The panel commissioned by the Signoria would never see the light of day because Leonardo could not finish it. To start with, the work was delayed by decidedly unusual political circumstances. Three months after signing the contract in January, Leonardo was paid 25 fiorini larghi to begin the work, but the city, the Signoria, and even the Palazzo where the painting was to be be hung were struck by a terrible event.
Lorenzo de’ Medici himself was aware that the dissatisfaction caused by his family’s ‘tyrannical’ hold over the city had spread insidiously among some of the most powerful Florentine families, and he took steps to hold in check his enemies’ mood of discontent with a complicated policy of alliances. The Pazzi family, which was perhaps even richer and certainly older and of higher standing than the Medici, had reached a tipping point at which matters could no longer be tolerated and, in conjunction with the new pope, Sixtus IV della Rovere, who also had reasons for opposing the Medici, decided to take action. Urged on by the animosity of one of the heads of the family, Franceschino dei Pazzi, a plot was orchestrated that deliberately chose to ignore the fact that Bianca, the sister of Giuliano and Lorenzo, had married a member of the clan, Guglielmo dei Pazzi.
The day chosen for the elimination of Lorenzo and Giuliano was Sunday 25 April, and the place was none other than Florence’s cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore. The sanctity of churches at that time was no obstacle to murder and other crimes, even on holy festivals. Only two years earlier, the duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, had been assassinated on Saint Stephen’s day while walking into the cathedral of Milan, where he was about to attend Mass. The Florentines, with an eye on being first in all their endeavours, decided to assassinate the two Medici brothers right inside the church; and, at the agreed moment (it appears that the signal was given by one of the priests celebrating Mass!), they and their henchmen attacked Lorenzo and Giuliano with daggers. Giuliano, the good-looking and enterprising horseman admired in so many jousts, died on the spot. On that particular day a leg injury that bothered him prevented him from wearing his chain mail vest under the doublet and from carrying his famous war dagger, from which he was never separated. Lorenzo, who had no time for jousts and was less of a fine figure, was only injured and had the good fortune to be saved by his friends, who carried him into the sacristy.
The conspirators were convinced that they could raise the city against the Medici, but when they ran and rode through the streets, crying liberty, the people turned on the Pazzi and their followers because they loved the Medici and did not feel the burden of their tyranny. Before long the whole city was in uproar, chanting its support for the Medici in a unanimous cry: palle, palle. The reference was to the family’s coat of arms: even then, images and their message were a speciality of Florence. Some of the plotters rushed from the cathedral to the Palazzo Vecchio, just 200 metres away, but that short moment of uproar enabled the loyal Medici supporters inside the palace to realize that something was afoot. The doors of the palace were barred and a barrage of stones rained down from the windows. The situation immediately turned in favour of the Medici and within a few hours most of the conspirators were captured and killed, together with many others who had inadvertently found themselves on the wrong side. Lorenzo rid himself of the plotters and their supposed friends with the same ruthlessness he had shown when dealing with the insurrection of Volterra, showing no regard for the close family ties created by his sister’s marriage.
Florence was implacable in the defence of its own liberty and government. Hanging corpses often made a macabre spectacle at the city gates; but on this occasion, in an unequivocal message, many of the plotters were hanged from the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria and were left there for days before being cut loose and allowed to fall to the ground below. The worst fate was reserved for the archbishop of Florence, Salviati, an active member of the conspiracy. Without a second thought for the censure of excommunication (which promptly arrived from Rome), Lorenzo’s supporters hanged him, together with his brother and another relative who was completely unaware of what was happening.
The furious reaction of the Medici and their supporters was unstoppable and, according to an account given by Francesco Guicciardini, ‘over fifty were hanged that day; never had Florence seen a day of such distress’.22 Paradoxically, however, the Pazzi conspiracy proved a great political success for Lorenzo, who had been in economic difficulties and would have started to lose his power to influence the city. Instead, after the conspiracy, he found his government stronger, having eliminated both his rivals and, as Guicciardini cynically noted, his handsome, braggart brother Giuliano, with whom he would have been obliged to share the family inheritance:
This tumult was particularly dangerous for Lorenzo … but it increased his renown so much and proved so useful that that day can be said to have been most lucky for him … the people took up arms for him and, doubting that he was still alive, they ran to his house shouting that they wished to see him, and he appeared at the window to the enormous joy of all, and finally on that day they recognized him as lord of the city.23
Where he had not succeeded alone, he succeeded through the stupidity of his enemies, given that after that event he was not only permitted a personal armed guard (an aberration in a republic of equals) but also able to tighten the reins of control still further, now that he was the sole master and arbiter of a city where no one would dare to rebel again, at least in his lifetime.
Leonardo, who had also become part of Lorenzo’s household, lived and worked a few metres from the cathedral and was able to follow the conspiracy at close hand. It made an impression on him and he was also able to make drawings using an approach characterized by the same painstaking attention he applied when chronicling the turbulent forces of nature, a tempest, a downpour or a flood. If it is to historians and chroniclers that we owe the precise details of the event, it is to Leonardo that we owe one of its most pathetic visual testimonies: a sort of snapshot, drawn in pen on paper, accompanied by a brief, synthetic caption: ‘beret in tulle, black satin doublet’ [Plate 15] – so detached in tone as to be cynical. The hanged man swings lifeless from the Bargello, his eyes hollow from the suffering and maltreatment prior to public execution (unlike Archbishop Salviati and his accomplices, he was hanged from the windows of the Bargello), and he is wearing Ottoman garments that are described in detail by Leonardo, together with the beret that still covers his head. The man is Bernardo [Bandini], one of the leading plotters – and perhaps the most hateful, because he had accompanied Franceschino dei Pazzi to Giuliano’s house on the morning of that fateful April Sunday.
Giuliano was not feeling very well and had decided not come to Mass. His absence risked upsetting all the plotters’ plans. However, they convinced him to follow them to the cathedral and everyone noted how, on the way from Palazzo Medici to the church, Bernardo embraced Giuliano several times – not out of affection, as a naïve onlooker might suppose, but in order to check whether he was wearing the chain mail vest under his elegant doublet. It was Bernardo, too, who stabbed Giuliano, leaving him dead on the consecrated floor. In the tumult that followed he had managed to flee from Florence and take refuge in Istanbul, where a year later the Medici’s agents tracked him down and brought him to Florence; there he was hanged on 29 December 1479, in his Ottoman garb, under the satisfied gaze of the Florentine people. Leonardo recorded the tragic sensationalism of that event with cool detachment. The sketch was never used in a painting but chronicled an event, one that was neither more nor less complex than many others drawn to the artist’s attention by people and nature.
The addition of that note is the first in a lengthy journey of introspection that Leonardo embarked on precisely at this time and that was to take him far from painting – and, in the coming months, also far from the panel commissioned by the Signoria for the chapel of San Bernardo, about which no more would be heard. Among the sheets of notes that Leonardo began to collect and preserve and that ended up forming what we know now as the Codex Atlanticus in the Ambrosian Library, Milan, is a list of names – not of painters or patrons, as you might expect, but of the most famous Florentine scholars. It includes professors of arithmetic, doctors, students of physics, and even that Messer Giovanni Argiropulo – John Argyropoulos – regarded as the greatest scholar of Aristotle, who had been invited to Florence by Cosimo de’ Medici after his flight from Constantinople. The list marks an important moment in Leonardo’s life. He now realized that he had to provide a stable structure for the desire for learning and knowledge that had consumed him since boyhood and that his apprenticeship in Verrocchio’s workshop could no longer satisfy.
Now he needed to raise his sights and pit his learning against that of the universities and their professors. The cultural dynamism of Florence had had an effect on the young man, who was now nearing 30. Although his first steps in painting had made him famous in the city, he felt attracted to more distant goals. To reach those goals, he had to embark on a path of self-taught learning. The people on the list might have given him concepts or books he deemed important. The list of names circumscribes a list of skills to which Leonardo now turned: ‘Quadrant belonging to Carlo Marmocchi, Messer Francesco Araldo, Ser Benedetto da Cepperello, Benedetto of the Abacus, Maestro Pagolo doctor, Domenico di Michelino, El Calvo of the Alberti, Messer Giovanni Argiropulo.’ Carlo Marmocchi was a well-known astronomer; Francesco Araldo was Francesco Filarete, herald of the Signoria and an intimate friend of the greatest intellectuals of the time; Maestro Paolo, doctor, was Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli, a mathematician and scholar of comets, as well as a close friend of Alberti and Cardinal Cusano; the man known as ‘Calvo de li Alberti’ formed part of the family of Leon Battista Alberti, who was already an important reference point for Leonardo because he was the first person in Italy to unite philosophical and theoretical humanist culture with the practice of architecture and painting, merging the different sectors of medieval knowledge. Lastly, Argyropoulos was Aristotle’s translator and commentator, mentioned earlier.
Leonardo started to collect the works of university scholars, with whom he would always have a conflictual relationship, challenging them to competitions but also noting their distrust. This conflict would goad his pride, urging him to acquire, in a somewhat disorderly manner, the appropriate means for his inquiries into the natural world. He began to study Latin so as to be able to read books and embark on a rigorous verification of the entire scientific tradition inherited from the classical world, on which others were already working. His lack of schooling made itself felt, and Leonardo knew that he had to make up for lost ground without delay and at all costs. Unfortunately his burgeoning interest in pursuing such a wide range of scientific topics meant that he lost interest in the commission from the Signoria, which had been the envy of all his fellow artists. Torn between the need to expand his own theoretical knowledge, an impulse he could not resist, and the need to make a living from paintings, Leonardo struggled to do both. It was an arduous task.