The Lost Battles Read online

  Leonardo too was reading Lucretius. In a suggestive note he misquotes the Roman author’s claim that “the first weapons were hands, nails and teeth.” In Leonardo’s note the original is slightly embellished: “Lucretius in the third of The Things of Nature: hands, nails and teeth were the weapons of the ancients. Also they used as a standard a bunch of grass tied to a pole.” He works in a satirical image of his own, introducing the notion that primitive humanity went to war behind a bunch of grass fluttering from a pole; it adds another dimension to the struggle for possession of a standard in The Battle of Anghiari. The desperate struggle in the painting is for something as worthless as any savage totem—the standard that Piccinino fought so savagely to save was no more intrinsically valuable than the primitives’ bunch of grass on a pole. The armoured warriors were technologically advanced, clothed in metal and armed with sharp blades, and Leonardo revealed how close their fury made them to the cannibal rage of their horses. War was just armed barbarity. The wretched images of the New World spread by Vespucci deeply informed Leonardo’s vision of war as a grotesque ornamentation of primitive instincts, but it only confirmed the evidence of his own eyes. What he saw of battles and tournaments had convinced him that deep down, whatever technology it uses—a tank, or just the dagger a man on the ground thrust at an enemy’s throat—war is no more elevated than mauling someone with your teeth.

  This image of fighting with one’s teeth, of using the most basic of weapons, is one that Leonardo kept returning to. It was at the very centre of The Battle of Anghiari in the disturbing spectacle of a horse biting into another horse’s throat, its eyes maddened. It struck him to find this image in Lucretius—that the first weapons were nails and teeth. And in his passionate essay “How to Paint a Battle,” he dwells on it again: “Make dead men, some partly covered with dust, others completely … others as they die grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, tightening their fists against their bodies, their legs distorted; some might be shown, disarmed and beaten down by their foes, who turn on the enemy to take a cruel and bitter revenge with teeth and nails.” Unarmed and defeated, the men take a cannibal revenge. This image of disarmed soldiers biting and scratching their enemies was probably composed late in Leonardo’s life. It surely draws on his battle picture for the Great Council Hall and the experiences and ideas that forged it.

  Leonardo’s cartoon, which he now began to transfer to the wall, embraced anthropology as well as history, incorporating the reports—however inaccurate—of life in the Americas that had just been published in Florence, and distilling an evolutionary view of human violence inspired by his reading of Lucretius. We are all at heart animals with animal instincts, and when we are cornered we fight like maddened beasts, says Leonardo in his disturbing masterpiece.

  If his image of cannibalism reached across the Atlantic to the new world being discovered in his day, it also struck close to home. For all true Florentines knew the most compelling horror story in the Divine Comedy of their city’s great poet Dante. Deep in the pit of Hell, on the frozen Lake Cocytus, Dante and Virgil see Count Ugolino—whose story will end with Dante’s call for the destruction of Pisa. A spectacle of cannibalism holds their gaze:

  … I saw two frozen in one hole,

  so that one head was a cap to the one below;

  and as the starving gorge on bread,

  just so the one on top put his teeth to a human meal,

  right there—where the brain is joined to the neck.

  The vengeful biting horse of The Battle of Anghiari called forth Dante’s infernal feast. You didn’t need to cross the world to find the heart of darkness.

  It is always with us, it is history’s curse. For everything that is built, every beauty that is nurtured, there is a destructive warrior waiting in the wings. In the dead spaces of pitiless time, horsemen fight forever on a dusty plain. So Leonardo da Vinci suggests in his early unfinished marvel of a painting The Adoration of the Magi. Of all his surviving works this is the most intellectually ambitious. He began it in 1481 for the convent of San Donato a Scopeto outside the walls of Florence, but left it incomplete when he moved to Milan. Even so, this painting, or honeyed drawing, leads us deep into his imagination. As the dark-eyed Magi proffer gifts to the Christ Child and sensitive horses look melancholically at us, a vision of history unfolds in the painting’s distance. A fabulous classical architecture rises into the sky, ruinous and unfinished at the same time: trees grow on broken walls, staircases ascend to nowhere. Amid the ruins of human ambition spectral armies fight. And far away, in an empty, sterile no man’s land, two horsemen are locked in mortal combat, their horses rearing, their faces masks of fury.

  The image that Leonardo began to paint in the Great Council Hall in June 1505 had lain in his mind for a long time. It went back, at least, to The Adoration of the Magi. And yet to compare the two works is to compare a dream and a nightmare. The battle in The Adoration is just one aspect of life’s wonder and mystery; the one he started to paint in the Great Council Hall blotted out every good thing. Claustrophobic despair greys the eyes of the warrior.

  PART THREE

  The Lost Battles

  1506–Present

  THIRTEEN

  The Good Citizen

  The fury of Pope Julius II was terrible to contemplate. Raging, yelling, and served by men who were always ready with fists and cudgels, the Warrior Pope was casual about issuing death threats. The poet Ariosto, on a diplomatic mission to Rome from the court of Ferrara, had to endure being menaced with a dunk in the Tiber. When Michelangelo was nearing the end of his labours high amid the vaulting of the Sistine Chapel, the impatient Julius asked when he would finally finish.

  “When I can,” said the artist whose neck was aching from bending backward as he stood on the wooden platform under the vault.

  Julius flew into a rage: “You want me to have you thrown from that scaffolding!”

  It was not wise to get on the wrong side of Julius.

  As Michelangelo told the story to Condivi, he decided discretion was the better part of valour when Julius harried him in the Sistina, and brought his work to an end, leaving a few highlights undone. That was after years of experience had told him when to fight Julius and when to let it go. In May 1506, however, he decided it was time to fight—and the Pope had well and truly met his match.

  Michelangelo, Running Nudes, 1504–5. On the other side of this sketch Michelangelo copied Adam and Eve from the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, an anxious image of the nude. (illustration credit 13.1)

  Michelangelo had been working for more than a year making preparations for the tomb that Julius had commissioned from him. He had personally led the quarrymen in Carrara in cutting the right stone for the many sculptures that were to grace a free-standing mausoleum inside the old Church of St. Peter’s. Its tall, rectangular form, like a vast sarcophagus with a statue of the Pope enthroned on top, was to be decorated, if that was the right word for the contorted figures Michelangelo had in mind, with prisoners of war seething or submitting in their chains, with biblical prophets, including Moses, plus plenty of putti and angels. It was a stupendous scheme that would unavoidably eat up years of time and sacks of gold and result in a monument of sublime arrogance and ostentatious intellect.

  Yet even as his marble awaited the first blows of the chisel, Michelangelo could feel that something was wrong. Intrigues were in the air. He no longer had the ear of the Pope—he couldn’t even get an audience. Flunkeys turned him away at the door, when there was so much that needed discussing, and paying for.

  Finally he snapped. One morning he went to see the Pope again and was told he couldn’t enter. This time, it was clear the refusal came direct from Julius himself. No one gave Michelangelo the cold shoulder like this. People didn’t freeze him out: he froze them out. He went back home and ordered his servants to pack. That very night he quietly set out on horseback, and he didn’t stop riding till he reached Florentine territory. In a letter he sent to Giuliano Sa
ngallo from Florence on 2 May 1506 he explains:

  Of my departure, it is true that I heard the Pope say on Holy Saturday, speaking at table with a jeweller and with the master of ceremonies, that he did not want to spend a penny more on stones small or large: by which I was quite amazed; yet, before I went, I asked him for part of the funds to get on with the work. His Holiness answered me that I should come back on Monday; and I did come back on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, as he himself saw. In the end, on Friday morning I was sent out, or rather chased away; and he who sent me away said that he knew me, but he had his orders. When I heard this speech that Saturday … I became very desperate. But this was not the only reason for my departure. There was another thing, which I don’t want to write about; enough that it made me think that, if I stayed in Rome, my own tomb might be made before the Pope’s. And that was the reason for my immediate departure.

  The terrible pride of Michelangelo is audible in that acid observation that he was reduced to eavesdropping on a conversation between Julius and a jeweller—as if trinkets had the same value as great art. But he claims there was more to it: what is the thing he doesn’t want to write of?

  Michelangelo believed that the architect Bramante was constantly plotting against him, badmouthing him to the Pope, and in this letter his paranoia about rivals at the Papal Court reaches the point of fearing for his life. It is a stark revelation of how real and fundamental competition was, in this age of growing artistic ambition; that Michelangelo seriously feared it might lead to violence. However exaggerated his suspicions might be, they reflected a Rome where artists saw themselves as competitors for work of cosmic scope. With such extraordinary commissions in the offing, it seemed realistic to suspect a rival of planning to injure you. Nor were Michelangelo’s terrors totally unrelated to reality. A little later in the sixteenth century Benvenuto Cellini did actually murder a rival in the contest for papal patronage. In 1506, noticing Bramante had the ear of il Papa, Michelangelo decided he’d be better off on home ground.

  The truth was that Julius II was in talks with Bramante, and was losing interest in the project for a colossal tomb, because he had an even bigger dream. He wanted to build a new St. Peter’s. This made Michelangelo’s carving him a monument in the old St. Peter’s irrelevant. Julius commanded Bramante to build the new basilica on a scale to outdo the ancient Romans whose ruins loomed so large in the papal city, and in a classical style to assert the rebirth of beauty at the heart of Christendom. It was one of the most important cultural decisions in European history. The building of a new St. Peter’s would become a gargantuan task for which Bramante had time only to lay the groundwork before it was continued by Raphael, Sangallo, and ultimately Michelangelo himself. The incredible expense would necessitate exceptional fundraising measures, including a special sale of indulgences, the Pope’s personal guarantee of a reduced number of years in Purgatory, to gullible northern Europeans. Unfortunately they were not as gullible as hoped. The indulgence sale provoked a German theologian named Martin Luther to publish the protest that started the Reformation. The greatest building in Christendom paradoxically helped to divide and fragment European Christianity.

  In 1506 all this was in the future. Michelangelo had just done something unprecedented in the annals of artists’ relations with their employers. It was a heroic, and dangerous, assertion that artists are worthy of respect. As Condivi tells it, “Michelangelo, who had never found an entrance denied him before, got angry when he saw how he was being pushed about, and replied, ‘And you can tell the Pope that if he wants me from now on, he can seek me elsewhere.’ ” All Michelangelo’s passion and invective that so hurt Leonardo on the streets of Florence was now aimed at the most powerful human being in Italy. As messengers from the Pope urged him to return—to be forgiven, or beaten, or worse?—he turned for support to his friends in the government of the Florentine Republic.

  Piero Soderini was a friend, he knew. But if he was to guarantee the Gonfalonier’s solidarity, there was one thing he’d better do. Soon after his arrival back in Florence, Michelangelo did what was necessary and took up work again on his cartoon for a history painting in the Great Council Hall.

  Despite his absence for more than a year, and his failure so far to move beyond drawing his historic Bathers, Michelangelo had an advantage in the competition. Leonardo had made a disastrous and demoralizing start on his painting in the Hall. As Leonardo himself tells it in Madrid Codex II:

  6th June, 1505, a Friday, on the stroke of the thirteenth hour, I started to paint in the Palace. At the very moment I applied the brush, the weather deteriorated and the bell resounded, calling the men to their deliberations. The cartoon tore, the jar of water being carried broke and water spilled. And suddenly, the weather broke and it rained vast quantities of water until evening. And the atmosphere was like night.

  Leonardo, this diary-like personal note reveals, believed like all his contemporaries in the significance of omens and prodigies. Nature was a book full of cryptic meanings. He records the grim weather on the day he started to paint in the Hall in an apocalyptic tone of dread. He reads some sinister meaning into this coincidence of meteorological misfortune and a spillage of water. The implication appears to be that he will never get anywhere on his wall painting: it is cursed. Yet there is a more prosaic psychological insight here, too. It confirms that he found the Great Council Hall an awkward working environment, open as it was for business as usual. As he worked and the great bell of the Palace rang to call a meeting, you sense his frustration—how was he going to concentrate in such a setting?

  Another problem was becoming apparent. The Battle of Anghiari was being painted in oils onto the dry wall, just like The Last Supper. He tried to create a binding agent, apparently using flour, that did not stick properly. Even as he and his team coloured the colossal horses and their monstrous riders, paint was flaking off the wall.

  Yet there were other reasons, beyond the slowness of his work, for the Florentine government to fall out of love with Leonardo. The very fact that Michelangelo had been brought in to compete with him already implied less than a ringing endorsement. From the start the Republic seemed to be rooting for the younger man—as if to punish its former star. Despatching Leonardo to Piombino that November gave Michelangelo an advantage, and by the time Leonardo returned to Florence his up-and-coming rival had already done a huge amount of work on his cartoon of an army of nudes.

  Michelangelo’s composition was not only a crowd of nudes. It was also a picture of a river. Among the muscular troops is an old man with vine leaves in his hair trying to dress. He represents the commander that day, who, according to Villani’s chronicle, was old and ill and all too ready to let his men have a dip in the Arno while he rested. Michelangelo stresses his decadence, even his corruption, by giving him the look of a sensualist votary of Bacchus.

  The Battle of Cascina anticipates, in an elusive and unresolved way, the scenes of bacchanalian revelry that would become one of the great courtly themes of sixteenth-century art. A painting like Titian’s Bacchanal of the Andrians, painted in the 1520s for the Camerino—the Cabinet—of the duke of Ferrara and today in the Prado in Madrid, with its tipping, swaying, bending nudes, is indebted to Michelangelo’s Bathers. His pastoral army gave a new grandeur to the nude that was to influence not battles but erotic scenes of massed naked feminine flesh, from Titian’s Diana and Actaeon to Peter Lely’s Nymphs by a Fountain. In collaboration with his early rival Giorgione, the young Titian painted nudes on the Fondaco dei Tedesci in Venice in 1508–9 that directly emulate The Battle of Cascina by putting naked skin into a city’s public space. Look again at The Bacchanal of the Andrians and you see how closely some of his nudes resemble Michelangelo’s Bathers.

  You also see in Titian’s pastoral scene, lying dead drunk on a hilltop, the bearded figure of Silenus, the teacher of Bacchus and, in Greek myth and Renaissance art, a ridiculous old sot, an emblem of indulgence. Michelangelo’s depiction of
an elderly commander bears a resemblance to such Sileni. He has a beard, a garland—you could mistake him for the mythological drunkard. This detail is singled out in a copy from Michelangelo’s design painted onto a maiolica plate in about 1539–47, which by setting the scene in woodland outside a town removes it from any association of battle and makes it purely bucolic. But why does Michelangelo stress such a decadent character, if not to satirise folly? Could he be making a cruel allusion to Leonardo and the Arno diversion? Cascina, as we have seen, is close both to Pisa and to the point where Florentine engineers tried to divert the river towards Livorno in October 1504. Michelangelo might just have been exposing Leonardo as the bacchic voluptuary who led Florence into dangerous waters. Now, the Republic had bravely to extricate itself from the folly of the river and renew its strength against the Pisan enemy. And this is where the urgent political resonances of Michelangelo’s battle picture become hard to ignore. As he was planning his design in the autumn of 1504, Machiavelli was moving on from the disaster of the waters to push the idea of a citizens’ militia. It was the trained and disciplined bodies of young men that would win the Pisan war, not the delusion of technocratic schemes. Michelangelo’s army of awakened heroes looked very like an advertisement for Machiavelli’s militia.

  Michelangelo, Brutus, circa 1542. In a dialogue written up by one of his friends, Michelangelo says Brutus belonged in Hell for murdering Caesar. (illustration credit 13.2)

  When Michelangelo returned to Florence in the spring of 1506, Machiavelli was at the height of his campaign to give Florence a truly republican army. Typically of him, the idealism was accompanied by a gratuitous toughness: he pushed to get Don Michelotto, a notorious former henchman of his idol Cesare Borgia who had helped massacre the disloyal captains at Senigallia, as its commander. Nor did he recruit the cream of Florentine patrician youth. Instead, the Ten of War authorised Machiavelli in January 1506 to go into the countryside of the Mugello and Casentino and recruit young countrymen between the ages of fourteen and forty. It was a draft rather than a volunteer battalion. But when Machiavelli’s new soldiers were paraded in Florence at Carnival time, they were presented as the core of what would become a citizen army of thousands. The four hundred conscripts were drilled on Piazza della Signoria, uniformed in white jerkins, red and white stockings, white caps, white shoes, and iron breastplates and lances. Their red and white colours matched the cross design of the Florentine Republic’s flag; they’d have looked like red and white versions of the Vatican’s Swiss Guards.