The Lost Battles Read online

  Machiavelli’s toy soldiers impressed the populace and promised a new dawn in the Republic’s ability to make war on Pisa and any other enemy. “This was thought the finest thing that had ever been arranged for Florence,” reported Luca Landucci.

  As we’ve seen, that spring Michelangelo fled Pope Julius II and sought the protection of the Republic. Condivi says the very reason Soderini protected the artist from the Pope was because Soderini hoped he would “paint the Great Council Hall.” So while Machiavelli was drumming up patriotic enthusiasm for a standing army, Michelangelo “finished that marvellous cartoon begun for the Council Hall, in which he represented the war between Florence and Pisa and the many and varied accidents that occurred in it.”

  In Michelangelo’s memory as he communicated it to Condivi years later, the earlier war with Pisa had become the war Florence was fighting in 1506. This is a revealing slip. Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina was a much more direct comment on the current war with Pisa than Leonardo’s—while Anghiari was on the other side of Tuscany, everyone knew Cascina was close to Pisa. It was a place that featured regularly in news of the war. And Michelangelo’s image of alert, courageous, active soldiers rushing to seek the enemy, turning crisis into triumph, fitted perfectly with the rhetoric coming out of the Palace in 1506.

  Early that year Machiavelli published his poem Decennale to promote his military ideas. His plan was enthusing citizens high and low. In Michelangelo he found a mirror of his zeal. A painting done in Florence in about 1510 makes the connection between Machiavelli’s ideas and Michelangelo’s art explicit. In this portrait a young Florentine citizen stands poised to defend his Republic. He is clad in armour, hand on his sword, in front of the Piazza della Signoria. A flash of white in the distance catches your eye—it is Michelangelo’s David, posed bravely in front of the Palace. The painting associates this man’s readiness to use his sword with David’s preparedness to fight Goliath: it makes a direct connection between Michelangelo’s art and the ideal of a citizen-soldier. In a speech he wrote calling for funds for the war, to be delivered in the Great Council Hall, Machiavelli uses a suggestive image, saying it is better to have your own sword than to rely on someone else’s to defend you; and better to put it on before the enemy arrives. This is just what the young man in the painting has done. Looked at in this light, it is surely an explicit allusion to Machiavelli’s idea that citizens must fight for their own liberty. It draws an overt analogy between the Republican militia and Michelangelo’s David. It consciously interprets David as a work of Machiavellian political art.

  When Machiavelli said it is better to have your own sword than to rely on the sword of another, he meant that a city with its own standing army is stronger than one that relies on mercenaries or on powerful allies. The young man in this painting symbolically grasps his sword: he is not reliant on mercenary hirelings to defend him and his city. The young soldier’s body is clad in armour, but behind him you can see the glittering white nudity of David. To be a citizen-soldier is to emulate the virtues of a Michelangelo nude—readiness, alertness, selfless energy.

  Machiavelli argues in The Art of War that one of the advantages of a citizen militia is that it gives young men something to do. On festival days the young bloods idle about looking for trouble. Instead they could be parading proudly in armed and uniformed companies. This idea of soldiering as both the natural expression, and a perfect way of managing, the aggression of young men resonates with Michelangelo’s portrayal of an army of youths leaping out of the water in rapid, well-trained collective action. Michelangelo’s nudes didn’t get their muscular bodies by lazing around: they are exercised to a peak of fitness. Machiavelli’s ideal of a citizen-soldier was, precisely, of young men so trained and honed that weapons and armour were almost beside the point. The militia he was campaigning for in 1506 as Michelangelo was finishing his cartoon looms behind the charcoal shadows of The Battle of Cascina. Clearly Michelangelo shared the republican politics of Soderini and Machiavelli. Far more than Leonardo, he was a proud citizen of Florence—a patriot. His family claimed a long (if partly fictitious) and honourable role in the history of the city. When, later in his life, an emissary sent to collect a painting from him said something sarcastic to the effect that Florence was just a city of merchants, Michelangelo refused to hand over the picture.

  Shortly after Michelangelo had returned from Rome, Leonardo had begun trying to get permission from the Florentine government to leave his painting aside and visit Milan. So as Michelangelo worked on his image that heroically mirrored Machiavelli’s militia, Leonardo was doing his best to get away from Florence. Milan was now under French rule, and the French were deeply impressed by his works there; it was said the king lamented that it was not possible to remove The Last Supper from its wall and take it to France. That spring Leonardo and his collaborators on the altarpiece depicting the Virgin of the Rocks in a Milanese church started suing for unpaid fees; this marked the start of a new relationship with the city where he had worked so long and apparently happily.

  Within weeks of his rival’s return to Florence, Leonardo wanted to go elsewhere. It is surely not a coincidence. Here is the personal tension between Leonardo and Michelangelo set in the cold ink of a legal contract.

  The Signoria made the older artist sign a document promising to return to Florence within three months to continue The Battle of Anghiari. The French were determined to get him to the northern city, and negotiated with Florence to save him from a threatened financial penalty. In this record of the very different relationships that emerge in 1506 between Leonardo and the Republic on the one hand, and Michelangelo and the Republic on the other, we can discern a defeat, and a victory.

  There never was a formal prize; it was nastier than that. A prize ends it. The loser can shrug. This competition was a battle for hearts and minds—a struggle for prestige—whose consequences were limitless and uncontrollable. Michelangelo was proving, in the eyes of all who were there to see the spectacle, that he, not Leonardo, embodied the future of art. But what won over the Florentine Republic, what endeared him to Soderini, was politics. He was a good citizen. His cartoon showed the heroism it takes to win a war. The Battle of Cascina was a grave work, full of compassion for its soldiers, who go naked into the fray. Michelangelo didn’t have to pretend to be a passionate republican. He believed in his city and he believed in liberty.

  Salone dei Cinquecento, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Vasari transformed the Great Council Hall by raising the ceiling, opening windows, and filling it with pro-Medici art. (illustration credit 13.3)

  What did Leonardo believe in?

  This was the disturbing question that Leonardo’s painting in the Great Council Hall raised. It was not a patriotic citizen’s work of art at all. It was not a rousing image of military courage. It was horrifying, and frightening. The Republic had asked him to glorify its famous historic victory. What he was slowly committing to the wall was a shocking image of battle’s madness. It looked suspiciously like a denunciation of war.

  The French historian Lucien Febvre once asked if it was possible to be an atheist in the sixteenth century. It was not, he proceeded to demonstrate, claiming that even to conceive of the non-existence of God was impossible then. If we ask the same question of pacifism, the answer is very different. It was entirely possible to be a pacifist in the sixteenth century. The condemnation of war has deep origins in European culture. Christianity in the early Middle Ages found fault with war: the chivalric code and the Crusades can be seen as negotiations between this early anti-war bias and the military orders that dominated medieval society. By the 1500s the Pope himself was making war, but the idea that war is evil could be eloquently expressed in the Renaissance. In 1515 the great Dutch Humanist Erasmus published an essay on the Latin adage “Dulce bellum inexpertis”—“War is sweet to those who have no experience of it.” In it he expresses disgust that war has become a respectable pursuit. There is nothing more wicked and un-Christian than war, h
e insists. Yet people enthusiastically embrace it. Even priests and bishops go to war without a second thought. So universal is the enthusiasm for war that “it is considered impious, I almost said heretical, to disapprove of the one thing in the world that is the most wicked and wretched.”

  Erasmus goes on to denounce war in images that recall Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari. As it happens, Erasmus went to Italy in 1506 as the Great Council Hall competition was reaching its climax and stayed on for two years, visiting Turin, Bologna, Venice, and Rome. Is it conceivable that he heard descriptions or saw copies of Leonardo’s battle painting? In his anti-war essay he describes the wonder and beauty of humanity, God’s finest creation. He continues:

  Now on the other hand we will compose, if you would like to see it, the picture of war. Suppose now, therefore, that you see the barbaric cohorts, inspiring horror with their very faces and the sound of their voices, the iron-clad men drawn up for battle, the formidable noise and glare of weapons, the odious roar and onrush of vast multitudes; threatening eyes, raucous horns and startling trumpets, the thunder of the artillery, no less terrifying than thunder itself but truly more noxious. Insane clamour, furious assault, savage mangling, the cruel fates of the fallen and killed, heaps of bodies, fields streaming with gore, rivers stained with human blood.

  This epic and brilliant onslaught on the horrors of war can be traced as an influence on northern European artists. Erasmus’s word-picture of war’s horrors haunts Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s and Albrecht Altdorfer’s paintings of massed armies. It also bears a striking resemblance to Leonardo’s word-picture of war in his text “How to Paint a Battle”: “You might see someone who has been maimed, fallen to the ground, covering himself with his shield, and an enemy bent low over him trying to finish him off … And do not show any part of the field that feet have not trampled with blood.”

  That’s Leonardo in about 1510. Nor do we need to turn to Erasmus to find an explicit statement that war is a scourge and a crime, for it is there in Leonardo’s notebooks. He explicitly called war a “most bestial madness,” and in his prophecy “Of the Cruelty of Man” it is one of the reasons this “inhuman monster” deserves to be destroyed. But perhaps his most moving repudiation of violence is a paean to humanity. If his studies of nature move you, says Leonardo, remember that humanity is even more marvellous. If after reading him you believe it is wrong to destroy nature, “think what a nefarious thing it is to take away the life of a man …”

  War is the destruction of the most wondrous thing in the world—ourselves. Leonardo, like Erasmus, contrasts the inhumanity of war with the miracle of humanity.

  Leonardo was painting a negation of the patriotism the Republic sought to instil with its parade of new soldiers in their red and white costumes on Piazza della Signoria. The Battle of Anghiari was more liable to scare the assembled citizens of the Great Council into peace than fire them to war. The heroism of Michelangelo was more in tune with the effort to defeat Pisa—that noble struggle.

  There is, to be sure, another way of seeing The Battle of Anghiari. The rage and violence of it have not struck all observers as denunciatory. All images are ambiguous in nature; one way to understand this painting is simply as a manifestation of what war is, a personification of its passions. The luridly ornate decorations of real garnitures of armour in sixteenth-century Europe, we have seen, resemble the grotesque metallic shells of Leonardo’s warriors. Armourers competed to create the most bizarre metallic disguises for aristocratic warriors to wear. To acknowledge war’s violence was not, in other words, necessarily to condemn it. It is possible that portraying war’s fury might have been intended to release a primal savagery in the Great Council. But if so, this was poor politics. A vision of war that sees it as unleashed barbarism might well be defended by an unusually honest and radical military thinker—in short by Machiavelli—but in reality, in inculcating patriotic feeling, it was counter-productive: a thought best kept to yourself. A heresy.

  When Erasmus denounces priests and bishops for making war, he is undoubtedly thinking of Julius II, the Warrior Pope, who in 1506 personally led his armies on his campaign to reconquer the traditional Papal States, long since become autonomous cities, for the Church. Julius stormed towards the Apennines. Michelangelo’s worst nightmare was coming true: the furious Pope was headed his way. Condivi says that while Soderini did his best for Michelangelo, after Julius had written three times demanding to see his artist there could be no more refusing.

  In September 1506 the young sculptor—he was still just thirty-one—set out on horseback from Florence, headed for a terrifying meeting with an employer he had audaciously insulted. Julius had conquered Bologna and was holding court there. For Michelangelo it was a moment of truth. Out of fear or pride, he turned back before he reached the city. The trip is not mentioned by Condivi and is not usually noted by Michelangelo’s biographers. But it was recorded, because Machiavelli was already in Bologna, at the height of his prestige, serving as Florentine ambassador to the Pope. Michelangelo was asked by the Florentine Chancellery to take Machiavelli some money to cover the politician’s expenses. After the artist turned back to Florence, his servant returned this money to the Palazzo della Signoria with apologies. Machiavelli’s colleague Biagio Buonaccorsi wondered what to do next because, he wrote to Machiavelli, he didn’t know who else to trust. This reveals how involved Michelangelo now was in the affairs of the Palace, how much faith was placed in him in government circles, and hints at a friendly relationship with Machiavelli.

  Florence and Rome negotiated over a guarantee of Michelangelo’s safety until in late November 1506 he finally felt sufficiently confident to make the journey to Papa Giulio in Bologna. When he got to the conquered city he went to San Petronio to hear mass, and while he was there some of the Pope’s grooms recognised him. He was taken to the Palace of the Sixteen where the Pope was at table. Julius II glared at Michelangelo.

  “You were to have come to find us, yet it appears as if we have come to find you.”

  The artist knelt before the Pope and asked pardon, saying he had not been able to endure being chased away by servants. The Pope sat there in silence, his head bowed.

  At this point, a priest representing Florence’s Cardinal Soderini, the Gonfalonier’s brother, spoke up in Michelangelo’s defence.

  “Your Holiness, pay no attention to his error, because he has erred through ignorance. Painters, outside their art, are all like this.”

  This clumsy intervention—making explicit a disdain for artists—turned out to be a lightning rod for the Pope’s wrath.

  “It is you who speak rudely to him and not us,” the Pope yelled at the Florentine churchman. “The ignorant one is you and you’re the scoundrel, not him. Leave me immediately and go to your ruin.”

  When this poor man was slow to react, Julius had his servants beat him out of the room. Meanwhile Michelangelo stayed, unharmed and unabused, once more the Pope’s artist.

  Julius pardoned Michelangelo and ordered him to stay in Bologna awaiting a new task. Soon the order came: he must cast a colossal bronze statue of the Pope to show Bologna who ruled it. It was a martial image, a statue of a conqueror. Michelangelo was told to portray the heir of St. Peter with a sword in his hand.

  In another victory over Leonardo da Vinci, who as he pointed out had failed to cast the bronze horse in Milan, the supremely skilled Michelangelo succeeded in the technical challenge of casting a colossus. It took him just over a year to create this awe-inspiring imperial work. Later, records Condivi, when Julius’s rule was overturned, this statue “was hurled to the ground and melted down by the fury of the people. Its size was three times larger than life.”

  When Michelangelo was preparing to go Bologna he sought as much reassurance and protection as possible from Piero Soderini and the Florentine Republic. Communications between Soderini and the Pope’s aide Francesco Alidosi smoothed his path, and Soderini wrote a touchingly affectionate, almost paternal letter for Mi
chelangelo to present to the Pope, praising “the bearer … the sculptor Michelangelo” as a fine young man, unequalled as an artist in Italy if not the entire world. If treated well, praised, and cherished, said Soderini, he would do great works. With love and favour his creations would astonish everyone. Here in Florence, he added, Michelangelo had started a marvellous history painting for the people.

  Soderini stresses Michelangelo’s youth in the letter; implicitly it is the passion of youth that excuses his impulsive behaviour. He also makes a clear judgement of Michelangelo’s art, leaving no doubt who had triumphed, to Soderini’s mind, in the Great Council Hall.

  It is sadly instructive to contrast this letter with another that Soderini wrote that same autumn. Leonardo’s French friends were trying to buy him more time in Milan. Charles d’Amboise wrote to the Florentine government asking leave for Leonardo to stay there a bit longer. Soderini sent this caustic reply on 9 October 1506: “Excuse the Signoria for not agreeing a day with Leonardo da Vinci who has not carried himself as he should towards this Republic: because he has taken a good sum of money and made little beginning on a great work which he must do, and in his love for your Excellency has already delayed it: we don’t want any more requests, because the work is to satisfy the people.”