Leonardo da Vinci (7 page)

Leonardo and Michelangelo were the two greatest artists of the day, or perhaps any day: men of supreme talent and contrasting temperaments, sharing air and glory in the hotbed of Renaissance creativity. It was inevitable that they would become rivals.

Leonardo was older, having made his name when Michele Agnolo di Lodovico Buonarroti was a boy. By the time Leonardo returned to Florence in 1500, Michelangelo was the city’s new star. He was in Rome during Leonardo’s first months in the city. But, in the summer of 1501, Michelangelo signed a contract with the Florence Signoria to carve his great “
David
.”

Two years later, with the statue standing more than seventeen feet tall and comprised of some six tons of stone, Michelangelo was still liberating the figure “from the prison of the marble,” as he described it. Leonardo had begun painting
Mona Lisa
and had also taken on a major work for the Signoria: a fresco on the wall of Florence’s huge Council Hall of the
Palazzo Vecchio
, where city rulers met.

The subject of Leonardo’s mural was to be the
Battle of Anghiari
, a Florentine victory over Milanese troops led by the
condottiere
Niccolo Piccinino
. In truth, the battle was a minor skirmish in which only one man died by accident when a horse fell on him. But in folklore, it was known and told as a grand clash of forty squadrons of cavalry and 2,000 troops, with St. Peter himself appearing in the heavens to urge on the Florentine warriors.

Leonardo had taken over a large unused refectory at the nearby monastery of Santa Maria Novella to use as a studio, where he would draw the enormous sketch from which the outlines of the painting would be transferred to the wall of the Council Hall. As in his work on “The Last Supper,” he had private living quarters next to the refectory. A ten-foot-wide platform was hung from a system of pulleys so that Leonardo could reach the whole surface of his drawing. By late spring of 1504, he was hard at work, his notebook filled with the snarling faces of warriors and the straining, contorted muscles of their horses. The great fresco would be no idealized triumph, but a grisly depiction of the true horrors of war.

By then, Michelangelo’s “David” – referred to merely as “the giant” by Florentines – was nearly finished. There’s no record of how the two rivals got along up to this time, but they were hardly compatible. By all accounts, Leonardo was cool, fastidious, and almost unfailingly courteous; he shunned conflict, and his rare outbursts of temper always surprised those around him. By contrast, Michelangelo was brash, a swaggerer, with a flattened nose smashed in a fistfight.

It would hardly be surprising if Leonardo resented the young genius - on top of everything else, Michelangelo’s “David” was already eclipsing the Verrocchio sculpture for which Leonardo himself had been the youthful model. So when the Signoria called together twenty-nine illustrious Florentine artists to vote on where in the Piazza della Signoria Michelangelo’s masterpiece was to be permanently displayed, Leonardo’s opinion was a bit dismissive. “I say that it should be placed in the loggia,” the record quotes him, “behind the low wall . . . in such a way that it does not interfere with the ceremonies of state.” But he was in the minority: The statue was hauled to a position of honor in the piazza, outside the main entrance of the Palazzo Vecchio, where visitors would see it before they could view Leonardo’s mural.

Whether it was before or after Leonardo’s harsh words, the rivalry produced a confrontation on the streets of Florence. Anonimo Gaddiano, who apparently heard the story from someone who was there, recorded this vivid anecdote: “Leonardo was walking with P. da Gavine through the Piazza Santa Trinita, and they passed the Pancaccia degli Spini where there was a gathering of citizens arguing over a passage of
Dante
; and they called out to the said Leonardo, asking him to explain the passage. At that point, by chance, Michele Agnolo was passing by, and Leonardo answered their request by saying, ‘There’s Michele Agnolo, he’ll explain it to you.’ Upon which Michele Agnolo, thinking he had said this to insult him, retorted angrily, ‘Explain it yourself – you who designed a horse to cast in bronze, and couldn’t cast it, and abandoned it out of shame.’ And so saying he turned his back on them and walked off. And Leonardo was left there, his face red because of these words.”

On another occasion, Gaddiano records, Michelangelo jeered at Leonardo, “So those stupid Milanese actually believed in you?” Not long after this, he wrote a veiled comment on Michelangelo’s characteristically tense and straining bodies in his paintings: “You should not make all the muscles of the body too conspicuous . . . If you do otherwise you will produce a sack of walnuts rather than a human figure.”

With “David” completed, the Signoria was inspired to ratchet up the rivalry between the two artists: In October 1504, Michelangelo was commissioned to paint a separate mural on the Council Chamber wall opposite Leonardo’s. He was to depict another martial scene, the
Battle of Cascina
, dating from an earlier war with Pisa.

It wasn’t to be. As soon as he learned of the new commission, Leonardo left Florence. His father had died in July, and his journey was in part to visit relatives in Vinci. But one biographer believes his departure was at least partly “a piqued withdrawal from the scene: a walk-out.”

Meanwhile, Michelangelo was given another large studio to produce his own drawing. He chose to paint a scene prior to the battle, showing surprised Florentine soldiers hastily putting on their armor after being caught swimming in the Arno by the enemy. As Vasari described it, “Michelangelo’s inspired hand depicted them . . . in various unusual attitudes, some upright, some kneeling or leaning forward, or halfway between one position and another, all exhibiting the most difficult foreshortenings.”

Michelangelo exhibited his finished draft in February 1505; Vasari says that “all the other artists were overcome with admiration and astonishment.” Michelangelo then left for Rome to discuss designing a tomb for Pope Julius II. A copy of his drawing remains, but there is no record that he ever started work on the painting itself.

By the time Leonardo started painting his Council Room wall, he had reached the deadline by which he had promised “without any exception or cavil whatsoever” to finish the whole project. He painted throughout the year while the Signoria paid his monthly stipend of fifteen florins. But the councilors were grumbling, and Vasari recorded a telling incident: “It is said that when [Leonardo] went to the bank for the salary which he was accustomed to receive from Piero Soderini every month, the cashier wanted to give it to him in piles of
quattrini
[small coins]. He did not want to take them, saying, ‘I am not a penny painter!’ There were complaints about this behavior, and Piero Soderini was turning against him. So Leonardo got many friends of his to gather up a whole pile of
quattrini
, and he took them to him to return the money; but Piero did not want to accept them.” The payments to Leonardo continued through the end of October.

Some records suggest that the painting ran into technical problems akin to those of “The Last Supper.” Writer Antonio Billi said Leonardo’s pigments weren’t adhering to the wall because he had been fobbed off with adulterated linseed oil. Whatever the cause, Leonardo never finished the mural, though a large central portion was near completion when he left Florence in May 1506. As late as 1549, writer Anton Francesco Doni wrote to a friend, “Go up the stairs of the Sala Grande, and take a close look at a group of horses and men, a battle-study by Leonardo da Vinci, and you will see something miraculous.” But twelve years later the painting was gone, covered by a huge multi-wall fresco done by Giorgio Vasari.

Unless the painting had deteriorated, Vasari would likely have taken steps to preserve a work of Leonardo’s before plastering the wall for his own fresco. In fact, a tiny inscription in a corner of Vasari’s painting reads
Cerca Trova
, seek and ye shall find. In recent years, various high-tech means have been used to probe the walls for a buried painting. But the results have been ambiguous, and it isn’t even certain which wall of the chamber Leonardo painted. Even if Vasari’s fresco were ripped away, there might be nothing but fragments left of “The Battle of Anghiari.” And as a Florentine councilor recently argued, “Vasari may not be Leonardo, but he is still Vasari.”

Leonardo’s initial drawing for the painting has also vanished. There are several copies of varying quality, but the closest we are likely to get to Leonardo’s work is a marvelous watercolor attributed to
Peter Paul Rubens
. Rubens never saw the original mural, but his version was painted sometime after 1600 directly on top of an earlier Italian drawing of the fresco. Rubens conveys all the fury, turmoil, and brutality of Leonardo’s preparatory sketches.

Leonardo turned to classical themes during his second stay in Florence, creating a drawing of
Neptune
in his chariot for his patron Antonio Segni, a Florentine banker. He seems to have painted a Bacchus as well; Alfonso d’Este, Isabella’s brother and the Duke of Ferrara, wrote to one of his business agents that he wanted to buy Leonardo’s “Bacchus,” but the agent replied that the painting had already been promised to the
Cardinal of Rouen
. If the painting did exist, it has been lost.

Leonardo’s classical period neared its peak in “Leda and the Swan,” a painting that Antonio Segni may have commissioned and Leonardo may or may not have finished. Several drawings in Leonardo’s hand exist, along with copies of several versions of the painting, apparently by Leonardo’s apprentices. The French royal collection once included a “Leda” attributed to Leonardo, but it was dropped from the list late in the seventeenth century. It has long been rumored that
Madame de Maintenon
, mistress and secret wife of King
Louis XIV
, found the painting immoral and ordered its removal.

She would have had reason. The painting depicts the classical myth of
Jupiter
, disguised as a swan, courting the lovely princess Leda. None of Leonardo’s sketches of the scene are as erotic as earlier interpretations of the scene by other artists, which show the swan forcing itself upon Leda; his versions stress fecundity and fertility, portraying Leda as a Rubensesque beauty with a brood of small children hatching from eggs at her feet. In Leonardo’s most striking drawing, Leda rests on one knee, with the other leg poised to lift her to her feet, while the amorous swan seems to be nibbling at her ear. Finished copies of the painting show Leda standing on both feet, and there is also a full-scale copy of a preliminary drawing of the standing Leda done by Raphael while he was in Florence in 1505 or 1506. Of the painting itself, if it existed, there is no trace.

But more than one swan inhabited Leonardo’s thoughts in those years. He had returned to his obsession with flying and flying machines, sketching detailed designs for such parts as rotating wing joints, and musing repeatedly on what it would be like to soar through the air. A small notebook now in the Royal Library in
Turin
is filled with these notes, drawings of bird flight, and observations on aerodynamics.

“A bird is a machine working within mechanical laws,” Leonardo wrote. “It lies within the power of man to reproduce this machine with all its motions, but not with as much power.” A machine built to fly would lack only “the spirit of the bird,” he said, which the spirit of man would have to supply. In his own spirit, he was already in the sky, mounting thermals with his wings steady or banking with the wind: “If the north wind is blowing and you are gliding above the wind, and if in your straight ascent upward that wind is threatening to overturn you, then you are free to bend your right or left wing, and with the inside wing lowered you will continue a curving motion . . .”

He may actually have tried his flying machine. The Turin notebook contains two versions of what amounts to a press release, an announcement worthy of
P.T. Barnum
: “The big bird will take its first flight above the back of the Great Cecero, filling the universe with amazement, filling all the chronicles with its fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest where it was born.” The “great Cecero” is Leonardo’s version of Monte Ceceri, a peak near Florence; no doubt he spelled it Cecero because that is Florentine dialect for swan.

For all the notebook braggadocio, if he did try to fly, it must have been in secret. If there had been any such public event, it is hard to imagine that it was never recorded, by Leonardo or anyone else. The only surviving note is a tantalizing sentence by the mathematician
Girolamo Cardano
, who wrote in 1550 that Leonardo was an “extraordinary man” who tried to fly “and was frustrated.” Leonardo would surely have left word of such an experiment, whether it was a success or a failure; he would have learned too much from either to let it pass. In all probability, he spread his wings only in his imagination.