The Lost Battles Read online

  In Piombino, on All Saints’ Day 1504, Leonardo demonstrated to Jacopo d’Appiano how the landscape itself could be reshaped as a defensive measure. If the little hills beyond the trench were flattened into a geometrical plane, this would give a perfect, lethal sightline to the gunners in the squat tower. Exactly this type of mathematical analysis was soon to become the universal principle of fortification. Leonardo made explicit the rationale of his gun tower: it provided a secure vantage point “where men are stood to batter all the countryside with artillery.” In one of his designs for the tower, its body rises from a torqued star of triangular buttresses, their acute angles designed to deny enemy gunners a target. Even in designing the layout of trenches in front of the walls he uses geometry, explaining how mathematical accuracy is the secret of survival in this new age of ballistics. He draws a triangle and then cuts through its interior with zigzag lines representing the trenches: the apex of the triangle is marked with the letter p, representing the enemy; Leonardo calculates the best angles of these trenches to minimise their exposure to this enemy.

  In Leonardo’s notes on his work at Piombino, contained in Madrid Codex II, we see him, not as a solitary visionary isolated from his contemporaries by his genius, but as a participant in avant-garde military science. The design of bastions was a very real and significant evolution in European warfare. It seems from this rare glimpse of him actually at work—as opposed to theorising—that Leonardo truly was a master of war. His friend Francesco di Giorgio, whose writings on military architecture he transcribed and whose manuscript architectural treatise he annotated that same winter, was another. But Leonardo’s proposals to the lord of Piombino were superbly original applications of the new technique of fortress-building—and they were practical. He planned to make earthworks central to the scheme, and his notebook contains detailed calculations of man-hours to do the digging and move the rubble. He costs every part of the scheme based on his calculations of the volume of earth to be moved and the pay of workers.

  Leonardo was not trying to create something aesthetic here, but something that worked. He pragmatically opted for earthworks, simple banks and ditches, as a means of creating strong bastions quickly. In a note dating from the early 1500s he points out that “for a bastion to have spring in it, it should have a layer of fresh willow branches placed in the soil at intervals of half a braccio.” That is, by weaving willow into your earthen bastion you can make it absorb cannon fire more effectively. This is a quite different Leonardo from the visionary scientist who was an enigma to his contemporaries. The Leonardo the Florentine Republic sent to Piombino is a practical engineer.

  He also knows enough about war to know that science is not its essence. What if the enemy do get inside his defences? he wonders. It will be a close-quarters fight. The enemy will be trapped in a narrow defile created by his earthworks, and then the defenders will strike back: “Throwing smoke and flames and other fetid things, they will clear out the enemy with fury.” In war, however much you calculate, in the end it is down to the visceral force of irrational violence, the release in otherwise perfectly normal human beings of murderous fury. This image of furia connects his work at Piombino with the cartoon of the Battle of Anghiari. In Leonardo’s battle picture, wrote Vasari in 1550, “rage, bitterness and revenge are seen no less in the men than in the horses.” It was a painting of anger, of hate—of the fury of battle. This is what generation after generation has seen in Leonardo’s battle picture. In the seventeenth century Pieter Paul Rubens drew a version in which the frenzy of the horses is like that of monstrous dragons. In the nineteenth century the critic Walter Pater shuddered that “we may discern some lust of terrible things in it.”

  One of the drawings Leonardo made for his battle cartoon reveals him researching fury by studying facial expressions in a maddened horse. In this fierce little masterpiece horses rear and rage, and Leonardo moves closer to study bulging eyes, chomping teeth, lips bared. The horse’s flesh is pressed down on its skull, revealing the contours of the bone; its teeth are primitive, grinning instruments, its eye a circle of irrationality. Next to it he draws a roaring lion and a screaming man, to stress and analyse the idea of furia. As he plans his battle painting he is thinking about the psychology of war. This drawing matches precisely his observation in his notebook at Piombino that if the enemy get into the defile they can be driven out with “fury.” The new artillery changed war, but the face of battle was an eternal scream of hate.

  There seems to be an obvious contrast between Leonardo’s work on The Battle of Anghiari and his visit to Piombino. He broke off from designing an imaginary battle to offer his services in a real war. But this is a modern perspective. Art in sixteenth-century Florence was not a “soft” activity compared with the real world where “hard” reality prevailed. Images were powerful. Paintings and statues in churches could possess miraculous powers or manifest protective saints. In public art too, mysterious forces were at work, as became apparent at the meeting to decide David’s location. The Republic knew of Leonardo’s talents as an architect and engineer. It consulted him—perhaps was deeply influenced by him—in planning to divert the Arno and sent him to advise on fortifying Piombino. His painting in the Great Council Hall was also intended to advance the war against Pisa. This isn’t hard for us to understand. We’re familiar with propaganda. Leonardo’s painting was intended to celebrate a patriotic victory and inspire the city in its current war. And yet, its purpose may have been more precise than anything we mean by propaganda. Art could be a charm, a rite.

  Niccolò Machiavelli had radical ideas about images and their effects. He revered antiquity; and his political writings, in 1504–6, when he was trying to win the Pisan war, as much as later on when he wrote his infamous books, are saturated in classical learning. But he did not see the Greek and Roman world through rosy spectacles. He worshipped its power and energy, and attributed these qualities to forces that were dangerous and unstable. He defended the riots and tumults of ancient Rome, for, he argues in his Discourses, these disorders bred liberty and drove the Roman Republic to conquest and war. Machiavelli’s ancient Rome is in some ways a primitive place. He disparages Christianity for its softness and pity, for muting the old warlike ways of pagan Italy. In his most provocative onslaught on the religion of his own day, Machiavelli claims the reason ancient cities fought so much harder for freedom than modern ones can be found in

  the contrast between our education and that of the ancients, founded on the contrast between our religion and theirs. For having shown the truth and the right way, our religion makes us think less of worldly honour: while the gentiles [i.e. the ancient pagans], thinking a lot of it and seeing it as the supreme good, acted more ferociously. This can be understood from many of their constitutions, starting with the magnificence of their sacrifices compared with the humility of ours, which have a pomp more delicate than magnificent, but no ferocious or energetic action. Theirs did not lack pomp or magnificence of ceremony, but to this was joined the action of the sacrifice packed with blood and ferocity, with the killing of a multitude of animals; and this spectacle, being terrible, made men similar to itself.

  This image of sacrifice as a bloody visual spectacle that rouses violent passions in the spectator is powerfully suggestive about the purpose of showing the citizens of Florence, assembled in their Great Council Hall, a savage painting of a battle. Today, in sixteenth-century Italy, says Machiavelli, the pieties of the Church honour weakness and celebrate “humility.” Christianity’s tranquillizing effect pacifies citizens and makes them easy to tyrannise. Ancient religion was the opposite: paganism valued this world and its glories, and its rites were bloody and cruel. The spectacle of sacrifice was violent and ferocious: “being terrible,” it “made men similar to itself.”

  Machiavelli here advocates a use of visual horror to make citizens cruel and violent, to prepare them for war. He was ultimately concerned as a political thinker with changing the subjective feelings and disposit
ions, awakening the energy, of his fellow citizens. Republics in his eyes were made free by passion: people were more alive, and that means more violent, in free cities. “But in republics,” he sardonically warns would-be tyrants in The Prince, “there is greater vitality, greater hatred, more desire for revenge.” His praise of ancient blood sacrifice is on these grounds: by watching blood flow on their altars, the old pagans absorbed cruel, but strong and warlike, ways.

  Leonardo da Vinci was designing a monument to fury, a painting that visually manifested the warlike passions. Armies marched to the beat of drums. What if we pictured Leonardo’s painting as the visual equivalent of a stirring drumbeat, drumming war into Florentine hearts as they met in their Hall to vote taxes to pay for the defeat of Pisa? A Machiavellian understanding might see The Battle of Anghiari as the equivalent of a pagan sacrifice, a rite of violence that, “being terrible … made men similar to itself.”

  If so, it would be a true Machiavellian attack on piety. The Great Council Hall was a room drenched in religion. Built by Savonarola, it had an altar for which Filippino Lippi and then Fra Bartolommeo were contracted to paint the Virgin and the saints of Florence, a wooden loggia on top of which a nude Christ was planned. But in place of humility and sanctity, Leonardo’s wall painting would bring a vision of rage, anger, revenge—of the Machiavellian virtues. The very qualities Vasari would see in it—“rage, bitterness and revenge are perceived as much in the men as in the horses”—are, according to Machiavelli, the strengths a republic needs if it is to survive.

  Fury and fire burst off the pages of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks in designs for cannons, mortars, bombs, missiles, fireships, and armoured cars. In a drawing in Manuscript B that he works up in more detail on a sheet in the British Museum, he gives form to his idea for a “covered chariot.” Leonardo’s predecessor of the modern tank is a round-roofed wagon, moved by gears, armed with cannon that blast away as it rolls across the battlefield. A note by the side of the drawing suggests some uses: “These replace the elephants. You can joust with them. You can hold bellows in them to spread terror among the horses of the enemy, and put gunmen in them to break up any battle formation.” That is, they could be as terrifying and unexpected as the elephants the ancient Carthaginian general Hannibal used in battle—a prophetic image of the kind of shock tanks would exact in the twentieth century. But Leonardo also suggests the wagons might be used for jousting, conjuring up a science-fiction picture of young knights driving their wooden tanks at one another while ladies of the court look on.

  Leonardo’s notes on fortifying Piombino in November and December 1504 are so realistic, so practical, that they raise a startling question about his work as a military engineer. In his letter to Ludovico Sforza in about 1481 he claimed to have many “secrets” of war. In his notes, from the early Manuscript B with its original inventions mingled with interpretations of ancient war machines to a plan for a submarine attack that he wrote in Venice in 1500, there are many military inventions and stratagems. Yet it can seem that these are in the end pure theory—that his utopian plans were never really put into practice. This assumption has the convenient effect of absolving the modern world’s favourite Renaissance genius from any involvement in actually killing people. But the rare day-to-day record of him at work in Piombino does not reveal a hapless fantasist, let alone someone whose military designs can be seen as satires or intellectual games. It is very real, prosaic stuff, calculating costs and man-hours, digging ditches, shifting earth. The conclusion seems unavoidable that he had done this kind of thing before, that he was an accomplished engineer who could get results. His capacity for fiendish, visionary inventions was combined with a total lack of snobbery, a readiness to think in terms of ditches and dirt, that made him a useful expert to have around on the battlefield.

  Leonardo had worked as chief engineer for Cesare Borgia in 1502. There was nothing whimsical about Borgia’s attitude to war. He was not staging jousts; he didn’t need a court artist. If he employed Leonardo, it was because he found him genuinely useful. If the inventor hadn’t been able to offer anything substantial and real to back up his talk of “my secrets” in Borgia’s company, he could even have ended up dead. And as we have seen, soon after returning to Florence in 1503 Leonardo was being consulted by the Republic about its plans to use the Arno against Pisa—which suggests his work for Borgia was known and respected.

  But what does this say about his drawings of crossbow bolts with heads packed with incendiary materials to turn them into explosive missiles, of spheres to be fired from mortars that spray out smaller projectiles from holes in their bodies, of multi-barrelled guns and fire ships? All these horrible inventions and more can be found in his notebooks, often drawn in great detail. They are not reconstructed on television programmes as often as his flying machines are. But they do resemble real weapons that were manufactured in sixteenth-century Italy, and beyond. Henry VIII of England, who was keen to keep up with the latest military know-how, bought ingenious artillery pieces from Italy including a multi-barrelled gun and a set of handguns fitted with shields to protect the user. Both these devices (examples survive in the Royal Armouries and were found on Henry’s warship the Mary Rose) resemble ingenious inventions in Leonardo’s notebooks.

  In London in 1588—the year the English used fire ships against the Spanish Armada—a translation was published of the Italian pioneer of ballistics Niccolò Tartaglia’s book The Art of Shooting. Translated by Cyprian Lucar, gent., it has an appendix by Lucar compiling various inventions and insights from Italian works of military science. Among these is a mention of a name it’s surprising to find Elizabethans bandying about: “Frauncesse George of Sena was the first inventor of Mynes for the subversion of Fortes, Castles, and walles of Cities …” The English in 1588, very serious about war, looked back to Leonardo’s friend Francesco di Giorgio as an important inventor. Leonardo had met this Sienese architect, engineer, and artist—a polymath like himself, without the drawing ability—when he was at the court of Milan. They both competed unsuccessfully—as did Donato Bramante, another architect friend of Leonardo’s—to become the designer of the tiburio, the soaring central section of Milan’s Gothic cathedral. In 1490, Leonardo went with Francesco di Giorgio on a work trip to Pavia. But before this, Leonardo himself had boasted of his ideas for mining fortresses. In the letter he sent to Milan’s ruler offering his talents as a master of war at the start of the 1480s he says, “If through the height of the banks, or the strength and site of the place, it is impossible, when besieging somewhere, to carry out a bombardment, I have means of ruining every rocca or other fortress …” Later in the letter he is explicit: “I have means by secret and tortuous caves and ways to come silently to a chosen place …”

  Nor was this an idle boast. Leonardo gives serious thought to how to tunnel underneath a fortress in Manuscript B. Evidently he already had ideas about undermining fortresses before he met Francesco di Giorgio; these two radical thinkers about the science of war were mutual influences on one another. Elizabethan soldiers eager for every scrap of knowledge that would help defeat the Spanish were consciously indebted to Francesco di Giorgio, and that was but a breath away from acknowledging the influence of Leonardo himself.

  The inventions listed in the English book were almost all derived from Italian military science. The sources it cites include Vannoccio Biringuccio, Girolamo Ruscelli, Girolamo Cattaneo, Francesco Ferretti, and Cosimo Bartoli. To take one example of these Renaissance authors, Girolamo Ruscelli’s Precetti della militia moderna (1572)—Precepts of Modern Warfare—describes a wide variety of “fireworks” including a fused bomb, a spherical shell that bursts into a shower of lethal fragments, and a “dart of fire” that can be shot from a crossbow and contains burning matter inside a rocket-shaped wire frame. All these weapons have infinitely better-drawn counterparts in Leonardo’s notebooks. This doesn’t mean they originated with him. He too adapted ideas from Valturio’s De re militari, a compendium of unus
ual weapons ancient and modern. On the other hand, as well as improving Valturio’s designs, his notebooks are full of his own notions, like weapons with their own built-in shield.

  What all this boils down to is that when it comes to the arts of war, it doesn’t make sense to see Leonardo in dreamy isolation. His inventions were definitely not fantasist. They are closely related to real—and ghastly—weapons that were made and used in sixteenth-century Europe. You can see, in armouries, fiendish devices that exhibit exactly the same mentality as his inventions. He was working in an age when everything was changing on the battlefield, when war was highly experimental, and even his wildest ideas should not be seen as daydreams or jokes. Leonardo was a working military engineer whose means of offence were as real as the means of defence he demonstrated so gracefully at Piombino.

  Leonardo da Vinci, Neptune, circa 1504. All the fountains of Baroque Italy are implied in this irresistible homage to the god of the sea. (illustration credit 9.2)

  Does this make him a sinister, amoral military magus, the Dr. Strangelove of Renaissance Italy? Not necessarily. War was a field of research for many early scientists. The new age of artillery offered a unique opportunity to study ballistics, and Leonardo drew and calculated the trajectories of mortars and crossbows in ways that look forward to the Scientific Revolution. In his designs for the bombardment of Pisa he finds incongruous beauty in the trajectories of destruction. In the later sixteenth century the great Pisan scientist Galileo Galilei would also write on ballistics and fortifications, and in the seventeenth century Isaac Newton would reach some of his most important conclusions by considering the fiery arcs of the artillery.

  In Madrid Codex II you can see exactly why the practical engineering problems of war interested Leonardo: they are mathematical problems. His notes on fortifying Piombino enigmatically melt into speculations in pure geometry, and back again. Only gradually do you understand how pertinent his apparently gratuitous calculations on the nature of the pyramid are to his designs for mounds, banks, and trenches.