The Lost Battles Read online

  Was this scene meant to be part of a larger composition? Leonardo had already shown with The Last Supper how ruthlessly he was prepared to isolate a single dramatic moment and tell a story entirely in one scene, compressing past and future into a pregnant present, and so giving art a new eloquence. The Last Supper strives for emotional truth, and so did The Battle of Anghiari. Leonardo found an eyewitness record of the battle and sought to preserve that truth even as he heightened the power and poetry of it through radical simplification. He aspired to paint a Florentine history as authoritative as the Humanist literary works of Bruni and Bracciolini. His martial spectacle would not be fiction but harsh reality. He even sought out the bronze medal of Piccinino cast by Pisanello in the condottiere’s lifetime. Portraying the proud warrior in profile as if he were a Roman emperor, this contemporary image shows Piccinino as a tough-faced man in a tall, soft hat. In his painting, Leonardo gave him the same headgear. All these exact visual details add to the sense that he is seeking the truth of this battle.

  But Leonardo had more than one way to discover the truth. He looked at old pictures of the battle, read the chronicles, and compared these documents with his own experience of war. All that makes it seem a very sombre exercise. It was nothing of the sort. When he tried to build a mechanical “bird” shortly before starting to paint in the Great Council Hall, science slipped into a realm of dream. We have noticed how he seems in his observations of bird flight to imagine himself becoming a bird and how, in a similar way, his drawings of galloping and rearing horses done in preparation for The Battle of Anghiari identify with the energy and frenzy of the excited animals. The riders he started to paint now in the Hall were not rationally controlled emblems of war but something more demonic and potent. They were the other side of Leonardo’s fantasy of becoming a bird. Human beings become beasts in The Battle of Anghiari—not symbolically but actually. The men merge with their horses. Their armour sprouts organic forms; their faces are bestial masks. These apocalyptic centaurs are the monsters lurking in the stain on the wall. In visionary experience the traveller through fantastic realms risks meeting evil as well as benign beings.

  Paolo Uccello, The Battle of San Romano, probably circa 1438–40. War resembles a tournament and a rite of spring in Uccello’s joyous painting steeped in chivalry. (illustration credit 12.3)

  If it is Piccinino’s story it is also Leonardo’s own. The artist had good reason to identify with the mercenary’s acrid disillusion. He too was a kind of mercenary. Like Piccinino he had served a ruler of Milan. He was a veritable condottiere of science, a mercenary engineer who just in the last few years had tried to sell a stratagem to Venice before entering the employ of the notorious Cesare Borgia. Just before or just after returning to Florence in 1503 he wrote a letter offering his services to Sultan Beyazit in Istanbul: emissaries from the Ottoman ruler, whose father had conquered the ancient capital Constantinople in 1453, visited Borgia, and Leonardo must have spoken with them. In his letter he recommends himself as an engineer to build a bridge from Pera to Constantinople. He invokes Allah enthusiastically. In the culture of the time there could hardly have been a more blatantly mercenary gesture than to sell his Christian birthright.

  In 1504, as Leonardo worked on The Battle of Anghiari, his pupil Salaì wore a cloak that had belonged to Borgia. In the summer of 1503 the Pope and his son suddenly fell ill in Rome. It was rumoured that they accidentally swallowed poison they meant for others. Alexander died. Cesare survived, but the Pope’s death fatally weakened him. The election of Julius II, an old enemy of the Borgias, as Pope that autumn sealed Cesare’s fate. As Leonardo worked on The Battle of Anghiari the soldier who had so recently seemed destined to conquer Italy and drive out the French, the sinister man of arms whom Leonardo had personally known and worked for, was ruined. By August 1504 Cesare was in prison in Spain; he would escape in 1506, but die the following year without ever getting back to Italy. The haunting portrait of Niccolò Piccinino is a study in defeat, the tragedy of a bloody man. It surely also suggests Borgia, the malevolent warlord whose fall was so swift in the end. Borgia’s sudden destruction happened just as Leonardo took on the commission for the Great Council Hall. And other fates, too, haunt his portrait of Piccinino. He had known soldiers who were modern versions of the fifteenth-century mercenary. There was Borgia’s captain and Leonardo’s friend Vitelli, killed horrifically at Senigallia. Machiavelli’s account of this murderous night reads like a Jacobean tragedy—especially in the Jacobean prose of a translation published in 1640. After being trapped, the captains were held in the palace Borgia had taken over:

  But the Dukes souldiers not satisfy’d with the pillage of Oliverotto’s Souldiers, began to sacke Senigallia. And had not the Duke by the death of many, stopd their insolence, they would utterly have sackt it. But night being come, & all stirres quiet, the Duke thought fit to put Vitellozzo and Oliverotto to death, and having brought them together, causd them to be strangled.

  This was the kind of scene that happened not in the pages of history but in Leonardo’s own lifetime, to people he knew. It was fresh in his mind when he was working on his painting of desperate violence. So was the fall of his patron in Milan, the soldier and schemer Ludovico Sforza, whose plot against Naples encouraged the French invasion in 1494 and led by the end of the fifteenth century to his own destruction: “The duke lost his state, his personal possessions and his liberty …” commented Leonardo.

  The Battle of Anghiari does not suggest he found soldiers attractive close up. The warriors whirling in dead space are the visual equivalent of the bleak vision of humanity he put into words in one of his “Prophecies,” “Of the Cruelty of Man”:

  Animals will be seen on the earth, who will always be fighting among themselves, with the greatest harm and many deaths on either side; these will have no limits to their malignity …

  O world, why do you not open and precipitate them into the deep fissures of your chasms and caves, and no more exhibit to heaven so cruel and ruthless a monster!

  To call it the “tragedy” of Niccolò Piccinino is not to imply that Leonardo’s battle painting was sentimental. Rather, it glimpsed the last shreds of self-knowledge in warriors whose mask-like grimaces and brutal actions take them to the very limit of sympathy and fellow humanity. This is what makes Leonardo’s drawing of the face of Piccinino so incredible. It manages to be at the same time utterly monstrous and hauntingly human. In his desperation the warrior opens his mouth in a scream of hate and rage, and Leonardo’s drawing portrays his contorted visage. And yet, in his eyes there is a dim spark of memory and life: inside his leathery hide there is still a human being, and you see the humanity in those eyes, callous and despairing as they are. The tragedy in this scene is that of the damned souls we encounter in Dante’s Inferno and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The desolation and hopelessness of Piccinino’s eyes as he prepares to bring down his sword in a futile blow could almost be a premonition of the final self-knowing moments of Macbeth: tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

  The portrait drawing reveals a last pulse of humanity in the hardened hide of the warrior, and yet at the same time Leonardo’s design questioned the full humanity of the men on their mighty horses. He became absorbed in the details of their elaborate armour, but this was not fancy for its own sake. In portraying it he let grotesque imagination run riot. This had as clear a function in the drama as the noble robes worn by the disciples in The Last Supper. The robes stress their dignity and the grandeur of their spirits. The armour of the warriors in The Battle of Anghiari made them into misbegotten beings, “so cruel and horrible,” part-man, part-beast, part-metal.

  Leonardo, the connoisseur of clothes, had seen his share of real armour, had even designed it. The armour he gave the warriors of Anghiari was not that much odder than actual armour you would see in tournaments, where knights wore extravagant costumes and fantastic masks. Leonardo had designed costumes of savage “wild men” for a tournament in Milan. Masked, ornate armou
r was not purely decorative. When Roman cavalrymen wore bronze masks—uncanny metal replicas of faces—for training games, the alienating device must have made it easier to forget they were fighting friends. The same estrangement is fundamental to the masked helmets of samurai warriors, bristling warrior faces that transfigured the wearer into a personification of war. In Renaissance Italy, as the history of earlier civilisations was studied and revived, armour became a self-conscious dramatisation of the martial persona. Drawings done in Florence in the 1470s show crests of dragons and monsters sprouting from helmets; a surviving example of a fantastic Italian helmet, made towards 1480, encloses a metal sallet—a protector for the upper head—inside the golden head of a lion. It would have transformed the wearer into a brave beast.

  Verrocchio’s workshop, where Leonardo was trained, specialised in fantastical images of armour. Marble reliefs of ancient heroes in profile made by Verrocchio and his assistants—one was reputedly sent by Lorenzo de’ Medici to King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary—portray them in an imaginary version of ancient armour with Medusa breast ornaments and dragon helmets. Leonardo’s early drawing of an old warrior, today in the British Museum, is manifestly related to these reliefs but has far more power: his soldier’s leathery face is an ancestor of Niccolò Piccinino’s. The man’s armour threatens to mutate him into a dragon as bat wings sprout from his helmet, crocodilian scales cover his shoulder (ancient Roman armour did, in fact, include suits of crocodile hide), and a lion—not a sculpted beast but the head of a living lion—roars on his chest. This drawing is oddly reminiscent of the story Vasari tells of how Leonardo made a composite monster from dead animals and painted its image on a shield. Another early drawing by him is of a helmet with a visor that is a mask of a human face. He was not merely observing the rise of new fashions in armour: he helped create them. The Battle of Anghiari in turn would encourage the ornate grotesques and satyr-like visors invented by sixteenth-century armourers such as the Negroli family.

  The armour of the warriors in Leonardo’s battle painting was so laden with bizarreries that it twisted their very identities. One man wore gigantic coiling sea shells on his shoulders and a huge ram’s skull on his chest. Both were skeletal remains of exhausted nature. Leonardo studied fossilised sea shells and wrote of the skeleton of an immense animal he identified as a whale, discovered in a cave. He wondered at the aeons of time the fossil had witnessed, and marvelled that its bare bones now seemed to support the mountain above, as if its ribs were pit props. Death leaves a skeleton or shell that becomes a fossil; in such passages it is clear how much fossilisation interested Leonardo. The rider at the left of his battle scene, his flesh invisible within a skin of chain mail encrusted in bony growths, with the horns of a ram’s skull suggesting at once potency and death, masculinity and desiccation, was turning into a fossil even as he twisted around and grimaced at his enemies, grabbing onto the shaft behind his head as his body transformed into a freakish spectacle of dead forms, fit for a cabinet of curiosities. Beside him Niccolò Piccinino raised a sword arm encased in plate armour, while two Florentine captains confronted them, both wearing splendid helmets. One helmet was crested with a writhing serpentine dragon. The other had a visor in the shape of a bearded satyr mask, a second face, half-human and half-goat, to be lowered over the real flesh as the rational, normal personality disintegrated in battle’s fury. This mask was the emblem of war’s alterations, its transfiguration of men into monsters.

  Lion’s head helmet, Italy, circa 1475–80. Fantastic helmets like this surviving example were worn at tournaments and parades and won as jousting prizes. (illustration credit 12.4)

  As they screamed and grabbed at the wooden shaft of Piccinino’s standard, the warriors’ horses cannibalised each other. A horse sunk its teeth into another’s neck, locking its mouth in place. The men and their horses formed centaur-like allegories of war’s nature. The men with their arms and armour embodied technological warfare, the horses the savagery beneath—the unconscious of war. Where the men at the top of the painting—literally higher up, mounted on the backs of the horses—clothed their violent instincts in chivalry, dressed as knights, with heraldic crests and finely wrought weapons, their horses manifested their lower, base selves, their driving instincts. Below the lie of civilised warfare, the reality of primitive cannibalism.

  Helmet (Burgonet) alla Romana antica, Milan, circa 1550–5. The grotesque armour in Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari resembles real designs manufactured in sixteenth-century Italy. (illustration credit 12.5)

  The idea of an original, primitive “state of warre,” as Thomas Hobbes was later to call it, held Florence spellbound at the start of the sixteenth century, for news had reached the city from a Stone Age society, and it was unnerving.

  The little wooden ships with their high rear castles bobbed on the undulating ocean. The men on board, who had sailed so far, as far surely as any human beings in history and certainly as riskily, waited uncertainly while their captain looked with interest at the strange people on the land mass ahead: a crowd of men and women as naked as newborn babies, parading longhaired beneath the palms.

  Later he would sit in his house in Portugal, dazed by what he’d seen, wondrous and awful things: the desolation of the mid-Atlantic that made him feel like Ulysses on his last hellish voyage, as he knew it from reading Dante, then the mighty forests of the western shores, but most of all the people, at first sight so innocent, in reality so bestial—cannibals, as he discovered. He couldn’t get the horrible images out of his head: feasts at which everyone gorged on a mother and her children, battles fought with stone-headed weapons after which the enemy dead became food. The horror; the horror. And yet that land was so rich, so promising—and it seemed to go on so far south it could not, after all, be just an outpost of the Indies. It was a continent apart, a Mundus Novus.

  Troubled as his mind was by nightmare scenes of New World savagery, as he took up his pen at his desk in Lisbon, he was cheered by thoughts of the lovely far-off republic of which he still considered himself a citizen. His exhaustion and the salt in his skin, the beauty and terror of all that he’d seen, did not stop him from wanting to express his sincere admiration for the Magnificent Gonfalonier and that Sublime Republic with whose affairs Piero Soderini was perpetually busy.

  Such is the burden of the “Letter to Soderini,” sent to Florence by the Atlantic navigator Amerigo Vespucci from his base in Lisbon in 1504, and rapidly issued to the city’s printing presses.

  It is a book built on water. Even its frontispiece is misleading. It starts with an engraving of Vespucci and his men in their three ships observing the naked people of what this explorer’s previous report, published in Florence in 1503, had already named (in Latin) the New World. But this is a recycled engraving originally produced to illustrate Christopher Columbus’s account of his discoveries. The theft of the image is of a piece with what follows. Vespucci claims that he sailed to the mainland of the new continent in 1497, a year before Columbus reached tierra fierma in 1498. This is probably a lie. But was it Vespucci’s lie? Or did editors in Florence concoct the “Letter to Soderini” without his knowledge?

  Vespucci was a Florentine citizen—the cousin of the Agostino who worked with Machiavelli—who went to Spain as a business agent of the Medici, was excited by the voyages of Columbus, and in 1499 (assuming the 1497 voyage to be fiction, as most historians of exploration insist it was) sailed westward himself. Whatever the real origin of his letter, its appearance in Florence in 1504 undoubtedly influenced The Battle of Anghiari, for it portrays the New World as a place of perpetual war between cannibal tribes. These people go to war, it seems to Vespucci, essentially to catch prisoners to eat: “They eat little flesh, other than human flesh, for Your Magnificence should know that in this they are so inhuman that they outdo every custom of the beasts, because they eat all the enemies they slaughter and capture, women and men, with such savagery that to tell it seems a brutal thing; how much worse to see it, as I
was fated to see it many times and in many places.”

  The raw primitive warfare of Vespucci’s New World was instantly reflected in Florentine art. Piero di Cosimo’s paintings in these early years of the sixteenth century imagine a world of primitive humans and half-human hybrids, a wild Stone Age whose frenetic violence is surely marked by Vespucci’s report. In his Battle of the Centaurs, humans and monsters do battle with improvised weapons as a wedding degenerates into savagery. The knot of frenetic fighting at the centre of the picture suggests the intense grouping of Leonardo’s horse-borne furies. Piero, as it happens, painted some of his primitive scenes to decorate one of the houses of the Vespucci family.

  Piero may have been inspired by news from the Americas, but he got his knowledge of the Stone Age from a Latin poem. When Poggio Bracciolini discovered a manuscript of the Roman poet Lucretius’ philosophical epic De rerum natura—On the Nature of Things—in 1417, he brought to Florence not just a text whose details of myth enriched those known from Ovid’s Metamorphoses but an ambitious vision of human development. Lucretius is positively Darwinian in his materialist explanations of how humans advanced from savagery to civilisation. The first people lived like wild beasts. They had no agriculture, laws, or fire. Their lives were tough, says Lucretius, but they did not know the “civilised” cruelties of war. Slowly, people learned to use fire and live in simple communities, and language evolved. One day lightning caused a forest fire and in the hot earth humans saw molten metals: the arts of metalworking were born, and with metal came weapons. Piero di Cosimo’s painting The Forest Fire, done in Florence around 1505, evokes this epochal fire.