The door that Ludovico il Moro had thrown open to Charles VIII in the hope that the latter would defend him against the aggression of other Italian states, especially Venice and Naples, remained wide open, unfortunately, and in 1499 it let in the French troops once again. Louis XII’s army arrived at the gateway to Italy and made a straight line for Lombardy. They met with no resistance at all. The web of alliances that Ludovico had so carefully constructed fell apart with a speed that left even foreign political observers dumbfounded. Not only Maximilian of Austria abandoned Ludovico because he was unwilling to engage in war against France, but Ludovico’s own commanders ducked out, the castellans whom he had entrusted with the defence of the state. Last of all, even the people of Milan, worn out and overtaxed, abandoned him. The summer of 1499 marked the end of the Sforza court; and that society, which had seemed to be so compact around its ruler, now crumbled and distanced itself, in preparation for the arrival of new masters. Ludovico watched the unstoppable collapse of his system of government and, in a desperate attempt to defend the duchy, appealed to the Milanese in a speech that Francesco Guicciardini summarized a few decades later in his History of Italy:
and having convoked the people, to whom he was becoming odious on account of the heavy taxes, and in their presence he abolished several of those duties that were most oppressive, adding with warm words, that if the good people of Milan found themselves overcharged with taxes, he trusted that they would not ascribe it to his natural disposition, or to a covetous desire of accumulating riches, but to the condition of the times, and the dangers that surrounded Italy…. for so long a term of years under his government, they had enjoyed peace and quietness, which had enabled them to grow rich, and augment the splendour and magnificence of their city beyond all others; witness the stately structures, the public spectacles, the great increase of artificers and other inhabitants, not only in Milan, but over the whole duchy, to the no small envy and amazement of all the other states of Italy.25
We might imagine that, in speaking these words, Ludovico would have been thinking above all of Leonardo, who was the recognized symbol of that magnificence throughout Italy, and that, if Leonardo was present at this speech, Ludovico would have sought him out among the crowd, seeking comfort that the artist was unable to offer him. Consumed by his intellectual obsessions, Leonardo was bored of politics, tired of the antics of its players, and he could not interest himself in anything except his own research. While Ludovico was forced to watch as the affection gained during those of years of splendour melted away like snow in the sunshine, everyone’s thoughts turned to their future life under the new victors. Leonardo was one of these: he wasted no time in forging bonds of friendship with the new master of Milan, Louis of Luxembourg, count of Ligny, who arrived with the first storms of autumn.
Art was a first-class visiting card, and one that a cultured, refined man like the new governor could not resist. For his part, Leonardo thought he had found a new and even more powerful patron. But the atmosphere in Milan was not propitious and, in the meantime, while waiting to see which way fortune would turn, Leonardo took his money to Florence and deposited it at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in December that year. It was a modest amount, 600 florins, a quarter of the sum that Michelangelo would be paid that very same month in Rome for a single sculpture. Perhaps Il Moro had not paid him well for his service (and this might explain the speed with which Leonardo hastened to abandon him to his fate), or perhaps the Sforza payments had financed his expensive scientific research, the dissections, the experiments on flight, the books, and, last but not least, the elegant clothes for Salai and the comfortable lifestyle of the small group that Leonardo had gathered around him, his household or ‘family’. At any rate, Leonardo needed to earn enough to pay for his studies and for his way of life. The contacts he had made in Milan provided an immediate lifeline, which took him first to Mantua, in January 1500, and then, in March, to Venice.
In Mantua Leonardo could rely on the admiration of Isabella d’Este, who had followed his career as a painter with an enthusiasm bordering on fanaticism. As was seen earlier, Isabella had even asked Cecilia Gallerani to send her the portrait that Leonardo had painted; and now she could not resist the idea of having her own portrait painted, a move she hoped would win the admiration of all other Italian courts. As soon as Leonardo arrived, she posed for him in profile, wearing a most elegant dress, which revealed her beautiful shoulders in a bare décolleté [Plate 40]. Having neither Cecilia’s youth nor her extraordinary beauty, Isabella would make the most of the elegance that had already made her famous throughout Italy. Her hair, gathered in a fine net, perhaps of silver, falls exuberantly but tidily down her back. Her straight profile, revealing the hint of a smile that barely lifts the thin-lipped mouth, is lit by a proud look that stares into the distance. Leonardo does not appear to have been very inspired by Isabella and reduces the portrait almost to an illustration of fifteenth-century style, barely softened by the beautiful shading that contours her face.
Isabella’s ambitions were not enough to keep him in Mantua: Leonardo needed a powerful state, one to which he could sell his extensive knowledge, since he was beginning to regard painting as a secondary activity, and a rather boring one at that. He left Mantua to travel to Venice, where his close friend, Luca Pacioli, had already arrived and was waiting for him. Pacioli, who had taught mathematics in Venice before going to Milan, had now returned to take up an important post. He was one of the few influential figures and persons of recognized authority who believed in Leonardo’s scientific talent, and this attracted Leonardo far more than any artistic commission. By March Leonardo was busy carrying out an inspection to assess the need to reinforce Venetian mainland defences against the possible invasion of the Turks. Whether this inspection had been requested by the ‘most serene republic’ or he had decided to offer his military expertise without a direct commission, the inspection paid off and Leonardo drew up a report on the defence of the Isonzo, which was regarded as the weak point in Venetian defence to the east:
My most illustrious Lords, As I have perceived that the Turks cannot invade Italy […] without crossing the river Isonzo, and although I know it is not possible to devise any means of protection which shall endure for any length of time […] I have formed the opinion that it is not possible to make a defence in any other position which would be of such universal efficacy as that made over this river.26
Leonardo’s suggestion was to amplify the natural defences by constructing locks to regulate the speed of the river’s flow. His studies of flow dynamics were starting to bear fruit and, as far as we can tell, Leonardo’s advice was taken quite seriously by the Venetian government, although not to the point of securing him a permanent position in the city. Venice offered at the time the greatest book market in Europe and Leonardo leapt enthusiastically into that torrent of knowledge, which was flowing into the lagoon from all over the continent, without censure and impediments. He realized the importance of this new instrument of printing and the possibilities it offered, as it was growing faster and more sophisticated day by day, in the workshops of Aldo Manuzio and other typographers in Venice. The artistic climate, however, was very different from that of Milan, where for two decades he had dominated the scene without any real competition: here instead the great workshops of the city vied against one another in fierce competition, producing works of art of the highest quality, and the decisions were never taken by a single prince, as in Milan, but by the patrician elite, which had firm ties with artists like the Giorgione and the Bellini as well as with youngsters like Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo, whose precocious talent was making an impression on the market.
Meanwhile unsettling news for Leonardo arrived from Milan: in January the Milanese, led by Sforza partisans, rose up against the French, demanding the return of Ludovico – who, in tears, had left Italy for Germany four months earlier. Leonardo’s old acquaintances, such as General Galeazzo Sanseverino, for whom he had prepared jousts and masquerades with costumed ‘savages’, had returned to the city, and it was likely that they had been informed of the eagerness with which Leonardo had fraternized with Ligny and the French. In April the duke made an attempted comeback close to Novara but was comprehensively defeated and taken prisoner while trying to flee dressed as a Swiss soldier. Venice had the most efficient spy network of its day and news arrived practically in real time – especially the worst news, like the public hanging and quartering of one of Leonardo’s friends who had remained loyal to Il Moro, Giacomo Andrea of Ferrara. In such precarious and turbulent circumstances, the best option for Leonardo was to go back to Florence, where he could rely on important contacts.
The summer saw him heading back to his native city, where much had changed: the Medici had been ousted since 1494 and the city’s republican government was now led by Piero Soderini, with some assistance from Niccolò Machiavelli. One constant remained, however, throughout all the changes: Leonardo’s father, Ser Piero, was of the same status and disposition, and his hostility towards his illegitimate son had not faded. By now his third wife had finally given him legitimate sons – mediocre men who would leave no trace of their existence, yet they represented the continuation of the family inheritance and as such needed to be protected against the peasant girl’s son, conceived in the shade of scented cypresses.
Leonardo was therefore not welcomed into his father’s house but took lodgings at a monastery, from where he then moved to various noble Florentine families. He arrived in the city with his small retinue, including Zoroastro, who was well known but not well regarded in Florence. He must certainly have been also accompanied by Salai, now in his mid-twenties, handsome and elegant – if a little overly so for the strict tastes of the city’s merchant class, which had only recently been under the spell of Girolamo Savonarola’s moralistic regime (until the ashes of a pyre in the Piazza della Signoria put an end to his repressive rantings on 28 May 1498). Leonardo had no intention of changing his way of life and presented himself on the Florentine scene with a refined elegance that immediately struck his fellow citizens. The description offered in the so-called ‘Anonimo Gaddiano’ refers to this moment, and it is no coincidence that the chronicle draws attention not only to his handsome looks but also to the flamboyance of his clothing:
He was a handsome person, well proportioned, graceful and with a beautiful countenance. He wore a rose-coloured cloak that came only to his knees at a time when it was the custom to dress in long robes. He had a magnificent head of hair, which fell in carefully arranged curls halfway down his breast.27
Determined to reconquer his native city, Leonardo took rooms at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata, where his old friend Filippino Lippi – the painter who 20 years earlier had carried out the commission given to Leonardo by the Signoria but never touched by him – generously handed him the work that the monastery had commissioned of him: a panel painting of the Annunziata. Once more, almost against his will, Leonardo found himself back in a world from which he was desperately trying to escape.
He regarded himself as a military engineer, a mathematician, a savant with expertise in anatomy, mechanics, geology and botany, and his horizons were those of the universities, not of artists’ workshops. But in Florence, at least at the moment when he arrived, there were no other openings except those offered by painting.
At the same time, for the first time in his life, Leonardo was forced to take into account the existence, in his own native city, of a very advanced community of artists, capable of offering perfectly valid alternatives to the research that he had worked on alone during his Milanese years. Leonardo had scorned the mediocre representation of nature achieved by contemporaries when he left Florence two decades earlier. He believed that a more effective representation of the natural world could only come from the experimental study of nature and the study of optics, physiognomy and anatomy. These were all concepts that he had been explaining for the past ten years, at least in his Libro della pittura, a work that was now almost complete.
A tour of the city’s churches and of the saloni of the best families informed him that his fellow citizens had taken different approaches, and their achievements were certainly not to be overlooked. The frescoes and altarpieces by Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Pinturicchio and Filippino Lippi himself revealed a reality that was no less credible than his own, convincing in its realism but at the same time conjuring up an ideal world in which humanity seemed to purify itself of all vulgarity and to draw closer to that representation of an ideal universe that everybody imagined by means of abstruse philosophical constructs and that the Florentine painters had finally succeeded in fixing on murals and in painted panels.
Even more astonishing progress was evident in architecture; echoes of it may have reached Leonardo’s ears in Milan thanks to the visits of Francesco di Giorgio Martini, in the form of the designs by Giuliano da Sangallo and the studies of Bramante, with whom Leonardo had collaborated. On his return to Florence he saw how architecture had been freed from the prison of schematic geometry in which he, too, had felt entrapped and that, seen as such by his contemporaries, had presented an insurmountable barrier, which had not permitted him to achieve much in his Milanese years except for fantastic designs, sometimes highly practical but remote from what was requested by the new humanist awareness. Now, dressed in his knee-length pink cloak, hair flowing over his shoulders in curls that were still brown rather than grey, he visited the buildings of Giuliano da Sangallo, which revealed the birth of a world about which, in his own isolation, he had not even heard. The sacristy of Santo Spirito, the Palazzo Gondi, the Villa Medicea at Poggio a Caiano and, lastly, the church of Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato: all these were extraordinary works, built with a discipline that combined functional and spatial research with the harmonious laws rediscovered through the study Vitruvius’ canons.
While Leonardo had shut himself away in his notebooks and studies, in the presumptuous conviction that only intellect would suffice to penetrate the laws of nature and limited by the idea that the human microcosm was a mirror of a macrocosm whose governing laws could be understood, Giuliano, the true pioneer of Florentine experimentalism, had criss-crossed Italy in search of the laws of composition that had guided the classical architects when they constructed their astonishing monuments. He had measured and drawn almost all the classical buildings, had gone as far as Benevento and Naples, had measured the Roman forum and anything that shed light on the classical laws of architecture, on that ability to imprison space and bring it alive, which could be felt in Roman monuments still practically intact. Giuliano had also spoken to other architects and had been helped by younger and not so young members of his own family (one of the leading dynasties of Renaissance architects), who were now ready to continue his work. Giuliano had pushed the boundaries of architecture forward, much further than Leonardo could possibly have imagined.
Nor could Leonardo – accustomed as he was to being celebrated in printed works and in sonnets and even heralded as a new Apelles in the Antiquarie prospettiche romane, a major book published the previous year28 – have imagined that he would be publicly insulted by a young artist who had only just started in a bottega at the time of Leonardo’s departure, the son of a well-to-do family of Florentine merchants who had fallen on hard times. That youth was Michelangelo Buonarroti; and he was rapidly creating a stir in Italy’s artistic circles. Like Leonardo, he came from an affluent family and was determined to show that art was an intellectual activity worthy of his status and on a par with the other liberal arts.
Only just 25, the youth had already given signs of such greatness that everyone spoke of him as the true genius of Italian art. Sought after by cardinals and, before long, by popes, when Leonardo arrived back in Florence Michelangelo had just been commissioned to carve a marble colossus from a block that no one had managed to use in the previous 20 years. The statue had been commissioned by the Opera del Duomo [the Works Committee for the Cathedral], but people already talked about the statues he had carved in Rome, in particular the one in the basilica of Saint Peter’s, the Pietà, for the French cardinal Jean de Bilhères-Lagraulas. Imagine the surprise with which Leonardo discovered that, independently and at an even earlier age, Michelangelo had begun to study anatomy by dissecting corpses in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova between 1490 and 1493!
Michelangelo’s anatomy dissections, which were recorded in drawings no less refined than those that Leonardo himself had made, were not tied down by being intended for a study of human physiology like the one in which Leonardo had become a little lost, as his progress was hampered by the many biases inherited from the classical physiology that he continued to study. Instead Michelangelo had dissected corpses to understand not why but how the human body moves, and he had transposed his discoveries into his sculpture (and his paintings), attaining a representation that was so convincing as to overshadow the research of every other living artist in Italy.
While no one could deny the extraordinary quality of Leonardo’s shadows and the precision of his psychological insights, Michelangelo had realized in colour and in stone real men animated by that heroic spirit that made Florentine art much more fascinating than the purely mimetic art of the Flemish. Michelangelo had skinned corpses, lifted muscles and isolated bones, recording human morphology in his drawings with a graphic quality that was in no sense inferior to that used by Leonardo in his sketches. Moreover, unlike Leonardo, he did not lose his way among countless minor pathways of research but instead had an obsessive determination to realize tangible works, capable of challenging the limits of the material – as he had done when carving his Pietà out of a single block, or as he was doing right then, moulding his David to a height of over four metres, almost as tall as the equestrian monument that Leonardo had had to abandon in Milan.
Leonardo’s inability to bring about his own ambitions was regarded with disapproval in a city that owed its freedom, its greatness and its very reason for existing to the concrete actuality of its inventions. Michelangelo could not wait to challenge and humiliate the old master whom everyone was talking about – and of whom he was jealous for other reasons as well. Michelangelo, too, was a homosexual but had nothing of Leonardo’s elegance and beauty; he showed instead in his behaviour an ostentatious sobriety, exaggerated to the point of brutality. Young Buonarroti might have seemed like a bear compared to the mature, elegant brilliance of the man who had reappeared in Florence with his young lover in train. Their public clash became legendary in the city. They had come across each other by chance, at one of those small gatherings in which citizens used to discuss passages of Dante Alighieri while sitting on the benches outside Palazzo Spini. Leonardo was obviously well aware of Michelangelo’s love of the Florentine poet and had the idea of inviting the young sculptor to contribute to the discussion. Registering the ironic dig at his ‘mechanical’ status, Michelangelo had a brutal reaction to the invitation:
‘Explain it yourself! You who designed a horse to be cast in bronze, which you could not cast, and shamefully gave up.’ And with these words he turned his back on them and went on his way, while Leonardo reddened at these words … On another occasion, Michelangelo, wanting to sneer at Leonardo, said to him: ‘Those Milanese blockheads actually believed in you!’29
Openly, publicly, Michelangelo challenged a man of mythical status and accused him of lack of resolution and incapacity. We can imagine how much pain this reproach must have caused Leonardo, highlighting as it did his pretensions of omniscient scientist and the fact that he had not succeeded in casting the great Sforza horse. It rubbed salt into fresh wounds and presaged the battle that he would shortly enter into against this presumptuous and arrogant young man. Leonardo also took revenge on the arrogance of the young sculptor in his Libro della pittura where, in order to show the superiority of painting over sculpture, he presented the sculptor as a savage, a brute who wrestled with his material; and the portrait of this savage was so close to what everyone knew of Michelangelo’s own ways of working that one could not fail to realize that Buonarroti himself was the one humiliated in these lines, which are in fact some of the most beautiful ever written by Leonardo:
The sculptor undertakes his work with greater bodily exertion than the painter, and the painter undertakes his work with greater mental exertion. The truth of this is evident in that the sculptor when making his work uses the strength of his arm in hammering, to remove the superfluous marble or other stone which surrounds the figure embedded within the stone. This is an extremely mechanical operation, generally accompanied by great sweat which mingles with dust and becomes converted into mud. His face becomes plastered and powdered all over with marble dust, which makes him look like a baker, and he becomes covered in minute chips of marble, which makes him look as if he is covered in snow. His house is a mess and covered in chips and dust from the stone. The painter’s position is quite contrary to this (speaking of painters and sculptors of the highest ability), because the painter sits before his work at the greatest of ease, well dressed and applying delicate colours with his light brush, and he may dress himself in whatever clothes he pleases. His residence is clean and adorned with delightful pictures, and he often enjoys the accompaniment of music or the company of authors of various fine works that can be heard with great pleasure without the crashing of hammers and other confused noises.30
The passage was a mortal blow to Michelangelo, another social misfit – an aristocrat who had slipped down into the mechanical arts, from which he wanted to redeem himself; yet with a cruel dig Leonardo pushed him back towards the status of a manual worker. A more perfidious revenge could not have been imaginable for the young Buonarroti, who boasted that his illustrious ancestors were involved in the government of Florence.
But had Michelangelo’s ill will been provoked by something more? A clue may perhaps be hidden in Leonardo’s notebooks: a small sketch of a youth, who points upwards with a clearly visible erect penis, and underneath the name of ‘Granaccio’ – a young artist who had spent his apprenticeship in Ghirlandaio’s bottega with Michelangelo and was among the great artist’s few lifelong friends. Leonardo had evidently appreciated his more hidden skills and had kept the memory alive on paper. Whatever the circumstances that Leonardo recorded in that drawing, Michelangelo was not pleased and his aggression was tainted by a bitter judgement of the perhaps excessively open manner in which Leonardo expressed his preference for young men.
These are mere conjectures, but they are useful in clarifying how Leonardo’s position in Florence was far from easy, particularly in the light of much more serious reasons. Leonardo’s old friendship with the Medici did not help to create a welcoming climate around the returning artist. What was needed was something that could rekindle people’s admiration for a master who had been absent for so long: a work that the artist could complete within a short time, and maybe a large cartoon that would show the extraordinary expertise he had achieved through his knowledge of shadows and his science (because science indeed it was) of the emotions.