The Lost Battles Read online

  What does Raphael identify as the contrasting traits of the two competing artists? He was an eyewitness to their struggle for supremacy, after all, and we are not—and besides, he looks at them with the eyes of genius. In these paintings by Raphael it is not simply different poses that are borrowed from Michelangelo and Leonardo. He identifies them with two different principles. Michelangelo is energy. The sideways, soaring movement of the child in Mary’s arms in the Bridgewater Madonna, the determination of Christ to stand upright—the strident, passionate fluency of Michelangelo’s art—is unmistakable in Raphael’s quotations. But this is balanced by the courtly Raphael with the softness of Leonardo, the yielding, enveloping quality of his compositions and his painterly delicacy of tone. It is no mere simile to compare Raphael with a courtier, intelligently recognising the best qualities in both older painters and weaving their antitheses into a civilised synthesis. He was famous for his social graces, for being a model courtier as well as a great artist. One of his closest friends was the diplomat Baldassare Castiglione, whose Book of the Courtier, published in 1528 and widely translated in the following decades, became the guide to civilised behaviour for every socially ambitious sixteenth-century European. In it Castiglione—quoted here in the Tudor translation that introduced Leonardo and Michelangelo into the English language—encourages the courtier to take a tolerant and pluralistic attitude to artistic style: “Behold in painting Leonardo Vinci, Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo, George (Giorgione) of Castelfranco: they are all most excellent doers, yet are they in working unlike … everie one is knowne to bee of most perfection after his manner.” In Florence in the early years of the sixteenth century Raphael is visibly reaching the gracious view later to be expressed by his friend Castiglione that each great artist excels equally “after his manner.” Neither Michelangelo nor Leonardo is the “best”: in talents of this order you can only compare their differences, and recognise their aesthetic personalities. Raphael does that in his paintings.

  This is a powerful insight into the true nature of the competition between Leonardo and Michelangelo: it was a recognition that such a thing exists as a personal artistic style. There had been artistic competitions before. But what sense of the two artists’ personalities does one get from Brunelleschi’s and Ghiberti’s rival reliefs of the Sacrifice of Isaac in the Bargello? None at all. They are simply competing craftsmen: the better work is the more technically proficient. The judge can’t for one minute conclude that Ghiberti was more emotionally involved in the scene, that he identified more deeply with the boy waiting to die or the father ordered by God to carry out this terrible deed—there is absolutely no sense that either artist personally engaged with the story in that way.

  A century later, the competition between Leonardo and Michelangelo was fundamentally different. Personality was at stake. The two artists were being compared and contrasted in their dramatically dissimilar styles, rather than being given points for technical merit.

  This was really something new. It was unimaginable before, among painters and sculptors. Artistic personality was coming to the fore for the first time in history. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti did have something in common: their works’ wilful singularity. Leonardo and Michelangelo were “themselves,” and themselves alone, as artists, in a way no one had ever been before. The confrontation that came about in Florence in 1504 was the consequence and acknowledgement of this. Leonardo’s notebooks, his misty painting style, his very evasiveness and complexity in his working habits, set him apart—and Michelangelo’s gravitas, strength, and self-consciousness set him apart, in parallel with his rival. Their competition arose because Florentines could see this and were enthralled.

  It was the recognition of Leonardo’s inner mind, his imagination on view, in Florence at the start of the sixteenth century that had begun this new way of looking at art. In flocking to see a mere drawing for an unfinished work at the Annunziata, people were admiring the personal nuances of Leonardo’s style, the “genius” of the artist, rather than welcoming one more addition to the city’s collection of beautiful images. He took the same approach to his commission in the Great Council Hall, setting out to design a vast cartoon at Santa Maria Novella. People could witness his mind, his fantasy, the process of his art, even before he began to paint. And when Michelangelo entered the fray with him in the autumn of 1504, that was the challenge he took up: he threw himself into drawing, and composed a cartoon at the Hospital of the Dyers so people could see that he was just as personal, just as manifestly himself, as the older man. It was a competition in idiosyncracy.

  If this was the history of a battle, one might say that Leonardo was the first onto the field, had his choice of territory and time to prepare his positions, but that he diffused his forces over the landscape and failed to prepare any defences. Michelangelo, coming late in the day but with his army of nudes superbly trained and resolute, thrust straight into the middle of Leonardo’s scattered ranks with a crushing, devastating attack. While Leonardo was away from Florence in November, Michelangelo was massing his men. By the time Leonardo returned in time for Christmas 1504, the daring raid on his camp was well under way.

  Michelangelo, to look at it another way, had more to prove. David was a sensation, but its maker was still regarded essentially as a brilliant sculptor. Leonardo was seen as a great artist in a much larger way. “And those capons of Milanese really believed in you?”—Michelangelo’s bitter question was also a reluctant recognition that an aura of enigmatic genius hung around Leonardo. The real challenge Michelangelo took on in 1504 was to show that he too was a thinker, a visionary, to make the personal nature of his art impossible to ignore. His entire conception of himself as an artist evolved during his competition with Leonardo. In these years he was working on a spectacular range of sculpture commissions: as well as the Apostles in Florence there was a series of statues for Siena Cathedral. But these projects fell by the wayside. Only one Apostle was even begun. For Siena he turned out hack work. He didn’t care. Why? Because these were old routines. It might seem as if he rejected everything about Leonardo. In reality he was learning from Leonardo, and what he saw was a bigger, bolder way to be an artist.

  To Michelangelo, the notebooks with which Leonardo’s workshop and camera at San Lorenzo was stuffed must have looked like what their editor J. P. Richter called them in the nineteenth century: The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci. It cannot be coincidence that it was during their competition that Michelangelo started to produce his own “literary works.” His first fragments of poetry are on sheets that also carry drawings for The Battle of Cascina. Not only that, but on some sheets of paper he seems to be deliberately mimicking the heterogeneous richness of Leonardo’s notebooks. Verses are juxtaposed with drawings of grotesque architectural decoration and, on the sheet’s other side, a statue design with a battle sketch and stray, mysterious lines of poetry. The fact that he’s imagining architectural details is itself significant: Michelangelo was not yet an architect, but here, as he confronts the polymath genius of Leonardo, he is imagining forms that in fact do resemble the masks and grotesques that decorate his later interiors. He’s thinking big, expanding his idea of the artist’s role.

  The greatest lesson Leonardo had to teach Michelangelo was also the most dangerous. The supposed flaw in the older artist’s character that made him delay and evade and fail to finish his works was a succinct way of differentiating genius from mere craft. The products of genius are worth studying even if they are only notions, rough drafts, sketches: that was what Leonardo proved when he won acclaim for “mere” cartoon drawings. It was also the lesson of the Horse, and for all his coarseness about it, Michelangelo understood this. During his stand-off with Leonardo he became less the efficient artisan and more prepared to leave works unfinished. He had failed to finish things before, it’s true, but for practical reasons. However, his statue of St. Matthew, begun for Florence Cathedral during the years of competition, is a masterpiece whose
very poetry lies in its being unfinished. It is the first of his sculptures in which, as Matthew’s form emerges in fragments and feints from the mottled block, raw stone becomes part of the work’s poetry. It is the sculptural equivalent of Leonardo’s tantalising drawings: a stone schizzo, a sublime sketch.

  Michelangelo’s supreme sketch was the gigantic cartoon he was drawing at the Hospital of the Dyers. There is no explanation for the way it turned out except sheer competitiveness. In his great drawing he took Leonardo on intimately, on his own ground—as a draughtsman and as an eccentric. If Leonardo was putting his own preoccupations into his design at Santa Maria Novella, well, Michelangelo would push the personal preoccupations of his own work to the edge of complete self-indulgence. His cartoon trumpets individual passion and disdains explanations.

  At Santa Maria Novella the personal nature of Leonardo’s battle cartoon had been clear from the start. His sketchbook of horses records his continuing quest to understand nature—and that completely individual quest continued into the cartoon itself. As he drew it, two massive horses’ rumps took shape on the great sheet of paper, parallel to one another, like two planets. The horses were rearing up—like the first design he’d submitted, long ago, for the Sforza monument, and like the rearing, thrashing horse he drew so brilliantly from life in his sketchbook. The horses in his cartoon were the wild children of his spectral bronze steed: they were fearsome beasts, ogres of the equine—not the grace but the power of the horse. It was not an aspect of his cartoon dictated by history, or by the Florentine Republic, this monumental revelation of frenzied horses. It was part of his artistic biography and a reassertion of his reasons for making art.

  But if Leonardo could draw these horses like great signatures at the heart of his battle picture, Michelangelo would go further. He would relentlessly concentrate on his own personal subject, the male nude. He would draw vast nudes, a whole crowd of them—and nothing else. No battle. No fighting. Just men getting out of the water, naked, and struggling to put on armour, racing to see the enemy. The oddity of it was the entire point. The Battle of Cascina was an essay in individuality: a declaration of independence. It was a deliberately grotesque exercise. Not grotesque because it was ugly, but in its fanciful freedom. It was a kind of joke. It was hyperbolic. It set out to leave no confusion. In all his works Michelangelo was drawn to the nude. Here, he flaunted it as an obsession—drew attention to his habit, dramatised his penchant.

  To this day, The Battle of Cascina is a confusing title; hence its alternative moniker of The Bathers. The drawings of men fighting that he made early in his thinking are, I believe, essentially responses to Leonardo—as soon as he found his own idea he stopped drawing fighters and concentrated entirely on nudes. The Battle of Cascina was to be portrayed through this vast scene of naked men. Michelangelo sought to outdo his rival in sheer abstract wilfulness.

  In the Strozzi Chapel at Santa Maria Novella, in 1502, Filippino Lippi had finished a work of surpassing strangeness. Lippi’s fresco St. Philip Exorcising the Demon in the Temple of Mars portrays a dragon being driven by an early Christian out of a hole in the steps of a classical temple. This temple is an architectural phantasmagoria: trophies of armour, jagged, violent statues, offerings and living sculptures decorate its weird semicircular niche inside which the god Mars—not a statue but the god himself—stands on a plinth, raising a broken lance above his head, a wolf at his side. Around the surreal temple, colossal painted pilasters are covered with intertwining abstract creatures, garlands, and foliage in white relief on a dark background. Even the people in the crowd watching the exorcism are out of the ordinary, with exotic faces and headgear.

  Lippi, like Michelangelo, had been in Rome, where in the last years of the fifteenth century the buried corridors of the Golden House of Nero were rediscovered beneath the Esquiline Hill. This vast villa connected by a subterranean passage to the Palatine palaces was Nero’s indulgent whim, a pleasure house that so shocked the Romans they consigned it to a damnatio memoriae and built over it. When a way into its underground passages near the Colosseum was found, artists lowered themselves on ropes to study by torchlight its curious paintings. These were the first ancient Roman paintings to be seen by Renaissance artists: up to then any knowledge of Roman painting, as opposed to sculpture, had come from descriptions by authors like Cicero and Pliny. Now, ancient frescoes could be compared with modern ones, and the artists were confounded by how utterly unlike they were. The murals in the Golden House were free-flowing fantasies of colour and design: monstrous creatures, ornate tendrils, masks, and foliage were strung together in random shapes juxtaposed with planes of pure colour. These monstrous fantasies were found in a cave, a grotto, so they were named grotteschi. Lippi’s painting is one of the first to import the grotesque to Florence.

  It is especially striking because the grotesque is not confined in it to the playful decorations on the painted pilasters. The entire painting is grotesque: a spirit of disordered fantasy has entered every aspect. The repulsive Temple of Mars, the living statues, the piles of armour and clutter of offering vessels—it is all pleasantly deranged. Lippi’s painting reveals how thoroughly the idea of the grotesque could be applied by a Renaissance artist—it wasn’t just masks in the border. It was a release of disorder into the very core of a work of art.

  Michelangelo had an appetite for the grotesque. Drawings of ornate capitals for columns that he did in 1503–4 have empty-eyed masks and interlocking gryphons in a free architectural play absolutely indebted to the Golden House and taking it, as Lippi does, as a licence to imagine monstrosities within a classical idiom: this would one day result in the extravagant freedom of his architectural masterpiece, the Laurentian Library. This new understanding of art also destabilised his cartoon. Its bathers weren’t ugly; but their arbitrary and self-pleasing display showed grotesque freedom.

  The men in the cartoon were arranged in a complicated serpentine group whose convolutions created a tremendous sense of energy and panic. They were rushing and reaching in all directions. Some had staffs. Some put on armour. An old man sat on the rocks pulling on his clothes, a garland in his hair. Two hands rose tragically from the river, as if someone had panicked and was drowning in the rush to reach the shore. The drawing of a nude sitting on the rocks, twisting round to face into the group, grew into a huge chalk figure in the cartoon. So did the man with his back arched, a deep black spine engraved into his jagged form. There was a dramatic creation of three-dimensional space, not in the landscape (which was just perfunctory rocks) but in the revolving figures: they forcefully materialised as they veered towards or away from the beholder. There was no consistent direction to their energy: they cut across one another, contradicted one another.

  Michelangelo made his point. The Battle of Cascina was so personal it was befuddling. The subtleties of Leonardo’s drawings were shoved aside by a bravura display of one man’s manner.

  Raphael’s civilised idea that the differences between Leonardo and his competitor could be gracefully elided, that each man was perfect in his own style and these styles might be blended in an ideal harmony, was utopian. What he failed to see was that Leonardo and Michelangelo’s opposition went deeper than style. It was as if they had been born for this moment, so absolutely did they negate each other’s personalities. They saw the world and humanity in radically different ways.

  As Leonardo came back to Florence from Piombino in mid-December 1504, his rival was speeding ahead. By the following February, when Michelangelo received a payment from the Signoria for his work on The Battle of Cascina, it seems the young contender had drawn much of his nude composition. And yet, the records contain a surprise. Leonardo, too, was satisfied he’d done enough on his own cartoon to start painting in the Great Council Hall. In February 1505 work began to erect his scaffolding there. It would take until June for him actually to set his brush to the wall—and as well as building a scaffolding as complex as the one he’d created at the monastery, he was still bu
ying more cartoon paper. But now history, in the person of Pope Julius II, intervened to make Leonardo’s life a bit easier.

  Il Papa sits melancholically on a throne decorated with the massive gold acorns that symbolise his family, the della Rovere, in his portrait by Raphael. Huge emeralds and rubies decorate his fingers; a long white gown falls like a waterfall over his knees. His new-grown white beard bristles beneath a face of compassionate authority. Raphael’s reverence for order finds its perfect expression in this painting of the Father of the Church that was to provide a template for later portraits of seated Popes by Titian, Velázquez, and Francis Bacon—but few written accounts of Julius II make him seem so gentle. When Giuliano della Rovere, Cardinal of St. Peter in Chains, was elected Pope in his sixtieth year in October 1503, he set out to restore the might and prestige of the Church—a work he interpreted as secular and indeed military. In Italy’s age of war, he was the warrior Pope. Where the Borgia Pope had placed his son at the head of the Papal armies, the new Pope would lead his own campaigns. Julius set out to reconquer Italian cities, including Bologna. From this springboard he attempted to forge a grand alliance to drive the French out of Italy, to expel these “barbarians” and restore Italian liberty under the leadership of Rome. This imperial Pope, who took the name Julius to identify himself with the greatest Roman soldier of them all, also took grandiose steps to renew Rome itself, to restore the city to a glory that matched and even outdid the Caesars: the seat of the Popes would become a truly imperial and impressive place, a city to overwhelm pilgrims and amaze ambassadors, not just with ancient ruins but with brand-new structures that revived the antique.