The Lost Battles Read online

  31 it survives among his notes: Richter 1, n. 669, pp. 348–9.

  THREE: HEROICS

  1 “Oh, you have made this faun”: Condivi, p. 11.

  2 “tell your father”: Ibid., p. 12.

  3 It has a fairy-tale feeling: E. H. Gombrich, “The Early Medici as Patrons of Art,” in Norm and Form, London, 1966, pp. 56–7, debunks the “legend” of Lorenzo’s garden academy; Caroline Elam, “Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Sculpture Garden,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 36 (1992), pp. 41–84, demonstrates its documented reality.

  4 One pupil in the garden: Carmen C. Bambach, ed., Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman, New York, New Haven, and London, 2003, p. 228.

  5 “from the garden”: Elam, p. 58.

  6 He also remembered: Condivi, pp. 12–14.

  7 “That which in your beautiful face”: Rime, 60, p. 109 (written 1532).

  8 Although Piero and his friends: Condivi, pp. 15–16. 58 the exact sound of his voice: Ibid., p. 62.

  9 Some of the stories must be true: Michael Mallett, The Borgias: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Dynasty, London, 1971, p. 95.

  10 in addition to the Pope’s own permanent harem: James B. Atkinson and David Sices, eds., Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence, DeKalb, IL, 1996, Letter 22, Agostino Vespucci to Niccolò Machiavelli, Rome, 16 July 1501, p. 38.

  11 “he asked my opinion”: P. Barocchi and R. Ristori, Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, vol. 1, Florence, 1965, no. i, pp. 1–2.

  12 “Bacchantes indeed”: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Epistulae ad familiares, VII. 23, Oxford 1979, vol. 1, p. 203.

  13 The frenzy that blinds him: P. O. Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, New York, 1942, pp. 308–9.

  14 he must endure one last ordeal: Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, London, 1960. Initiation rites in ancient Greece are stressed in Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World, trans. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, Baltimore and London, 1986, which is striking given Michelangelo’s relationship with the classical heritage.

  15 the sculptor’s “great friend”: Condivi, p. 22, “suo grande amico …”

  16 the “tyrant” Goliath: Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre, New Haven and London, 2000.

  17 “David with a sling”: Rime, p. 341.

  18 “And Saul armed David”: King James Bible, 1 Samuel 1.

  FOUR: STONING DAVID

  1 “the Judith is a deathly sign”: The meeting is recorded in Archivio dell’ Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, Deliberazioni degli Operai, 1496–1507, published in Giovanni Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti dei secoli XIV, XV, e XVI, Florence, 1840, vol. 2, pp. 455–63. My translations use the Italian text in Charles Seymour Jr., Michelangelo’s “David”: A Search for Identity, Pittsburgh, 1967, Appendix II-B, pp. 140–55, hereafter referred to as Transcript. The herald’s words are on pp. 142–4.

  2 Specialist committees: John M. Najemy, A History of Florence, Malden, Oxford, and Victoria, 2006, pp. 147–8.

  3 a city in winter, as Leonardo observes: Richter 1, nn. 468, 469, pp. 235–6.

  4 he’d lent Attavante four gold ducats: Richter 2, n. 1525, p. 457.

  5 At the very edge of the group: Vasari, pp. 565–71.

  6 This great mechanism: See Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance, rev. ed. Cambridge, 1987, pp. 178–9, for the cult of clocks.

  7 According to … Marsilio Ficino: D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, London, 1958; Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London, 1964; Burke, pp. 178–88; Armando Maggi, In the Company of Demons: Unnatural Beings, Love, and Identity in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago, 2006; Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, second ed., Cambridge, 2006, pp. 71–4.

  8 The spectacle of a woman killing: Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, St. Albans, 1976. The misogynist nature of this fantasy is clearly evident in the highly influential late-fifteenth-century demonological treatise Malleus maleficarum, now available in English: Christopher S. Mackay, The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the “Malleus Maleficarum,” Cambridge, 2009, esp. pp. 160–73. On the witch as old woman, see Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, New Haven and London, 2006, pp. 160–78.

  9 Pico della Mirandola, who argued: S. A. Farmer, Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486) … with Text, Translation, and Commentary, Tempe, AZ, 1998; P. O. Kristeller, “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and His Sources,” in L’opera e il pensiero di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola nella storia dell’umanismo, Florence, 1965; Yates, pp. 90–129.

  10 a passion for ideas: Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, New Haven and London, 2000, esp. pp. 22–3, 193–6.

  11 a commentary on Dante: Vasari, p. 477.

  12 drawings that rival Leonardo’s notebooks: Royal Academy of Arts, Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” London 2000.

  13 Mars lies under a spell: E. H. Gombrich, “Botticelli’s Mythologies,” in Symbolic Images, third ed., London, 1985, pp. 31–81. Botticelli’s Venus and Mars in the National Gallery, London, directly illustrates Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham, rev. John Godwin, London, 1994, pp. 10–11.

  14 supposed to conquer “melancholy”: Yates, p. 67.

  15 as Ficino claimed: Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, fourth ed., Princeton, 1971, pp. 165–71; idem and F. Saxl, “Dürer’s Melencolia I,” Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, 2 (1923).

  16 At once hymn to spring: Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s “Primavera” and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Princeton, 1992, summarises some of the many interpretations of this painting, pp. 3–19.

  17 The difference between Florence: Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London, 1971; Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London, 1978; Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles, London, 1983, and Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, London, 1990.

  18 he designed the woodcut: The woodcut illustrates Savonarola’s Sermone della oratione, c. 1495. See also Paul Joannides, “Late Botticelli: Archaism and Ideology,” in Arte cristiana, LXXXIII (1995), which recognises the connection and argues that Botticelli must have at the very least imitated the woodcut—“and that the woodcut might have been his own.” Botticelli’s painting The Agony in the Garden is in the Capilla de los Reyes, Granada, and is illustrated in Daniel Arasse et al., Botticelli: From Lorenzo the Magnificent to Savonarola, Milan, 2003, p. 159.

  19 be shaken by his revelations: The gender-segregated crowd in the Cathedral is depicted in a woodcut in Savonarola’s Compendio de revelatione, 1496. Women outnumber men in this image, reproduced in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Renaissance in Italy and Spain, New York, 1987, p. 80.

  20 “The people of Florence do not appear”: Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Corrado Vivanti, Turin, 2000, p. 39.

  21 “with a Judith at the other corner”: Transcript, p. 146.

  22 Monciatto confessed: Ibid., p. 144.

  23 “The David in the courtyard”: Ibid., p. 144.

  24 Always ready to criticise: Condivi, pp. 22 and xxxii, where Caroline Elam argues that Michelangelo’s later comment means he did not make the spiteful remark against Donatello but was misunderstood or misrepresented by his biographer. In his correction, Michelangelo specifically says he meant the Judith when he spoke of Donatello’s works being unfinished, which might suggest he was still revolving arguments about Judith versus his own David in his mind nearly half a century after the 1504 meeting.

  25 “The greatest gifts are often seen”: Vasari, p. 545.

  26 “the sixth day of March”: Condivi, p. 8.

  27 “My feeling was very much”: Transcript, p. 146.

  28 “I’ve listen
ed to all”: Ibid., pp. 146–8.

  29 “I agree with what the herald has said”: Ibid., p. 148.

  30 popular superstitions about the evil eye: The Malleus maleficarum refers to widespread beliefs about the evil eye. Mackay, p. 107.

  31 “I confirm that it should stand”: Transcript, p. 150.

  32 its genitalia should be decently concealed: The translator George Bull shares my understanding of ornamento decente in his Michelangelo, Harmondsworth, 1995, pp. 51–2.

  33 The late-fifteenth-century demonological work: Mackay, pp. 194–9. 81 That night, the statue had to be guarded: Luca Landucci, A Florentine Diary, trans. Alice de Rosen Jervis, London and New York, 1927, pp. 213–14.

  34 Luca Landucci’s awed account: Ibid. and p. 139 for his shock at hearing Savonarola’s confession in the Great Council Hall.

  35 He represents the target audience: Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence, New York and London, 1984, pp. 22–3, sees Landucci as typical of the non-elite citizens empowered by the Great Council.

  FIVE: THE ASCENT OF ART

  1 “several months ago Leonardo”: Luca Beltrami, ed., Documenti e memorie riguardanti la vite e le opere di Leonardo da Vinci, Milan, 1919, doc. 140, p. 87.

  2 “the previously mentioned magnificent Signori”: Ibid., pp. 87–8.

  3 “the painting of this cartoon will not be allocated”: Ibid., p. 88.

  4 “It happened that, while that rarest”: Vasari, p. 888.

  5 One speaker at the meeting: The goldsmith Michelangelo Bandinelli suggested putting David in the Great Council Hall. Transcript of the meeting of 25 January 1504 in Charles Seymour Jr., Michelangelo’s “David”: A Search for Identity, Princeton, 1967, p. 153.

  6 a new “Humanist” style of thought: Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, second ed., Cambridge, 2006, and Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1: The Renaissance, Cambridge, 1978, give succinct accounts of this movement at the heart of the Renaissance.

  7 “In painting, Cimabue thought”: Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XI, ll. 94–6.

  8 “Sad is the disciple”: Richter 1, n. 498, p. 250.

  9 “I say and say again”: Ibid., n. 495, p. 249.

  10 “He was held to be a miracle”: Vasari, pp. 320–21.

  11 No city has seen so many civil disorders: Niccolò Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., Princeton, 1990, p. 7.

  12 “Leonardo painted an angel”: Vasari, p. 547.

  13 “staying” with him, according to: Archivio di Stato, Florence, Ufficiali di Notte e Monasteri, Deliberazioni, Parte II, fol. 41r, 9 April 1476, in Pietro C. Marani, Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2000, p. 342.

  14 “The House of Sforza has been and will be”: Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, ed. Giorgio Inglese, Turin, 1995, pp. 144–5.

  15 “Having, my illustrious Lord”: Richter 2, n. 1340, pp. 395–7.

  16 “in times of peace”: Ibid., p. 398.

  17 “Again work could be taken up”: Ibid., p. 398.

  18 Although Leonardo had been entrusted to create a model: Carmen C. Bambach, ed., Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman, New York, 2003, p. 230.

  19 Two drawings by Leonardo: RL 12357 recto and RL 12358 recto in the Royal Library, Windsor.

  20 “On the twenty-third day of April 1490”: Leonardo da Vinci, Manuscript C, Institut de France, Paris, fol. 15 verso. Richter 2, n. 720, p. 14.

  21 This model, recorded the mathematician: Bambach, p. 232.

  22 “You can see in the mountains”: Richter 2, n. 721, p. 15.

  23 He believed, following Vitruvius: Nigel Spivey, Greek Art, London, 1997, pp. 97–9; Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed. Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe, Cambridge, 1999, esp. pp. 47–8, 148.

  24 “The big jennet of Messer Galeazzo”: This and the paragraph’s earlier reference to one of Galeazzo’s horses can be found in Richter 2, nn. 716, 717, p. 14.

  25 “The movement more than anything”: Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus, Ambrosiana, Milan, 147 recto (old numbering)/399 recto (new numbering).

  26 its sheer size and strength become poetic: Madrid II, fol. 157 recto.

  27 like a rocket on a launch pad: Ibid., fol. 155 verso.

  28 “These are the pieces of the forma”: Ibid., fol. 157 recto.

  29 “everything related to the bronze horse”: Ibid., fol. 157 verso.

  30 “departing in the afternoon from the Corte Vecchia”: Matteo Bandello, Tutte le opere, ed. Francesco Flora, vol. 1, Milan 1935, p. 646.

  31 “Of the horse I will say nothing”: Richter 2, n. 723, p. 15.

  32 “Truly marvellous and celestial”: Vasari, pp. 545–6.

  33 “He proposed to the Duke”: Ibid., pp. 550–51.

  34 He was compelled to endless research: James Strachey and Albert Dickson, eds, Sigmund Freud 14: Art and Literature, Harmondsworth, 1990, pp. 151–231.

  35 “I saw and observed him many times”: Bandello, p. 646.

  36 The large, calm face: Andrei Rublev, The Saviour, tempera on wood, early fifteenth century, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  SIX: BLOODSTAINS

  1 Nothing in the history of Florence was prouder: Poggio Bracciolini, Historia Fiorentina, Florence, 1492, and Leonardo Bruni, “Memoirs,” in his History of the Florentine People, vol. 3, trans. James Hankins with D. J. W. Bradley, Cambridge, MA, and London, 2007, p. 395, give contemporary accounts of the battle. Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., Princeton, 1988, pp. 224–8, describes it dramatically, but for rhetorical reasons—he wants to stress the puniness of Italian warfare prior to the French invasion of 1494—rejects the earlier historians’ casualty figures. Bracciolini says many of Piccinino’s men died and many more were captured, Bruni that he lost virtually his entire army, while more than twelve hundred citizens of San Sepolcro were taken prisoner. The account compiled from chronicles for Leonardo by the Palazzo della Signoria in 1503 also portrays it as a bloody day; Richter 1, n. 669, pp. 348–9.

  2 In 1494, on the eve: Francesco Guicciardini, History of Italy, trans. and ed. Sydney Alexander, Princeton, 1969, p. 44, and by Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, Chicago and London, 1998, p. 113.

  3 no sign a battle had taken place: Landucci, A Florentine Diary, trans. Alice de Rosen Jervis, London and New York, 1927, 29 July 1504, pp. 215–16.

  4 “This is that when you look”: Richter 1, n. 508, p. 254.

  5 Florentine pride expressed: Niccolò Machiavelli, La Mandragola, act 1, scene 2, in Teatro, ed. Guido Davico Bonino, new ed., Turin, 2002, p. 77.

  6 He wrote of skirmishes: See Bruni. Another Humanist historian, Poggio Bracciolini, who narrates the Battle of Anghiari in his 1492 Historia Fiorentina, was responsible for rediscovering many lost classical texts.

  7 “Hunger overpowered grief”: Dante, Inferno, Canto XXXIII, l. 75.

  8 “Ah! Pisa”: Ibid., Canto XXXIII, ll. 79–84.

  9 Contemplate the wretched events: Landucci, entries for the spring and summer of 1503, pp. 204–8.

  10 He looked across the river: Madrid II, fol. 7 verso. Leonardo’s note: “CASCINA qui è la veduta” (“Cascina—this is where the view is from”).

  11 Madrid Codex II, the notebook he carried: Leonardo’s on-the-spot sketches in Madrid II that chart his journey by the Arno that summer illuminate fols. 15 recto, 16 recto and verso, 17 recto and verso, 18 recto and verso, 19 recto and verso, 20 recto and verso, and 21 recto, with detailed maps of the river across 22 verso and 23 recto and across 52 verso and 53 recto.

  12 Exactly thirty years later: Madrid II, fol. 1 verso.

  13 “Levelling of the Arno.”: Ibid.: “Livello d’Arno fatto il dí della Madalena 1503.” The day of the Magdalene falls on 22 July.

  14 still being restored in the twenty-first century: As witnessed by the
author on a visit to the restoration laboratory of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Fortezza da Basso, Florence, in 2006, forty years after the floods.

  15 A plan was concocted in 1503: Carmen C. Bambach, ed., Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman, New York, 2003, pp. 473–4; Roger D. Masters, Machiavelli, Leonardo and the Science of Power, Notre Dame, 1995; Denis Fachard, Biagio Buonaccorsi: Sa vie, son temps, son oeuvre, Bologna, 1976.

  16 On such awkward questions: Masters, in his Machiavelli and in his Fortune Is a River, New York, 1999, makes a bold case for collaboration between Machiavelli and Leonardo.

  17 Madrid Codex II explicitly: Madrid II, fol. 1 verso.

  18 “It is possible to change the flow”: Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Arundel 263 nella British Library, Florence, 1998, 271 verso/278 recto. See also 149 recto, 274, recto and 275 verso.

  19 he carefully charts this canal: Madrid II across 22 verso and 23 recto; RL 12279 recto in the Royal Library, Windsor.

  20 In that summer of 1503: Madrid II across 52 verso and 53 recto.

  21 “to level the Arno near Pisa”: Luca Beltrami, ed., Documenti e memorie riguardanti la vita e le opere di Leonardo da Vinci, Milan, 1919, doc. 127, p. 80.

  22 “it is as if one who wants to draw”: Machiavelli, Il Principe, ed. Giorgio Inglese, new ed., Turin, 1995, p. 5.

  23 “with many discussions and doubts”: Beltrami, doc. 126, pp. 79–80.

  24 “Make first the smoke of the artillery”: Richter 1, nn. 601, 602, pp. 3013.

  SEVEN: THE GENIUS IN HIS STUDY

  1 “dolce stanza nell’ inferno”: Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London, 1895-9-15-496. J. Wilde, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Michelangelo and His Studio, 2 vols., London, 1953, 3 recto.

  2 “The summer heat was immense”: Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People, ed. James Hankins, vol. 2, Cambridge, MA, and London, 2004, p. 463 (my translation). The medieval chronicle by Giovanni Villani and family, Cronica, Turin, 1979, p. 328, gives an alternative account of the Battle of Cascina.