The Lost Battles Read online

  It was the distilled essence of battle, this infernal mêlée. Looking at it was to fall towards the very heart of darkness, the deadly centre of some immense whirling struggle. While knights and horses and foot soldiers howled all about, invisible, these riders fixed every fibre of their being on their desolate fight for possession of the symbol of victory or defeat, the old warrior’s proud standard. They saw nothing but each other. They knew nothing but loathing and fury.

  The painting Leonardo finally began in the Great Council Hall that brooding June day was a horrific revelation of the essence of war. In spite of all the diversions, all the delays, this was perhaps his greatest masterpiece. It was, no question, the work of his that would cry out most keenly down the ages to artists who felt the need to witness the ferocity of war in their own times. In it Leonardo distilled what battle is, for all time. The Battle of Anghiari reached back to the imperial art of antiquity and the chivalric art of the Middle Ages, but what makes it different from its models and precedents is its conscious truth-telling. This is what it is really like, Leonardo says. This is the face of battle. It is a face frozen in a hopeless howl.

  Unknown sixteenth-century artist, The Battle of Anghiari. This early copy may give a strong impression of how the unfinished painting looked on the wall. (illustration credit 12.1)

  The greatest of all Leonardo da Vinci’s surviving designs for his painting of the Battle of Anghiari is a study of the head of the old warrior he visualised at the bloody heart of the struggle. In the frenzied composition he started to paint in the Hall, this man raised his sword over his head in his right hand while he screamed hate and defiance at his enemies. While he was planning the picture, Leonardo made an emotionally devastating drawing of the man’s head, with an old man, perhaps a soldier, as his model, that is one of his supreme drawings. The man glares downward from eyes with sharp black pupils beneath a mountainous rumpled brow. His nose is wrinkled in rage. The muscles around his mouth are distorted and strained in great crevices as he opens it wide, a dark hole fringed with stubs of teeth. Old creatures, as Lorenzo de’ Medici had long ago observed, always have some of their teeth missing, and in Leonardo’s desperate portrait this man has just a few square molars in his cavernous mouth. A very large-scale copy in Oxford that may exactly reproduce the scale of the wall painting—it has even, implausibly, been identified as a scrap of the lost cartoon—makes the fewness of the teeth even more prominent.

  It is a face of acute concentration as well as rage—a face fixed on battle. In this, it is a direct reply to the gigantic face that went on view outside the Palazzo Vecchio in 1504. This is Leonardo’s antithesis to the noble gaze of Michelangelo’s David. In David’s eyes there is keen attention, readiness, an anger that is life-giving: the eyes of Leonardo’s warrior are just as keen and glaring as he, like David, attains almost supernatural consciousness in the excitement of battle. Look at the drawing of the warrior and his brow is a massive, furrowed fact: with its two lines deeply sculpted by passion above the nose, and its flaring eyebrows, it is a quotation of the brow of Michelangelo’s David.

  Michelangelo, the artist still in his twenties who had never seen a real battle, portrays heroism in his statue of David as the elevation of human consciousness. His statue was installed outside the government Palace because it was the perfect symbol for the Republic—an image of courage and defiance. David is getting ready to kill a tyrant. He poses calmly, stares intently. Has a soldier ever looked like this in battle? That is the question asked so acutely by Leonardo, the man in his early fifties who had seen wars and known warriors. A lifetime’s experience of military matters lies behind his riposte. If David is a hero, Leonardo’s furious warrior is an antihero. And if David tells the old lie that it is sweet and decorous to die for your patria, the warrior Leonardo was about to paint in the Great Council Hall had in his eyes the desolate truth that is left when we are done with lies.

  Leonardo’s face of a warrior is a systematic response to the David. There is a force, a sharply etched strength, to the warrior’s head that resembles the Giant on the Piazza. Even his long, flared nose is like David’s. But the antitheses are extreme. Where David is young, this soldier is old. Where David is beginning, he is ending. And where Michelangelo’s statue has a face of caricatural simplicity, characterful and yet not in the slightest real—no actual face looks like this—in his drawing Leonardo gives equally battle-roused features a tender, subtle realism. What make this face so great are the nuances in Leonardo’s use of chalk: the leathery texture of skin on the delicately vibrating right cheek; the muzzy grey muffle of the tongue inside that awful mouth; the supple delineation of creases in the distorted flesh and masses of wrinkled folds under the eyes; the white, bloodless lips and stiffened tendon in the neck. Michelangelo gives beauty itself a grotesque boldness in the face of David. In this drawing Leonardo gives a grotesque expression the same microscopic accuracy and delicacy he put into the face of the Mona Lisa.

  The face of the David is not real. This face is real. This is the true “fury,” furia, that Leonardo knew from experience was the face of battle. All the science and technology in the world didn’t change that face—in the end the decisive moments in war were fought at close quarters by soldiers worked up into a heat of hate.

  There is an overwhelming truth to Leonardo’s drawing. Its disillusion is so absolute that it attains the grandeur of tragedy. The nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt observed that Renaissance Italy did not give birth to great tragedy. He reckoned without Leonardo.

  The Battle of Anghiari in 1440 was a victory for Florence. It was also a defeat, the great defeat, for a soldier who had risen to fame on Italy’s battlefields and hoped to end as prince of some petty state. The contracted commander, the condottiere, a freelance expert in war, became a powerful type in Italy in the fifteenth century, when states relied almost exclusively on mercenaries to fight their wars. In the wake of fearsome individual soldiers like the Englishman John Hawkwood, the condottiere became admired as a muscular hero whose prowess in arms and strategy made him the modern equivalent of the great Roman soldiers of old. Some condottieri ruled their own small cities, like Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino; others aspired to. In Italy’s chaotic political map these mercenary leaders who ranged the landscape had a lot to play for.

  Francesco Sforza, whose equestrian monument in Milan occupied Leonardo for nearly twenty years, was a spectacular instance of the hired warrior who became ruler of a state. His rival in the early fifteenth century was Niccolò Piccinino, who came from Perugia and started his career as lieutenant of a powerful warrior named Braccio di Montone. On the reverse of a medal of himself, Piccinino has as his emblem the griffin, heraldic beast of Perugia, suckling two children—him and Braccio—just as the she-wolf suckled ancient Rome’s founders Romulus and Remus. Braccio was killed in battle by Sforza, leaving Piccinino as the toughest soldier in central Italy, under contract to the Florentine Republic before he abandoned it to enter the employ of Milan. As Machiavelli writes in his Florentine Histories, “There were at that time two sects of arms in Italy, the Braccesca and Sforzesca: the head of this last was Count Francesco Sforza; of the other the prince was Niccolò Piccinino … to these sects nearly all the other armed men in Italy were drawn.”

  Francesco Sforza had the upper hand, not least because he was promised to marry the daughter of the duke of Milan. But Niccolò was a powerful warrior, and in 1440, at the head of the armies of Milan, he stood poised to enter Tuscany and threaten the very survival of the Florentine Republic. At Anghiari he met his nemesis. The Florentines took his standards and he ran for his life; afterwards the duke of Milan kept employing him, but Sforza’s rise continued at his expense. As Machiavelli tells it, the duke of Milan recalled Niccolò on a pretext so that Sforza could isolate and defeat Piccinino’s son: “Niccolò arrived in Milan; and seeing he had been tricked by Filippo, and having learned of the rout, and the taking of his son, he died of grief in 1445 at the age
of sixty-four years, having been a captain more talented than lucky.”

  Leonardo’s picture of the Battle of Anghiari concentrated on the despairing figure of Piccinino. The scene he prepared to paint in the Hall on 6 June 1505 shows a frantic last-ditch struggle for Piccinino’s standard; at the heart of this fight the old warrior himself prepares to inflict a last cruel wound, to take revenge. But how did Leonardo find such depth of emotion and truth in the face of Piccinino?

  He looked hard at the sources, for a start. The passion for historical research that he showed in his preparations to paint The Battle of Anghiari matched his more famous love of scientific research. History was the favourite literary genre of the Humanists. It was what Florentine intellectuals such as Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and (in the early sixteenth century) Machiavelli and Guicciardini specialised in. Depicting a historical event was a great chance for Leonardo to demonstrate to such people the intellectual seriousness of painting. In his notebooks he argues, with literary Humanists in his sights, that painting can narrate a complex event like a battle more immediately than any written description: “But I ask no more than that a good painter should depict the fury of a battle and that a poet should write about it, and that they might be put in public where many people could see them and then we would see where the witnesses would look more, where they would give the most praise and which would satisfy them more; certainly the painting would please more, being more useful and beautiful.”

  Here the painter and engineer challenges Humanists who value the literary arts over the scientific, word over image. The commission to paint a historical battle in the public heart of Florence, in the Palace where classically trained political characters like Machiavelli and Agostino Vespucci were steeped in the ancient histories of Livy, Tacitus, and Xenophon, was a chance to prove that painting was serious by these literate intellectuals’ own criteria. Leonardo read the histories of Bruni and Bracciolini to learn about the Battle of Anghiari, but he went further. He searched for visual evidence of what the battle had really looked like.

  The Battle of Anghiari was a richly visualised event. A few years before it took place, Paolo Uccello painted three big panels illustrating another recent fight, between Florentine and Sienese mercenaries, really just a skirmish that his paintings elevate into the noble pageant that is The Battle of San Romano. Clad from head to foot in heavy plate armour with florid plumed helmets, waving long banners that flutter in the breeze, charging one another with coloured lances, the knights in Uccello’s lovely paintings seem to be participating in a tournament rather than fighting to the death. Huge rearing horses, crossbowmen in particoloured costumes hunting hares, oranges in the trees, and the sweet face of a page boy add to the vibrant life and joy of these paintings of battle as a gaudy rite of spring. Uccello’s happy paintings lend credence to Machiavelli’s claim that mercenary cynicism and the theatre of chivalry combined to make war in fifteenth-century Italy, fought (as Machiavelli sneered) only in the spring and summer as if it were a sport, harmless because the condottieri treated war as a craft instead of a matter of life and death.

  When Florence made its stand before Anghiari in 1440, however, something real was at stake, and the seriousness of the struggle was remembered in images. A memorial survives, worn by time, on the battlefield itself. The earliest wall painting of the struggle may also be in the immediate area, in the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo. In the 1450s or thereabouts—his work is notoriously hard to date—the local master Piero della Francesca painted his calm and monumental fresco cycle The Legend of the True Cross in this church. It includes two powerful battle scenes that have a gravity quite unlike Uccello’s tournament. In one battle, the Christian emperor Constantine defeats his enemy Maxentius. In the other, The Battle of Heraclius, warriors fight desperately and murderously at close quarters.

  Piero came from the town of Borgo San Sepolcro, which faces Anghiari across the plain of the Tiber. It was from this town that Niccolò Piccinino charged across the broad valley in 1440. It is very possible that Piero, who seems to have been in Borgo San Sepolcro at the time and who indeed spent most of his life there, witnessed the fight. If so, his paintings of battle may incorporate his memories of that day. The Battle of Constantine was fought across the Tiber at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome; Piero’s painting moves the scene to his own landscape of the upper Tiber valley. The army of Constantine, stately and confident with its lances aloft and banner high, slowly chases the fleeing Maxentius across a narrow, glassy river that looks like the tributary of the Tiber over which the Battle of Anghiari was fought. The pale, rocky landscape with patches of scrub and the reflective river are those of Piero’s own immediate locality, also portrayed in his Baptism of Christ. Here, the location is unambiguous. As Christ stands in the river’s shallow mirror, the walls of Borgo San Sepolcro can be seen in the distance on the far side of the valley. It seems Christ is being baptised on the very site of the battle. In these paintings the Battle of Anghiari is remembered with the compassionate stillness that makes Piero such a great artist.

  So there is every reason to think that Piero’s paintings remember the most dramatic event that happened in his landscape in his lifetime—but no reason to think Leonardo would have understood this. He certainly knew about this painter, because Piero was a mathematician as well as an artist, who wrote manuscripts on geometry. Leonardo’s friend the mathematician Luca Pacioli knew Piero’s mathematical works well and was even accused of plagiarising them. In 1502, when Leonardo was with Cesare Borgia and Borgia’s captain Vitellozzo Vitelli was fomenting rebellion in Arezzo, this Vitelli promised to get the artist and engineer a copy of a work by Archimedes that was in Borgo San Sepolcro. It could easily have been a book that had belonged to Piero. And if Leonardo visited Arezzo at that time, he could have seen The Legend of the True Cross.

  Piero’s landscape, that dry, scrubby plain of the upper Tiber valley between the walled towns of Borgo San Sepolcro and Anghiari, is recognisable in a painting Leonardo definitely does seem to have looked at: a long wooden panel that survives in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, made for a piece of furniture in Florence in the 1460s and decorated with an epic painting of the Battle of Anghiari. This richly detailed history has colour and pageantry and a vivid sense of the landscape. In the distance, the walled cities of Tuscany—the entire region was Piccinino’s potential prize that day—stand on their hilltops. In the foreground, the walls of Borgo San Sepolcro—white as in Piero’s Baptism—face fortified Anghiari on its hilltop, the houses inside its grey walls honeyed in hue just as they are today. The painting shows different moments in the battle simultaneously: the Florentines march up the hill to Anghiari and simultaneously stand massed for battle below it, while Piccinino musters his men outside Borgo San Sepolcro.

  Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ, 1450s. The landscape here is the plain of the Tiber between San Sepolcro—seen in the distance—and Anghiari. (illustration credit 12.2)

  There are rich details. Women wait beneath the walls of Anghiari with big earthen jars full of water—the Florentine forces were fresher and less physically stressed as they fought on their own ground, said Leonardo Bruni, who was chancellor of the Florentine Republic in 1440, and here we see that illustrated. The scene of the water carriers is a very immediate detail that chimes with Bruni’s contemporary written account: it is so homely that it raises the possibility that, like Piero della Francesca, this unknown artist was an eyewitness of the battle. Who but an eyewitness or a painter with access to very immediate details would include that touching detail or depict the local landscape just as it is in Piero’s paintings?

  Leonardo reached the same conclusion. He appears to me to have treated this painting—or a lost version of the same “eyewitness” picture—as an historical source. Here was a picture that, as far he knew—and he may have been right—portrayed the battle from direct observation, and so he looked at it very carefully.

  At the heart of the
dusty landscape, between two branches of the Tiber, the battle is fought in a passionate clash of men, horses, and arms. As in Uccello’s and Piero’s battle paintings, knights go to war in full plate armour with elaborate helms, wooden lances, and swirling banners. Their war horses are mighty beasts bred to carry all the steel plate their riders wear. It is a spectacular clash—and at the heart of the tangled fray, a man who must be Niccolò Piccinino, his head uncovered and bandaged, looks downward in grim, grey-faced determination as he raises his baton or club high over his head in a steel-gauntleted hand, just as he will raise a sword in Leonardo’s painting. Around him, the banners of his army are falling. The loss of Piccinino’s standards was still remembered in Florence in the 1500s, and the tattered banners were kept in the Gonfalonier’s chambers in the Palace. The griffin standard of Perugia and the serpentine banner of Milan topple in the Dublin painting: in the struggle, hands grasp the poles of banners as they fall; men are tangled up in the cloth; in front of Piccinino, two horses charge into the fray, their massive hindquarters parallel.

  The figure of Piccinino in Leonardo’s painting was apparently adapted from this scene—the similarities are too close for coincidence, and not just in the way the desperate old soldier raises his right arm above the fray. The two horses, the tumble and tangle of banners—the elements of Leonardo’s painting are all here in a primitive form. There is a close relationship between this and his gory compositional drawings that survive in Venice: the way banners swirl as an old warrior raises his arm is very similar. But in the final version he composed as a cartoon at Santa Maria Novella and at last began to paint in June 1505, he isolated just four riders, concentrating on Piccinino’s struggle for the banner with leaders of the Florentine army.