The Lost Battles Read online

  The process of rebuilding had begun under Sixtus IV, who had created a gracious new bridge over the Tiber with advice from Alberti. It continued under Alexander VI, who transformed Hadrian’s mausoleum by the river into a richly appointed papal fortress. With Julius, however, a truly ostentatious new Rome began to rise. The architect to whom he entrusted his stupendous ambition was Bramante, who had been one of Leonardo’s friends at the Milanese court; they shared ideas just as Leonardo did with Francesco di Giorgio. When their employer Ludovico Sforza was driven out of Milan and both men had to flee, Leonardo listed Bramante’s architecture in a fragmentary kaleidoscope of this sorrowful moment:

  The small hall above for the apostles [i.e. The Last Supper]

  Buildings by Bramante

  The castellan made prisoner

  Visconti dragged away and then his little son killed

  Gian della Rosa robbed of his money

  Borgonzo began and … his fortunes fled.

  The duke lost his state, his things, and his liberty, and

  none of his works were finished by him.

  While Leonardo painted The Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, his friend Bramante was rebuilding the choir of the monastery’s church, right next door to the long Gothic hall where Leonardo was working. Indeed, their conversations on architecture, perspective, and illusion are nakedly recorded in their works that survive in Milan. Bramante’s choir resembles some of Leonardo’s architectural drawings, while The Last Supper’s eye-fooling perspective is intimately related to Bramante’s architecture. In the Church of Santa Maria Presso Santo Spirito in Milan, in the late 1470s, Bramante had created an exactly parallel effect, a barrel-arched chancel that delights you when you realise it is an illusion, a shallow stone theatrical device that creates the fiction of a far larger space. Leonardo and Bramante were both, in Milan, experimenting with architectural fictions and dreaming of temples.

  In 1502, the Spanish monarchy commissioned Bramante to build a small chapel to St. Peter where he was said to have been crucified, on the Janiculum hill in Rome. The architect created a circular temple with a dome, an upper storey of recessed niches, a balustraded parapet, and a lower storey of smooth colonnades surrounding a circular room with four doors. It is not so much a building as a vision of what buildings might be like, a manifesto for classical harmony and perfection that mirrors Bramante’s young friend Raphael’s intoxicating vision of the ultimate temple in his painting The Marriage of the Virgin. Bramante’s Tempietto has a lot in common with Leonardo’s drawings of centrally planned churches. It was the first full-fledged Renaissance “temple” to have been built in Rome, and right at the start of a new age of building it introduced a form this city would take on to bigger things—a form Bramante, like Leonardo, loved: the dome. Bramante’s Tempietto impressed the new Pope. In 1505 Julius gave him a magnificent task—to build a new palace, the Belvedere, that would take up a sprawling area of the Vatican, with three gargantuan courts, so large that a niche in one of them can hold a colossal pine cone found on an ancient Roman chariot course and make it seem entirely appropriate and in scale. The Belvedere would transform the Vatican into a secret city of power and mystery. Its scale and audacity announced a direct attempt to rival the vast palaces of the Roman emperors on the Palatine Hill.

  Raphael’s portrait of Julius contains a truth. Julius was sensitive—at least when it came to art. It went with his rage, was the obverse of his mercurial temperament. Machiavelli characterised the Pope whose election he witnessed as a man of unstable, emotional character who was lucky enough to rule at a moment when spontaneity was the right stuff: “Pope Julius II proceeded impetuously in all his actions, and found times and matters so suited to his way of proceeding that things always turned out well for him.” This “impetuosity” led him to start wars overnight, but it also made him a generous and enthusiastic patron with an eye for the very best. Before he became Pope he had employed Giuliano and Antonio da Sangallo as his architects, and in 1505 Giuliano moved from Florence to Rome, expecting the relationship to continue: but Julius saw that Bramante was better. He made an instinctive decision to give Bramante one of the biggest architectural jobs in history, and he was right. The secret of Raphael’s portrait is that Julius really did have an inner life: there is no other way to explain his patronage. In February 1505, it was Michelangelo who got the call.

  Raphael, Portrait of Pope Julius II, 1511. The “warrior pope” who led his own armies into battle and menaced Michelangelo seems benign in this tender portrait. (illustration credit 10.3)

  It seems likely that Sangallo had praised the young sculptor to the Pope and urged him to hire his fellow Florentine citizen, but there was also of course physical evidence in Rome to persuade Julius it was worth commissioning this young artist he had not yet met. Just as Bramante’s Tempietto was a sublime calling card, so were the sculptures Michelangelo had carved in Rome in the 1490s—his Bacchus and Pietà. In fact, Pope Julius was the uncle of the cardinal who first brought Michelangelo to Rome and commissioned the Bacchus. Maybe word spread through the della Rovere family. However it happened, by the end of March 1505 Michelangelo was in Rome squaring up to a project as stupendous as anything Julius had yet imagined. Julius wanted the young artist to build his tomb. Giuliano della Rovere rose to the Holy See at sixty; he knew time was short. As Machiavelli saw it, this was part of his success, for “the shortness of his pontificate did not permit him to taste failure.” As he paced up and down inside the awe-inspiring stone drum of the emperor Hadrian’s tomb, which was now a Papal fortress, the Warrior Pope craved a mausoleum of his own. Michelangelo in the city below was eyeing the Tiber, thinking how he might bring great blocks of marble down the river for this gargantuan work.

  ELEVEN

  The Great Swan

  Leonardo da Vinci thrilled with excitement at the great work he was about to accomplish. His cartoon for The Battle of Anghiari was ready to transfer to the wall in the Great Council Hall, a team of workers was assembling his scaffolding, and Michelangelo was in Rome, apparently out of the fight. Leonardo was making plans, precise last-minute designs, and getting everything ready. It wasn’t the battle painting that so enthused him, however.

  Walking and riding out into the Florentine countryside that spring, he watched birds of prey hovering in the air. It entranced him how a kite could hold its position in the sky, rigid in empty space, preparing to dive in an instant when it spotted something far below. He marvelled at how birds would mysteriously glide upward, exploiting updrafts to rise without even flapping their wings. All the secrets of bird flight astonished and delighted Leonardo, but his interest was not only in observation. Heading north out of the city, you approached the big sloping back of Monte Ceceri, “Swan Mountain,” in whose flank nuzzled the ancient town of Fiesole. From that high hill the view of Florence was glorious, the city spread around its russet Dome on the yellow plain. The very name of the mountain associated it with a picture Leonardo was working on, his nude painting of Leda, the ancient nymph seduced by Jupiter in the shape of a swan. In a copy probably done by one of his assistants on The Battle of Anghiari in around 1506, Leda stands above her newborn children in a rich Tuscan landscape, in a secluded spot by a pond protected by a mossy overhang. She embraces the coiling neck of her swan lover while her babies hatch from their eggs. A distinctively shaped mountain in the distance could almost be Monte Ceceri itself.

  “The great bird will take its first flight from the back of the great swan, filling the universe with amazement and filling all writings with its fame and bringing eternal glory to the nest where it was born.” Leonardo’s prophecy appears on the cover of a notebook he filled with studies of birds and flight in the spring of 1505. Another equally allegorical promise appears on a sheet in the same book that helpfully bears the date, 14 April 1505: “From the mountain that takes its name from the great bird the famous bird will take the flight that will fill the world with its great fame.” In the midst
of his labours for the Florentine Republic, he was planning the first human flight. His apparently enigmatic statements become completely clear from the other notes in his codex On the Flight of Birds. Leonardo was about to test a flying machine from Monte Ceceri just outside Florence. It was going to bring infinite renown to him and his Florentine “nest.”

  It seems the most remote distraction imaginable from the Great Council Hall. Yet it was not quite that simple. Leonardo’s mind saw connections others failed to make. For one thing, the flight experiment was an attempt to awe and amaze Florence, to reassert his fame independently of the competition with Michelangelo. Whatever people thought of his slowness in the Great Council Hall, they would be impressed when they saw his flying machine in the sky. At a more intellectual level, his flight attempt in 1505 grew directly out of his researches for The Battle of Anghiari. All the drawings he made in 1503–4 of horses rearing and galloping, his studies of equine speed, led him into a study of bird flight. Behind both lay a desire to cross between the human and animal worlds.

  Leonardo grew up with an empathy for the animal kingdom. One way he expressed it was through vegetarianism. “Man and the animals are properly the transit and the conduit of food, the sepulchre of animals and hotel of the dead,” he exclaimed in a passage that suggests his disgust with meat-eating. He himself did not eat meat, reveals a letter in 1515 in which Andrea Corsali tells Leonardo’s patron Giuliano de’ Medici about a group of people who are vegetarians—like Leonardo da Vinci, he comments. Lists of food and recipes in the notebooks refer to “beans, white maize, red maize … kidney beans, broad beans, peas” and to a sauce or paste made with parsley, mint, wild thyme, burnt bread, vinegar, pepper and salt.

  Leonardo da Vinci, studies of The Infant Christ and a Cat, late 1470s—circa 1480. Leonardo’s astonishing ability to capture motion and energy animates these rapid drawings. (illustration credit 11.1)

  Just outside the Tuscan hill town of Vinci stands the simple stone dwelling in one of whose bare, tall rooms the artist is traditionally said to have been born. The setting of this rustic house, surrounded by olive groves and yellow grass, probably wasn’t the actual location, yet it movingly conveys the world in which the future vegetarian first set eyes on blue skies and gliding birds. Even today, Vinci is set amid an unspoiled and abundant landscape. Vines and cypresses fill the valleys below. You can ramble from its sloping streets into meadows and woods. Until he was about twelve years old Leonardo lived in Vinci, in his grandfather’s house, and his lifelong feeling for and knowledge of nature took shape in this town and its countryside. In his notebooks are exquisite drawings of flowers and plants he’d have found in the first landscape he knew: blackberries, oak leaves, flowering anemones, rushes, reeds, Job’s Tears, and Star of Bethlehem. He draws these plants with acuity, tenderness, and precision. In his writings, as he gives advice on how to paint landscapes, he imparts sharp memories of rural vistas: “The dark colours of the shadows of mountains at long distance take on a very beautiful blue, simpler than the parts that are illuminated, and from this it is born that when the rock of a mountain is reddish the illuminated parts are of violet, and that the more they are illuminated the more they reveal their proper colour.” In a passage like this you can see Leonardo standing in a valley in the afternoon, contemplating the distant hills—his observations of nature so manifestly come of a lifetime exploring the Italian countryside.

  Leonardo records, in the Codex Atlanticus, a childhood memory in which the natural world is not simply something to be contemplated and admired but an enveloping power, a surrounding and overwhelming presence that becomes, in the strangest way, part of him—literally enters him. In a note on the flying techniques used by birds of prey, he observes: “This writing clearly about the kite appears to be my destiny, because in the first memories of my infancy it seemed to me that, when I was in the cradle, a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail, and many times struck me inside my lips with its tail.” This is an extraordinary recollection, and Freud made it the central piece of evidence in his book Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. For Freud, it is unlikely to be a literal memory and rather resembles a phantasy formed in adulthood and imagined to have taken place in infancy. His interpretation of it is erotic and also has to do with mothers, for he relied on an inaccurate translation that turned “kite” to “vulture” and so licensed speculations on the vulture-headed Egyptian mother-goddess, Mut.

  Leonardo did not believe this memory was a “phantasy.” He tells it not as a fable or dream but as an exact recollection of something that happened to him in the simple stone house in Vinci, “in the cradle.” Growing up so close to nature, he remembered that he was actually penetrated by nature—it got inside him. For Freud the penetration was sexual: he explicitly interprets the tail in the mouth as an image of fellatio.

  This is one way of looking at it. Another would take Leonardo’s experience more literally. It is not, after all, a bony mammal tail but the feathery tail of a bird that he believes struck him on the lips repeatedly: it was, whatever else it was, an intimate, life-changing encounter. Leonardo believes he was altered by the experience—he gained special knowledge. Far from being a metaphor for hidden sexual content, this makes complete sense within the mental universe revealed by Leonardo’s notebooks—a mental universe in which humans and animals are constantly meeting, merging, and melting into one another.

  If Leonardo’s earliest memory involves a strange encounter with the animal kingdom, so do his recorded dreams. In his notebooks he writes enigmatically of dreams, and in the examples he gives, conversations with animals play a prominent role. It’s surely his own dream life he reveals when he says that people “will hear animals of every species speaking in human language” and again that when you dream “you will speak with animals of every kind, and they with you in human language.” In his dreams, it appears, Leonardo inhabited a realm in which birds might visit him and horses, dogs, or cats speak with him. It sounds like the experience of a shaman.

  Science, for Leonardo, is the study of the natural world. In this he looks back to ancient writers such as Pliny the Elder and forward to Charles Darwin. He insists that natural processes have their own laws and logic and can be understood through experiment. He excludes “spirits” and magic from the powers he believes shape the physical world. He also debunks the theological belief in humanity’s uniqueness. In Leonardo’s notebooks, human beings are animals, and our bodies work in ways essentially similar to those of other creatures. In Renaissance philosophy, as in the traditional teaching of the Church, man is a spiritual being: God, said the fifteenth-century intellectual Pico della Mirandola, set humanity between the beasts and the angels: “I created thou a being neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal only, that thou mightest be free to shape and to overcome thyself. Thou mayst sink into a beast, and be born anew to the divine likeness …” Such metaphysical visions of humanity do not interest Leonardo very much. He sees human beings as organisms among other organisms, and his notebooks pursue not the hidden but the visible truths of nature. To see what is inside, he dissects. To discover the seat of the soul, he makes a cast of a brain’s interior.

  Leonardo’s vegetarianism is a clue to his distance from traditional theological conceptions of the hierarchy of being. In the Book of Genesis, God specifically tells Noah and his sons after the Flood that animals are food for them: “The fear of you and the dread of you shall be on every beast of the earth … Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you.” In the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci we encounter the opposite of this confident affirmation of man’s superiority to the creatures and unique place in God’s creation. The human species is just another variety of animal: this understanding is central to Leonardo’s most brilliant campaign of sustained scientific research, his dissections of human and animal bodies, which he recorded in unrivalled drawings now in the Royal Library, Windsor. In planning a book of anatomy, Leonardo makes an ob
servation almost in passing that anticipates Darwin: “Man. The description of man, which in it contains that of those animals almost of like species, such as the baboon, the monkey and suchlike, which are many.” And he stresses the close relationship between humans and other primates on another sheet: “Write the variety of the intestines of the human species [delle spetie umana], monkeys and the like.”

  Even his casual reference to the “human species” betrays an attitude very remote from that of the Bible or of Pico della Mirandola’s oration “On the Dignity of Man.” Humans are closely related to apes and monkeys—that is clear to Leonardo, the dissector of nature. Not only are we not fundamentally distinct from other species, we are not even uniquely effective or competent. He is fond of pointing out ways in which humans are weaker than other creatures—our eyesight, he stresses, is not very good compared with that of cats. Nor can we fly like birds.

  Leonardo dissected more than ten human bodies in the course of his research, but he also dissected animals, and he assumed the knowledge he got from studying pigs or cows could be applied to human beings—and this is where his thought becomes not so much an ancestor of Darwin as something altogether less recognisable. Leonardo blurs the anatomy of humans and other species in ways that cannot be rationalised as precocious evolutionism. In his most famous anatomical drawing of all, for example, he places a human foetus inside a womb that is partly human and partly that of a cow.

  The baby curls up, a ball of shiny, warm flesh, with perfectly formed toes and a great dome of a skull, its umbilical cord coiling around a foot, inside a fatty chamber that has been opened as if it were the outer shell of a horse-chestnut. The exposed layers of the uterus wall are connected by interlocking protrusions like the teeth of gears: other drawings on the sheet analyse how these “gears” interlock, designing, in effect, a science-fiction version of the human uterus, just as if it were one of Leonardo’s inventions for flying machines. For the nodes that, he imagines, must be part of the human womb’s workings—called cotyledons—are actually not part of human anatomy at all. He had observed them in a dissection of a cow’s uterus. So deep is his assumption that knowledge of other species can be applied to the “king of the beasts” that he fuses human and cow.