The Lost Battles Read online

  The best place to comprehend that hall today is from outside the Palazzo Vecchio, as the old Palazzo della Signoria has been known since the later sixteenth century. The pink tiles of its piazza have been replaced with blue-grey cobbles, on which crowds of visitors mill and horses waiting to give expensive carriage rides leave their droppings. Café terraces and a luxurious accretion of statues added over the course of the sixteenth century—Cellini’s bronze Perseus raising the green head of snake-haired Medusa and Giambologna’s frozen white contortion of Sabines and Romans beneath the stately arches of the Loggia, goat-legged satyrs disporting themselves around Bartolommeo Ammannati’s Fountain of Neptune close to where a plaque marks the site of Savonarola’s death—have transformed what was, in 1504, an austere, pristine space. But still it is a splendid arena, and the façade of the Palace has scarcely changed at all, whatever conversions went on within. This is in itself meaningful: a building that dates from the fourteenth century has been maintained in its original Gothic appearance as a manifest sign of the endurance of traditional Florentine values. The bell tower still soars, the windows still look like it would be quite natural to hurl somebody out of one. Along the north wall, there is a change in the stonework. It becomes more raw. There is a break where what must originally have been a separate building was added on, its slanting roof much lower than the tall fortress it adjoins. It is also easy to see, on the undressed façade, where it was later extended upward, towards the lofty heights. The archaeology of the Great Council Hall is plainly visible here: it is a separate hall built onto the eastern side of the original palace, and at some point its roof must have been raised.

  It is far more difficult to discern this room’s history from within. In the vast hall in a silvery light the visitor walks among twisted, violent marble people. A nude Florence holds Pisa in chains at her feet. Hercules fights a whole series of enemies. A Michelangelo youth stands astride an older, bearded man. Chairs are set out between the statues for a concert or a meeting; the Palazzo Vecchio is still the seat of Florentine local government and this is a functioning hall, with a lectern on the raised ceremonial platform called the Udienza. Scalloped recesses and marble prelates dignify this chilly platform, conceived as a shrine to the Medici family. High above, the ceiling is heavily impressive, a system of immense gilt beams framing oil paintings of the Medici and allegories of Tuscany, including a homage to the vintages of the Chianti hills. It might appear that above this false heaven float royal apartments: only by taking the “secret tour” into the attic space, an ancient, dusty labyrinth of wooden beams supporting the ceiling’s grandiosities beneath a simple slanting roof, does it become apparent that in essence this hall is a simple shed. On its long, high walls innumerable soldiers fight and die. Armoured men raise blazing torches to attack Siena by night. A warrior rushes to dress as the Florentine army swarms into Pisa. Hosts of cavalry raise scything swords. Muscles, chain mail, a palette of bright orange, glowing green, and violet.

  The frescoes, allegory-laden ceiling, display of sculpture, and raised galleries of this epic room date from the mid-sixteenth century, decades after Leonardo worked here. There is no sign of his mural among the works by lesser painters, but the visitor is likely to find assorted technological items and scaffolding along the walls, scanning for his lost work beneath the later frescoes. However, there is no need of hi-tech instruments to get closer to the past of this room. The floor is a sea of dark red tiles, like an ancient blood stain. They transport the imagination to a moment when the hall was new, when it was lower and darker than it is today, and bare plaster walls waited to be filled with images. The creator of the Great Council Hall still haunts it: a beak-like nose, a glittering eye, a stentorian voice linger in the room’s shadows.

  In 1494, when Florence threw out the Medici, the voice of Savonarola called for the new Republic to be truly popular. It had to invest power in a Great Council of all its citizens. When this democratic institution was created, there was the immediate problem of finding a space to accommodate so many. Savonarola had the answer: he called for a special hall to be built for the new assembly. Architects and craftsmen, fired by faith, worked with a speed the Savonarolans dubbed miraculous. Angels must have helped, it was said, for the Great Council Hall was ready by 1496. Its construction had taken just nine months. The plain coffered wooden ceiling was far lower than today, but the ground plan was the same. Roofing and flooring a first-floor chamber on such a scale were no mean feats.

  It opened with a mass, held by Savonarola’s lieutenant Fra Domenico da Pescia, for this was to be a sacred space, formally consecrated as if it were a chapel. Savonarola preached here to the Great Council. Naturally this holy place of the People needed to be ornamented with fine seating and works of art. In 1496 an order went out for anyone hiding treasures looted from the Medici during the revolution to hand them over “to honour and ornament the new great hall in honour of the Florentine People.” The hall honoured the People and it in turn needed honours.

  After Savanorola’s death, citizens watched his ashes float away on the river but did not forget his words. The shopkeeper and Great Council member Luca Landucci recorded that on a festival day in 1500, “at the door of the Signori was placed a Christ of very beautiful relief, as if it appeared we wished to say ‘We do not have any other King than Christ.’ I believe that this was a divine permission, because many times Fra Girolamo said that Florence had no other King than Christ.” Soderini’s government had an instant way to preserve an image of continuity with the idealism and passion of Savonarola’s Republic and so please the People: decorating and dignifying the Great Council Hall. So in June 1502 it commissioned another representation of Christ, this time a marble statue, to stand above the wooden loggia where Soderini and other governing executives—the Signoria—sat. In the same sanctimonious spirit, Filippino Lippi had been commissioned to paint a religious altarpiece for the Hall shortly after Savonarola’s death—the symbolism was obvious. Even as it burned his body, the Republic was using public art to stress faith and fidelity. The Hall was in short not just bricks and mortar: it was the physical expression of the Republic, a sacred manifestation of the Florentine People itself. Machiavelli understood this well. Years later, after the Great Council Hall was closed for political reasons, he gave some advice to Pope Clement VII on how to govern Florence with consent: “It remains to satisfy the third and final class of men, who are all the universality of the citizens … and therefore, I judge that it will be necessary to reopen the [Great Council] Hall … Without satisfying the many, you cannot have any stable republic. Nor will the great mass of Florentine citizens be satisfied, if you don’t open the Hall: therefore, if you want to make a republic in Florence, open this Hall …” Both Machiavelli and Soderini knew that Savonarola had left them a secret weapon. Simply by giving the Great Council Hall its due, the managers of the Republic could reassure humble citizens of the integrity and sanctity of their policies.

  Leonardo da Vinci, at this time, was famous among the entire citizen body of Florence. His exhibition of a cartoon at the Annunziata drew crowds as if it were a carnival. His portrait of Lisa del Giocondo was patently the most lifelike record of a person anyone had ever seen. Portraits were revered in Florence as simulacra of the living and relics of the dead. After Lorenzo de’ Medici survived an assassination attempt, he had lifelike models of himself placed all over the city; in a negative expression of the same impulse, portraits of conspirators were painted in public places to denounce, identify, and curse them. Families kept death masks of ancestors in their houses and, if they could afford to, paid for realistic portraits. Domenico Ghirlandaio’s picture of an old man with a misshapen nose looking down at his beautiful grandchild is a touching example.

  Leonardo, by the early 1500s, was rarely finishing any of his paintings and avoiding commissions wherever possible so that he could concentrate on scientific research. In Mantua, meanwhile, the brilliant, beautiful Marchioness Isabella d’Este was assembling
an erudite art collection. She was determined to have a work by Leonardo to go with her paintings by such contemporaries as Giovanni Bellini and Lorenzo Costa; specifically, she wanted her portrait painted. Isabella wrote to one of Leonardo’s previous portrait subjects, Cecilia Gallerani, asking to see her picture; she hosted Leonardo in Mantua and sat for a drawing. Yet he evaded all pleas to work it up into a painted portrait and never gave Isabella a work of art.

  Soon after this, as we have seen, he took on a portrait not of a princely ruler or court beauty, but of the wife of a Florentine citizen. Not only that, but he worked fast enough to impress people within months of starting on the Mona Lisa in 1503. The explanation is unavoidable: he was deliberately honouring Florence and its citizens. He wanted to make a quick impact, to give the city his calling card. Look closer at the painting and patriotic suggestions rise from its mists. The landscape of rocks and river and distant sea is a fantastical version of Tuscany—compare it with the plainer Lombard landscape in The Last Supper. Sitting in front of this landscape, Lisa del Giocondo identifies the city with its surrounding region. Her pose is patriotic, too: she sits elegantly and modestly, the pious, polite wife of a sturdy citizen. Compared with the bohemian courtly manners of the artist’s much more dynamic painting of Cecilia Gallerani, who holds a pet ermine as she looks sharply out of the picture, the Mona Lisa is respectably bourgeois. Only her smile hints at subversive secrets.

  Leonardo set out to awe and enthuse the Florentine People with a simple, beautiful picture of one of their own. Today, the Mona Lisa is the prisoner of fame, glimpsed between camera flashes in the Louvre like a celebrity on the red carpet. It’s tempting to imagine this intense fame must be a modern phenomenon, some bizarre by-product of the reproduction of images—as Marcel Duchamp joked when he drew a moustache on a postcard of the Louvre’s top star. But in reality this painting solicits the crowds. It is the great Renaissance inventor’s one machine that still functions—a fame machine. He painted it to get attention, and succeeded beyond all imagining.

  In the autumn of 1503, the fame machine seduced its original intended audience. Florence was impressed. Hearing the enthusiasm (“Leonardo da Vinci could not have done a better portrait …”), the Republic’s canny leaders invited him to the Palace. He agreed to paint a mural in the Great Council Hall that would satisfy the People.

  Soderini and Machiavelli were astute patrons. The Republic was a weak, threatened entity, a small city-state trying to preserve ancient ideas of liberty in a Europe of empires and potent monarchies—and yet here they were, commissioning an ambitious work of public art from the most famous artist in Italy. In October 1503 Leonardo collected the keys to an old hall off the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella in Florence where he was to be provided with a living and working space gratis by the Republic. There, his task was to design a picture worthy of the dignified communal meeting room that was the Great Council Hall.

  That all the painting and sculpture commissioned for the Hall up to that time had been religious fitted in with the traditional decor of communal palaces throughout medieval Italy. In the Public Palace in Siena, government officials were reminded of the sacred nature of their responsibilities by Simone Martini’s painting of the Virgin enthroned in heaven. In ethos, there was no difference between this fourteenth-century fresco and the altarpiece of the Virgin and saints commissioned for the Great Council Hall from Filippino Lippi in 1498. Leonardo, however, embarked on the room’s first secular decoration. Out of his discussions with Soderini came an idea for a narrative painting on a vast scale that would tell the history of the famous Florentine military victory at Anghiari, which had taken place on 29 June 1440.

  Machiavelli’s junior Agostino Vespucci, who watched Leonardo’s discussions with Soderini and noted that “we will see what he does” in the Great Council Hall, also seems to have been the Palace pen-pusher delegated to transcribe an account of the battle from the old Florentine chronicles. In this official history of the Battle of Anghiari compiled for Leonardo’s reference—it survives among his notes—there remains a piety towards the religious origins of the Great Council Hall. In a nod to the simple citizens who mourn Savonarola, it stresses a moment of spiritual vision on the eve of battle. On that early summer morning as the enemy approached, says Vespucci’s account, the patriarch who represented the Papacy at the battle addressed the army of Florence: “Having spoken he prayed to God with joined hands, and a cloud appeared from which Saint Peter emerged to talk to [him].”

  The ordinary, pious citizens would undoubtedly be moved by this portrayal of a heavenly helper in the sky cheering on the Florentine army; it was a way for the government to pay homage to the power of talking to God that had enabled Savonarola to build the Great Council Hall in the first place. In its initial conception, Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari was to be a pious history that would help erase the bitter popular memory of an inspired leader’s ashes floating to oblivion on the swirling waters of the Arno.

  THREE

  Heroics

  In time it became his habit to leave the marks of his chisel on his works, the only signature most of them bear, as if his living, breathing, straining actions were fossilised in the chipped, unpolished surface of the marble. Entire works look like this, unfinished conundrums. Others are divided in their nature, with beautiful lifelike limbs and anguished faces bursting from a storm of curved cuts in rumpled overhangs and pillars of stone raw as it came out of the mountain. But there are no marks on the perfect youth. No chisel-wounds, no drill-scars blemish the form it took Michelangelo three years to release.

  “Luna” is what the Romans called Carrara, whose marble is as white as the moon’s shining disc. The block Michelangelo stood in front of in 1501 had come from the quarries years before, had been “badly begun” by a semi-competent sculptor in the busy workshops of the Cathedral and then left there unwanted for forty years. The tools with which Michelangelo proposed to hew this massive lump of stone into a human shape were hammers and chisels, rasps and files and scrapers and a wooden bow like an archer’s whose string you could pull back and forth to rotate a drill. With this simple technology he had to excavate slowly into the seventeen-foot-long marble slab, negotiating the clumsy damage done by its previous assailants, hoping his labour would not be wasted and that he would find the perfect limbs, the breathing sternum, the keen gaze within. The work was dusty, sweaty, backbreaking, and secret, done behind partitions in the Cathedral workshop so no one could spy on his calculations with the dividers, or watch him drill heart-shaped pupils into the statue’s stone eyes.

  It is impossible to picture this labour standing in front of the statue in the Accademia Gallery in Florence, inconceivable, really, how he got from toil to miracle. Other works by Michelangelo may call attention to the struggle of creation—the crowds walk towards the tall hero down a long avenue, almost like the sacred avenues of prehistoric sites, of unfinished bodies aching to be liberated from formless stone—but David is as absolutely himself as are any of the people circling his plinth under the semispherical vault of an immense niche.

  View of David and the Captives, Accademia Gallery, Florence. Michelangelo’s most famous statue was brought indoors in the nineteenth century to protect it from the elements. (illustration credit 3.1)

  Stand far back, and his outline is a sharp drawing, as if Michelangelo had confidently mapped the shape in the air with pen and ink. The face, turned almost ninety degrees to look to the left, with its massive triangle of a nose, its mountain outcrop of an overhanging brow and florid hair flying out into space, forms a scintillating profile. The proportions of the body, from this distance, are mathematically graceful. The measurement from the hair on the head to the fusillade of hair above the penis appears—to the eye—identical to that from genitals to toes. One can not only see but almost feel the weight of the body gracefully shifting onto its right foot as the figure easily inclines his left knee forward, rolling his ribcage on top of his stomach to move his centre of gra
vity.

  Go nearer, and this harmonious silhouette stays in the mind yet also dissolves into glances and momentary impressions. The ridges and tensions of the immense chest high above—David is approximately three times the height of a living person, still higher because of the tall plinth—drink in nuances of shadow, so that, if from a distance he resembles an outline drawing, up close David is richly shaded, the belly button a pool of darkness, the nipples and ribs collecting delicate grey-greens. At his side hangs his gargantuan right hand, disproportionate not just in scale but in the mesmerising, exaggerated attention to detail the sculptor lavished on it: those veins throbbing in the marble, those knobbly knuckles, and the wrinkled skin on the vast thumb. Once the strangeness of this hand is sensed, the beautiful body Michelangelo has carved seems yet more alive, for it is clear this is not some chilly, perfect nude, complacent in its proportions and harmonies, but mobile, active, keen-eyed. The hand is the most radical instance of a quality that all David’s parts possess: they are separate and slightly at odds with each other, like characters in a play. The statue may be finished as a work of art, but what it portrays is unfinished: a body still growing and changing. David contradicts himself even in his grace, because to be alive is to be contradictory.