelo respect and help his father, but he did his best for his brothers, especially his beloved Buonarroto, whose death caused him terrible grief. The family home was in the Santa Croce quarter, east of Piazza della Signoria, a working-class district where Michelangelo was later to increase the family’s property: today the Casa Buonarroti museum is there. Michelangelo worked on his cartoon for the Great Council Hall in a room at the Hospital of the Dyers in this quarter, near the family home. At this time of his life there is no record of him indulging in flights of Platonic love or expressing his admiration for male beauty in any other realm but his art: it may well be significant that his pursuit of Tommaso Cavalieri and other men became an overt part of his life only after his father died. In 1504 he was a good son and brother who chose to work on his cartoon in his own family’s quarter. On the other side of Florence there was Leonardo with his strange famiglia centred on a relationship with a handsome young criminal type, Salaì, who, in between visits to the barber and the fortune teller, functioned as something between Leonardo’s adopted son and his lover.

  With his coiffed hair and his pink tights and his extravagant wardrobe, his equally finely got-up servants and followers, Leonardo simply repelled Michelangelo. There is real rage towards the older man’s blurring of male and female beauty, his strange sensuality and “family,” in the younger artist’s responses to the Annunziata cartoon. His Doni Tondo utterly rejects the alternative Holy Family depicted in Leonardo’s vision. Not only does a firmly masculine family replace a feminised one: the infant John the Baptist is portrayed by Michelangelo at a respectful distance from the Family, separated from them by a grey stone wall. This is a pointed contrast with the intimate, indeed sensual, way the young Baptist approaches Christ in Leonardo’s cartoon in London. Michelangelo makes the same point even more insistently in his marble tondo: Christ flees the young John as if disgusted by him.

  In 1504, as they plot their rival cartoons for the Great Council Hall, these two titanic minds are systematically competing in every aspect of their designs. Consider Michelangelo’s drawing of a seated nude turning away from the beholder, twisting his entire body and neck while maintaining elegance. This might seem utterly remote from Leonardo’s works. But one of the works to be seen in Leonardo’s rooms at Santa Maria Novella was his portrait of Lisa del Giocondo—a seated figure who turns around in her chair, twisting her body with such apparently effortless elegance that the convolution of the pose goes unnoticed. Not by Michelangelo. The Mona Lisa is a hidden enemy with which his gyrating nudes compete. Her circular motion even as she sits still becomes, in his drawings of mighty male figures turning their heads, twisting their backs, a vortex of power. And this, in turn, provokes Leonardo’s most brilliant riposte to the strident energy of all those nudes.

  Daunted as he was by David, in the end Leonardo didn’t find his rival’s obsession with the male body that enviable. In his notes on painting he denounces an art that appears to be Michelangelo’s: “O anatomical painter, in your desire for your nudes to display all their emotions, guard against your extreme awareness of the bones, chords and muscles making you a wooden painter …” This is a direct criticism of the kinds of nudes Michelangelo was drawing. In fact it is an insightful analysis of their meaning: Michelangelo set out to “display all their emotions” not in their faces but through their bodies. In a great drawing of a man’s back he reveals pathos and passion inscribed in the very flesh in exactly the way Leonardo suggests. But this muscular emotion is “wooden,” says Leonardo, and in the Mona Lisa he offers his brilliant reply to the anatomical grandeurs of Michelangelo’s nudes.

  When Michelangelo insulted him in the street, Leonardo couldn’t think of an answer; when it came to art, he was more eloquent. The earliest imitation of the Mona Lisa, painted by Raphael in about 1506, transposing her features onto those of Maddalena Strozzi Doni, notably lacks the most famous thing of all about her: Maddalena does not smile. This doesn’t prove that Leonardo had yet to make his painting smile, but a scientific investigation of the painting by the Louvre revealed an unsmiling image below the one we see. It’s conspicuous that Raphael should have left out the feature that most struck later observers and was assiduously copied or inventively reimagined by so many later artists. The Mona Lisa’s smile in fact seems connected with the anatomical drawings Leonardo did after 1506, in which among other things he dissects “the muscles called lips.” If so, her face is his considered riposte, in the aftermath of his competition with Michelangelo, to the young man’s “wooden” anatomical nudes. All those surging backs and stretching limbs, those contorted poses, that strident heroic display of feeling in the human body—and really, the only muscles you need to display emotion are your lips. Without stirring from her chair, Lisa del Giocondo banishes Michelangelo’s men with a mocking smile.

  NINE

  Master of War

  It was Novembe
r 1504 and Leonardo’s work on The Battle of Anghiari had been interrupted—but this time it wasn’t his fault. The government of Florence sent him on a mission connected with the war on Pisa. The small city of Piombino on the Tuscan coast commanded the coastal route south, and was considered strategically essential. Earlier that year its lord, Jacopo d’Appiano, had nearly switched sides in Tuscany’s war and gone over to the Pisans. As he was such a valuable ally cutting off the rebel city’s link with Naples, the Signoria sent the excellent Niccolò Machiavelli to visit Piombino and mollify its ruler. Machiavelli smoothed things over and Leonardo was sent, in effect, as a goodwill gift. To confirm the renewal of Florence’s alliance with this tinpot local despot, the great genius was despatched to mend his castle. Having packed his books and clothes away in Santa Maria Novella, he rode out into the rocky, riverine Tuscan landscape, towards the glittering Mediterranean.

  The coming of the artillery age had reduced the picturesque walls of medieval chateaux, their lofty turrets and quaint portcullises, to decorative playthings, good only for romance literature. We have already seen how the French invasion of Italy in 1494 had turned the politics of the peninsula upside down. It led to the fall of the Medici and Ludovico Sforza, and caused the war with Pisa that Florence was still fighting. This single catastrophe dominated Italy for decades. In his political writings Machiavelli returns to it obsessively, sees it as a dividing line between the golden age of fifteenth-century Italy and his own tumultuous times. But the most disturbing new reality that struck Italians in 1494 was the fury of artillery. This war marks a fault line in European history. It was the first time cannon truly determined a conflict’s outcome. After a century of experiment with bombards and siege guns, this was the moment when an army deployed mobile cannon to maximum effect and proved that the age of gunpowder had truly come. War would never be the same again. The year 1494 is a critical date in the birth of the modern world.

  Contemporary Italians understood this with stunned clarity. In his History of Italy, composed in the 1530s at the end of the cycle of conflicts the invasion inaugurated, the Florentine politician Francesco Guicciardini describes the fatal impact of the new technology. Siege guns had gradually been improving in impact and mobility for decades, but there was a sudden transformation in 1494 when the French brought

  many pieces which were even more mobile because they were solely of bronze, that were called cannons, and used balls of iron, where before stone ones had been used that were heavier and grosser beyond comparison, and they were pulled on carriages, drawn not by oxen, as was customary in Italy, but by horses, with such agility of men and instruments chosen for this task that they almost always progressed alongside the armies, and were conducted to the walls and positioned with incredible speed …

  The impact on castles and walled towns was devastating. A style of defensive architecture that had evolved organically over long centuries and that still, to this day, comes to mind when we picture the medieval world was blown to pieces. A drawing by Leonardo illustrates this apocalyptic scenario. A tower explodes in fragments, literally disintegrating in a cloud of smoke and dust. This was the kind of scene people had to get used to. Walk around the old walls of Florence, or examine any medieval castle, and the problem is obvious. Tall barriers of stone were no use against a cannon ball. Italy had an especially deep emotional investment in those old walls. Italian images of cities show houses jammed into a circle of walls—in San Domenico in Bologna stands St. Petronius, carved by Michelangelo, holding a model of Bologna safe within a magic mural enclosure. City walls were symbols of liberty and communal solidarity. The idea of a city safe behind its defences was too potent to be abandoned. Thus was born one of the most surprising inventions of the Italian Renaissance: the bastion.

  Leonardo da Vinci, designs for cannon and guns, 1480s. Artillery warfare was new in the fifteenth century, and Leonardo’s designs were at the cutting edge. (illustration credit 9.1)

  This was a great age of architecture—and of radical architectural thinking. The rediscovery of classical Greco-Roman architecture was at the very heart of the Italian Renaissance. In studying the buildings of Rome and reading the writings of Vitruvius, architects such as Alberti didn’t only start to rethink houses and temples but defences, too. Even before 1494, engineers, architects, and military men set about inventing new kinds of fortification for the artillery age. After 1494 the search intensified. Antonio and Giuliano da Sangallo, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, and Leonardo himself realised there were ways to outwit the besieging gunners. The new ideas had first been advanced by Alberti, and it is significant that Leonardo had Alberti’s architectural writings in his book collection.

  Renaissance architects were in love with geometry. It was the rejection of arbitrary Gothic fantasy, the ordering of space on principles of proportion and symmetry. That was what fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italians so revered in the temples that survived in Rome. Brunelleschi launched the Renaissance when he surmounted Florence Cathedral not with a crazy spire but with a regular, harmonious dome. The same ideas that made architects want to build domes made them see that mathematics could save cities. Instead of tall walls that presented easy targets, you could fortify a site with massive embankments, sloping and zigzagged and filled with rubble, and with low circular or triangular gun towers with a formidable visual command of their surroundings. Low and sinister, more like pyramids than walls, the new fortifications could turn the tables and make artillery attack impossible while maximising the defenders’ firepower.

  Leonardo da Vinci is not usually thought of as an architect. A would-be aviator, an inventor of diving suits—everyone knows he was these things, but an architect? And yet architecture is the hidden channel that links the entrancing world of his notebooks with physical, built, Italian—and French—reality. Always, to read his notes, to contemplate his inventions, is to wonder what was ever made. There are no records of his tank ever scattering the enemy as it trundled across a battlefield, or his diving suit being used to sink enemy ships or fish for pearls. There are no buildings by him either, but his architectural ideas had a real, observable influence on his contemporaries. A spiralling well at Orvieto, a chateau staircase in the Loire valley—there are buildings in the world visibly indebted to Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings. His designs contributed to the ingenious development of Italian architecture.

  His most scintillating architectural drawings are in the notebook Manuscript B that he compiled in Milan in the 1480s. They explore one of the most cherished ideas that architects were starting to dream of: a totally centralised “temple” that rejected the asymmetrical aisles and cross-shaped plans of traditional churches. It was the logical culmination of the quest for architectural harmony. In Leonardo’s drawings a tall central dome is surrounded by eight smaller domes which form a circle; the squared outer walls have niches with statues set into them. The drawings have a compact, compressed power; the temple with its domes lingers in your mind like a utopia.

  There could not be a more committed expression of the Renaissance classical ideal. Leonardo’s domes are mathematical dreams. He applied the same geometrical mind to the new science of military architecture.

  At Piombino in 1504 Leonardo rapidly devised an impromptu masterpiece of geometrical defence. What the seaside castle needed to make it modern and impregnable was, he reasoned, a massive circular mound with a squat gun tower sunk into it, linked to the main fortress by a covered passage, with a deep trench and earth banks adding to the defences. His designs analyse the long, low, sloping banks from the point of view of artillery sightlines, and show how jagged, angular trenches provide a more difficult target for gunners. At the same time he thinks of his mound as a “pyramid,” which starts him thinking about the pure mathematics of pyramids—but that too has practical value. It was by thinking geometrically that Renaissance architects invented the science-fiction bunker-like forms of the new fortresses, so devoid of picturesque detail.

  Leonardo understood
ballistics and the sightlines necessary to maximise defensive firepower while making attack difficult. He had often considered it from the other point of view. Also in 1504 he made an eerily beautiful drawing of a row of mortars planted by a besieging army into the ground outside a fortification. The mortars fire upward, and their diffusions of shot arc over and fall into the courtyard on the other side of the walls. He draws the lines of the mortars’ trajectories as spectacular red fountains, spilling over spectacularly behind the enemy walls: it is like a fireworks display. That is what it is, a murderous fireworks display. The point of the plan is to totally cover the area behind the walls in an even rain of devastating grapeshot. A hard rain is falling on Pisa—for surely the fortifications are meant to be Pisa’s. This is a design for a massive artillery attack on the city Florence was besieging. There is also a sketch for it on the reverse of one of his horses drawn for the cartoon of The Battle of Anghiari.