Commenting on his Cicero, the sardonic Agostino Vespucci, nephew of the explorer who had just opened the doors to the New World from a continent suddenly turned old, referred sceptically to the commission that Leonardo had just received in October 1503: to decorate the Great Council Hall in the Palazzo della Signoria (now Palazzo Vecchio), the city’s political hub. Leonardo’s talent was so prodigious that it defied even the proverbial practicality of the republican government – which, once again, staked its reputation and money on this eccentric citizen; for three years had he been seen strolling around the city with his small but elegant court of assistants and lovers, all of whom were handsome, unconventional, and in search of a way to make ends meet.
This time the project was extremely ambitious and formed part of an idea devised by Pier Soderini’s government: to ask artists to portray the glory of the republic. The first sensational step taken to further this idea was the public installation of David, the marble giant whose recent completion had sparked a complex debate regarding its final resting place – a matter of state in the most literal sense of the word. In an act that was unprecedented in the history of the Old World, the republican government of Florence summoned all the major artists present in the city, even those who were not born there, to decide where to place the marble giant. The colossal statue – the first since Roman times to see the light of day, being carved ex novo from a single block – had become a symbol of republican pride in Florence, and Gonfaloniere Soderini had convened the artists in order to ensure that it was valued in the highest possible way, thereby recognizing for the first time their specific competence in adding value to political strategies.
The meeting was attended by all the artists whom later generations would identify with the Renaissance itself; and the decision was eventually taken to place the David at the entrance of the Palazzo della Signoria. Leonardo, with a touch of rancour, opposed the decision and instead agreed with others that the statue should stand apart, against the wall of the loggia beside the Palazzo: ‘I agree that it should be in the Loggia, where Giuliano [da Sangallo] said, but on the parapet where they hang the tapestries on the side of the wall, and with decency and decorum, and so displayed that it does not spoil the ceremonies of the officials.’11 The mention of decency may have referred to the addition of a gilded leaf that for a while covered the youth’s genitals – which on this occasion must have appeared to Leonardo too ‘indecent’ to be displayed.
The next step taken by Pier Soderini’s Signoria was to commission the two artists widely regarded as the greatest, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti, to undertake a new work, which would be even more openly political and celebratory of the republic. In what would become an open contest between two equally innovative and extraordinary ways of conceiving art, the work consisted of two huge mural paintings on the walls of the Great Council Hall in the Palazzo della Signoria. Their subject matter was two battles through which the young republic could vaunt its military virtues. This programme was a proclamation of intent by the government – which, prompted by Niccolò Machiavelli, secretary to the Signoria, was engaged in the hard work of reinstating a citizen militia, a local army that would in part replace the mercenary troops used by the republic for years. One of the protagonists of the time, Francesco Guicciardini, praised the importance of this political project:
At the same time [in autumn 1505], work on the militia ordinance began to be enforced; in the past this had been practised in our countryside and wars were fought not with mercenaries and foreign soldiers, but with citizens and our own subjects.12
Nothing could arouse the military pride of the Florentines better than the evocation of the two battles that the citizen militia had successfully fought in defence of its own liberty: the first a victory against the Pisans in July 1364 at Cascina on the banks of the Arno, not far from Pisa, and the second a victory against the Milanese in 1440, close to the town of Anghiari. It is easy to imagine how much the republican government staked on the realization of this decorative cycle, all the more as it had been trying for years to quash the rebellion of the Pisans in a long siege. Michelangelo was assigned the Battle of Cascina and Leonardo the Battle of Anghiari. The task of agreeing on the detailed portrayal of the battles was delegated to the historians who worked for the republic, above all Niccolò Machiavelli, who knew how to gather exact information regarding these events. Leonardo was asked to depict a particular moment in the battle of Anghiari, namely the fight for the standard and the exact moment when the Florentine commander, Micheletto Attendolo, grabbed it from the commander of the Milanese troops, Niccolò Piccinino. Michelangelo was asked to depict another crucial moment of the battle of Cascina, when the Florentine troops were surprised by the enemy as they bathed on the banks of the river.
Both episodes are described in detail in the Florentine chronicles, but we do not know whether the two artists were offered the chance to choose exactly which moment of the battle to paint from a number of options. Undoubtedly, the moments that were finally chosen allowed both Leonardo and Michelangelo to display their own innovations and studies to great effect, and therefore it seems very likely that the choice of topic was made in collaboration with the artists. In displaying the battle between armed horsemen, Leonardo could put to good use his passion for horses; most of all, he could draw on the long and complex studies carried out in Milan during the previous decade, while working on the equestrian monument for Francesco Sforza. At the same time, his studies on physiognomy would reach a new frontier in this kind of representation. After the surprise and dismay shown on the faces of the Apostles in The Last Supper, he would now have an opportunity to experiment with the expressions of extreme ferocity, violence and hatred as well as with the physical impetus that all animate a battle scene [Plate 46].
For his part, Michelangelo, who had neither the desire nor the opportunity to tackle anything but the male figure and the expressive potential of the human body, would have to portray a scene in which nude males were surprised by the Pisans while refreshing themselves in the Arno and were able to foil the attack only thanks to their commander Manno Donati, who had not joined the bathers and immediately gave the alarm [Plate 47]. Michelangelo’s soldiers, naked like classical athletes, are seen struggling to recompose themselves rapidly in order to confront the enemy. Michelangelo’s perfect control of male anatomy – visible in the cartoon, which has survived through a copy made by Bastiano da Sangallo – allowed him to represent an orderly scrummage in which the spaces between the bodies and the movements of individual men are perfectly organized; and the realistic effect could not have been more astounding.
It was Michelangelo who was the more daring one in this challenge, since he had practically never painted anything on a wall, except during his apprenticeship in Ghirlandaio’s workshop. After that he had painted on easel panels, such as the small Temptations of Saint Anthony and a larger one of Saint Francis, both now lost. However, in recent months he had finished the Tondo Doni, which portrayed a sacred family, and its beauty and innovation was the cause of widespread marvel. For the Tondo he chose the rapid medium of tempera, in which the colour is mixed with egg white and a small amount of glue; this method allows it to dry very fast, even though it does not permit much tonal variation. Thanks to the use of dashed brushstrokes of extraordinary precision, Michelangelo obtained such softness in shading that he surpassed the quality and refinement of oil paintings, which were all the vogue in those years.
Unlike Leonardo, Michelangelo did not like dawdling over his work; once the image had reached a good level of definition through his tense way of drawing, which was full of energy, he moved quickly to colour, moulding the surface through chiaroscuro contrasts in order to give plastic force to his figures – because he only drew human figures. Yet in those painted figures he revealed such excellence that, in spite of his small number of pictorial works, the Florentines were convinced that he would certainly be capable of completing a pictorial enterprise of huge proportions. He, too, was rash in his own fashion; but, unlike Leonardo, he knew exactly how to recognize his own limits and would never embark, throughout his life, on a project that he was unable to finish.
In 1504, in a Florence that worried about political events in Italy and the instability of its own government, everybody’s attention was focused on this unprecedented challenge between the old master aged 52, who was renowned for his extraordinary talent in painting, even if not manifested in particularly large works, and the young artist, still under 30, who was known mostly for his sculpture – magnificent and imposing works, but sculpture nonetheless. Already by this time Michelangelo thought that the problem of art was not the technique used but the force of invention and the accuracy of representation, two areas in which he did not brook comparison. Leonardo, in turn, also regarded this commission as an extension of his sophisticated studies of light and of the gradations between light and shadow.
The first sketches for the Battle of Anghiari, like the one preserved at the Accademia of Venice [Plate 48], immediately reveal the level at which he intended to develop the narrative. The subject matter is condensed in the clash between the horses; and the horsemen almost seem to be a natural extension, a fusion of flesh and fury. Once again, Leonardo tends to identify and express human feelings through those of the animal, as he had done in the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani. To reinforce this identification of the enemy with the beast, he painted a fabulous ram’s head on the armour of the enemy captain, Niccolò Piccinino, a symbol of bellicose furor but also of the animal regression to which the enemy had stooped. To complete the metamorphosis, there are horns on his helmet that seem to sprout straight from his skull. His face transformed by fury gives additional expression and emphasis to the metamorphosis.
The copies of Leonardo’s cartoon (the Tavola Doria and the canvas by Peter Paul Rubens) are detailed enough to allow us to interpret the painting that Leonardo never finished. The horses’ profiles are reduced to diagrams of clashing forces, giving unnatural emphasis to the arched backs, lifted high by hooves compressed like springs ready to explode. A powerful mechanical device seems to be concealed under the animals’ muscles and the men’s armour. The battle is a condensation of forces transformed into flesh, steel cuirasses and angry shouts, but the upward thrust of the group prepares and highlights the winner as he pulls the standard pole from the enemy’s hands: the Florentine captain, whose unaltered face is almost a manifesto of rational control over bestiality and who epitomizes, in his symbolic gesture, the significance of victory. On the helmet of the victorious commander, rising above the throng, is a winged dragon that symbolizes wisdom and prudence. The symbolic reading goes along with and strengthens the dynamics of the battle, which are revealed with the immediacy of a chronicle; the clash is between good and evil, reason and bestiality, men and animals – and the attack itself is so violent that even the atmosphere is set in movement, making the flags whirl as if in a storm. The tangle of bodies had to appear credible and the painting ambitiously aimed to show how even the air was filled with dust.
In the successive phase of the study Leonardo focused on the physiognomies of the men and animals, trying to give that narrative and psychological value to their features that he had experimented so well in The Last Supper. The force and violence of the combat can be read in the men’s faces as it twists their features, but the greatest novelty is in the humanized expressions of the horses, which appear to participate in the fight with as much intelligence and skill as their riders. Never had horses been painted with such terrified and moving eyes as those that Leonardo prepared in the Palazzo della Signoria, and the entangled front legs of the two horses in the centre of the scene reach such heights of pathos that the two animals seem to embrace each other in despair rather than clash with hatred. In the classical fights between centaurs a human torso had to be shown on the horse’s body in order to narrate the fusion of man and beast, yet Leonardo gave human faces to the horses simply through the art of drawing and chiaroscuro. The clash between animals was transformed in the final preparatory phase of the painting into an insoluble cluster of limbs and bodies in which there is no difference between human and animal.
That war that Leonardo had never managed to contribute to with his machines and exploding projectiles, with war chariots whose wheels were fitted with scythes and whose metal warheads were intended to destroy enemy chariots designed almost like future tanks – that war was now represented in its bestial violence, which burst onto the artistic scene, overriding the dignified representations of battles so widely admired in Florence in the solemn geometrical forms of Andrea del Castagno and Paolo Uccello. Leonardo’s imagined battle reveals the human creature’s pure regression to primordial sentiments, its becoming one with the primitive natural forces represented by the horses and by the fury of the wind whipping the standards and the banners. The tangle is so dense that only colour would have been able to introduce order, and from the surviving copies we know that the artist made use of the clear contrast of the horses’ colour to make it easier to understand the clashing forces. Leonardo imagines the horses as being palest in colour in the parts closest to the viewer in order to separate their impact visibly from that of the horsemen, whose individual bodies and armour can only be discerned with difficulty. The horses in the inner part of the scene are brown, a colour that complements the shadow into which the tangle of bodies dissolves. Here his technique is somewhat reminiscent of the way in which the bodies of the Virgin and Saint Anne merge in the Burlington House cartoon.
But, once the image had reached a good level of definition through these preparatory studies, the artist was forced to confront the age-old problem of its practical realization. The Florentine Signoria, well aware of Leonardo’s shortcomings in this respect, had done everything possible to encourage the successful execution of the project, starting with wildly generous advance payments that, in this particular instance, were nothing more than a gamble. The contract, perhaps the most intricate of the entire Renaissance, tried to foresee and prevent every possible defection on the part of the artist. Leonardo was paid monthly, both for the work on the cartoon and for the painting, and deadlines were set for delivering the preparatory cartoon, after which, in the event that Leonardo failed to meet this deadline, the patrons had the option of appointing other artists to complete the wall painting using his cartoon. At the same time, however, the artist was given the guarantee that, if he wished to alternate between the preparation of the cartoon and painting the battle scene, even in part, he would be free to do so. By hedging their bets in this way, the sceptical councillors of the Gonfaloniere thought they had found a way to protect themselves against their notoriously unreliable but exceptionally talented fellow citizen.
Florence’s survival had for centuries been linked to the political astuteness and pragmatism of its administrators, and this contract, which was drafted in the chancery overseen by Machiavelli between late 1503 and early 1504, is a perfect example of this. Alongside this elaborate notarial document, a complex artisanal structure was also put in place in order to help the artist overcome all the practical problems linked to his way of working. By now it was widely known that Leonardo not only drew the scene to be painted in his cartoons, but prepared the actual painting itself. His cartoon not only showed the outlines of the figures and the main shadows, applied with two or three shades of charcoal (Raphael would do the same shortly afterwards in his marvellous cartoon for the School of Athens in the Vatican): Leonardo completed what was to all effects a painting on the cartoon, albeit in monochrome with infinite shades of grey and highlights in lead white, so as to experiment to the full with the brightest light and the darkest shadow.
His intentions were already clear from the first supplies of materials, a list of which is preserved in the archives of the punctilious Florentine administration. On 28 February 1504, having prepared a large wooden scaffold in the Salone dei Papi at Santa Maria Novella, where there was enough space to reproduce a scaled version of the immense walls of the Great Council Hall at the Palazzo della Signoria, the apothecaries Francesco and Pulinari del Garbo and the stationer Giovan Domenico di Filippo delivered
a ream of paper and 18 notebooks with sheets at 12 soldi and … 11 a notebook for Lionardo da Vincio to make the cartoon for the Hall and for squaring and flattening the said sheets … 39 libbre and 4 oncie of white wax to mask the windows of the Palazzo del Podestà and the Council Hall and for the window at the Friars and the Sala de’ Signori, and between the rooms and the Ten and elsewhere, and turpentine, biacca, sponge and other things given to Lionardo da Vinci.13
Together with the sheets of paper to be glued together to form a single, large square of paper of the same dimensions as the painting, Leonardo had biacca delivered to him: a white pigment made by corroding lead sheets with ammonium that was widely used in all paintings except in murals – where, as Cennino Cennini warned and Cimabue’s great Crucifixions at Assisi testified, it darkened and turned violet over time. Biacca was also widely used to highlight watercoloured drawings, and Leonardo had used it for years to finish his pencil drawings. So, with the help of biacca and his assistants, he now prepared to complete a real monochrome painting in the Salone dei Papi before it would be transferred in colour onto the walls of the Palazzo della Signoria.
At this time, given that this was an enormous cartoon, Leonardo must already have finished the general layout as well as the drawing itself; therefore it is plausible to imagine that the life-size cartoon of the painting would have been ready in two or three weeks. But nothing of the sort happened, confirming that any predicted timing was destined to fail with Leonardo. For more than a year he did nothing but work on the shading of the cartoon, trying to create those misty effects that he was pursuing through his studies on optics. Under the gaze of the Florentine councillors, first satisfied but then growing increasingly concerned, and as Agostino Vespucci looked on, as one might imagine, with a mocking smile, given that he had predicted renewed failure also on this occasion, Leonardo worked on the cartoon by hanging it from a huge frame and gluing its edges to a thin linen cloth, which also appears in the expenses recorded by the Signoria: ‘and for a sheet and 3 canvas cloths given to the said Lionardo to bind the cartoon’. The frame on which the cartoon hung was so large that it needed supports, and the scaffold had steps to make it easier to climb up and down. Since the records also contain references to ‘wheels for the platform for Leonardo’, it seems likely that the artist ordered a movable platform to be built that could be rolled back from the vertical cartoon: in this way he would get an overall view of the composition and would avoid seeing it only in parts, as would have been the case with a fixed scaffold.
He therefore spent a whole year making this huge painting on paper, bringing it to a level of perfection seen in the copy made by Rubens, also in monochrome. But while the Signoria urged Leonardo to finish off the work rapidly and even modified the contract in May 1504 to hasten the work, Leonardo was distracted by other projects. He did not abandon the treatise on the flight of birds, and above all he did not stop working on a mathematical problem that was pointless as well as laborious, that of squaring the circle, for which he thought he found a solution, as he recorded in his notebooks on 30 November 1504: ‘On the night of Saint Andrew’s day I came to the end with the squaring of the circle: and it was the end of the light and of the night, and of the paper on which I was writing.’14 Exhausted but pleased to announce both the end of that day and the last of the sheets of paper on which he had solved the problem, Leonardo felt fully satisfied at having reached, or rather at believing that he had reached, this important intellectual goal. No painting ever gave him as much satisfaction, even if he had achieved excellent and real goals in painting alone. All the while he remained indifferent to the Florentine government’s growing concern about the unending gestation of the painting for the Palazzo della Signoria, which now had to be postponed to the following spring.
In the meantime Michelangelo was also working on his cartoon, having rapidly completed the preparatory drawings, and he too was committed to dozens of other works: the Tondo Pitti, the Tondo Taddei, and the Tondo Doni, the statues for the Piccolomini Altar, the Madonna of Bruges, the Saint Matthew for the Opera del Duomo and yet more; but that November while Leonardo was toiling over squaring the circle, Michelangelo finished the preparatory studies for his Battle of Cascina, and a month later, on 31 December, ignoring the end-of-year celebrations, the tenacious young artist ordered another supply of paper for the huge final cartoon:
1504 xxxi decembris. To Francesco and Pulinari di Salamone del Garbo apothecaries for X libre of white wax and sponges and turpentine to wax the windows and for the cartoon of Michelagnolo and to Lionardo da Vinci, up to the 3rd of this month, 10 lire 6 soldi for several tacks and tapes to cover the window where Lionardo da Vinci is working.15
The moment of direct confrontation in the Great Council Hall was drawing ever closer. However, while Michelangelo had completed all his private orders within just one year after finishing the David, Leonardo kept the duchess of Mantua waiting on tenterhooks, while she regularly pestered him with reminders sent through her ambassadors, requesting a small figure painting, a youthful Christ. Isabella, with a flash of that seductive insight for which she was already famous throughout Italy, invited Leonardo to work on her small painting in order to distract himself from the battle scene, as she knew for certain through her informers that he was already bored with it: ‘when you are tired of the Florentine painting, we ask you to paint this little figure by way of recreation, by which you will do us a very gracious service and benefit yourself.’16 However, the duchess could never have imagined that Leonardo found it much more restful to dedicate himself to mathematics than to her ‘salon painting’. Apart from mathematics, Leonardo was also distracted by grief and deeply bitter feelings, from which he may have sought solace by retreating into that marvellous world of abstract numbers and circles that become squares with the help of a square and a ruler.
Ser Piero, his father, died in the summer of 1504 without having legitimized him; he relegated him forever to the position of the reject, the bastard, from which no amount of fame spreading throughout Italy in printed books could ever redeem him. The pain over the loss – or over the fact that, with that loss, the possibility of healing the wound of his illegitimate birth vanished forever – must have made him suffer in a way that he could not even acknowledge to himself. The death of his father appears to have been recorded in a scant couple of lines (but written with his right hand) between the note about stockings bought for Salai and the pay owed to his assistants: ‘On the 9th day of July 1504, on Wednesday at seven o’clock, died Ser Piero da Vinci, notary at the Palace of the Podestà, my father. He was 80 years old, and left ten sons and two daughters’ (Codex Arundel, fol. 79r, f. 272r). The note is found again in the Codex Atlanticus (fol. 196v), in an even more synthetic form: ‘On Wednesday at seven o’clock died Ser Piero da Vinci on the 9th day of July 1504. On Wednesday at around seven o’clock.’ But 9 July 1504 was a Tuesday: Leonardo was undoubtedly very shaken by the news.
As he notes, that father, so sensual and so avid for sex and power, left ten sons and two daughters; and, if he had had children with his first two wives, he might have left 30 children, if not more. These ten males, five from the third wife, Margherita, and five from the fourth wife, Lucrezia, left no room for him, Leonardo, the son of a young peasant girl, Caterina, sired because there was nothing better on offer in the countryside around Vinci. There was no space in that army of sons for Leonardo’s legitimacy; and, even worse, Leonardo discovered that his father had not even wanted to leave him a single florin and had rejected the idea of including him as part of the family to the last. The wound that had never stopped smarting was renewed with the opening of the will and the realization that Leonardo was nothing for the Vinci family.
The artist’s pain moved his elderly uncle, Francesco, his true childhood friend, the uncle who never felt the urge to work and who stayed in the countryside, idling his days away, as Nonno Antonio said, but who guided Leonardo in his earliest explorations of nature. Francesco had no heirs and his brother Piero, together with his last wife, had exercised their rightful authority by making him draw up a will in which all his possessions went to his legitimate nephews. But in this Florentine world, which was so brutal and enslaved to business interests and to the laws of inheritance, Francesco had a weak spot for Leonardo and challenged the memory of his brother and of all the other nephews, with whom he had nothing in common: the eldest of them, Antonio, had been born when Francesco was already forty, whereas Leonardo had been the joy of his youthful years. Hence Francesco decided in secret to bequeath a considerable part of his inheritance to Leonardo – a share that was larger than anything he would leave to his legitimate nephews. This was a tribute to the love and affection that was beginning to break the rigid rules of the medieval world, as well as an homage to the years when young Leonardo had won the heart of his young uncle and his grandparents, Antonio and Lucia, in the house in Vinci, while in Florence Ser Piero was going through wives and reams of paper, in an attempt to obtain a legitimate son from the former and social prestige through the latter. But during those hot days of mourning Francesco’s will was still a secret, while Ser Piero’s rejection was clear-cut – and now fixed for eternity by his death.
Leonardo was under increasing pressure from the Signoria to finish the cartoon that had been started more than a year earlier, and Michelangelo was breathing down his neck with unstoppable energy as well as insolence. The city of Florence, which could be crossed from one side to another in less than one hour, was far too small for two geniuses of this magnitude. Michelangelo had started his cartoon in December, finishing it just over a month later, an incomparable achievement as far as Leonardo was concerned. Finally, Leonardo’s horses champed at the bit on the immense sheet of card that was pasted with flour and raised up in the Salone dei Papi. The moment had come to transfer it onto the wall. The transport alone was a challenge: there were only a few hundred metres between the Salone at Santa Maria Novella and the Palazzo della Signoria, but the whole cartoon and its frame measured several metres in length, perhaps ten, and was at least six metres high; it could be cut, but it would still have been difficult to transport. In February 1505 a payment was made ‘for 4 wheels to make a cart for Lionardo da Vincio, or a platform, as stated in the ledger’.17 From this we can infer that a large cart was prepared on which Leonardo’s cartoon would be transported, and at the same time a new scaffold was put up in the Great Council Hall of the Palazzo della Signoria, where from now on Leonardo had to start work on transferring his battle scene onto the wall.
Michelangelo was also ready to climb onto a scaffold next to Leonardo’s, and the whole city quivered in anticipation of the most exciting competition in living memory and tried to predict the outcome of the challenge. To win the challenge, Leonardo needed to paint in his slow and reflective technique, to superimpose thin washes [velature] in transparent hues, and to coax the image out of the mist in which he enveloped it, so as to make it seem both realistic and at the same time ideally superior to nature. He was not content with the technique he had used in Milan, since early reports had reached him of the deterioration of the painting in the refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie. He knew he had to change materials and the way of preparing the wall for painting. He could have used the technique that other Florentine artists had used for mural painting, the dry fresco technique that would have freed him from the slavery of working with giornate [daily sections]. There were good examples in Florence of a secco [dry] wall paintings that had lasted for decades, if not centuries; but, as always, Leonardo had too little confidence in others and too much in himself, and he decided to experiment with a new form of preparation for the mural.
In the plaster for The Last Supper he had simply created a waterproof layer using a light plaster made of slaked lime and marble dust, coupled with layers of lead white pigment [biacca] and oil, perhaps also with the addition of an animal glue. Here, in the Great Council Hall of the Palazzo della Signoria, he ordered considerable quantities of ‘Greek pitch’, which arrived on 30 April 1505: this was a resin taken from the pines that grew along the Mediterranean coast and was used to seal ships’ timbers and to prepare paints. It had never been used to waterproof walls, but Leonardo thought that it would solve his main problem by turning the wall into a perfectly smooth, impermeable surface. The Greek pitch had to be dissolved over heat, and this explains the presence of those braziers mentioned in a list of Milanese equipment that was recalled by some Florentines years after these events. At the end of April, the workers responsible for applying the plaster and preparing small parts of the painting were at work and were paid by the Signoria, together with Leonardo’s new assistant, Ferrando, a Spaniard who started to help him with the painting itself:
To Lorenzo di Marcho labourer for three works and fi. [sic] in the Great Council Hall on the painting by Lionardo da Vinci…. To Raffaello d’Antonio di Biagio painter for 14 works working on the painting by Lionardo da Vinci in the Council Hall at 2 soldi a day, lire 14. To Lucha di Simone ropemaker for one hundred tegolini and for one pail and a half of earth for use by Lionardo da Vinci on his scaffold for the painting. To the painting in the Great Hall for more colours and jars bought for Lionardo and 5 gold florins paid to Ferrando the Spaniard painter and to Tommaso di Giovanni who grinds the said colours given by Giovanni piffero.18
He spent the month of May preparing the sealed plaster and grinding pigments in the porphyry mortars in order to make them as fine as possible. Everything was ready: the bowls containing colours, the brushes of all different sizes, the palettes for mixing paints, the well-filtered and clear drying oils. The pail of earth provided by Luca di Simone is particularly interesting, because this must have been coloured earth (terra di Siena?) with which Leonardo coloured the preparatory wash to produce a ground that was not white, but warm and golden, as is confirmed by some copies of the portion of the painting that was completed. The coloured earth was mixed in large quantities with the plaster used by the artist to seal the wall and to prepare it for the addition of colour.
The large scaffold in the Hall must have looked like an apothecary’s shop. In early June – an ideal month, owing to the warm temperature and the long hours of daylight – the much awaited moment finally arrived and Leonardo started to paint. Disaster struck immediately. According to old wives’ superstitions, Friday was not a good day on which to start a project, but Leonardo did not heed superstitions – at least not until that day, when he annotated the event in his notebook as nothing short of divine punishment for his boldness:
On the 6th day of June, 1505, Friday, at the stroke of the 13th hour, I began to paint in the palace. At that moment when [I] applied the brush the weather became bad, and the bell tolled calling the men to assemble. The cartoon ripped. The water spilled and the vessel containing it broke. And suddenly the weather became bad, and it rained so much that the waters were great. And the weather was dark as night. (Ms. Madrid II, f. 2r)
What else could happen, after such anticipation? If the start was illfated, the end would be tragic. With the help of Ferrando and of his old friend Zoroastro, busy grinding colours, Leonardo continued to paint all summer. The first figures to be traced were the horses, and they immediately became an object of wonder in the Florentines’ eyes. For a short while, the long wait appeared to have paid off. Nothing could have been more pleasing to the Signoria than the fake battle Leonardo was painting, since the real war was not providing the same satisfaction. In August that year Pisa had finally been besieged and initially the campaign seemed to move towards Florence’s advantage, but in September, when the final attack should have been made, there were cowardly defections among the Florentine troops that seriously embarrassed Pier Soderini’s government. The events are told in inexorable detail by Guicciardini:
The day arrived on [17th] of August when, after a long skirmish, the enemy was overwhelmed and quite a few were captured. All the gun carriages and flags were taken, and these were put up in the Council Hall, given that the Gonfaloniere was very proud of this victory and attributed it to his own renown…. and then having breached several lengths of wall with the artillery, and wanted to press home our advantage, there was so much cowardice and so little order among our troops, that being brutally rebutted they made no effect whatsoever, and then, given that some Spanish troops sent by Consalvi [Gonsalvo] arrived in Pisa, it was necessary to withdraw, having lost all hope, with great burden on the captain, the commission and the Gonfaloniere [battle of 8 and 12 September] … At the same time the militia ordinance was set in motion, following the ancient practice in our contado, that wars were fought not with mercenaries and foreigners but with citizens and our own subjects [Autumn 1505].19
In front of this harsh reality it was all the more necessary to take refuge in the consolations of art, and Leonardo’s cartoons could assuage the anxieties of the entire city. But not his own anxieties, which continued to drive him toward imaginary intellectual goals. In July, with total disregard for the pressures of work and for the fact that a large team of artisans, painters and joiners were reliant on him, he started to write a new book, and proudly announced its conception in his notebook: ‘Book entitled “Of Transformation” that is of one body into another without diminution or increase of substance, begun by me, Leonardo da Vinci on the 12th day of July 1505’ (Codex Forster I, fol. 3r).
Bored by the battle of Anghiari, Leonardo immediately commenced another battle, with mathematics. The autumn brought reassuring news: his rival, whose progress had been worrying him, had left the Council Hall and abandoned the city back in March, and for the time being the contest appeared to have been won by the old master. Michelangelo had been summoned to Rome by the new pope, Julius II, to design and then work on a monumental tomb to stand in the Vatican basilica. The commission was richly rewarded and brought him fame beyond all expectation. While Leonardo continued to receive a monthly stipend of 15 ducats for his painting, in March the pope had advanced 50 ducats to Michelangelo just for his travel expenses. In the following months Michelangelo had been paid 1,000 ducats, an exorbitant sum, to purchase marble from the quarry of Carrara. What was more, Michelangelo promptly bought his first property outside Florence, a piece of news that must have disturbed Leonardo. Suddenly the commission on which Leonardo was working must have appeared trifling by comparison to the fame and money received by his rival.
The voice of the siren from Milan had been audible already for a few months, and now it grew more persuasive every day. The French governor of the city, the maréchal de Chaumont, Charles d’Amboise, invited Leonardo to Milan in the name of King Louis XII, and in the early months of 1506 the artist accepted, leaving the Gonfaloniere Pier Soderini and the entire Signoria disconcerted. Florence appeared to have been afflicted by the curse of emigration. Its greatest sons were unable to produce their best work in their native city – they could do it only abroad. Both Leonardo and Michelangelo would grow famous in the coming years, above all for works commissioned in other Italian capitals, in Milan and in Rome.
Pier Soderini could oppose neither the pope nor the French king, both of whom were too important in the political scenario in which Italy now found itself. Julius II had embarked on his campaign to reconquer the territories that belonged to the church. He was an energetic pope: as a cardinal he had held the Borgias to account, and now, as pope and at the head of a real army, he wielded a sword more often than he held a cross. His irascible temperament meant that he did not hesitate to brandish a stick when he wanted to get his own way with others. Louis XII was a similar sort of character. He was preparing to invade Italy with a large army in order to reconquer Genoa. The manoeuvre was a cause of concern for some Florentines and of rejoicing for others. Genoa was allied to Pisa and its defeat would also bring down Florence’s worst enemy. At the same time, the French king’s invasion of Italy would destabilize the fragile political balance and bring back the Habsburg emperor, Maximilian of Austria. Venice, the kingdom of Naples, the papacy, and smaller states like Mantua and Florence had to decide on which side to stand, well aware that the wrong alliance might cost them their future. Above all, the future of Pier Soderini was at stake, since he was regarded as being too closely linked to the French faction. As a result, he had to guard himself not only from enemies among the republicans but also from the Medici, who had never stopped plotting to return to Florence with the support of Cardinal Giovanni (the future Pope Leo X), who was now fostering closer relations with the new pope.
In such a complex and unstable scenario, it was not easy to oppose Leonardo’s latest betrayal. On the other hand, the artist did not like the city’s political climate. His mind yearned after grand projects, and grand projects needed grand patrons. Michelangelo had thrown himself into the pope’s arms, and it was therefore right for Leonardo to throw himself into the arms of the French, all the more as their embrace was open beyond any reasonable expectation. From Milan Leonardo received a request for a funerary monument for the condottiere Gian Giacomo Trivulzi: this was not the pope, but the project was still worth a considerable amount, which the artist himself estimated at around 3,046 ducats in a detailed quotation recorded in the Codex Atlanticus between 1506 and 1508. But what attracted him to Milan more than anything was the request of the French governor, Charles d’Amboise, to paint a number of paintings directly for him and for the king of France, and to assist him again in repairing Milan’s defensive fortifications. Leonardo decided to leave Florence for Milan in early 1506, leaving behind him the riderless horses on the wall of the Palazzo della Signoria. The governor of Milan guaranteed to protect Leonardo from the Florentine Signoria’s demands that he return to Florence, and on 18 August 1506 d’Amboise wrote in person to Soderini:
Because we still need Master Leonardo to provide certain works that, at our request, he has begun, let it please your Excellencies, as we now request them, to extend the time they have given to Master Leonardo by two months.20
Pier Soderini’s response is polite and respectful, as it ought to be when writing to the representative of a king on whom the security of the Florentine state depended. He agreed to let Leonardo return to Florence the following September, but of course Leonardo had no wish to return and a new request for a further extension arrived from the governor in due course. On 9 October Soderini wrote to d’Amboise again, and on this occasion his irritation at Leonardo’s offensive behaviour is all too apparent. Leaving aside any pretence at diplomacy, Soderini accused him of having cheated the Signoria by accepting a conspicuous sum of money in exchange for very little work:
We beg Your Lordship’s pardon for writing again about Leonardo da Vinci, who has not behaved as he should have done towards this republic, because he has taken a good sum of money and only made a small beginning on the great work he was commissioned to carry out, and in our devotion to Your Lordship two extensions have already been granted. We do not wish any further requests to be made on this matter, for this great work is for the benefit of all our citizens, and for us to release him from his obligations would be a dereliction of our office.21
The reply verged on insolence and d’Amboise waited until December to reply in harsh terms, praising Leonardo’s almost supernatural talent and feigning surprise that his own fellow citizens were not ready to grant him in return a freedom and an honour of similar greatness. Soderini was left champing at the bit until, almost incredible though it seems, in January 1507 King Louis XII himself became involved and informed Soderini in the clearest of terms that Leonardo was his, and that he would use him and protect him for however long was needed. Leonardo’s talent, irrespective of his eccentricities, had conquered a kingdom. In order to put an end to the petulant complaints of the small state that Louis regarded as completely irrelevant on the European political chessboard, and whose sole merit in his eyes was that it produced a stream of artistic and literary talent of outstanding ability, the king summoned the Florentine ambassador in Paris, Francesco Pandolfini, and the latter immediately informed Florence of the king’s wishes:
Write to them that I wish to employ their painter, Master Leonardo, who is now in Milan, and that I want him to make several things for me. Act in such a way that their lordships will order him to enter my service at once, and not to leave Milan before my arrival. He is an excellent master, and I desire to have several things from his hand…. I replied that if Leonardo were at Milan your lordships would order him to obey his Majesty.22
This is how matters stood; and there would be no more discussion. In Milan Leonardo was given back all his goods, and in April 1507 he also received his properties. The spring of 1507 marked the start of a glorious new Milanese season, but it would not give any fruits.