The Lost Battles Read online

  On the battlements of San Miniato it was as if Michelangelo was haunted by memories of Leonardo. During the siege he painted a work far from his usual subject matter—Leda and the Swan. In Michelangelo’s version, Leda disturbingly allows the swan to slide between her legs and extend its long neck along her body. This image is extremely disconcerting—and evocative of Leonardo. Not only does it compete with the older—and now a decade dead—man’s lost Leda, begun during their Florentine rivalry. It also mysteriously insinuates Leonardo’s fascination with flight and the life of birds. In Michelangelo’s painting—known only from a copy, the original having vanished like Leonardo’s, as if this subject were too odd to survive—the swan touches Leda’s lips with its beak. What a singular echo this makes of Leonardo’s famous childhood memory that a kite came down and touched his lips with its tail feathers!

  In this moment of war and terror, Michelangelo found himself thinking about Leonardo da Vinci, in a curiously intimate way, remembering the would-be aviator. He was not the only Florentine thinking about Leonardo at this time.

  Jacopo Pontormo, who portrayed the young militiamen posed bravely to defend Florence, soon found himself seeing the war through bleaker eyes. As the siege held his city in an iron claw he dug out his old cartoon for The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand in which he quoted both Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina. When it was conceived, this design was an erudite and precious Mannerist plaything. Now he painted it, on a small scale and with lurid additions, to create a disturbing image of mass murder at the hands of a merciless tyrant. A Roman emperor sits enthroned, presiding over the slaughter of thousands of innocents. He is copied from the figure of Giuliano de’ Medici that Michelangelo had begun to carve on the Medici tombs in Florence.

  Michelangelo, Tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, 1519–34. The serpentine neck and monstrous armour make this an uneasy manifesto for Mannerism. (illustration credit 15.1)

  Michelangelo’s Giuliano is an apocalyptic vision of a classical warrior. He sits in armour all’antica, staring harshly, and his neck, when you see it from the side, is as peculiarly elongated as that of some demon in Dante. On his figure and that of Lorenzo de’ Medici (a later Lorenzo, not the Magnifico) facing it in the enclosed theatre of the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo, details of dark-eyed masks, animal skulls, and metal armour rendered in stone accumulate in deathly magnificence. It is Michelangelo’s answer to the grotesque armour of Leonardo’s Anghiari warriors.

  Pontormo pointedly includes Giuliano in his painting to make it clear that it is an allegory of the siege of Florence. Thousands are dying at the hands of the Medici tyrant. The way Pontormo describes the horrors of war is by adducing the horrors of art: his painting quotes two figures fighting on the ground directly from The Battle of Anghiari, the upper one holding down his victim as he raises a dagger to deal the death blow just like the men beneath the wheeling horses in Leonardo’s picture. Naked horsemen, nude versions of Leonardo’s armoured warriors, ride wildly: you can almost hear the screams and drums of the savage horde.

  Leonardo’s battle painting survived, unfinished but potent, on the wall of the Great Council Hall in 1529. But it was coming to life on the streets, as well, just as Pontormo’s picture implies. The inferno of war was consuming Florence, as if The Battle of Anghiari were the one true prophecy ever to have been delivered in Savonarola’s Hall.

  As 1529 became 1530, a city was dying.

  The Republic held out for nine months. Hunger and disease set in. The modernised fortifications never gave way. Instead, food supplies were cut off and civilians paid the price for the courage of Republican volunteers. The success of Michelangelo’s defences produced a situation that was to become the pattern of war in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, as artillery fortresses brought battles to a deadlock and siege became a routine military strategy. As ever, Florence was in the vanguard. It paid a shocking price.

  About thirty thousand civilians died during the siege. One victim whose name is at least remembered was the painter Andrea del Sarto, who succumbed to plague as the gates were finally opened and the restorers of Medici rule strode in. The poor, it was observed by Francesco Guicciardini, who entered Florence with the invading forces, had died en masse: this had become a city without a proletariat. It was the worst catastrophe suffered by Florence since the Black Death.

  Michelangelo was on a list of Republicans to be put to the sword in those first chaotic days of the Medici restoration. He hid in cellars and crypts. Luckily no assassin located him, and soon word came from Pope Clement VII for the famous artist to be spared. Close friends were not so lucky: Battista della Palla, who had persuaded him to stand by the Republic, died in prison. Clement ordered Michelangelo to take up work again on the Medici tombs, to earn his salvation. Michelangelo took up the chisels “more from fear than love.” He composed a poem explaining the reclining figure of Night on the tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, who shares the pose of his Leda:

  Michelangelo, Capture of Rebellious Slave, circa 1513–16. Michelangelo’s Captives form part of the abandoned original design for the Tomb of Julius II. (illustration credit 15.2)

  Dear to me is sleep, and even more to be made of stone,

  while damage and shame persist;

  not to see, not to feel is to me a great stroke of luck;

  therefore don’t disturb me, please, speak low.

  Michelangelo, Night, 1525–30. Night wants to sleep through the shame of Florence, wrote Michelangelo. (illustration credit 15.3)

  The new duke of Florence was Alessandro de’ Medici, who asked Michelangelo to advise him on his construction of a massive new fortress to rule the city. Michelangelo refused to give any such advice. After Clement VII died, he knew he had no protector in Florence. In 1534 he left for Rome and a self-imposed exile. Michelangelo lived another thirty years but never returned to Florence. When Alessandro de’ Medici was assassinated, he carved a bust of Julius Caesar’s killer Brutus to celebrate the tyrannicide.

  The final fate of Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari is inseparable from the fate of the Florentine Republic. The Medici now consolidated their power, and eventually the Great Council Hall would have to be dealt with once and for all.

  Vasari now enters the story, not as the author of the Lives of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and so many other artists, but as a painter and architect in his own right. Vasari had been born in Arezzo in Tuscany in 1511 and had been supported in his early career by Medici patronage. He was always loyal to the powerful family. After the siege, he was patronised by Alessandro de’ Medici, but his finest hour came with the reign of Cosimo I, first grand duke of Tuscany. This most efficient and ruthless of the later Medici routed the very last Republican rebels and set out to put the stamp of his dynasty more firmly on Florence than ever before. Vasari was his court artist and architect; Vasari’s Lives are dedicated to Cosimo.

  Although Vasari’s paintings are somewhat synthetic and repetitive Mannerist concoctions, as an architect he was very creative. He built the Vasari Corridor across the top of the Ponte Vecchio to link umbilically the Pitti Palace and the Palazzo della Signoria, which now became known apolitically as the Palazzo Vecchio, and created a U-shaped grey and white building by the river for the bureaucracy of ducal Tuscany, called simply the Offices—the Uffizi. Most ambitiously of all, Cosimo commissioned him to transform the austere fortress of the Republican seat of government into a palace fit for a Medici duke. Vasari added rich chambers and grand staircases, working with a team of painters to fill the palace with allegorical and historical frescoes. His masterstroke was the transfiguration of the Great Council Hall.

  It was a symbolic space that needed to be stripped of the least shred of subversive meaning. Cosimo I and his architect realised that desecrating a symbol only strengthens it—in 1527 the very misuse of the Hall since 1512 gave it intensified significance, as citizens ritually cleansed it of Medici ordure. What was done in the mid-sixteenth century by Vasari wa
s a far more intelligent and final way to efface the history of this room than simply laying it waste. Vasari understood about the magic of place; when he built the Uffizi he buried a talisman in its foundations. What he did to the Great Council Hall was not to disenchant but re-enchant it—to turn it into a rich theatre of Medici rule. He raised the height of the hall, added new windows and a gallery at the southern end. He created a ceremonial stage for ducal appearances, the Udienza, with sculpture by his rival Baccio Bandinelli. Statues were placed in the hall, including works by Giambologna and Michelangelo’s Victory, all chosen as images of conquest and rule. The huge frescoes and ceiling paintings by Vasari and his team repeated the message of Medici glory ad nauseam, with detailed visual documentation of Cosimo I’s reign. No monarch in the Europe of the day could boast such a spectacular and at the same time classically ordered hall. Memories of the Republic simply vanished into a larger room and, by implication, a bigger history: that of the Medici, first family of Florence.

  Leonardo da Vinci’s wall painting vanished, too. Its condition by then cannot have been good. Later witnesses describe the “horses” of Leonardo—were their great, round rumps all that survived? Or was the picture comparatively well-preserved? Still more ambiguous is what Vasari did to its remains. He was, after all, Leonardo’s ecstatic biographer. His writings are full of passion for works of art and grief for those destroyed in wars and disasters. At Santa Maria Novella, a painting by him was discovered in modern times to conceal—and preserve—a great work by Masaccio. Perhaps Vasari hid Leonardo’s martial masterpiece instead of destroying it. In recent years efforts to rediscover the lost work have become ever more intense. This is no surprise, because ever since it was begun, Leonardo’s Battle has troubled the Western imagination.

  Jacopo Pontormo was not the first artist, in the reference he made to it during the siege of Florence, to set aside the Mannerist cult of grotesquery for its own sake, forget about the rivalry with Michelangelo, and respond to The Battle of Anghiari in a direct, human way as a terrifying picture of war’s madness. Even during the competition itself in the early years of the sixteenth century, Rudolfo Ghirlandaio painted a Christ on the Road to Calvary in which a Roman soldier tormenting Christ has the cruel face of Niccolò Piccinino. This is a moral instead of an aesthetic interpretation of Leonardo’s masterpiece—in Ghirlandaio’s eyes the Anghiari warriors were evil men. But the artist who saw more clearly than any other the protest at war’s fury in Leonardo’s painting was Peter Paul Rubens.

  The painting was already lost when Rubens travelled to Italy to learn from its masters at the end of the sixteenth century. He came into possession of an excellent copy, however, and adapted it into his own unrivalled reconstruction of The Battle of Anghiari. Rubens responds instinctively to the roaring, swirling energy of Leonardo’s battle picture, but not in a cold Mannerist way. On the contrary, he sees in it the mirror of his own loathing for war. In his childhood his home city, Antwerp, was put to the sack. Rubens grew up with a traumatic knowledge of the reality of war. When he became a famous artist and his manners and bearing won him a reputation as a courtier and diplomat, he actively tried to promote peace among the monarchs of Europe whose ear he had. He even made a painting to show Charles II of Britain the benefits of peace and the destructiveness of war. Children and cornucopian plenty embody peace, while war, eyeing them balefully, is held back by Minerva.

  Rubens failed to bring peace to Europe. In his painting The Horrors of War, he shows what happens when Mars is unleashed. A woman hopelessly tries to protect her child as a village burns in the distance. That detail of a hamlet in flames is an image that Erasmus describes in his essay on war in the Adages, for the northern artist Rubens drew on Erasmus as well as Leonardo to forge his pacificist art. We’ve noticed a similarity between Erasmus and Leonardo as prophets of war: Rubens saw this too.

  The Horrors of War hangs in Florence, in the Pitti Palace. Through this and other paintings influenced by it, Leonardo da Vinci’s Battle of Anghiari survives. It has never been lost. Picasso’s Guernica with its horse screaming against the bombs has an echo of it. While Picasso was responding to the Spanish Civil War with his great history painting, Salvador Dalí was actually copying figures from Leonardo’s Battle designs in the Accademia Gallery, Venice, into a dusty vision of a desolate Spanish plain. In Dalí’s painting Spain the warriors of Anghiari return to fight their endless battle. In a landscape modelled on his own Catalan region, in a flat expanse of nothingness, Leonardo’s battle becomes an image of Europe’s ancient hatreds: a vendetta in the brain.

  The search for Leonardo’s lost work under the walls of the Hall in Florence will quite possibly succeed. It is pointless to protest that what is finally uncovered will probably be even more fragile and fragmentary than The Last Supper and that hysterical publicity will probably make seeing it as unsatisfactory as visiting the Mona Lisa. The marvel of Leonardo will never fade, and after all, our obsession with him is entirely justified.

  I hope I have shown that a recovery of the painting is almost beside the point. The lost Battles of Leonardo and Michelangelo are as available to us, as real, as any work of art, for all art requires imagination and thought to truly enjoy it. Almost because the originals are not visible, the process of reconstructing these great works in our minds can give us a stronger feeling for them than we might have for many a well-preserved painting. Their first audience responded to the concepts and images that were in them, not to details of execution. So can we. There are enough preparatory drawings, copies, written descriptions, and allusions in later works to make these vanished pictures astonishingly real. In the end this is simply the immediacy of the greatest art.

  There is no need to chip away Vasari’s frescoes to see The Battle of Anghiari. Its shadows are eternal, its truth as old and as new as human folly. Switch off the latest barbarisms on the television news, close your eyes, and its demonic faces swarm the dark.

  Michelangelo and others, St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome, works by Michelangelo 1546–64. Michelangelo gave supreme form to the dream of the dome that beguiled Renaissance architects, including Leonardo. (illustration credit 15.4)

  The steps lead up, up above the church and the city, circling a vast emptiness. At last the climber emerges onto a fenced gallery, to look down into the golden space where specks of dust float in shafts of sunlight. Far below on a marble floor people mill among colossal grey pilasters. A bronze black canopy that towers over them seems tiny from up here. Yet the dome flies higher still, above the drum on which you’re standing, which is the last work Michelangelo saw completed.

  He was a very old man when he took on the challenge of St. Peter’s. The new basilica begun by Bramante was nowhere near completion. Michelangelo in his final years knew he would not see it finished either, but he alone possessed the clarity of mind and the practical authority to redeem a corrupted enterprise. He imposed a vision on St. Peter’s so firm and magnificent that he ensured its glorious completion. It would, he insisted, be a domed temple, the supreme monument of the classical passions of the Renaissance. He himself built the stupendous stone drum on top of which the dome would rise. He built it so grandly that finishing the dome would only be a matter of time.

  He was old, and for once he was forgiving. Michelangelo had once loathed Bramante, but in his designs for St. Peter’s he openly returned to his long-dead rival’s original plans for a domed geometric monument. Michelangelo’s vision built on Bramante’s architecture and, in so doing, silently, perhaps unconsciously, commemorated another old rival. For Bramante’s ideas for domed churches were developed in the fifteenth century in conversation with his friend Leonardo da Vinci. There are no more eloquent testimonies to the power of the dome in the Renaissance imagination than Leonardo’s breathtaking designs for them. There is a visible relationship between these paper temples and the almost utopian architecture that Bramante achieved with his Tempietto in Rome. This same relationship exists between Leonardo’s drawings and
Michelangelo’s impossible, yet real, dome of St. Peter’s. No one is an island. Michelangelo knew as he raised the stone drum of St. Peter’s that he would not see his dome finished. But he also knew it was not just his dome. It belonged also to Sangallo, to Raphael, to Bramante. And here above Rome, he repaid the greatest debt of all. Enmity does not endure. Beauty does. From the heights of St. Peter’s, the imaginations of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo soar together.

  Cosimo Rosselli, attrib., The Execution of Savonarola, circa 1498. It may reveal something about the tensions of Florentine history that the most vivid painting of the city’s political heart is so violent. (color insert 15.5)

  Titian, The Bacchanal of the Andrians, circa 1523–5. The swaying and gyrating figures in Titian’s drunken idyll owe some of their grandeur to Michelangelo’s Bathers. (color insert 15.6)

  Raphael, The Entombment, 1507. The energy and gravity of the Battles of Anghiari and Cascina profoundly shaped Raphael’s narrative painting. (color insert 15.7)

  Leonardo da Vinci, The Mona Lisa. The fame of Leonardo’s portrait spread in Florence within months of his beginning it in 1503. (color insert 15.8)

  Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1508–12. The daring that Michelangelo showed in his cartoon for the Battle of Cascina reached its apotheosis in the Sistine Chapel. (color insert 15.9)