The Lost Battles Read online

  Maybe not better, but there was an obvious reason why the Battles might strike artists as more useful, more reusable, than the ceiling that Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint in 1508. What he did in the Vatican would leave comparisons behind. The Sistine Ceiling is less a painting than an event: the images up there cannot be fully experienced in isolation from their setting or from the heroic solitary labour that produced them. This is the purest expression of Michelangelo’s effacement of boundaries between himself and his work, the sense that a moment of creation goes on forever in them and that when you lean back to see the ceiling, you are really getting a glimpse of the artist’s physical ordeal in painting it.

  The ceiling is unique. It cannot be imitated. One panel in it also provides evidence that Cellini’s claim for The Battle of Cascina really was over the top. Michelangelo started painting the vault of the Sistine Chapel from the back of the room, furthest from the altar: you can see his painting become freer and bolder as he moves towards the last scenes to be painted—the images of Creation, including God making the sun and earth and giving life to Adam. One of the earliest panels to be painted is therefore one of the last in the story he tells—his picture of the Flood; this must surely look to any spectator like a far more static and crowded composition than the exhilaratingly open images he went on to paint further along the ceiling. It is also impossible to miss the fact that it is derived from his cartoon for The Battle of Cascina. He reuses his own work as he paints people heaving themselves out of the floodwaters onto rocks. This gives us the chance to compare The Battle of Cascina with the overall wonder of the Sistine Ceiling and see that it was, however brilliant, a less exceptional work.

  Michelangelo, The Flood, Sistine Chapel, Rome, 1508–12. The people pulling themselves from the water strongly resemble the Cascina soldiers leaping from the Arno. (illustration credit 14.1)

  That was precisely why it so influenced other artists. In the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo achieves something no one could ever hope to rival. It is him, it is part of his life. By contrast, The Battle of Cascina was a—wildly original, perverse, and mannered—contribution to a genre, the heroic wall painting, that had existed before and would continue to exist. It could be absorbed into the tradition in a way the Sistine Ceiling could not.

  If it fitted in a tradition, it did something singular to that tradition. Both Leonardo’s and Michelangelo’s designs were full of eccentric details. Frenzied faces, monstrous armour, twisting bodies, convoluted poses, masks, and mad horses—between them the two Great Council Hall images provided sixteenth-century artists with a banquet of oddities. This was because Leonardo and Michelangelo competed to assert their personalities, their individual imaginations. That was why people valued the cartoons, too—because it was the minds of the artists that fascinated them. In these fantastical works, two geniuses tried to outdo one another in sheer quiddity. Their battle pictures were singular to the point of being mannered.

  This made the battle cartoons founding works of a kind of art that came to be identified with maniera, “manner” or “style”—today known as Mannerism. Even as the Renaissance reached its summit of majestic authority, it broke up into playful eccentricity; and if the Great Council Hall competition led to the Sistine Ceiling, it also led to the sometimes superb, sometimes slight, always wilful originalities of artists such as Cellini and his contemporary Bronzino. An outrageous example of how Mannerist artists quoted the Great Council Hall designs is in Bronzino’s seductive Allegory with Venus and Cupid, painted in Florence in the 1540s. Behind the glowing white nude bodies of Venus and her son is a dark, downcast, screaming, monstrous face: it probably represents Envy, or perhaps Syphilis. But it is a reversed copy of the face of Niccolò Piccinino in The Battle of Anghiari—the same mouth, the same rage, everything. Bronzino’s intensely precious, ornamental, and stylised erotic allegory pays homage to the grotesque imagination of Leonardo.

  Bronzino was the pupil and close friend of one of the founders of Mannerist art, Jacopo Pontormo, whom Vasari lists among those who looked long and hard at Michelangelo’s cartoon: “Aristotile da San Gallo, who was Michelangelo’s friend, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Raphael, Francesco Granacci, Baccio Bandinelli, and the Spanish artist Alonzo Berughetta [perhaps the bearer of Michelangelo’s letter of recommendation], and next Andrea del Sarto, Franciabigio, Jacopo Sansovino, Rosso Fiorentino, Maturino, Lorenzetto, Tribolo as a boy, Jacopo da Pontormo, and Perino del Vaga; and they all became outstanding Florentine masters.” The names are a roll call of the makers of Mannerism, of this openly perverse style that deliberately twisted and polished things to stress above all else the ingenuity of the artist. Condivi calls the cartoon for The Battle of Cascina “arteficiosissimo,” a Mannerist term of praise if ever there was one. In stressing the “most highly wrought” character of his cartoon to Condivi, surely Michelangelo is confessing to something about it—the way he deliberately courted quirkiness and preciousness to outdo Leonardo as an original. He is also seeing it retrospectively as a Mannerist work, similar to some of his later wilful creations such as the New Sacristy in San Lorenzo, Florence. At the core of Mannerism was the belief that what matters is artistic originality, to the point of eccentricity—and this idea can be traced directly to the Great Council Hall competition.

  Bronzino, An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, circa 1545. The face of the old warrior from The Battle of Anghiari is copied (in reverse) at the left of this Mannerist picture. (illustration credit 14.2)

  Vasari says these artists studied Michelangelo’s cartoon, but their own works reveal they looked hard at Leonardo’s Battle as well. Pontormo drew in the 1520s a cartoon for his painting The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand, a grisly scene of mass martyrdom, in competition with Perino del Vaga. The very fact that they produced competitive drawings for paintings is a—mannered—homage to the Great Council Hall competition. In Pontormo’s highly imaginative version, there are vivid echoes of Leonardo’s Battle—wild riders, men fighting with daggers on the ground—and quotations too of figures in The Battle of Cascina. Pontormo must have passed on his enthusiasm for these battles to Bronzino.

  Among works by other Mannerists who studied the cartoon, the massive, straining nudes of The Battle of Cascina return in Rosso Fiorentino’s Moses and the Daughters of Jephron (1523–4) in the Uffizi, while The Battle of Anghiari is emulated in Giulio Romano’s Battle of Constantine in the Vatican (1521). Giulio responds more creatively to the power and energy of the Great Council Hall works in his cascading, all-embracing tumult of massive bodies, the Sala dei Giganti in Mantua (1532–4). In Francesco I’s Studiolo in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence you spot the bodies of Michelangelo’s bathers among the pearl fishers and wool workers.

  At the end of the sixteenth century the virtuoso painter Caravaggio made a painting to give to the Medici family as a present. His Medusa, in its elaborate rivalry with Leonardo da Vinci, might be seen as one of the last Mannerist paintings.

  Simply looking at the snake-haired Medusa in Greek myth could turn the unfortunate observer to stone. In art this monster became associated with the imaginative power of Leonardo, who was said to have painted a Medusa that in the sixteenth century was in the proud possession of the Medici family. Perhaps Leonardo painted a Medusa that was lost, perhaps he never painted one at all. Either way, the image of this monster became snakily entangled with the memory of the old warrior’s howling visage in The Battle of Anghiari. Early copies of Leonardo’s Medusa actually give it the face of Niccolò Piccinino. So does the head that stares out of Caravaggio’s painted shield.

  Caravaggio painted his Medusa gift for the Medici with a visceral energy that vies not just with Leonardo’s painting but also with the hideous monster that Vasari says the young genius made from dead animals then painted on a shield. Caravaggio, too, painted his monster on a round shield—the painting was hung by the Medici in their armoury. And it is easy to believe that, like Leonardo, he had filled his workshop with dead snakes because the se
rpents of Medusa’s hair look so writhingly real. Caravaggio’s decapitated monster gazes in frozen horror and terror at its own mirrored image, its mouth open in a scream that is the prolongation of the silent cry echoing from the Great Council Hall.

  The cartoons that were shown in competition in Florence from about 1506 to 1512 were revered, studied, ransacked. The Great Council Hall competition cast a long, complex shadow in Italian sixteenth-century art, inspiring a new cult of artistic originality. But if the huge drawings were so treasured, what became of them? For they have vanished off the face of the earth.

  Vasari tells two stories about how Michelangelo’s cartoon for The Battle of Cascina got destroyed. In his “Life of Michelangelo,” he says it was killed by love. In his “Life of Baccio Bandinelli,” which didn’t appear until the second edition of the Lives in 1568, he says it was killed by hate.

  When the cartoon was placed in the Medici Palace, he says in Michelangelo’s “Life,” this great work on paper was not looked after carefully enough. As one artist after another came to study it without adequate supervision, they succumbed, one after another, to a terrible temptation. They tore off bits of the cartoon. It disappeared piece by piece until nothing was left. The very adoration it received obliterated it. In his “Life” of a personal enemy, Baccio Bandinelli, Vasari claims that when the city was in turmoil at the fall of Soderini, this Baccio got the keys to the Medici house. Taking out a knife, he slashed Michelangelo’s cartoon and tore it to bits until there was not a single viable scrap left. He might have done it for many reasons, says Vasari. Some said “that he was moved to do this by his affection for Leonardo da Vinci, from whom the cartoon of Buonarroto had taken away much reputation …” Baccio was pursuing a vendetta on Leonardo’s behalf.

  The image in Vasari’s “Life of Michelangelo” of artists carrying away souvenirs raises the weird possibility that all the quotations of The Battle of Cascina in sixteenth-century art are not just memories. Some of the artists may have had scraps of the cartoon in their possession to work from. Some pieces were said to survive in the 1550s, “looked after with the greatest diligence as if they were sacred things,” says Condivi; and Vasari speaks of some fragments in a house in Mantua. But none are known to exist today. The destruction of the cartoon for The Battle of Anghiari was just as complete. A fragment in Oxford may conceivably be part of the secondary cartoon that Leonardo’s men worked from in the Great Council Hall.

  Perhaps the reason Florentine officials were reluctant to hand over the keys to the Sala del Papa in 1508 was because the cartoons were already badly damaged; there is also the ambiguous word Albertinelli uses in his Memoriale: disegni, “drawings.” He says you can see drawings, plural, by Michelangelo in the Great Council Hall and by Leonardo at Santa Maria Novella. Could this refer to surviving fragments of cartoons already partially torn up by 1510?

  This does seem a very plausible interpretation. It appears unlikely that Michelangelo’s small preparatory drawings would have been shown in the Great Council Hall—the space was too vast for them to make an impact. And while it might be possible for a beholder to refer to the multiple figures of Michelangelo’s Bathers in the plural as “drawings,” this would not make sense as a description of Leonardo’s intensely centred composition. It might make sense, however, if the cartoons were already in pieces, already on their way to vanishing, by 1510. It was oddly appropriate. The competition became a display of creative originality, and its very relics were absorbed into the creative process, vanishing into the life of art. A strange thought is that all the precise quotations of the lost battles in Renaissance painting—such as the head of Piccinino in Bronzino’s Allegory—may not simply be accurate copies. Some may have actually been made using fragments of the cartoons as templates.

  The fact is that neither of the cartoons seems to have survived the return of the Medici to Florence in 1512. After the sack of Prato came the ravaging of the Great Council Hall. The bigger picture is suggestive and disturbing. The competition in the Hall was initiated by the Florentine Republic, to dignify a space sanctified to Savonarola and the revolution that threw the Medici out. When the politically adept family came back in 1512, they vented their wrath on the Hall itself, deliberately desecrating it, using it as a barracks. Is it a coincidence that neither of the cartoons survived this crisis? It seems at least worth considering the possibility that what finally erased these masterpieces of drawing and invention from the world was neither the love of artists nor the hate of a Leonardo disciple carrying out a vendetta on Michelangelo, but politics. If so, it would match the eventual fate of the last surviving relic of the competition.

  FIFTEEN

  Prisoners

  The young people worked all night to sweep and scrub and wash their beloved Great Council Hall, to purge it of Medici filth. It was May 1527, and once again revolution had swept aside the ruling family of Florence. The city cast off its Medici overlords, declared a return to Republican liberty, and reinstated the Great Council. The age limit was set younger than ever before, at just twenty-four, and this fitted the intense and exalted mood of the time. For millenarian politics were sweeping Europe. The Reformation had brought subversive hopes and possibilities in northern Europe, and recently German peasants had taken its overturning of the traditional order at face value by rising against their overlords. In Florence, the faith of Savonarola was once again firing the young. The new Republic proclaimed Christ its only king.

  It was a long time since Michelangelo had been the young idealist who had carved David. In riots that preceded the expulsion of the Medici in 1527, the arm of his statue was broken by a stone hurled from the roof of Palazzo della Signoria. He himself was in Florence, working on the tombs of the Medici family in the New Sacristy of their parish church, San Lorenzo. He was fifty-two. The most famous and revered artist in Italy, he was enjoying a second career as an architect. His poetry was increasingly read and admired. He was feted by young artists who vied for his approval. His chief patron was Pope Clement VII, born Giulio de’ Medici, head of the Medici family. It was Clement who employed him to create the Medici tombs and whom he needed for any future work in Rome. For artists it was wise to side with the powerful, especially as no one believed this Republic would last.

  The fall of the Medici in 1527 came about because Clement was humiliated by a Habsburg army that attacked Rome, sacked the Eternal City, and besieged the Pope in Castel Sant’ Angelo. This seemed the nadir of the Papacy and of the Medici family, who had dominated the holy office since the death of Julius II (before Clement, the family produced Pope Leo X). It was the Papacy that ensured Medici rule over Florence as the autonomy of city-states declined. In a world of lofty power-brokers, with Italy the plaything of Spain, France, and the Church, the disaster of the sack of Rome was soon rectified. Charles V, a Catholic ruler embarrassed by his army’s transgressions in Rome, found himself trying to please and compensate Clement VII, and what the Pope wanted was a Habsburg imperial army sent to crush the upstart Republic of Florence.

  Benvenuto Cellini, the boy who saw the Great Council Hall competition and had now grown up to be a leading goldsmith, got a personal message from Clement advising him to leave Florence and show which side he was on. He promptly complied. What choice was there for a craftsman dependent on patronage in Rome? But Michelangelo made a different choice. In 1506 he had defied a Pope on an issue of pride. Now he stood up to a Pope again, in defence of his city.

  He stayed in Florence and applied himself to the art of war. In his youthful Battle of Cascina and David he had created heroic images of the ideal citizen-soldier. The nude army he drew in his cartoon for the Great Council Hall embodied citizens ready to fight for liberty. This idealism had helped him win his competition with Leonardo; but it was no calculated move. It was sincere—as he would now prove. In 1528 he set out to solve a problem at the heart of republican political theory. Machiavelli, in arguing that citizens should fight for their own cities, revived an ancient belief that
was contradicted by the brutal realities of the artillery age. In reality, how could the bravery of citizens stand up to cannon? How could a city-republic be maintained by its people when city walls were no use anymore?

  Michelangelo now himself volunteered as a citizen-soldier, but his weapons were not a sword and pike. He would use his architectural knowledge to reinvent the science of fortification and give the brave young men he watched training on the piazzas something more than daring to save their lives when they faced the tyrant’s guns. In 1528 he drew designs for an ambitious remodelling of the city’s fortifications and was appointed to the Ten of War. In 1529, as Commander of Fortifications, he created brilliant last-minute defences for the city as the imperial army approached. Now the famous artist in his fifties stood shoulder to shoulder with young Florentines ready to die for their city’s freedom.

  This was the last stand of an ancient ideology. Renaissance republicanism evolved out of medieval communal values and classical theory. It was already virtually extinct when Machiavelli and Soderini tried to defend it in the early 1500s. Now it was truly a threatened species, and the great powers were prepared to crush Florence with devastating force to kill it off. In Florence, as Savonarola’s prophecies were avidly reinterpreted, young men volunteered for militia companies—not rural conscripts this time but real citizen-soldiers, who drilled proudly on the piazzas as war approached. Jacopo Pontormo portrayed two of them standing to attention, gazing out of the canvas, defying tyrants and fortune alike. Pontormo’s two great Republican portraits of Carlo Neroni and Francesco Guardi done in 1529–30 are conspicuously similar to the portrait of a young soldier in front of David, attributed to Granacci, that dates from 1510. Like the earlier work, they stress the youth and readiness of their subjects: Guardi, in a sensual masterpiece now in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, looks out of the picture especially boldly. He is dressed in red pants with a codpiece, a creamy silk tunic, a red cap. He clutches his phallic pikestaff bravely even though he’s visibly just a teenager. Emulating David in a similar way to the older picture by Granacci, the young citizen-soldier stands vigilant, ready. Even though he is dressed, his delicate clothes offer little protection. It is a study of foolhardy young courage. Pontormo’s portrait of Carlo Neroni is even more explicitly a homage to Michelangelo as its subject looks fiercely to the left, actively imitating the glare of David.