The Lost Battles Read online

  As confessions, this series of three works—Bacchus, carved in his early twenties; the Pietà, when he was still under twenty-five; David, begun when he was twenty-six—chronicle a journey of the psyche. Michelangelo flirts giddily with madness and death before rising to his full height, a stone in his hand, defying the world. His Roman statues dare to fall towards oblivion: they are perilously introspective, and their enduring universal truth comes of the insights of that introspection. The power of frenzy; the terrible sleep, the soft finality, of dying. David faces the world like Michelangelo himself, who has come back from the edge, renewed.

  The creation of David was like a ritual and Michelangelo’s early career like a tribal initiation. The young man goes out into the forest—in this case Rome—and has epic nocturnal adventures: he loses his old identity as he encounters fabulous monsters. Where an initiate might have to hunt in the forest, Michelangelo subjects himself to the drunkenness of Bacchus, the deathly sleep of Christ. And then he returns to his community, but before reintegrating into a new life there he must endure one last ordeal. It is the Ordeal of the Giant. Out of the rock he must hew a figure: out of the broken, dead block he must produce life. He carved David in secret, behind a wooden palisade, before finally revealing his first truly adult accomplishment in the workshops in 1503. When the artists spoke about it in January 1504, many were tender, respectful. It was as if they understood how personal a thing this was.

  The gaze of David, ever-watchful, is Michelangelo’s coming to terms with the world. The young artist who has—at least in his imagination—been to the edge of madness and death, of dissolution, now produces from raw matter a statue that is supernaturally coherent. This is his discovery of form.

  It is also his entry into the political world—the city and the Republic. The Gonfalonier, Piero Soderini, saw the public power of Michelangelo’s David when it was still emerging from the block. Soderini, evidently, was keen-eyed. Michelangelo always acknowledged this early support. Condivi, echoing his master’s voice, called the Gonfalonier the sculptor’s “great friend.”

  Even before he was confirmed as the Republic’s head of state, Soderini was watching the progress of the marble figure Michelangelo was carving. In 1502 he asked the young man to create a second work that orbited it—a bronze statue of David to give as a present from the Signoria to a French diplomat. Michelangelo told Condivi that it was because Soderini wanted the young artist to display his prowess in every art that he challenged him—for the first time in his life—to make something in bronze. Yet this was also an emphatic way of pushing Michelangelo towards political art.

  Donatello’s bronze statue of David was taken, like his Judith, from the Medici courtyard after the family’s fall in 1494. The Medici had inscribed its pedestal with one of their republican slogans, reminding the people of how a boy defeated the “tyrant” Goliath and calling on the citizens of Florence to defeat their enemies just as bravely. David was an archetypal hero for a republic. Defying the gigantic Philistine warrior armed only with his slingshot, he epitomised the triumph of the weak over the strong just as in a republic the people overcome would-be tyrants. Donatello’s statue found in this hero a triumph too of youth and beauty: nude except for his disc-shaped helmet and ornate greaves, his David is truly a boy, cockily displaying the hairy head of the human monster he’s brought down beneath his foot.

  Soderini challenged the young Michelangelo to rival this masterpiece that now stood in the government Palace, having been brought there, like the Judith, because its republican meaning was so potent. Michelangelo’s sculpture is lost, but a design for it survives, and it is a direct response to Donatello: David stands nude with his foot on Goliath’s head, his body eloquently drawn back in victorious pride. Beside the drawing is a detailed study of David’s right arm, and to the right of that two lines of Michelangelo’s strong and spiky handwriting: “David with a sling and I with a bow. Michelangelo.” The “bow” he means is the sculptor’s bow drill; he is drawing a parallel between a tool he used in his struggle with the vast block of marble and the slingshot David used to bring down Goliath. When the Hebrew shepherd boy David, in the Book of Samuel, proposed to fight the Philistine champion “whose height was six cubits and a span,” he was offered the king’s own armour:

  And Saul armed David with his armour, and he put an helmet of brass upon his head; also he armed him with a coat of mail.

  And David girded his sword upon his armour, and he assayed to go; for he had not proved it. And David said unto Saul, I cannot go with these; for I have not proved them. And David took them off him.

  And he took his staff in his hand, and chose him five stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd’s bag which he had, even in a scrip; and his sling was in his hand: and he drew near to the Philistine.

  Michelangelo’s line, “Davitte colla fromba e io coll’arco,” with his signature emphatically placed beneath it, acknowledges that in his labour to reveal a beautiful figure within the immense, badly blocked-out slab of marble he was given by the Florentine state, he had come to identify himself with the young hero. It also commits his art to a political mission. Michelangelo is a citizen-soldier, armed with genius. In Leonardo he is soon to find his towering opponent.

  FOUR

  Stoning David

  There is another David, drawn on a sheet of paper that survives in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. In many ways it is a perfect copy of Michelangelo’s statue. The hero stands in the same pose, his weight on his right leg, his chest sliding over to shift his balance, his right arm hanging at his side and his head turned in profile. To sit in the panelled Victorian Gothic study room above the trees of Windsor Great Park and hold this drawing in white-gloved hands is to contemplate Leonardo da Vinci’s direct response to the work of his contemporary, drawn when the David was first shown to the world in 1504.

  It is unmistakably the David. Leonardo must have been deeply impressed by the statue to draw its muscles so precisely. The drawing’s right arm, for example, is dimpled and tapered in exactly the same places as the arm of the marble figure; the torso mirrors the statue even more scrupulously, its ribs and muscles and the slope of the shoulders all as carved by Michelangelo. With his consummate draughtsmanship Leonardo even captured patterns of shadow, the lights and darks that play on the statue’s richly nuanced surface.

  The idea of perfect, ideal proportion is a theme that fascinated Leonardo. He expressed it in his own famous nude design for a “Vitruvian Man,” a naked male figure stretching out his arms in two alternate poses within a square transposed onto a circle, making himself into a shape like a star. This diagram illustrates the ideas of the ancient Roman writer Vitruvius, who argued that the standard of beauty in architecture and art originated in the proportions of the human body. Given Leonardo’s preoccupations, it is no surprise that in his drawing of Michelangelo’s David he got the ratios of distance between belly button and genitalia, between genitalia and head and feet, exactly as they are in the statue itself, as if analysing its quantifiable beauty.

  But a glance at the loins of Leonardo’s David reveals something very odd.

  Among the anatomical features of Michelangelo’s David is a stone penis that rests on stone testicles amid a corona of stone pubic hair. In Leonardo’s drawing the statue’s manhood has undergone a strange metamorphosis. It is effaced by a daub of bronze-coloured ink. This fig-leaf splash connects to a bronze belt around the statue’s hips. The hero has been emasculated.

  Leonardo’s graphic attack on David is best understood by listening in on a debate that took place in Florence when Michelangelo’s statue was all but finished. The discussion started with harsh words for Donatello’s Judith, raising her falchione sword in her right hand outside the government Palace. With her glazed eyes she seemed intoxicated by her duty to kill. The First Herald of the Florentine Republic, a certain Messer Francesco, shuddered when he saw her—or so his words imply. One can almost imagine him flinching and shaking h
is head when he speaks, first of all the speakers, to a committee meeting held on 25 January 1504. Donatello’s bronze statue fills him with dread and revulsion, he confesses. Messer Francesco knows what he’s talking about, for his office of herald makes him Florence’s public censor of symbols. It seems to him, he says, that Donatello’s statue, for all its associations of the humble overcoming the proud, is not an appropriate image to stand right outside the gate of the Palace as a “sign” of the Republic. For “the Judith is a deathly sign, and it doesn’t seem right, when our emblems are the cross and the lily; and it doesn’t seem right that the woman kills the man, and above all it was set up under an evil constellation, for from then to now things have gone from bad to worse: it was then we lost Pisa.”

  It is time to replace this statue’s black magic, its witch-like woman slaughtering a man, with something white in its magic, male in its significance, and—presumably—benign in its horoscope. There is only one candidate. Michelangelo Buonarroti’s new statue of David, now “as if finished” in the Cathedral workshop, should take its place.

  Messer Francesco’s passionate words were the first to be spoken at this extraordinary meeting, which brought together some of the greatest figures in the history of Western art, together with many lesser-known craftsmen, on a winter’s day in Florence. Specialist committees, or pratiche, of citizens were an established part of this city’s political tradition; they were convened to advise on decisions rather than to vote, and served to build consensus informally. The purpose of this one, which took place in the premises of the Operai del Duomo—the Cathedral works—in the shadow of the red and white dome, built as it had been with cranes and scaffolding that emerged from these very workshops, was to advise on an “appropriate and acceptable location” for Michelangelo’s marble man. Freed the summer before from its hiding place behind wooden screens, the immense statue stood for all the speakers to look on as they came together that day in the workshops where everything was pale with marble dust, where fragments of angels and prophets lay around unfinished or removed from the cavernous Gothic edifice next door. Everyone was doubtless wrapped up against the freezing cold. That winter was so chilly that a couple of weeks after this meeting the Arno would freeze solid in the centre of Florence, marooning the stone pontoons of the Ponte Vecchio in a white iron world. It was a day for Leonardo to wear his purple cape with the wide lapels and velvet hood, or his heavy coat of crimson satin.

  All of the artists had been summoned to the meeting by the consuls of the Arte della Lana guild and the officials of the Operai. Blowing on their hands and warming up at the fireplace—a city in winter, as Leonardo observes in his notebooks, has a permanent cloud of smoke above it from all the hearths—were Leonardo’s old friends and rivals: Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Giuliano Sangallo, all three aging now, Sandro nearly sixty, Filippino to be dead within months, the proud architect Sangallo massively powerful even as he aged, his family dominating military architecture and palace-building with their easy mastery of classical rules and strong technical abilities, his masterpiece the Palazzo Strozzi, the city’s newest, most impressive exercise in luxury tempered by gravitas. Giuliano’s brother Antonio was there, too, and the younger architect Simone del Pollaiuolo, nicknamed “Il Cronaca,” who’d overseen the Strozzi in its final stages. Il Cronaca was a relative of the Pollaiuolo brothers, renowned painters; another artistic dynasty of Florence was represented by Davide del Ghirlandaio, yet another by Andrea della Robbia, of the family whose painted ceramic sculptures gave such life to the city’s streets. Two lesser participants that day, the goldsmith Michelangelo Bandinelli and fife-player Giovanni Cellini, themselves had sons who would become famous artists. All were gathered both as artists and as Florentine citizens to advise on a matter of great importance to their community.

  One outsider was the painter Pietro Perugino, from Umbria, who had recently been seen as the most original artist at work in Florence—until, that is, the full genius of Leonardo struck the city on his return in 1500. Francesco Granacci, a young friend of Michelangelo’s, was there. So were the goldsmith Andrea il Riccio, the painters Cosimo Rosselli and Lorenzo di Credi, and the miniaturist Attavante. Leonardo knew them all, even the lesser lights. The previous summer he’d lent Attavante four gold ducats.

  Giovanni Cornuola, Biagio d’Antonio Tucci, Guasparre di Simone, the goldsmith Ludovico, the master-embroiderer Gallieno, the jeweller Salvestro, Chimenti del Tasso, and the wood-carver Bernardo di Marco della Cecca sat down to the meeting alongside the more famous artists. At the very edge of the group lurked the eccentric and brilliant painter Piero di Cosimo, admired for his strange pictures of centaurs and forest fires, notorious for his anti-social ways which reputedly included living entirely on boiled eggs, being afraid of the chanting of monks, and loving to stand outside in heavy rain. In the transcript of the meeting he is recorded as speaking last, as if he had to be cajoled to say anything. He too was a friend of Leonardo.

  One of the most curious people invited to this meeting might seem to be the clockmaker Lorenzo del Volpaia. What did a horologist have to do with art? That the question arises is proof of the mental distance between the twenty-first century and Renaissance Florence. Volpaia was renowned for the great astrological clock he had created for Lorenzo de’ Medici. It was a wonder of the city and also an important scientific asset of the state: in 1504 it stood in the Hall of Lilies in the government Palace, a crucial civic resource in planning wars, votes, even the placement of statues. Instead of merely keeping time, Volpaia’s Clock of the Planets had dials showing the signs of the zodiac and the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and Mercury—not simply lumps of stone in space, according to the culture of the Renaissance, but celestial beings and astral powers whose positions determined events on earth. The phases of the moon, the timing of eclipses—every consideration of significance in the casting of a horoscope was catered for by the complex motion of Lorenzo’s clock and was studied by the officers of the Republic. This great mechanism was simultaneously evidence of the modernity of Renaissance Italy—signifying as it did a developing consciousness of space and time—and of a web of beliefs that to us may seem bizarre. The clock did not merely reflect a belief in astrology, however. According to the fifteenth-century Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino, who translated magical writings attributed to the fictitious ancient Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, the planets signified powerful supernatural forces, and the Hermetic magus could perform “natural magic” by calling down their powers.

  The reason Messer Francesco’s fearful opening speech has survived, along with everything else said at the meeting that January day, is that it was all meticulously recorded, verbo ad verbum—word for word—by an assiduous clerk. The transcript carries us to a world where the first thing to be said in considering where a new statue should stand had to do not with artistic style or physical practicalities but with magic. Donatello’s Judith had been erected on Piazza della Signoria under an “evil constellation.” Since then everything had gone wrong. Astonishingly, the First Herald blamed the statue for the rebellion of Pisa and the bloody, apparently unwinnable war to get this nearby city back under Florentine rule.

  Messer Francesco’s denunciation of Judith is an expression of magical thought. The spectacle of a woman killing a man even summoned up the terror of witchcraft that was so much a part of this world. Judith had charmed and seduced Holofernes and then killed him. Yet Donatello’s statue does not portray her as seductive in any conventional way. She’s all wrapped up in her robes, her face a rapt mask. The man she holds by the hair is utterly paralysed and helpless, in a stupor. If not drunk, might he be under a spell?

  Messer Francesco was right, of course. Judith in art is a curiously ambiguous figure—a heroine but also an embodiment of male nightmares. In Gustav Klimt’s knowing modern Judith, painted in Freud’s Vienna, she is explicitly an erotic goddess intoxicated by her own sexual power. In sixteenth-century Europe, however, the insights
of Freud and Klimt lay far into the future. Women were profoundly excluded from power and authority. They were not citizens of Florence; they did not belong to the Great Council. So what the city’s herald said of Judith connects Donatello’s sculpture with the darkest terrors of a society of absolute inequality. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, thousands of women were tortured and killed in Europe for the crime of witchcraft. Most were poor, older women, a fact that amplifies the witch-like character of Donatello’s figure because, in the swathing, un-erotic robes the artist gave her as if to insist on her virtue, she looks like a peasant of indeterminate age. While many artists—such as Lucas Cranach in Germany—loaded their Judiths with finery and stressed the biblical assassin’s beauty, in Italian art there are subversively open acknowledgements that Judith might have been some sort of evil enchantress. The most shocking of all was painted by Caravaggio in late sixteenth-century Rome. His Judith is in the middle of decapitating a man who looks up at her out of shining, agonised eyes: in Caravaggio’s nightmare Holofernes is conscious as he is killed. But if conscious, why can he not resist? Has she put him under a spell so that he lies there unable to stop her cutting through his arteries towards his spine? Here Judith’s servant is portrayed as an old crone—the stereotype of a lower-class witch.