The Lost Battles Read online

  At least one of the artists who listened to the herald’s disturbing words was himself a master of this theme. In Botticelli’s painting of Judith, the hero and her servant are neither simple virtuous women nor sinister crones. As they walk home, the servant carrying a man’s severed head, they may well have something of the occult about them—but it is inspiring rather than evil.

  Botticelli in 1504 was old and no longer fashionable. He came along to the meeting as an eminent craftsman and was one of the first artists to speak, but his works were no longer defining the look, the mentality, of Florence as they had twenty years previously. Still, the memory of his masterpieces perfumed the air. A few years older than Leonardo, he had come into his golden age in the 1470s and ’80s, the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Refined and highly educated, Lorenzo had little time for the Medici bank, source of the family’s wealth, and all he understood about money was spending it. But he was a good fighter, who beat all comers at a famous joust held on Piazza Santa Croce, and a brilliant politician. He spent freely but with a political purpose—to consolidate Medici prestige—commissioning or inspiring his friends to commission works of art that gave Florence an atmosphere of civilised grace unrivalled in fifteenth-century Europe.

  In his Adoration of the Magi, Botticelli in about 1475 portrays himself in orange robes looking proudly—even arrogantly—out of a company that consists of portraits of the Medici and their close associates. While the dead Cosimo the Elder and Piero the Gouty pose as Magi, and Lorenzo looks down sensitively and strongly, thinking, his brother Giuliano—doomed to be stabbed to death by conspirators in Florence Cathedral—stands with Angelo Poliziano leaning sleepily on his shoulder as the poet talks to the philosopher Pico della Mirandola, who argued that all religions are compatible and promoted the magical traditions of Hermeticism and the Jewish Kabbalah. In this powerful high-cultural company Botticelli cockily displays his own philosophical-looking figure as part of Lorenzo’s intellectual court with its occult interests; he too is a magus like Pico della Mirandola.

  Botticelli, Adoration of the Magi, circa 1475. Botticelli, robed, looks out from among the portraits of the Medici and their courtiers. (illustration credit 4.1)

  Much later, in 1500, when he inscribes a prophecy on a painting, it is written in Greek by “I, Alessandro.” So Leonardo da Vinci was not the only Florentine artist with a passion for ideas. In his “Life of Botticelli,” Vasari sniffs that pretension made the artist write a commentary on Dante. In fact Botticelli illustrated every canto of Dante’s Divine Comedy in drawings that rival Leonardo’s notebooks. He also painted, in the 1490s, a perfect archaeological reconstruction of the most famous lost painting of the ancient world, the Calumny by Apelles, based on textual descriptions. But for all these intellectual achievements, it is as a mystical weaver of impossible worlds, a visualiser of the invisible, that Botticelli rightly remains one of the world’s favourite painters. His famous mythological paintings—The Birth of Venus, Primavera, Pallas and the Centaur, Venus and Mars—gave the ancient gods new life to walk, or waft, abroad among the young men and women of Florence.

  Botticelli’s world, in his paintings of the late 1470s and the 1480s, is a young, erotic, beautiful world. It’s the world of tournaments, parties, picnics, and carnivals in which Lorenzo and his friends existed. It is also a magical world. In Venus and Mars, probably created to decorate furniture in a palace bedroom, the goddess of love, in a diaphanous robe, props herself on one arm, calm but very much awake, while her lover, the war god Mars, lies, nude and asleep, beside her. In their woodland bower, cheeky little fauns play with the slumbering slaughterer’s lance and helmet. Venus’ elegant clothes stress her power over the nude man: her beauty has literally enchanted him. Mars lies under a spell, a benign spell, and it seems plausible (if unprovable) to see this painting as a talisman, an attempt to call down the influence of Venus according to principles of natural magic. Its very crispness and solidity—its crystalline quality—have something enchanting and transformative about them. You feel better for seeing it. You feel benevolently influenced.

  Botticelli’s pacifying goddess has achieved some celestial effect: his Venus is the planet as well as the pagan personage, and the forces at work in this painting are the secret operations of spirit. It’s a benign version of the sinister power of women the Florentine Herald saw in Donatello’s Judith. Florentine natural magic worked by using materials associated with the desired planet—the right music, the right food; why not looking at the right painting? Talismans and incantations were above all supposed to conquer “melancholy.” Botticelli’s pictures are among the best cures for melancholy anyone has ever painted. They exude joy—and that joy is presided over by Venus, both the goddess of love and, as Ficino claimed, one of the happy, vital, fortunate planets that can defeat Saturnine melancholy.

  Botticelli, Primavera, circa 1481–2. The meaning of this expansive mythological scene is elusive, its power insidious. (illustration credit 4.2)

  In The Birth of Venus she floats over the green sea, the inexplicable way in which her shell-boat clears the water, blown by wind gods who float in the air, itself suggesting some divine phenomenon. Everything is so firm and clear in Botticelli’s world: the faces so limpid, the eyes so sharp—and yet there’s a complete mystery to the way in which figures move through space, most purely expressed in the simple but ineffable flight of Venus over the waves. She comes towards you; the effect of joy is infectious; the gloom of Saturn disintegrates. In Botticelli’s Primavera Venus rules a woodland gathering of gods and spirits. There’s a new joy in the world—Spring, the rebirth of nature. Venus, the goddess of generation, rules the time of renewal, the new Golden Age. Mercury raises his wand heavenward, connecting the earth with the celestial powers, reaching between one reality and another. Airy spirits populate the glade: the Graces dance, a blue Zephyr chases the nymph Chloris, who transforms into Flora with her dress of flowers. At once hymn to spring, representation of the pantheon of Venus, and transfiguration of the May dances that were part of Florentine high and popular culture, it’s pointless trying to finally fix the meaning of the enigmatic Primavera and futile to deny that its feeling is supernatural.

  The sheer reality of spiritual beings in Botticelli’s art populated Florence with occult forces. When he painted a centaur the centaur was real, solid, alive; the blue Zephyr blowing among the trees in Primavera is a personification of a demon. The world was self-evidently full of demons, spells, and planetary forces; there was no better theory available to explain how it worked. The difference between Florence and any village of the day where similar beliefs flourished was simply that Florentine artists, and none more enduringly than Botticelli, granted these superstitions beauty and grace.

  The Botticelli who came to the meeting on 25 January 1504 was no longer under the influence of Venus. In 1494 he discovered a new guru. Savonarola attacked the “vanities” of sensual art, and yet the sensual artist Botticelli became his devoted follower, says Vasari in his “Life of Botticelli,” and there is dramatic visual proof of this. Savonarola’s books—cheap pamphlets relating his prophesies, interpreting the Bible, advocating personal prayer—were copiously illustrated with woodcuts, including some that anticipated paintings Botticelli had yet to create. For example, his later painting The Agony in the Garden has a spiked fence and mound that match the same features in a woodcut of this scene in a Savonarola pamphlet. The painting is a deeply original composition, almost painfully personal to behold. In other words, he designed the woodcut.

  Botticelli’s devotion to Savonarola was in fact not a violent break with his magical paintings of myth, for prophecy was another variety of the occult. The spell Savonarola cast over Florence is the ultimate proof of the city’s hunger for the supernatural. Here was a man who spoke to God, and God told him the future. Everyone accepted that his foretelling was proved true by events. Men and women went to stand, in crowds segregated by sex, in the Cathedral and be shaken by his revelations. Thi
s was divination by another name: another way of making contact with the celestial. As Machiavelli wrote, the city’s credulity revealed a primitive stratum beneath all its sophisticated ways: “The people of Florence do not appear to themselves to be either ignorant or crude; nevertheless the friar Girolamo Savonarola convinced them he spoke with God.” The rise of Savonarola did not mark the end of Florence’s magical beliefs. Rather, it was the apotheosis of Florentine superstition.

  At the moment of Savonarola’s death, Botticelli was one of the diehard Weepers who felt like strangers in their own city. He bravely asked a member of the Signoria, to his face, to justify Savonarola’s cruel death. In 1500 he wrote on his painting The Mystic Nativity his own prophesy of the Last Days and the imminent end of the world, to be replaced by a New Heaven and New Earth. He believed the visible world, on that cold January day as everyone discussed Michelangelo’s statue, to be on the very edge of dissolution. The angels were about to come down to the city and embrace and kiss mortals, while the Devil would be driven down into the depths.

  Botticelli quietly disagreed with the caricature of Judith as a “deathly sign.” Michelangelo’s statue would stand well outside the Cathedral, he said, on the steps up to it at the right-hand side near the Campanile, “with a Judith at the other corner.”

  Leonardo da Vinci sat doodling on a piece of paper. While the first speakers gave their opinions, he was drawing a great, hulking man with a beaky profile, a tremendous chest pulsing with shadows. He gave his sketch of the David a sling and a stone, and eyes that somehow were more stupid, less alive than those of the glaring giant in whose thrall everyone was speaking. It was an insidiously cruel caricature—at once true to the statue’s physical power and denying something about it. Leonardo refused to acknowledge the youth of David, let alone admire the figure’s vitality. His doodle transforms the alert hero into a muscleman, a thug. Leonardo was looking at the statue towering there and deliberately refusing to accept its claims for itself, to see the movement of spirit in this body.

  As the artists and craftsmen began to give their opinions (What’s wrong with the buttresses of the Cathedral? asked the wood-carver Francesco Monciatto. Hadn’t the statue actually been commissioned to go up there on top of the building? His mind was not really made up, Monciatto confessed), the haunting words of the First Herald of the Republic hung in the air. Where had it come from, his denunciation of Donatello’s Judith?

  It had come from the Palace, as would become clear in retrospect. Piero Soderini wanted Michelangelo’s statue for the city, for the state. The potent masculinity of the statue was its virtue. It stood colossally nude. Its stone phallus rested on immense stone testicles. Here was a man, and nothing but a man. Freed from the dishonesty of clothes, standing without shame in the light of the Piazza della Signoria, he would display his manhood as he took up arms: the vital masculine spirit of the Republic replacing the malign feminine black magic of deathly Judith.

  There was, however, another possible voice lurking behind the herald’s, shaping his speech. After denouncing Judith, he went on to criticise Donatello’s David in the courtyard of the Palace, another spot the government favoured for Michelangelo’s work: “The David in the courtyard is an imperfect figure, for its back leg is cracked; for all these reasons I’d put this [i.e., Michelangelo’s] statue in one of those two places, but preferably where the Judith is.”

  Donatello’s bronze David is revered to this day as one of the supreme masterpieces of European sculpture. It was already recognised as such in Renaissance Florence—that was why it was taken from the Medici house to the government Palace, because it was such a public asset. But here Messer Francesco abruptly dismisses Donatello’s talent, saying his statue is “imperfect.” This is a familiar tone of voice, one strongly reminiscent of Michelangelo’s own in Condivi’s Life and in the artist’s letters. Always ready to criticise other artists, he rubbished Donatello to Condivi—saying that the sculptor never polished his works properly—before correcting the comment, taking it back, in a conversation with a friend.

  So the sculptural criticism offered by Messer Francesco seems to reflect Michelangelo’s opinions. As, in truth, does his invocation of supernatural terror to damn Donatello’s Judith. For Michelangelo believed as firmly in planetary influences and ghosts as he did in God. Messer Francesco’s mixture of arguments—art criticism and the supernatural—makes it likely that Michelangelo advised him on what to tell the assembled artists to convince them of the need to place his David in front of the Palace.

  In his biography of Leonardo da Vinci published in 1550, Vasari uses the language of astrology to praise the genius of the great polymath: “Truly celestial was Leonardo …” There is nothing casual about this language. He makes his meaning clear: “The greatest gifts are often seen to be rained by celestial infuences [influssi celesti] into human bodies naturally; and sometimes supernaturally one body is given beauty, grace and ability …” There was no rational explanation for a perfection as vast as Leonardo’s: he must have been shaped deliberately by God. When Condivi’s Life of Michelangelo appeared three years later, written under the direct influence of its subject, it made it clear that he could match and outdo Leonardo’s heavenly pedigree. With an accuracy worthy of the Clock of the Planets, Condivi related how Michelangelo was born on “the sixth day of March, four hours before daybreak, being a Monday. A great nativity certainly, and it showed the kind of child he was to be, and of what ability, because, having Mercury with Venus in the house of Jupiter with a benign aspect, it was favourable, promising he would have the noble and high genius to triumph in everything, but principally in those arts which delight the senses, like painting, sculpture, architecture.”

  Michelangelo himself must have been the source of this personal information. His line identifying himself with his statue—“David with his sling, I with my bow”—reveals that for its creator this was an intensely personal image. Messer Francesco’s indictment of Donatello’s Judith implies that the David was somehow astrologically superior. In Michelangelo’s mind it certainly was, for it shared his own excellent horoscope.

  Michelangelo had carved the statue in secret, in seclusion, but its form determined its future. In turning his imagination away from oblivion towards action, in turning to face the world, it was as if Michelangelo dramatised his relationship with other people through his statue. Angry, difficult, lonely, he created an image that faced down dangers, and in facing Florence it demanded, as if in a dream, to move from the secrecy of the workshops to the very centre of the city, to stand on the Piazza della Signoria.

  But very few of the artists at the committee meeting could see why this should be so. Cosimo Rosselli and Botticelli wanted it to stay in the neighbourhood of the Cathedral, as a religious work, perhaps on the steps facing the Baptistry. Then Giuliano da Sangallo spoke. He recognised that the David was a “public thing”:

  My feeling was very much for the corner of the Cathedral, as Cosimo said, where passers-by would see it: but in the end this is a public thing, and recognising the imperfection of the marble which is tender and fragile, and if it stands in the open air, it doesn’t appear to me it will last, I thought it would be better under the middle arch of the Loggia della Signoria, either under the vault so you can walk right around it, or against the back wall, in the middle, with a black niche behind it as a kind of tabernacle, for if it is put in the open air it will truly deteriorate quickly. Better cover it.

  This speech changed the entire meeting. Sangallo was the most experienced architect and engineer there. He was consulted all the time about practical building problems. His words were powerful. Instead of the airy language of the First Herald, all that occult hyperbole, here was plain technical reasoning. Even the First Herald’s nephew, the Second Herald, agreed with Sangallo. His comment sounds as if it was influenced by the chill of the month:

  I’ve listened to all, and all have spoken good sense for various reasons. And considering these places from the
point of view of frost and cold, I have thought about the need for cover, and the installation should be under the Loggia della Signoria as has been said but under the arch nearest the Palazzo della Signoria, and there it would stand under cover and be honoured by its closeness to the palace; and if you put it under the middle arch, it would break up the order of the ceremonies that the Signori and the other magistrates hold there.

  The Loggia was a ceremonial stage at ninety degrees to the nearby Palace where the Signori stood during public events—they had stood there to witness the execution of Savonarola. It was an honourable location, especially if, as the Second Herald wished, the statue were placed under the arch nearest the Palace. When Andrea il Riccio added his voice, however, the argument shifted once more from the purely technical to something more mysterious. The David, he couldn’t help stressing, was a powerful, even a menacing figure that seemed to look at you as if it were alive. He made it clear that he wanted it under the Loggia in the same way that it’s best to keep a bear on a chain or a lion in a cage. The Loggia, he said in a way that perhaps naively revealed the other speakers’ hidden agenda, would neutralise the eerie power of the David: “I agree with what the herald has said, both because it will stand well sheltered there in the Loggia, and because it will be more estimated and looked at if it is not ruined, and it will stand better under cover, because then passers-by will go to see it, and it will not be as if it goes to meet them, and we will go to see it, and not have the figure come to see us!”

  Here Il Riccio reveals something unstated in Sangallo’s argument, but obvious. Under the Loggia the statue would be less dominating. It would be muted, tamed. “We will go and see it, and not have the figure come to see us!”—this is a pungent image. Il Riccio imagines a scenario a bit like Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman, in which an equestrian statue chases a man through the streets of St. Petersburg. In other words, he sees as much uncanniness in the David as Messer Francesco claimed to see in the Judith. The David’s penetrating gaze is so lifelike—best keep it in the shadows under the tall Gothic Loggia instead of letting it rule the open space of the Piazza. Once again magic haunts the discussion as Il Riccio invokes popular superstitions about the evil eye.