The Lost Battles Page 30

  Michelangelo was reliving his own youth and making a bond with a new generation. At this time he drew his own sensitive portrait of a young Florentine, Andrea Quaratesi. It shares the idealistic candour of Pontormo’s two paintings. It’s worth pointing out that immediately after this experience of war he began for the first time to openly conduct love affairs with young men.

  Machiavelli would have been ecstatic to see the Republic prepare for war. His ideas were in the air. His book The Art of War was reprinted and intently studied. One of the speakers in this dialogue on military matters, Battista della Palla, was highly active in Republican Florence in 1529—and a good friend of Michelangelo. But Machiavelli had died in 1527, after more than twenty years of exclusion from office. One of his last essays was a radical suggestion about the need to defend Florence from the hill that overlooked its southern suburbs, Monte San Miniato, where cannon might be placed by an enemy to reduce the Santo Spirito quarter to rubble.

  But it was Michelangelo, not Machiavelli, who lived to do battle for the last Republic.

  War had never attracted Michelangelo as a scientific testing ground, as it did Leonardo. But in the 1520s his genius as an architect emerged when he began the New Sacristy and the Laurentian Library. These deliberately gloomy, disorientating interiors, with false doors and sealed windows and columns that float disturbingly in mid-air, not supporting anything, all done in chilled white marble and morbid grey pietra serena, are Mannerist masterpieces. No room on earth declares quite so powerfully as the Vestibule of the Laurentian Library does that it is poetry, that its expressive meaning overrides practical function. In these disturbing spaces, Michelangelo constantly invokes ideas of exclusion, claustrophobia, and power: doors that cannot be opened and windows that admit no light, a staircase that seems a barrier to entry—his architecture is a shadowed tragic courtly theatre, a setting for Hamlet. It made poetic sense for him to move in 1527 from building tombs and a library to designing gatehouses. His drawings for new ones in the walls of Florence are both aesthetic marvels and practical designs. Seen in plan, his bastions look like grotesque masks, with sinister passages in which suspect visitors can be trapped, and gunfire radiating like sharp bristles from pores in the bulbous structure. But they do the job a bastion needed to do: they refuse to give the enemy any straight angle to fire at, while maximising the defenders’ artillery coverage of the city’s surroundings.

  Ingenious and macabre as they are, these designs could not possibly be realised in time to protect the city against an attack that seemed imminent. So Michelangelo was sent to study the fortifications of Ferrara, famous for its defensive measures. What he created as the situation grew desperate in the summer of 1529 was, however, very unlike the conventional defences of such cities. He worked by torchlight with an army of volunteers and drafted workers, shifting huge quantities of earth, strengthened with branches, to build banks and mounds at key points south of the city where the walls were weakest. His most brilliant coup was to turn the city’s greatest defensive weakness into an asset.

  As Machiavelli had observed, Florence was vulnerable to the hill of San Miniato, where artillery could be placed to bombard it from above. Machiavelli argued that an entire section of the city below the hill should be demolished because it was such a weak point. Michelangelo, however, turned this argument on its head. He fortified San Miniato with elaborate earthworks on which artillery was placed, including a long gun—a falcone—actually in the top of the bell tower of the ancient church on the hilltop. If Monte San Miniato overlooked Florence, it also overlooked the landscape where the imperial army was likely to attack. Michelangelo’s raised gun fort commanded this entire southern terrain.

  In October 1529 an army of the Habsburg Empire arrived at the southern gates of Florence, its task to reinstate the Medici. It did not anticipate anything like the resistance it encountered. Above all, it did not expect to be fired on from above. The volunteer soldiers in their red codpieces chanting Savonarolan hymns were brave. But it was Michelangelo’s fortifications, especially his artillery fortress on Monte San Miniato, that changed the course of the war. The guns there pinned down attackers with devastating fire; and after their own guns failed to knock out the Republican artillery, the attackers had to face the inevitability of a long siege.

  Michelangelo had a moment’s panic as the enemy approached. After finishing his defences, he secretly left for Venice. His friend Battista della Palla persuaded him to come back, and after a few weeks he did, to spend the rest of the war maintaining his defences on San Miniato. It was a brave decision. Even though the fortifications held the enemy at the gate, there was never much ambiguity about the final outcome.

  The brilliance of Michelangelo as a military engineer was a new twist in his multi-faceted career and, it might seem at first sight, his ultimate triumph over Leonardo. For all his designs for military inventions and his dalliance with warfare, there is no record that an intervention by Leonardo actually changed the course of an important battle. But without the fortifications Michelangelo created, it’s unlikely Florence could have put up the long fight it did. A painting in the Palazzo della Signoria shows the huge imperial army encamped outside the city. In this topographic picture you can clearly see how the artillery fort of San Miniato dominated the landscape and empowered Florence.

  Leonardo, meanwhile, had died in France in 1519. If he did not, as story has it, die in the arms of François I, he did end his days in the bosom of the French monarchy, which provided him with a fine house in the Loire valley. He was too ill to paint in his last couple of years—he probably had a stroke—but François valued him as a “philosopher,” it was said. He designed spectacular court entertainments—work he delighted in. With him he had the Mona Lisa and his notebooks—the painting he left to Salaì, the notebooks to his companion and favourite pupil, the Milanese nobleman Francesco Melzi.

  The Great Council Hall competition had been a turning point in Leonardo’s life. It marked the moment at which he effectively stepped aside from the ambition and rivalry of Italian art in its supreme age. As Freud observed, at a time when individualist aggression was the norm, Leonardo stood apart in his peaceful and evasive personality. The defining moment of the Great Council Hall competition, from his point of view, might have been his planned attempt to launch a flying machine in April 1505. It was a step away from the heat of the contest—very literally an escape, into the countryside and, he hoped, into the very sky. He wanted out. Michelangelo—young, ambitious, and aggressive—could have the fluttering standard, the bit of grass tied to a pole.

  After the competition, this was no longer Leonardo’s choice to make. He was no longer trusted with big commissions. Only in Milan did the French ask him to create a monument to their captain Trivulzio, a job for which he showed little passion. But his talent was not gone, or his own private ambition lost. In Florence in 1508 he started a series of dissections that produced incredible anatomical drawings and notes. In the years that followed, he drew his mesmerising apocalyptic sequence of Deluges, completed the Mona Lisa, Leda, his nude Mona Vanna, St. John, and The Virgin and St. Anne, and wrote something close to a conventional book, his Treatise on Painting. But a stay in Rome, in Bramante’s Belvedere Palace at the heart of the Vatican, from 1513 to 1516 demonstrated sadly how far he was now from competing with a Michelangelo or a Raphael.

  Leonardo had a fine studio in the Belvedere, courtesy of Giuliano de’ Medici. But he was left there to get on with his mysterious researches without any sniff of a significant commission. He had become, you can’t help feeling, a curiosity, a human marvel to take out and contemplate occasionally like a rare shell. The Pope had him draw a map of the Pontine Marshes. For Giuliano he worked on an idea for a giant mirror, perhaps a weapon. In a letter to his patron he reveals the kind of paranoia that seems to have been endemic in Rome, where someone was always scheming.

  I have suggested that The Battle of Anghiari was a heretical image. By this I meant it had no respe
ct for the conventions of its time, no belief in the patriotic and civic values a painting in the Hall of the Palace of the Signoria might be expected to endorse. In Rome, there is an intimation that Leonardo was seen in powerful circles as close to heresy in a more literal sense. His science threatened religious orthodoxy. In his drafts of a letter complaining about a German assistant, he says not only that the man keeps going off shooting among the ruins of the Roman Forum, but that he “blocked my anatomy by blaming it to the Pope.” This was a serious anxiety. In the course of the sixteenth century, as the Reformation hardened religious ideas, the Vatican would become deeply suspicious of science, burning Giordano Bruno, putting Galileo on trial. Here is an explicit worry being expressed by Leonardo that as he works on his most brilliant scientific research, his anatomical dissections and drawings, he is risking condemnation and persecution, or at the least icy disdain, from the Church.

  A painting in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome casts an uneasy light on Leonardo’s notebooks. It is yet another Renaissance image of the book, painted by Filippino Lippi. But the tomes and albums and notebooks in this picture, which make you think of Leonardo’s codices, are not in the study of a father of the Church—they are the outcast books of heretics, in a fresco that celebrates the inquisitors’ St. Dominic, founder of the anti-heretical Dominican Order. Even at the height of the Renaissance, the book might be feared, especially if it was written in secretive mirror script by a man who spent his nights dissecting corpses.

  Leonardo’s curiosity about nature certainly struck some as subversive of the Church. In the first edition of his Lives in 1550 Vasari says outright that Leonardo “harboured such heretical [sí eretico] thoughts that he adhered to no religion of any kind, perhaps thinking it better to be a philosopher than a Christian.” In his second edition of 1568, Vasari cut out this provocative claim. But in the Rome of Pope Leo X, it seems, Leonardo felt under scrutiny. He believed his dissections were being criticised to the Pope. It is a potentially explosive anxiety in its implications for his thought and its relationship to the teachings of the Church. Was he aware that such notes as his observations on the closeness of human and ape anatomy, or his insistence that a “spirit” cannot act in the physical world, might not stand up to pious scrutiny?

  Whether or not Pope Leo did listen to calumniators of Leonardo’s science, he certainly wasn’t trusting Leonardo with anything important. “Alas this one will never do anything, for he starts thinking of the end of a work, before he has begun it,” Vasari quotes Leo as saying of him. Michelangelo had recently finished the Sistine Ceiling, Raphael was working on frescoes in the Vatican and in villas, palaces, and churches. There were a lot of walls being painted in Rome. Even corridors were considered fresco-worthy, and Raphael decorated the bathroom of Cardinal Bibbiena in 1516, the year Leonardo decided to emigrate. But Leonardo himself was treated as hors de combat, with nothing to contribute to the grandeur of the new Rome. The most visible relics of him here are his unfinished painting St. Jerome in the Vatican Picture Gallery, and the name of an airport.

  Vasari claims that Leonardo left Italy to escape the “sdegno grandissimo,” the very great disdain, between him and Michelangelo. Perhaps, however, their opposition should finally be seen in intellectual terms. Leonardo’s anxiety that his anatomy was being maligned in the Vatican goes to the heart of his differences with Michelangelo. The art that triumphed in Rome in the sixteenth century was a religious art. Michelangelo was profoundly Christian just as he was sincerely republican. Leonardo was a political heretic and perhaps a religious one, too.

  Michelangelo’s faith is inescapable. In his poetry, he turns again and again to Christ. But his most confident declaration of faith is also his bravest assertion of individuality: the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I have drawn analogies between the interfolding, book-like narratives and visual footnotes of the Sistina and the notebooks of Leonardo. But if the Sistine Ceiling is an answer to Leonardo’s notebooks, it is an antithetical answer. Michelangelo presents up in these incandescent heights a history of the cosmos and the earth that is unshakably Christian. Compare his image of Adam receiving life from God’s outstretched arm with Leonardo’s scientific depiction of the foetus in the womb. For Michelangelo, life is spirit. For Leonardo, it is biology.

  No wonder Leonardo felt uneasy in Rome, beneath the Sistine Ceiling. If it is true that in some sense Michelangelo drove him out of Italy, it was not only because the younger man won their competition. It was because when Michelangelo went on from his triumph in Florence to paint the Sistine Chapel he gave Rome a sacred art equal to the works of ancient paganism. The same sincere desire to support the Church is in the works of Raphael. In the High Renaissance are the roots of the Counter-Reformation and Rome’s recovery of nerve, the roots even of modern Catholicism.

  Leonardo, by contrast was a heretic.

  The Battle of Anghiari proved that. What God would make these desolate men? What faith survives in the eyes of Niccolò Piccinino? The Battle of Anghiari was the obverse of the glory of the High Renaissance, the scathing, sceptical negative to the energy of the Sistine Ceiling and the grace of the stanze of Raphael.

  Michelangelo was the prophet of an art that could renew Catholic Italy. Leonardo heard his message, and emigrated. Soon after Giuliano de’ Medici died, he accepted an invitation to cross the Alps and become the king’s painter in France. Nursed by royal generosity, free from pressure to be anything but a resident genius and courtly philosopher, accompanied by Salaì and Melzi, the exile spent his last years among fairytale chateaux.

  Michelangelo’s fortification of Florence in 1529 was a more dramatic engineering feat than Leonardo ever pulled off. It demanded just as much scientific ability as any of Leonardo’s schemes. Trajectories and sight lines had to be calculated, optimum gradients worked out when creating an artillery fortress. Michelangelo’s was not just an inert bunker but a strategic coup—his aggression paid off. He fought to win.

  Only, this was not the straightforward triumph over Leonardo that it might seem. It was something more subtle—and with more self-recognition. Michelangelo was in his dead rival’s debt. There was more at stake here, after all, than ego. He was trying to save his beloved city—which was also Leonardo’s city. And he seems to have cast his mind back to the days of their competition. In 1504 Leonardo had been sent to Piombino to advise on its defences. There, he came up with a series of earthworks—heaped mounds, deep ditches, smoothed banks. Sticks were used to strengthen the earthworks. It was an elastic, versatile method. And this was the method Michelangelo used in 1529.

  Michelangelo’s designs for gatehouses have more in common with Leonardo’s designs for fortresses and towers than with any other military architect of the age. Both of them experimented with rounded, twisted forms—and neither of them stuck to the simple formulae invented by architects like Sangallo. There’s an imaginative freedom to Leonardo’s and Michelangelo’s martial architecture that is more than coincidental. It is the key to a current of intimacy beneath their antagonism. For all their rivalry, they were both ready to learn from one another.

  In designs for the Trivulzio Monument, Leonardo drew bound prisoners which quote Michelangelo’s slaves in the younger man’s drawings for the Tomb of Julius II. He was only repaying a compliment. During their competition Michelangelo started to write poetry, aspiring to become an intellectual like Leonardo, and discovered the poetic potential of unfinished works. His later art is an unfinished symphony. His Slaves in Florence were left in such a tumultuous state of semi-formation that Medici dukes incorporated them as curios in the Great Grotto in the Boboli Gardens. Only in the twentieth century were they moved to the Accademia to form a sublime counterpart to David. Only after seeing Cézanne could people fully see these works.

  Leonardo offered an example of the truly free creative mind. In turn, Michelangelo challenged Leonardo with the nude. The anatomical dissections Leonardo started after their competition can be seen as an atte
mpt to outdo Michelangelo’s nudes—to go beneath the skin.

  Architecture is their most tantalising meeting ground. Architecture is also the art in which Michelangelo is most Leonardesque, because it takes him away from the human body into the human mind. His Vestibule of the Laurentian Library, with its surreally enlarged scrolls and staircase spreading out like blood from a chest wound, is the architectural equivalent of Dürer’s Melencolia I. This room is a portrait in sombre pietra serena set against skeletal white of a mind at once omniscient and despairing, infinite and enigmatic. It could almost be the mind of Leonardo da Vinci. In Leonardo’s architectural drawings, domes, columns, and cavernous interior spaces are used poetically, in a softly musical way. The classical orders and geometries are enthusiastically deployed; yet an intense graphic energy transfigures them into something more personal than the work of, say, Brunelleschi, or Bramante. The true ancestor of Leonardo as an architect is Alberti, the designer of Santa Maria Novella’s façade, whose treatise on building he owned. Alberti is also the ancestor of Michelangelo’s designs. What all three have in common is a supremely individual assimilation of classical style. In their architecture the classical grammar becomes a language of the unconscious.