The Lost Battles Read online

  Once Leonardo had created his monster, he sat down to paint its portrait on the round shield. Finally, he invited his father to see the result. The painting was so realistic that when the door opened on the teenager’s darkened room, it looked as if he had some hideous living creature in there that belched fire. Ser Piero was terrified; his son was delighted, for this was the desired effect.

  Vasari also tells how, after Leonardo completed his apprenticeship in Verrocchio’s painting-and-sculpture workshop, the young genius went to Milan to play for its ruler Ludovico Sforza on a grotesque-looking lyre of his own invention. Later he relates how Leonardo made a robot lion to greet the king of France that walked forward, then opened to reveal a cargo of lilies; and how sometimes for fun he would inflate a pig’s bladder like a balloon, pumping it up until it filled an entire room. One might take these to be tall tales. But Leonardo really did move from Florence to Milan in 1481–2, working there for Ludovico Sforza until 1499; he really did make a robot lion; and he wrote in his notebooks about how to create bizarre effects such as an explosion inside a room.

  Leonardo’s death offers Vasari a final folkloric image of fame. Having left Italy to end his days as court painter to the French king, the old artist was visited on his deathbed by the monarch in 1519: “A paroxysm came to him, the messenger of death; on account of which the King having got up and taken his head in his arms to help him and favour him, in order to ease his pain, his spirit, which was so divine, knowing it was not possible to have a greater honour, expired in the arms of that King, in his seventy-fifth year.”

  If Vasari’s image of the death of Leonardo is poignant, his explanation of how it was that such an eminent Florentine genius ended his days not just far from Florence but outside Italy itself is one of the most extravagant claims in his entire book. It seems that Leonardo had a potent enemy: their rivalry bordered on vendetta: “There was very great disdain [sdegno grandissimo] between Michelangelo Buonarroti and him; because of which Michelangelo departed from Florence for the competition, with the permission of Duke Giuliano, having been called by the Pope for the façade of San Lorenzo. Leonardo understanding this departed, and went to France …” Of all the anecdotes in Vasari’s “Life of Leonardo,” this is the most tantalising.

  Vasari was not the first writer to tell tales about Leonardo’s strained relationship with Michelangelo. Anecdotes about artists were part and parcel of the storytelling culture of Renaissance Italy. This goes back ultimately to the ancient Roman author Pliny the Elder, who included anecdotes about famous Greek artists in his Natural History. Boccaccio himself includes a funny story about the painter Giotto in the Decameron. One of the earliest accounts of Leonardo was written by the novelist Matteo Bandello, who, having as a novice monk at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan in the 1490s witnessed the painting of The Last Supper, introduces Leonardo as a character in his Novelle and even has him narrate a tale of his own, about the amorous friar and painter Filippo Lippi.

  Rumours of some vicious, irreconcilable enmity between Leonardo and his younger contemporary started to circulate in Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century. Such a feud was bound to fascinate a culture in which ritualised vendetta was practised as readily by artists as by aristocrats. The autobiography of the Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini is full of stories about his rivalries, grudges, and brutal acts of revenge. This was a fiercely competitive world and also one obsessed with “honour,” with the public image of a man and his family, which must not be sullied by insults or slights. Vasari tells tales in which artists do not merely try to outdo one another but even in one case commit murder out of professional jealousy. The story that the century’s two greatest artists loathed each other found a ready audience.

  In the 1540s—that is, before the publication of Vasari’s Lives—an anonymous Florentine author compiled a manuscript collection of reminiscences about artists that anticipates his comment on the geniuses’ mutual “disdain.” This writer, known as the Anonimo Magliabechiano, tells how Leonardo was walking in Florence “by the benches at Palazzo Spini, where there was a gathering of gentlemen debating a passage in Dante’s poetry. They hailed Leonardo, asking him to explain it to them.” Leonardo’s brilliance was, it would seem, well-known to Florentine citizens. But he passed on the compliment:

  It happened that just then Michelangelo passed by and one of them called him over. And Leonardo said: “Michelangelo will explain it to you.” It seemed to Michelangelo that Leonardo had said this to mock him. He replied angrily: “You explain it yourself, you who designed a horse to be cast in bronze but couldn’t cast it and abandoned it in shame.” And having said this, he turned his back on them and left. Leonardo remained there, his face turning red.

  A precious clue testifies to the reliability of this tale—a striking, physical clue. It seems that the Anonimo’s informant had an excellent visual memory of Leonardo, for his story of the insult at Palazzo Spini is preceded by a precise pen portrait of Michelangelo’s victim in what must have been about 1504: “[Leonardo] cut a fine figure, well-proportioned, pleasant and good looking. He wore a pink [rosato] cloak …”

  That pink cloak is a startling detail. In the painter’s inventory of the clothes chest he left in the monastery, the predominant colours in his wardrobe are pink and purple. The colour terms rosa and rosato recur so often that it’s safe to say this was the colour you were most likely to remember Leonardo wearing if you’d seen him around Florence. Among the items he mentioned were:

  Una gabanella di rosa seca [one dusty-rose-coloured gown]

  Un catelano rosato [one rose-pink Catalan cloak]

  Un pa’ di calze in rosa seca [one pair of rose-pink hose]

  Due berette rosate [two rose-pink caps]

  Leonardo’s rosy clothes were memorable—so memorable that an eyewitness accurately recalled their hue forty years later, along with bitter words exchanged between famous men in the street.

  The clothing inventory that Leonardo left in Madrid Codex II gives a good story the colour of an authentic eyewitness account. It is not a secondhand bit of information retold years later, but a note from Leonardo’s hand that puts him in pink clothes, just as the witness remembered, that day in front of the Palazzo Spini.

  The Spini is a formidable survivor, an urban castle with crenellated battlements that glower on the swanky shopping street that is today’s Via Tornabuoni. At once toweringly Gothic and discreetly elegant, its façade bowed and twisted by the irregularities of the medieval city and perforated by arched windows that glisten with wealth, in the twenty-first century Palazzo Spini is home to an eminent fashion house, its tough stone mass the perfect foil for displays of blue and yellow patent-leather shoes. It was outside this building that Michelangelo insulted Leonardo.

  The triangular space to the north of the Spini is the kind of Italian urban setting, formed naturally in the course of time by a gathering of mighty façades closing off a little piazza, that feels like a purpose-designed theatrical stage. Florence specialises in such superb sets for impromptu street theatre. On a summer night, mopeds are parked here, lovers sit close together on marble ledges. The walker southward past the palace soon comes to the river Arno, where, in the summer dark, teenagers perch dangerously above the black waters on the stone pontoons of Ponte Santa Trinità, savouring the eerily beautiful midnight view of the Ponte Vecchio, its freight of ancient craftsmen’s workshops glowing in the velvet dark.

  The “Chain Map” of Florence, circa 1480. Young men fish in the river Arno and palaces crowd within the walls in this image of the fifteenth-century city. (illustration credit 1.1)

  In the early 1500s there was a public space outside Palazzo Spini where citizens sometimes congregated. The gatherings were all-male. In Italian cities five hundred years ago the only time respectable women were seen in numbers on the street was during their early-morning walk to church. The rest of the time, the drama of civic life was masculine. To taste its flavour, look at Leonardo’s fresco The
Last Supper. All the men here, like the “gathering of gentlemen debating a passage in Dante’s poetry” that day in front of the palazzo, are passionate and argumentative. They make their emotions visible through hand gestures. When the great German poet and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote about The Last Supper in the early nineteenth century, he compared the disciples’ gestures with the hand signals people still used for emphasis on Italian streets in his day.

  In his play La Mandragola, a grittily real comedy of city life set in 1504, although first performed in 1525, Niccolò Machiavelli has a character go looking for someone in what would, at that time, have been all the obvious places: “I’ve been at his house, on the Piazza, the Market, the Spini Works [Pancone delli Spini], the Loggia of the Tornaquinci …” Thus the Spini was one of the places where a bad penny would turn up. He also mentions Tornaquinci, a nearby corner where five streets meet, in fact a brief walk further north on Via Tornabuoni. One of the most vivid records of everyday life in Renaissance Florence is the diary of Luca Landucci, an apothecary who kept a shop at Tornaquinci. One day in February 1501 he came out of his shop to watch a blistering scene. Two convicted murderers were being driven through the streets of Florence

  on [a] cart, being tormented very cruelly with pincers all through the city; and here at Tornaquinci the stove for heating the pincers broke. And not much fire being seen, and with it failing to flame, the officer, threatening the executioner, made him stop the cart, and the executioner got off and went for charcoals to the charcoal-burner, and for fire to Malcinto the baker, and took a pot for the stove, with which he made a great fire. The officer yelled constantly: “Make it scorching”; and it was as if all the people wished to do them great harm without pity. And the boys wanted to assassinate the executioner if he didn’t torture them well, for which reason they [the condemned men] screamed most terribly. And all this I saw here at Tornaquinci.

  The style of theatre that took place on the streets of a Renaissance city was bloody and extreme. Without having to leave his own shop, Landucci saw a drama of intense physical suffering, terror, hate: prisoners’ flesh being torn from their bodies with hot pincers, an officer roaring at his underling, a mob on the verge of taking the law into its own hands.

  This is not the Florence one sees today, looking down from the hill of San Miniato just outside the city walls. The skyline, to be sure, is remarkably unchanged. All the landmarks that dominate the vista of Florence on a bronze summer evening are the same today as on old maps: the slender pink, white, and green ribbon of Giotto’s Campanile; the tall, sloping roof of Santa Croce; the spire of the Badia; the tall watchtower of the fortified Palazzo Vecchio brown and fierce near to the glowing river; and, at the heart of everything, the Cathedral Dome, that white-ribbed terracotta imitation of the vault of heaven itself. The city lies there in the warm air like a set of jewels, and it would take an insensitive soul to resist a romantic sigh. But this beauty was always in tension with a gory, visceral, earthy everyday life of conflict, individualism, competition, violence. Today the street life of Florence is genteel and touristy—half a millennium ago it was far more vital. What has vanished is the human past. What we fail to hear as we contemplate the beauty of Florence are the screams of prisoners having their flesh ripped off with hot pincers.

  The row between Michelangelo and Leonardo that day at the Spini palace was as typical a scene of this world as the spectacle of public torture. Giving—and replying to—insults was a Florentine obsession. The entire Sixth Day of Boccaccio’s Decameron consists of stories about “those who, tried by some graceful witticism, have roused themselves to make a prompt riposte, escaping loss, danger or scorn.” The heroes of these stories demonstrate superior wit and mental agility by thinking up a reply to their verbal attacker: a brilliant comeback that turns the insulted victim into the witty victor. Leonardo shared this admiration for the barbed reply. Indeed, in a part of the Madrid Codex II that dates from the time of his confrontation with Michelangelo he tells his own story about a man who was insulted: “Someone once told off a man of worth for not being legitimate. To which the man replied that he was legitimate according to the conventions of the human species and the laws of nature. But that his accuser on the other hand according to nature’s laws was a bastard, because he had the habits more of a beast than a man, while by the laws of men he could not be certain of being legitimate …” Here Leonardo imagines the insulted man replying with devastating force. There is surely a personal animus in his calling the unnamed accuser the real bastardo, who behaves more like a wild animal than a man. It sounds as if he himself endured the insult and now is replying in fantasy—as if someone was hateful enough to upbraid Leonardo da Vinci for being illegitimate, as in truth he was, for Ser Piero had conceived him out of wedlock while sowing his wild oats with Caterina, a farmer’s daughter.

  Once again, Leonardo’s recorded thoughts and feelings tantalisingly strengthen the lurid narratives of the first biographers. And his imagined reply is curious. His antagonist has “the habits more of a beast than a man,” he rages. Leonardo penned an attack on the characters of sculptors which contains a personal caricature of the most famous one he knew:

  Between painting and sculpture I find no difference, except that the sculptor undertakes his works with greater strain of body than the painter, and the painter undertakes his works with greater strain of mind, which is proved to be true because the sculptor in making his works does so by force of arm and of percussion to wear away the marble or other stone and uncover the figure enclosed within, which is a most mechanical exercise often accompanied by great sweat, compounded with dust and turning to mud, with a face all pasted and floured with marble dust that makes him look like a baker, and he is covered with tiny fragments, so he seems to have snow on his back, and his house is dirty …

  This text appears in the Codex Urbinas, a manuscript compiled from Leonardo’s writings after his death by his pupil and companion Francesco Melzi, so there is every chance that it was written late and refers directly to the person it seems to portray—Michelangelo Buonarroti. Sculpture did not always mean chipping away marble to reveal an image—in the Verrocchio workshop where Leonardo trained, bronze and terracotta were used as well as stone—but it is how Michelangelo defined it. There’s a suggestive fit between this image of the Michelangelesque sculptor as a dusty mechanical who lives like a pig and the reply of an insulted man that his accuser has bestial habits.

  The insults are flying thick and fast now. We have put Leonardo outside the Palazzo Spini in his rosy clothes in about 1504, victim of Michelangelo’s brutal verbal onslaught. But what did Michelangelo say, exactly, and how did Leonardo respond? He may indeed have said, as the Anonimo claims, “You explain it yourself, you who designed a horse to be cast in bronze but couldn’t cast it and abandoned it in shame,” or he may have said something still more vicious. He may have called Leonardo a bastard. In fact the answer is there in the Anonimo’s manuscript, for it seems there was more than one meeting, more than one insult. On another occasion, Michelangelo challenged his enemy this way: “And those capons of Milanese really believed in you?” The manuscript states that he uttered this insult volendo mordere Lionardo—“wishing to bite Leonardo.”

  So there stands Leonardo da Vinci speaking to the gathering of Florentine citizens outside the Palazzo Spini in his rose-coloured cloak, and perhaps in a rosy cap, too.

  In the Romantic age and after, there was huge demand throughout Europe and America for scenes from Renaissance history. The nineteenth-century painter Lord Leighton, in a picture so admired in its day that it was bought by Queen Victoria after a triumphant exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, visualises Vasari’s story of how an altarpiece by the medieval master Cimabue was carried aloft through the streets of Florence by a grateful populace. Leighton’s imagined medieval Tuscans in their tights and headdresses march before a view of the hill of San Miniato that is meticulously observed from life. Just as in such works, by n
ow we have assembled enough details of costume, setting, and character to imagine our own history painting of the meeting in the heart of Florence of the city’s two most eminent artists of all time. Leonardo, an immaculately turned-out and handsome man in his early fifties with long hair and pink dandified garments, stands with the crowd of dignified gentlemen in their red and black robes in front of the tall, harsh Spini Palace. Michelangelo remains some distance off—a man who has not yet turned thirty, with messy black hair, a lump of a nose. The expression on his face as he utters his biting words may be imagined from the sculptors’s youthful self-portrait, in which a fierce boy stands with his right fist clenched at his side (it originally held a sword or dagger) and a face of concentrated rage. Deep incisions cleave his brow above eyes that glare unforgivingly. Moral outrage grips this face; intensity transfigures it. He is a rebel, an avenger, a martyr.

  Michelangelo carved his self-portrait into a little marble figure of St. Proculus in a church in Bologna in 1494–5. Proculus had been a Roman soldier who took the side of the Christians during their persecution in ancient Bologna: this violent revolutionary hero, this justified killer, had turned his weapon on a Roman official and died for his heroic crime. Michelangelo gave the soldier-saint’s face furious life—it is hard not to see this as an act of empathy and identification. For proof that it represents the young Michelangelo’s formidable self-image, one must look from his face to his feet. Why does the young man have leather boots on? Ancient Romans, as Renaissance artists knew, wore sandals or, in the case of soldiers, open-toed caligae. St. Proculus, however, has these boots of soft hide that enclose his feet cosily. They are made for comfort rather than style; it seems strange that a sculptor would have chosen to give a heroic figure such unflattering footwear. The decision to clad St. Proculus in snug, unaesthetic boots is a provocative act of realism. But what is its meaning?