The Lost Battles Read online

  Michelangelo is a marvellous young man, but Leonardo has let down the Republic. A judgement has been made, and it is not only artistic. Soderini is furious that Leonardo would rather serve the French nobility in Milan than create a work to satisfy the popular public of his own city. Leonardo has shown Soderini his true colours. The Gonfalonier is contemptuous of someone who would rather be a courtier than a citizen.

  We tend to picture Leonardo as a benign and wondrous philosopher, bearded and otherwordly. Michelangelo, meanwhile, is conventionally imagined as a bad-tempered, terrifying character. It is Leonardo who charms the modern world. Yet to Soderini, who knew them both, their personalities looked remote from their later images. Leonardo was a lazy and dilatory rogue, Michelangelo a sincere and virtuous young man. In short, Soderini liked—even loved—Michelangelo but came to seriously dislike Leonardo. Clearly this reflected his disappointment in the older man and his hopes for the younger. But it also implies something more elusive in Michelangelo’s victory over Leonardo. It was that Michelangelo communicated more naturally and openly with his fellow citizens of Florence. They could relate to him. At one level this was a popularity contest, and he won it.

  FOURTEEN

  School of the World

  The very stones would cry out against it if they could, said Michelangelo. He was far away in Rome when it happened, and he was lucky. It was far safer to be braving the wrath of Julius II than negotiating the terrible last days of the Florentine Republic. It was 29 August 1512, and citizens of Florence could see the smoke rise from their close neighbour Prato and hear horrifying details from refugees streaming into the gates.

  Some of Machiavelli’s militia were defending Prato, positioned to hold back the attackers who were streaming through a hole made in the walls by artillery, but when they saw the enemy pouring out of a hell of smoke and rubble they simply fled. The conquerors were full of fury and expended their rage, their hot blood, on the town. It was a sack, a sustained and ritualised outburst of violence. Guicciardini, from his vantage point in the 1530s, writes that two thousand soldiers were killed in cold blood after they surrendered. Another contemporary put deaths of soldiers and civilians at 4,500. At the very least, hundreds died in a consciously brutal spectacle designed to scare Florence into surrender. The attackers were Spanish troops, and their purpose was to put the Medici family back in power. It worked. Everyone knew the Republic had been sold down the river by a deal done with Julius II and other great powers. Soderini was visited in the Palace by a group of pro-Medici patricians who threatened him with physical violence unless he resigned at once. With help from Machiavelli, the Gonfalonier fled. Giuliano de’ Medici soon entered the city. The family with a habit of authority was back in charge.

  Symbols matter in politics. The most charismatic symbol of the Republic was not a person—there is no famous portrait of Piero Soderini to reproduce in this book, which must say something about his character as well as the Medici’s determination to have him forgotten—but a room. The Great Council Hall was seen by ordinary citizens as the soul of the Republic, the physical expression of popular power. Built for Savonarola, it was literally sacred, a consecrated structure dignified by fine wooden furnishings and great works of art. The Medici family now set out to desecrate it. A deliberate and systematic act of vandalism took place, to express contempt for what the Hall stood for. It was a ritual intended to purge the city of republican pride.

  That December the laying waste of the Great Council Hall began. All the finely carved wooden seating was torn out, all the hangings and fittings. Partitions were constructed to turn it into a guardroom. It was a deliberate offence to anyone who still wept for Savonarola. What became of Leonardo’s unfinished Battle of Anghiari while all this systematic vandalism was going on? Were things thrown at his painted horses by the soldiers who drank and gambled there, just as it was said arrows had been fired into his clay horse in Milan?

  Only in the spring of 1513 was a wooden cage set up around Leonardo’s painting to hide it from boozing soldiers. The relevant document in the Archivio di Stato records that a carpenter had been paid for making a box to protect The Battle of Anghiari from being “laid waste” (“per difendere che le non sieno guaste”). It is dated 30 April 1513, nearly five months after the attack on the Hall began. What happened to Leonardo’s painting in the intervening time?

  It had been, remembered Benvenuto Cellini, “the school of the world.” As a child, this son of a musician, who would grow up to become a goldsmith, sculptor, soldier, murderer, and autobiographer, was captivated by the rival battle pictures of Leonardo and Michelangelo. As he tells it in his manuscript Life of Benvenuto Son of Giovann Cellini, Written by Himself in Florence [c. 1558–62], he himself drew a copy from The Battle of Cascina:

  This cartoon was the first beautiful work in which Michelangelo showed his marvellous talent, and he made it in competition with another who was at work there: with Leonardo da Vinci; the works were intended to serve for the Council Hall of the Palazzo della Signoria. They represented when Pisa was taken by the Florentines; and the admirable Leonardo da Vinci chose to show a battle of horsemen with the seizure of certain standards, as divinely made, as it is possible to imagine. Michelangelo Buonarroti showed numerous infantrymen who because it was summer were bathing in the Arno, and in the same instant that the alarm was given he showed these nude footsoldiers rushing to arms, and with so many beautiful gestures, that no work by the ancients or moderns was ever seen to reach such a high mark, and as I have said, that of Leonardo was most beautiful and admirable.

  Cellini claims that although Leonardo’s painting was excellent, it was outdone by The Battle of Cascina, for Michelangelo’s cartoon was simply the greatest work of art in the history of the world. He adds that although Michelangelo went on to paint the Sistine Chapel, he never again reached the heights of his battle cartoon.

  Perhaps what is most extraordinary in this memory is that Cellini is speaking with such reverence not of paintings, but of very large drawings.

  When Leonardo returned to Florence in 1500 he had amazed the city with a cartoon, a full-scale preparatory drawing, for a composition of the Virgin and St. Anne. Today in the National Gallery, London, his only extant cartoon—also representing the Virgin and St. Anne—hangs near his oil painting The Virgin of the Rocks. The oil painting always draws a bigger crowd than the cartoon nearby. Eyes are drawn to the colours and brightness of oil paint, while a cartoon, just chalk on paper, requires much greater adjustment and imagination on the beholder’s part.

  In Florence in the early sixteenth century this imagination was not lacking. People were more than ready to contemplate drawings and compare Michelangelo and Leonardo on this basis. Leonardo’s earlier triumph with his Annunziata cartoon revealed the sensitivity and radicalism of Florentine eyes. A city that had already seen two centuries of artistic experiment since the days of Giotto was ready to take the final leap and value artists not for their finished works, but for their ideas. It might seem as if the Great Council Hall competition was a dismal failure, and an embarrassment, for the Florentine Republic. Only one of the artists even began to paint in the Hall, and Leonardo did not finish what he started. But it did not matter. For young artists like Cellini, whose very vocations were shaped by it, the competition was about genius; it was about looking into the minds of great creative spirits.

  In 1514 Albrecht Dürer, who was very familiar with the reputations of both Leonardo and Michelangelo, engraved Melencolia I, a winged woman who sits brooding among the tools of sculpture, architecture, and knowledge. She holds a pair of dividers limply in one hand, while the other supports her shadowed face. Nails and a saw, a plane, a hammer, and stone models of the type of geometrical solids Leonardo loved to analyse are scattered about. She seems to have lost faith in her work and sits there, blackly pondering. This image of melancholic paralysis is a portrait of the “saturnine” character the Renaissance ascribed to creative geniuses. The idea was disseminated b
y Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine Neoplatonist philosopher, whose works Dürer knew.

  Dürer’s icon of Melancholy explicitly associates majesty of invention with loss of direction and lassitude. It implies that all truly great artists and thinkers have difficulty finishing their works. It could almost be an epitaph for the career of Leonardo da Vinci, and it is also an insight into why no one thought the Great Council Hall contest a washout. To leave works unfinished is what real geniuses do. Lesser souls can learn an infinite amount simply by contemplating and copying these essays and fragments. This is the kind of idea we tend to believe has only flourished since the age of Cézanne. In reality it flourished in the sixteenth century.

  This was why, to the great acclaim of young artists, the cartoons of Leonardo and Michelangelo were displayed in competition in Florence from 1506 to the last days of the Republic six years later. Cellini recalls going from one cartoon to another to drink from the fountain of these supreme works: “These cartoons were kept one in the Medici Palace and the other in the Sala del Papa. While they remained there, they served as the school of the world.”

  Although Leonardo made use of a cartoon to paint in the Palace, this seems to have been a subsidiary working copy, while his original that he took so long to draw remained on display in his working space at Santa Maria Novella. Monies paid for cartoon paper just before he started painting in 1505 presumably record the creation of the copy to pounce through and tear up in the process of painting while his original graphic masterpiece was preserved in the Sala del Papa.

  Meanwhile Michelangelo’s cartoon seems to have moved around in the course of its display. The room where he had drawn it was less central than the Sala del Papa, so The Battle of Cascina was taken elsewhere. Vasari says the cartoon was “carried to the Sala del Papa with huge praise from artists and the greatest glory for Michelangelo.” Condivi confirms that the immense drawing was “left by Michelangelo in the Sala del Papa, at it was called, in Florence at Santa Maria Novella.”

  This was, at last, a direct, head-to-head comparison of the two battles. The Battle of Cascina could be seen in the same hall as The Battle of Anghiari—except it was the Hall of the Pope instead of the Great Council Hall. Later, Michelangelo’s drawing seems to have moved again. At some point it was apparently taken to the prestigious setting of the Great Upper Hall of the Medici house on Via Larga—presumably towards 1512, when the Medici were rebuilding their base in the city.

  A guide to Florence published in 1510, on the other hand, tells a different story. Francesco Albertini’s Memorial of Statues and Works of Art in Florence is an artistic guide to the city that appeared in the last days of the Republic and offers an eyewitness account of the public art sponsored by Soderini. It’s a fascinating handlist compiled by a priest of where famous works of art were at that moment—in other words, in 1510. And it contains a surprise: “Nella sala grande nova del consiglio maiore, lunga brac. 104. larga 40. è una tavola di fra Philippo, li cavalli di Leonard. Vinci et le disegni di Michelangelo.”

  Like some modern guides, Albertini can’t resist giving the exact dimensions—104 braccia long by 40 braccia wide! (a braccia being an arm’s length)—of the Great Council Hall. The works of art he mentions there include an altarpiece by Fra Bartolommeo, itself an unfinished work. This was the commission that had originally gone to Filippino Lippi; after he died Soderini gave the job to Fra Bartolommeo, a Dominican friar and follower of Savonarola—it was a blatantly political choice. In having a Savonarolan paint the Hall’s altarpiece the Republic was once again paying lip service to the piety of the prophet’s admirers. Although unfinished, the painting went on view anyway; you can see it today in the Museum of San Marco in Florence, a classical, dignified composition of the Virgin and patron saints by a painter who had much in common with Raphael as a master of order and harmony.

  With the display of this unfinished work it appears that in 1510 the Florentine Republic was doing its utmost to make the best of things in the Great Council Hall. In addition to Fra Bartolommeo’s incomplete painting, it staged an exhibition of the rival works by the greatest Florentine artists of all. As well as “li cavalli di Leonard. Vinci”—the painted horses of The Battle of Anghiari—you could see “le disegni di Michelangelo.”

  “The drawings of Michelangelo”: in 1510, according to Albertini, Michelangelo’s cartoon could be seen in the Great Council Hall along with Leonardo’s painting. Meanwhile, at Santa Maria Novella you could still see Leonardo’s cartoon—“disegni di Leonardo da Vinci.”

  There is of course an ambiguity here—the author says disegni, drawings. Could it have been preparatory drawings by Michelangelo that were on view in the Hall? This would still further deepen the sense of an exhibition that celebrated the creative process itself.

  In 1508 Michelangelo wrote a letter of recommendation for a young Spanish artist who wanted to see his cartoon. He wrote from Rome to his brother Buonarroto in Florence: “Buonarroto, the bearer of this will be a young Spaniard, who is coming there to learn to paint, and has asked me to make it possible for him to see the cartoon I began at the Sala; anyway try to make it that he can have the keys, and if you can help him in any way, do it for love of me, because he is a nice lad …” It didn’t go well for this young artistic pilgrim who apparently wanted to visit the Sala del Papa—or could the ambiguously named Sala have been the Great Council Hall itself? On 29 July Michelangelo wrote sarcastically to Buonarroto of his gratitude to the cartoon’s custodians at the Palace: “I learnt that the Spaniard has not been given grace to go to the Sala. I was indeed gratified; but solicit them on my part, when you see them, to do the same for others, and recommend me to them.”

  Did Michelangelo’s intervention make the Florentine government rethink the way it was displaying his cartoon? His letter suggests it was not that easy to view—you had to have permission and a loan of the keys to enter the Hall of the Pope. Yet the Spanish artist’s visit was confirmation of the growing fame of the Great Council Hall designs. Perhaps it helped encourage the Republic to display Michelangelo’s Bathers in the Great Council Hall, where Albertini locates them. But the word Sala does leave open the possibility that an exhibition of the two rival battles already took place there by 1508. Any such triumph for the Republic disappeared from the city’s histories. It was a memory laid waste by the Medici.

  Artists flocked to study the gigantic rival cartoons and to admire Leonardo’s unfinished painting. The competition shaped a generation. Among the very first to learn from them was Raphael. We’ve already encountered some of his interpretations of works by Leonardo and Michelangelo. At the heart of his study of the two titans loomed their battle cartoons. A copy by him survives in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, of The Battle of Anghiari; the small, quick, extremely precise drawing looks as if it was sketched on the spot while he was admiring Leonardo’s work. Yet when he started making great history paintings of his own, it was Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina that most gripped him. We can see its influence very clearly in his Entombment, painted in 1507. This majestic, emotive vision of the burial of Christ was commissioned in memory of a youth killed in the faction fighting that bedevilled the city of Perugia. Raphael’s large group of figures is organised at sloping, drastic angles in contradiction to one another: this way of suggesting agitation owes a lot to the tormented arrangement of Michelangelo’s nude soldiers.

  The Battle of Cascina peoples the frescoes Raphael went on to paint in Rome in the Vatican apartments of Julius II. In his utopian School of Athens (1509–10), a semi-nude figure running in from the far left is visibly adapted from one of the soldiers in Michelangelo’s cartoon. Once you spot this, further echoes abound. Even the way the huge group of philosophers in this painting is organised—above, on, and below a flight of steps—suggests Cascina with the rocks become stairs. The difference is that Raphael wants to communicate harmony instead of panic, but the idea that so many bodies can be made to function together in a noble crowd scene is beholden to Mic
helangelo’s Florentine history. Raphael’s dramatic fresco The Fire in the Borgo (c. 1516–17) returns again to Michelangelo to capture the essence of panic and terror, as people try to escape a burning city; nudes, contortions, all the muscular drama of The Battle of Cascina is here.

  Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea (1511–12) in the Villa Farnesina, Rome, features trumpeting tritons who echo a musician in Michelangelo’s design. Twisting watery nudes pay homage again to the Florentine soldiers jumping out of the Arno. But the influence of The Battle of Anghiari is unmistakable, too. Sea horses and rearing dolphins and a swirling composition around a dominant central figure hark back to the energy and cyclic ferment of Leonardo’s history painting and the closely related drawing he made of Neptune ruling the waves.

  Raphael’s ultimate tribute to the Great Council Hall cartoons was to emulate their cult status and influence. In 1515–16 he designed tapestries for the Sistine Chapel, but he made sure his cartoons for them were so finished, including being coloured in gouache, that these works on paper were considered worth preserving in their own right. In later centuries they were revered and widely emulated, ending up in Britain’s Royal Collection.

  So Raphael’s entire concept of narrative painting, which was to be admired and imitated for centuries in the loftiest frescoes and public art, begins in his witnessing the Great Council Hall competition. He can’t let go of his memory of it. In fact, even after he’d seen Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, it was still the Battles of Anghiari and Cascina that he kept acknowledging, reassessing, reimagining. Raphael did—notoriously—sneak into the Sistine Chapel to imitate Michelangelo’s latest forms. But it is the battle pictures that seem more crucial to his conception of public painting. It provides surprising evidence in support of what might at first seem Cellini’s bombastical, exaggerated claim that Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina was better than his later works in the Sistine Chapel.