The Lost Battles Read online

  With the ground still warm in the middle of Piazza della Signoria, the Florentine Republic, in no mood to welcome back the Medici, lurched from crisis to crisis as it tried to protect its liberty in an Italy descending into chaos. The French invasion of 1494 turned out not to be a passing storm but one of those events that define an age. Great changes followed. One fatal consequence for Florence was the rebellion of its subject city Pisa near the mouth of the Arno. Pisa proved agonisingly difficult to reconquer, and by 1504 Florence had been at war with its Tuscan neighbour for a decade. This was just one of the wars of Italy. By the time the entire cycle of conflicts ended, the very idea of the city republic would lie in ruins.

  Florence at the beginning of the sixteenth century was a republic bereft. It had driven out the Medici and executed Savonarola. With the former it extinguished a glamorous court, with the latter a countervailing force of religious charisma. Its moderate new government faced a timeless dilemma: how to make the middle course exciting. Keeping the Republic free from a return to Medici rule yet also safe from the tyranny of religious fanaticism was a tricky course. How to give compromise a glorious face? That was the problem confronting Piero Soderini, the Republic’s new head official, and his counsellor Niccolò Machiavelli.

  The defence of liberty is not what the name Machiavelli suggests. For five centuries it has been synonymous with political ruthlessness and skulduggery; in Italy the heirs of Machiavelli might appear to have been Mussolini and the Mafia, and all over the world, to this day, he lends his name to cynical and manipulative behaviour. There is even a school of primate research that claims to discern “Machiavellian”—that is, thoroughly competitive and ruthless—social traits in chimpanzees. Machiavelli is infamous not for his actions but for his words. A few years after his death in 1527, his books The Prince and The Discourses were published. Brief, brilliantly phrased, and deliberately shocking, The Prince was soon translated into all the major European languages and remains a thrilling read to this day. It disturbs and provokes because it appears to offer, with disarming candour, advice to a ruler on how to bamboozle and gull ordinary people and isolate, weaken, and if necessary kill rivals and enemies. Its longer companion volume, The Discourses, was if anything still more shocking to early readers, because it coolly analyses religion as an opiate of the people. Machiavelli was once as notorious for his atheism as he still is for his Machiavellianism.

  In Elizabethan England the spy and dramatist Christopher Marlowe popularised Machiavelli’s ideas, having him appear on stage to speak the prologue to his violent play The Jew of Malta (c. 1590). Shakespeare seems to have discovered Machiavelli through Marlowe and, within a year or so of his appearance in The Jew of Malta, had the tyrant Richard III swear to outdo the ruthless Florentine, boasting that he would “set the murderous Machiavel to school.” The real Machiavelli was as fascinating as the stage monster the Elizabethans made of him, and a lot more complicated. His attraction to the amorality of power was real, and without it his writings would not live as pungently as they do. But closer readers discover the subtleties and ambiguities of his thought, the richness of what he is really getting at. If his words are much more nuanced than the caricature of an evil counsellor, his life was practically the direct opposite of the fictional self he invented in his books.

  Santi di Tito, Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli, later sixteenth century. The sweet smile of the Florentine political thinker in this posthumous portrait contrasts with his image in Elizabethan theatre as a diabolical malcontent. (illustration credit 2.3)

  Machiavelli wrote his greatest works, The Prince, The Discourses, Florentine Histories, The Art of War, and his comic play La Mandragola while in forced retirement after the complete failure of a career dedicated to defending and preserving the Florentine Republic. Far from advising a prince, he got his political experience as second chancellor of the Florentine Republic and secretary to its military committee, the so-called “Ten of War”; he was a civil servant fired by the idea of republican government. He first came to office after the death of Savonarola in 1498, when he was twenty-nine, but his golden moment was the election of Piero Soderini as Gonfalonier for Life in 1502.

  Florence was edgy. The élite wanted to weaken the popular government established in 1494 and to present a more authoritative face to the outside world. Everyone envied Venice, the changeless maritime jewel of European states, whose republican constitution had endured for centuries. The stability of Venice owed much to its unique office of an elected duke, or doge, a role that combined the dignity of regal ceremony with the equality of a citizen among citizens. Florence decided to ape this institution by creating its own doge, known as the Gonfalonier, or Standard-bearer, for Life, and Soderini, an adept politician from a respected family, won the election. One of the ways in which he quickly proved his suitability for the job was by singling out the young Machiavelli as one of his most trusted agents and advisors. Machiavelli soon became a leading voice in the affairs of the Florentine Republic.

  Politics in sixteenth-century Florence was a man’s world—from ruling right down to citizenship itself. There was a stir when, shortly after Soderini moved into the Palazzo della Signoria, his wife, Argentina Malaspina, went to live there with him. “It seemed a very new thing to see a woman inhabit the Palace,” the diarist Luca Landucci observed wonderingly. Machiavelli’s correspondence with male political friends is full of dirty jokes and machismo, and when he was away on political missions his wife, Marietta Corsini, was often the last to get a letter. But in 1503 a woman changed the course of Florentine political history.

  She is both mortal and goddess, lover and mother, smiling archaic personage and merchant’s wife. Her pose has an eternal inevitability, as if she contained within her a serpentine column, revolving heavenward in a perfectly calibrated spiral: this effect of torsion means that she is in energetic motion even as she sits still in her chair. The relief of shadow on her strong features gives her feminine beauty a masculine counter-life. She is a hall of mirrors, a shrine of paradox.

  The crowd presses towards her, and to study her for any length of time means holding fast to a position jammed against the crash barrier in front of the glass box inside which the Louvre displays its most famous treasure. The Mona Lisa dwells in a painted atmosphere so thick she might be suspended in tinted liquid. Reality melts in her world. Mountains dissolve, roads wind to nowhere. Soft rocks sink into primeval seas. The power of this painting owes a lot to the strangeness and universality of its landscape, which feels like some kind of summation, some kind of conclusion about the nature of life on earth. At the heart of that conclusion sits a woman resting her left hand on the arm of a chair turned almost at ninety degrees to the surface of the picture, while her right hand spreads out gently on top of the left wrist, fingers fanning over a coppery sleeve. Bones and muscles and veins lie just beneath the translucent, glowing wax of those hands. The same hypnotic accuracy sculpts the smooth contours of the face that rotates towards us. Beneath her high, bright forehead the perfect symmetrical arcs of her brows graduate as precisely as if they’d been calculated to illustrate some geometrical theorem, curling superbly into the long perfection of her nose. Her lips are cool pink against the warmth of her skin, their clarity as still and eternal as fixed stars. The tautening of the muscles at their corners into a smile is sweetly life-giving.

  Her portrait is drawn with shadows. The darks that deepen her features are so bold that Andy Warhol was able to lift them off and reproduce them as a black template. A single stream of shadow starts at the corner of her eye and flows calmly under her rounded eyebrow, into the recess between eye and nose, right down the side of her nose and over her mouth, where it meets the ocean of shade that laps on her cheek. This dramatic yet exact use of shade deepens the Mona Lisa’s beauty by giving her superbly made features still greater fullness, smoothness, and symmetry; then it mutates into something more tantalising. The shadow on her cheek grows darker until it descends into a black myster
y between her head and her hanging coils of brown hair; the blackness below her right cheek is deeper still, almost resembling a cavern or grotto that metaphorically connects her body with the mountain landscape beyond.

  The shadows that swarm the Mona Lisa have the effect of diminishing the distance between foreground and background. The colours of the landscape bring it forward as her shadows draw her back. This optical effect heightens the psychological and poetic sense that somehow she contains grottoes and rocky recesses within her. The tenebrous voids that darken her beauty make one unconsciously recognise that one cannot interpret this as merely a portrait with a landscape in the background. The vista beyond her, with its coiling road, arched bridge, rocks, rivers, lakes, mountains, and sea, is as much part of her as she is part of it.

  The Mona Lisa—Mona or Monna being short for Madonna, the reverent way to title a married woman in sixteenth-century Florence—started life as a portrait commissioned by Francesco del Giocondo, a textile manufacturer and merchant who had business dealings with Leonardo’s notary father. But the picture of Francesco’s wife that Leonardo showed his fellow citizens that autumn must have looked very different from today’s unfathomable mystery. She must have looked like a real woman.

  “What was the relationship of a living Florentine to this creature of his thought?” asked the Victorian critic Walter Pater in 1873. The question resonates. Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa for years—perhaps until the end of his life. He never let the painting go, never handed it over to Francesco and Lisa del Giocondo. The poplar-wood panel was with him in France when he died. It is impossible, as the aesthetically intoxicated Pater rightly divined, to see this as a “portrait” in any normal sense. As her shadows deepened and her landscape ramified, so Lady Lisa was transfigured into a being of myth and fable. Yet Leonardo’s rhapsody really did start out as a portrait of a “living Florentine,” and what amazed the first people who saw the picture was its brilliant verisimilitude.

  “In this head anyone who wanted to see how art has the power to imitate nature, could easily understand it; for here were counterfeited all the minutiae that it was possible with subtlety to paint … the eyes had the lustre and moisture always seen in life …” So wrote Vasari in 1550. He praised the curve of the eyebrows, the graceful nose, the mouth that “seemed, in truth, to be not colours but flesh.” The use of the past tense is significant. Vasari hadn’t himself seen the painting, by then in the French royal collection at Fontainebleau, and relied on older Florentine artists’ memories of it. They remembered the name of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, an otherwise obscure name that has only recently been rediscovered in the archives, confirming his identification of her: they remembered how in the pit of the woman’s throat, if you looked long enough, you’d see “the beating of the pulse.”

  One way to glimpse the woman they remembered, the real Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo whose lifelike portrait became an instant icon in Florence in 1503, is by looking at Maddalena Strozzi Doni. In about 1506 the young Raphael, who came to Florence from his native Umbria to learn from the latest works of Leonardo and Michelangelo, was commissioned to paint portraits of Maddalena and her husband, Agnolo Doni, which hang today in the Pitti Palace in Florence. This wealthy couple—she belonged to the powerful Strozzi clan—collected art, and Raphael gratified them with a visual game to delight the trained eye. He painted Maddalena with a shadow of the Mona Lisa on her. It’s not just that she adopts the same pose as Leonardo’s model, turning towards us in her chair. She also crosses her hands in the same position. Most startling of all, the deep, clean shade that sculpts Lisa del Giocondo’s bone structure is reproduced along Maddalena’s brow and nose.

  Because it was painted so early in the life of Leonardo’s masterpiece, Raphael’s picture reveals what the Mona Lisa looked like before the older master’s imagination had finished transfiguring a living Florentine into a fantastic being. It shows what survives in today’s painting from the very first sessions in the Giocondo household in the spring of 1503. One can see that Lisa must have actually held that pose, the pose Maddalena would imitate—hand over hand, turning to her side while seated in a pozzetto chair (called a “little well” from its low, rounded back)—her eyes looking over to the left at Leonardo.

  Raphael, Portrait of Maddalena Strozzi Doni, circa 1506–7. The shadows on the Mona Lisa’s face, her pose, and the arrangement of her hands are subtly imitated in this painting. (illustration credit 2.4)

  So that’s how she sat, holding the pose with infinite grace. Women in Florence were trained to look beautiful, after all. In drawings and paintings by Leonardo and by Sandro Botticelli models wear, for the artist’s benefit, extraordinarily complicated hairstyles, the time needed for the elaboration of which suggests something of the boredom of women’s lives in this city that did so much to create the Western idea of beauty. Lisa’s family, the Gherardini, came from the Chianti hills, but the wine of wealth had long since gone sour, and her marriage, at sixteen, to the silk manufacturer and dealer Francesco del Giocondo was economically an upward move. It is quietly symbolised in the painting, for she wears a transparent veil of raw silk that glosses her hair in the very stuff of Giocondo’s wealth.

  “Leonardo da Vinci could not have portrayed you better,” wrote one Luca Ugolini to his compare—his co-father, a term of intimate social bonding—Niccolò Machiavelli on 11 November 1503. While Machiavelli was away in Rome observing the election of a new Pope, his wife gave birth to a son. With raw wit, Ugolini was assuring Machiavelli that there was no danger he had been cuckolded because the baby was his spitting image—the child looked as like its father as a portrait by Leonardo looked like its sitter. It would seem that within months of the first drawings being done, the Mona Lisa’s fame had reached the managers of the Florentine state.

  And so it hung there, a stray, indirect allusion to what might be the Mona Lisa in Machiavelli’s correspondence, until the announcement by Heidelberg University Library in 2008 that it had discovered something amazing. In the margin of its early printed volume of the ancient Roman Republican politician Cicero’s Letteres ad familiares, in handwriting believed to be that of Agostino Vespucci, who worked for Machiavelli in the Florentine Chancellery, a note about Leonardo mentions the Mona Lisa directly. Dating his comments October 1503, Vespucci says Leonardo is working on a picture of “Lisa del Giocondo.” It’s a vindication for Vasari, whose identification of this painting as a portrait of the wife of Francesco del Giocondo was never universally accepted as simple truth—after all, he has such a reputation for making things up.

  Nor is this the only claim in Vasari’s “Life of Leonardo da Vinci” that Agostino’s comment vindicates. The Mona Lisa, says Vasari, brought Leonardo’s fame in Florence to fever pitch. He started it after returning from his long sojourn in Milan, where he had attempted to cast a colossal bronze horse and succeeded in painting the sublime Last Supper. On his arrival back in Florence, he amazed people with a cartoon—a full-sized drawing for a painting on many sheets of cartone, the largest sheet of paper manufactured in Renaissance Italy—for a group that included the Virgin, her mother, Anne, and the infant Christ. This work may well survive as Leonardo’s only extant cartoon, which hangs in the National Gallery in London.

  Looking at the National Gallery’s cartoon—which also includes a young John the Baptist—it is clear how rectangular cartone sheets were stuck together to construct the vast drawing surface. On the soft paper, Leonardo used black chalk to create a group of figures born of shadow. The Virgin Mary and Anne sit in an arrangement so peculiar it takes a while to understand that Mary is sitting on her mother’s lap. Their legs, under sculpturally massive robes, are immense. The grouping of two figures so close together has the power of some massive fragment of marble statuary. This monument comes to spontaneous life in the childish energy of Christ and St. John, as the little future Baptist with his curly hair and soft, round face looks up at Christ, who, though but a baby, blesses him. Mary looks down tend
erly and happily at this scene. Her mother points heavenward and, also smiling, gazes at her daughter out of a face of cavernous revelation. Anne has profound shadows under her throat and shading that finely maps every muscle in her face. Most imposing of all, she has recesses of darkness for eye sockets, into whose ashen pits it is necessary to stare to make out her eyes at all.

  The London cartoon was probably drawn a year or so before the one Vasari describes, which he says was exhibited at the Santissima Annunziata, one of the holiest churches in Florence. People flocked to see it as if going to a festival: it amazed not only artists but all the people of the city. Leonardo soon followed up this triumph with the even greater success of the Mona Lisa. His miraculous portrait captivated the entire Republic:

  And this work by Leonardo had a smile so pleasing, that it was a thing more divine than human to see; and it was held a marvellous thing, since it did not differ from life.

  Through the excellence of the works of this most divine artificer, his fame had grown so much, that all persons who delighted in art, indeed the entire city, desired that he would leave them some memory. And it was being argued everywhere that he should be commissioned to do some notable and great work, by which the public might be adorned and honoured by the great intelligence, grace and judgement that were known in the works of Leonardo. And between the Gonfalonier and the great citizens it was decided, the Great Council Chamber being newly built, that he should be given some beautiful work to paint; and so Piero Soderini, then Gonfalonier of Justice, allocated him that room.

  There’s no doubt this happened: records of payments and even a contract survive for the mammoth project Leonardo now took on.

  What’s new about the recently discovered annotations by Vespucci is their confirmation that the commission was related to the Mona Lisa, just as Vasari said. In the letter to which Vespucci appended his comments, Cicero, writing in the first century B.C., describes a painting of Venus by the ancient Greek artist Apelles. No work by Apelles survives, but classical writers call him the greatest painter of all time. The old authors make him sound radical and brave: he once won a competition with another artist in which they merely painted lines on a board, a work so revered—says Pliny the Elder—that it was in the Roman Imperial collection on the Palatine until destroyed in a fire. In his letter, Cicero too stresses the aesthetic boldness of Apelles. He says that in one of his paintings this master meticulously delineated the head and shoulders of Venus but left the rest of her body “incohatam,” unfinished. Beside this passage in the margin of his copy of Cicero’s letters, Vespucci wrote, “so does Leonardo da Vinci in all his pictures.” He gives examples: Leonardo is working on two unfinished pictures, “the head of Lisa del Giocondo and Anne the mother of the Virgin.” In other words, when people first saw the Mona Lisa in Florence in 1503, it was an unfinished sketch, perhaps an uncoloured cartoon, like his design of St. Anne. This isn’t surprising, since he’d probably only begun it that spring. And Vespucci adds, “We will see what he does in the Great Council Hall …” Writing from within the Palace itself in October 1503, he confirms that Leonardo is preparing to decorate its grandest and most daunting space.