The Lost Battles Page 20
In October 1504, the month before Leonardo was sent to Piombino, the most spectacular attempt to apply science to the defeat of Pisa went risibly wrong. We know that back in the summer of 1503 he had been consulted about the Florentine Republic’s apocalyptic scenario of changing the course of the Arno to deprive Pisa of the river that was its lifeblood. In a roiling drawing done in about 1504 and closely mirroring his composition for the Great Council Hall, Leonardo portrays Neptune, god of the sea, dark-eyed and downward-glaring, raising his trident in his right arm, ready to plunge it down in fury, unleashing some terrible storm that will sink ships and drown sailors, surrounded by his sea horses, personifications of the waves that manifestly originate in the great drawings of horses Leonardo was making for his battle cartoon. They shake and judder their forelegs in the air in a cinematic blur of hooves, like something you might see in a zoetrope or flick book. Their magnificent faces are raised and their muscular necks twisted in passion; only Neptune himself can control these horses of the sea, whose bodies taper into dolphin-like tails, twisting like whirlpools. The drawing is a translation into marks on paper of the whirlpools and waves and sheer might of water.
Neptune did not smile on the military stratagem to divert the Arno. His waters would not be ruled by Florence. In October 1504, a hydraulic engineer, or “master of water,” hired for the job, named Colombino, attempted to dig a channel to divert the river with a force of two thousand men. Determined to try anything, wrote Francesco Guicciardini in the late 1530s, the Florentines “dreamt up an ingenious new way to injure the Pisans by trying to make the river Arno which runs by Pisa … flow into the Stagno.” Not only would this cut the supply line to Pisa from the nearby sea; it would also prevent rain flowing to the sea and so isolate Pisa in a muddy swamp. The city would not drown quite as totally as Dante had once imagined, but it would rot in a quagmire. Nor would the Pisans be able to attack traffic from Livorno to Florence, because it would be guarded by the new course of the Arno. But, continued Guicciardini, “this work commenced with the greatest hope and followed through at still greater expense turned out to be in vain: because, as happens many times with these kinds of things, although the demonstration with its measures may be almost palpable, one will discover by experience they are fallacious (a clear example of how great the distance is between putting things to design and putting them into action) …”
The failure, says Guicciardini, contradicted the optimism of the “many engineers, and experts on water” who were consulted. Leonardo was one of those experts, as we’ve seen. Guicciardini—a friend of Machiavelli—seems in truth to be alluding to the marvellous drawings of the polymath. It is so suggestive, the way he writes of the “almost palpable” plans with their authoritative measurements. The conviction in the design—disegno—that led Florence astray sounds exactly like the effect of Leonardo’s drawings on the beholder.
The failure of this strategy depressed the Florentine leaders and made them angry at the engineers responsible. Cardinal Francesco Soderini, the Gonfalonier’s brother, wrote to Machiavelli lamenting the catastrophe and blaming the supposed experts. The Second Chancellor turned against the whole idea of technocracy. Wars are not won by science, Machiavelli insists in his later military writings. Fortresses are phoney consolations, artillery can be defied by the brave, and the tactics of the ancient Roman legions are still applicable. These ideas were born in the wake of the error of the waters. As the Arno settled back in its usual course, Machiavelli sat down and wrote a poem called the Decennale, in which he calls for a new approach to making war. The true curse of Italy’s city-states, the fatal flaw in their fight to preserve their independence, is and always has been their use of mercenaries. In proclaiming this, Machiavelli was returning to older republican ideas. The use of mercenary troops by Italian cities had long nagged at virtuous minds. How could a city claim to be the new Rome if its troops were foreign hirelings?
Italy had become a boom market for professional soldiers in the fourteenth century, when the Hundred Years’ War created roaming bands of rootless knights who wandered over the Alps during breaks in the fighting between Britain and France. Because there were so many independent towns in Italy and the hierarchies of feudalism were eroded by centuries of urban self-confidence, there could be no feudal standing army like that of France. Jousting was popular, but in reality urban Italy was a mercantile economy and young men had better things to do than become knights. Hired soldiers were the answer. But such hired soldiers cannot by definition be morally worthy, says Machiavelli in The Art of War, “because no one will be judged good, who if he wishes to always get something out of his job, must be rapacious, fraudulent, violent and have many qualities which of necessity do not make him a good man.”
His answer was a citizen militia. It is an idea at the very core of his political thinking and it proves he was no fan of tyrants. In fact Machiavelli was an idealistic believer in republican government, and his “big idea” was an attempt to reform corrupt republics from within. By forming a militia of its own people, training them and calling them up at times of crisis, the Florentine Republic could free itself from the corruption and dishonesty of mercenaries. But this was not the only benefit. Citizen-soldiers were better citizens: their training made them braver and bigger-hearted. Like the youth of ancient Athens, they would not ask what their city could do for them but what they might do for their city. Citizenship in a true republic was active, it was “virtuous,” and the militia would inculcate an understanding of this. It would also bond and unite the community, as citizens became comrades.
Machiavelli would push this idea for the rest of his life. He had advocated it as early as 1503 in a speech he wrote to raise funds for the army, but after the failure of the Arno diversion it became the new panacea for the endless war with Pisa. His increasing boldness in promoting it had immediate relevance to the competition in the Great Council Hall, for as he told everyone about his idea for a citizen army, Michelangelo was mustering an army of nudes.
TEN
The Raid
Michelangelo was lucky with his subject, for not many battles include pastoral moments of naked bathing. Whether he himself found the most suitable battle in Bruni’s History of Florence or it was selected by someone in the Palace, the choice must surely have been deliberate, for it offered a rare opportunity to portray an army with its clothes off.
All his life studies drawn in the autumn of 1504, all those men who look like they’re at the baths, are exact designs for figures in his agitated army. These painted heroes would tower in the Great Council Hall just as David towered outside the Palace. On the Piazza, the gigantic statue stood stone in hand, eyes on the prize, ready to act. In the Great Council Hall, a few steps away, the Florentine army would leap out of the river, rushing to put on armour, stretching and twisting and running to see the enemy. David and the bathers have something else in common. The Florentine army in The Battle of Cascina aches and strains to see the enemy. But that enemy is invisible to us, just as there is no monstrously vast Goliath for David to look at. There is a particular unease to the way these heroes face a danger urgent yet invisible: perhaps what it does is to transfigure Michelangelo’s heroes from the real world to a larger cosmos of the imagination. Yet what it also does is destroy complacency: to prevent any resolution of the moment the work—portrays? No, “portrays” is not the word—enacts. David and the bathers of Cascina enact alertness. They are awake. And because the source of their wakefulness is unseen, it is also unfixed—it might be tyranny, it might be death. What matters is the wakefulness, the fully conscious state, that Michelangelo’s unclosed heroic drama creates.
Antonio Pollaiuolo Battle of Naked Men, 1465. Pollaiuolo’s eerie vision of muscular nudes fighting in a rural clearing was a powerful antecedent of Michelangelo’s naked history. (illustration credit 10.1)
So he was not only competing with Leonardo but also setting out to complete his conquest of Florentine public space. The citizen approa
ching Piazza della Signoria would first see David framed against the Palazzo Vecchio, its white form casting a long shadow; then would go through this Palace to the Great Council Hall, where the colossal bathers rushed to fight the invisible enemy. The entire sequence would be a monumental theatre, in which the citizen was the true actor: for all these nudes urged a state of mind identical with theirs. They were not mere depictions of primed energy. They were talismans to awaken the beholder. To experience them was in some sense to become like them.
The Battle of Cascina portrays a real moment in history, is scrupulously close to a written source—and yet it comes from deep within Michelangelo’s artistic personality. At the very beginning of his life as a sculptor he created a work that already contains it: the giant nudes he drew that winter, as 1504 became 1505, on his vast sheet of paper in the Hospital of the Dyers, grew directly out of a work he had sculpted when he was a teenager. If you look at the stains on a wall, said Leonardo da Vinci, you may see various forms, including battles. When he was about seventeen, Michelangelo cut into a slab of marble and found a writhing mass of human bodies. It is as if they had welled up in the shallow pool he carved out of the rectangular vertical block, as if they are swarming from the stone and taking shape under the beholder’s mystified gaze. Base matter becomes form, yet in the very moment of assuming recognisable shape, these creatures strangle, stone, club, and crush one another.
The poet Angelo Poliziano started it. When Michelangelo was living in the Medici Palace, this erudite author suggested to his young friend that the Battle of the Centaurs might make a good subject for him. He told Michelangelo the story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses of how the centaurs, those half-human, half-horse monsters, were invited to a wedding by their human neighbours the Lapiths: how it all went fine until the centaurs got drunk and tried to carry off the Lapith women; how a frenzied, savage battle broke out. It was a myth richly suited to art, full of visual challenges: the impossible centaurs to portray realistically, as well as the vast variety of poses that battle unleashes, which had been studied so powerfully by another artist in the Medici orbit, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, in his print The Battle of the Nudes.
In Pollaiuolo’s engraving a group of nudes have met in a forest clearing to fight one another: it is a dream of struggle, almost an image out of a folk tale or an uncanny mass vision like the army seen in the sky over Arezzo in 1494. The men fight with swords, bows and arrows, axes and daggers: like gladiators, they slaughter one another for our delectation. The battle displays the authority and excitement of the nude: the men are seen from different angles, in poses that mirror and complement one another, revealing the artist’s ingenuity in manipulating the human figure. Yet it is disturbing: the full beauty of the nude seems only to be revealed in violence; the strength and agility of these men’s bodies is at its most heightened in the moment they kill one another. This print is one of the few works that can meaningfully be said to have “influenced” Michelangelo. Engraved in 1465, it would certainly have been available to consult in the Medici Palace, where he could also see more monumental works by Pollaiulolo—his three large-scale paintings of the Labours of Hercules, done in about 1460, lost now but remembered in two small panels by Pollaiuolo in the Uffizi Gallery. In one of these paintings, Hercules lifts the giant Antaeus, whose strength derived from the Earth, right off the ground: this wrestling scene is even more Michelangelo-like than The Battle of the Nudes. The tremendous compression of Hercules’ powerful back as the body of Antaeus presses down on him from above must surely have been studied fervently by the young sculptor in Lorenzo’s house—it is exactly the kind of sensual suffering he discovers in the marble as he hews out his Battle of the Centaurs.
The close-quarters fighting in The Battle of the Nudes and, even more, the grappling, lifting, and squashing together of bodies in Pollaiuolo’s Hercules and Antaeus gave the young Michelangelo something he needed. Pollaiuolo saw that nudity in art did not have to mean beauty. It could also mean terror, cruelty, pain, and death. Michelangelo, when he was seventeen and for the rest of his life, could relate to that. His Battle of the Centaurs takes up the compression and claustrophobia of Pollaiuolo’s cruel nudes. Just as the older artist’s naked men battle in a clearing that is cut off by tall vegetation behind them—a natural arena—Michelangelo’s struggling bodies are trapped in a shallow basin with no room for manoeuvre. They can only throttle and pull hair—and hug. For there is an ambiguity here that has nothing to do with Pollaiuolo: where his battling men only battle, some of the grapplings in Michelangelo’s relief are more double-edged. Embraces become strangulations, assaults marriages. The intertwined struggles are somehow larger, more universal than Pollaiuolo’s. Where his predecessor had studied the nude in a new and harsh way, Michelangelo transfigures it into an allegory of life. The Battle of the Centaurs is manifestly an image of life as mortal combat; the world as a battle in a locked room, humans as helpless lovers and enemies condemned to grapple one another in this world’s stony prison. At the heart of the battle of life is a man with his back to us. His spine is a deeply cut line rising diagonally as he stretches to the left. Exactly the same back will appear in the same pose, reversed in direction, in the cartoon for The Battle of Cascina.
Michelangelo’s most moving preparatory work for his cartoon is an almost invisible sketch in misty black chalk that survives in the Uffizi Gallery, its figures as if fading before your eyes into the heat haze of that day beside the Arno. Some of them reach forward, away from us, in a sloping pyramid of foreshortening whose dynamic sense of the body moving in three-dimensional space potently transliterates Michelangelo’s sculptural genius into pictorial art: the spectacular dispositions of the Sistine Ceiling are already here in a nutshell. The bathers in this little drawing are, unequivocally, bathers: the men climbing out of the Arno onto the shore frankly show their buttocks, and one man bends over just like Diana or Susannah in later bathing scenes by Titian or Tintoretto. In other words, it is both sexually charged and feminising—and emotional. Michelangelo portrays in this little drawing a community of nudes who help one another, rely on one another, and are collectively imperilled. Their alarm is like that of a herd of gentle animals—they seem more boyish than heroic, they seem vulnerable.
The visitor was handsome and courtly, with fine, long hair and the manners to match. He had come there to learn from the best, to watch Michelangelo and Leonardo at work and assimilate their styles into his own. That very desire shows how different a person Raphael was from either of his elders. He was an orphan, brought up in the painting workshops of his native Umbria. His father, a painter and poet at the court of Urbino, had died when he was eleven, and Raphael’s lifelong quest for grace and harmony, in art and life, might be seen as a search for reassurance, for a structure to his existence. He was calm and confident in his internalisation of other artists’ styles: first his father’s, then that of Perugino, the most famous artist in Umbria at the turn of the sixteenth century. Raphael could afford to relax about his own individuality. He was a prodigy, like Mozart. The perfection of his touch is there from the very start, and by the time he was twenty-one he could create a work as sublime as The Marriage of the Virgin, his heavenly vision of a piazza in the open countryside that recedes towards a many-sided domed temple, with an airy loggia all round it and a view through its interior of the clean, bright sky beyond. It is a place you want to visit, but it is more perfect than any real building—although Raphael’s friend Bramante did try to create perfections like this.
Raphael, Self-Portrait, 1504–6. Raphael here seems a model of good looks, style, and manners, in contrast to his two troublesome elders. (illustration credit 10.2)
Raphael was hypnotically drawn to the competition between Leonardo and Michelangelo. He visited the workshop at Santa Maria Novella and drew works in progress by Leonardo—including Leda, in the alternate version of this long-nursed composition that shows her standing upright, embracing her swan. He looked long and hard at the Mona Lisa
, the Virgin and St. Anne, and the unfinished cartoon for The Battle of Anghiari. He also followed Michelangelo around, presumably at a safe distance from the volatile man who was eight years his senior, and drew David from behind. He sketched other sculptures and paintings Michelangelo was at work on, the constellation of sculptures and paintings that were born, or not, at the same time as the cartoon of The Bathers.
For the Cathedral Michelangelo had accepted a contract in April 1503 to sculpt twelve gigantic Apostles as his follow-up to David. He only ever made much headway on one, St. Matthew. For a family of Flemish cloth merchants he was carving a statue of the Madonna that is another brutal riposte to Leonardo’s melting Madonnas—the mother of Christ sits coldly upright, her son is a nude boy who also stands, leaning on her lap, already conscious of who and what he is. Leonardo’s childish intimacies of John and Christ and his enfolding maternal couples are replaced by a vertical shaft of strength.
Raphael saw the serious game the two artists were playing, the feints and insults as they rivalled and rejected one another’s poses, tones, mentalities, and he replays it in his own art. In paintings that he made as he internalised this spectacle, he brilliantly juxtaposes, and unifies, the contemporaneous works of the two masters. In his Madonna of the Goldfinch, a Christ visibly adapted from the infant hero in Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna rests against Mary’s lap and looks, in a Leonardesque way, into the eyes of his friend John the Baptist as they play together with a pet bird; Mary puts her arm on John’s back and looks tenderly downward, smiling gently, just like the Madonna in Leonardo’s St. Anne cartoon. Raphael’s Madonna of the Meadow contrives a very similar synthesis; and in his Bridgewater Madonna, the flying, fleeing Christ child of Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo is placed in the arms of a mother of Leonardo-like tenderness.