VI
“Nor do I wish it thought a presumption that a man of low and poor station set out to examine the laws governing the rule of princes.”
—MACHIAVELLI, THE PRINCE, DEDICATION TO LORENZO DE’ MEDICI
IN THE FALL OF 1502, WHILE HE WAS AWAY AT CESARE Borgia’s court in Imola, Machiavelli met a man, a fellow Tuscan, who was serving as Valentino’s military architect. Machiavelli probably knew him by reputation, since the fifty-year-old had already achieved some fame as a painter, first in Florence and later in Milan, where he had served for many years at the court of Ludovico Sforza. His name was Leonardo and he was born in Vinci, a village tucked in among the olive groves and vineyards that carpeted the hills west of Florence. When Machiavelli was still a child, Leonardo had worked as an apprentice in the studio of Andrea Verrocchio, where he had astonished everyone with his precocious gifts. The painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari relates the almost certainly apocryphal story that when the master saw an angel his young assistant had added to Verrocchio’s painting of the baptism of Christ, he set down his own brushes in despair because he knew he would never be able to match his pupil.i
But if Verrocchio knew talent when he saw it, most Florentines were less perceptive. Leonardo’s years in Florence were unhappy. More established artists such as Verrocchio and Botticelli grabbed most of the prestigious commissions, and Leonardo had to settle for the crumbs. In 1476, he was dragged before the magistrates on a charge of sodomy, a traumatic experience that colored his attitude toward the city that gave him his professional start. By 1481, Leonardo had left Florence for Milan, where the polymath, unable to choose among his various interests, promoted himself to Duke Sforza as a musician and military engineer. It was in Milan that Leonardo achieved fame as an artist, producing masterpieces like The Last Supper, The Virgin of the Rocks, and the massive equestrian statue of the Duke’s father, Francesco Sforza.
By the time Machiavelli encountered the middle-aged artist in Imola, however, Leonardo had suffered a string of setbacks and frustrations, punctuated by moments of incandescent triumph. He was, in fact, something of an enigma, a man whose gifts were so enormous that he managed to achieve less than others who deployed with greater efficiency their more modest talents.
Leonardo and the Second Chancellor of Florence were in many ways kindred spirits. Both were ambitious and driven by social and economic insecurity. As the illegitimate son of a prosperous provincial notary, Leonardo never received the education and status that his father’s position should have entitled him to. In the introduction to his Treatise on Painting he scolds his better educated but less gifted colleagues:
I am fully conscious that, not being a literary man, certain presumptuous persons will think that they may reasonably blame me; alleging that I am not a man of letters. Foolish folks! . . . my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words; and [experience] has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases.
Machiavelli, too, was sensitive to the chasm between status and ability. Take, for instance, his dedication to The Prince: “Nor do I wish it thought a presumption,” he tells Lorenzo de’ Medici,
that a man of low and poor station set out to examine the laws governing the rule of princes. For just as those who draw landscapes place themselves low on the plain to discern the nature of the mountains and high places, and to describe the lowlands they place themselves high above, similarly, to know well the nature of the people one must be a prince and to understand princes one must be of the people.
Both men make a virtue of marginality. Each claims a vantage point that allows him to see what eludes those more comfortably situated; each eschews empty erudition in favor of practical experience. Here is a new kind of man, unburdened by the dead weight of tradition (a university education in one case, wealth in the other) and free to discover new ways of looking at the world. Both Machiavelli and Leonardo spent their lives enduring the snubs of men whose only claim to superiority was an accident of birth. And in both the artist and the bureaucrat there burned a fierce desire to show those upon whom they depended for their livelihoods that they had something unique to offer the world.
Unfortunately, neither man left an account of their initial meeting in Imola, though it is inconceivable that the two compatriots were not at least in casual contact during the months they spent hovering like moths about Valentino’s court at the fortress of La Rocca. Thus when, in 1503, the Second Chancellor returned to the thorny problem of reducing the city of Pisa to submission, he recalled Valentino’s former engineer and military architect, who had already shown his willingness to find innovative solutions to intractable problems.
The idea of employing artists for military purposes might seem incongruous today, but it was only natural in the Renaissance, when art demanded technical proficiency and practical know-how. Leonardo in particular believed that art and science both dissected nature in order to understand the way the world really worked. In his paintings he put to good use his profound understanding of light, obtained by keen observation and enhanced by experiment, by creating images whose verisimilitude astounded his contemporaries. As a scientist, he was both a visionary and a tinkerer—a spinner of improbable yarns and a builder of ingenious devices. Fascinated by the forces of nature, he sought to harness wind, water, and even sunlight to serve the purposes of mankind.
By the summer of 1503, Leonardo had left the service of Valentino and returned to his native land. He was, as always, seeking new opportunities to test the theories that filled his notebooks and excited his imagination, and attending to the more pressing matter of replenishing his depleted bank account. Approaching members of the government—including, almost certainly, Machiavelli himself, who, as Secretary to the Ten of War was deeply involved in the day-to-day management of military affairs—he presented a plan to defeat Pisa not by use of brute force but by diverting the Arno (the vital artery of both Florence and Pisa), thereby starving the rebellious city of subsistence and commerce.
The notion was not as outlandish as it might seem. In fact the scheme was a culmination of ideas that had long been brewing inside Leonardo’s fertile mind. Anyone living near the banks of the capricious Arno, as Leonardo had growing up in the Tuscan foothills, would have witnessed the almost yearly floods that uprooted trees, washed away bridges, and submerged whole neighborhoods. In his series of drawings titled Deluge, he envisioned a world engulfed by the watery element, a rain-drenched apocalypse as powerful as anything ever conceived in art. Leonardo dwelled at length on the destructive potential of water, so using a river as an instrument of war must have seemed perfectly natural to him.
To many within the government, less imaginative but more accustomed to managing large-scale public works projects, the scheme seemed far-fetched. The Ten pronounced it “little better than a fantasy.” More than half a century earlier, another visionary artist, Filippo Brunelleschi, suggested that the republic might defeat her rival Lucca by diverting the river Serchio so that it flooded the city; the project ended in disaster when Luccan soldiers sabotaged the dam and turned the river back on the Florentines. But Leonardo’s plan, presented in a series of detailed maps and drawings, won the support of two critical figures: Machiavelli and, more importantly, Gonfaloniere Piero Soderini.ii The fact that he convinced two such practical men to pursue such an unconventional project was a testament not only to Leonardo’s powers of persuasion but also to their frustration with conventional approaches that thus far had yielded nothing. After so many disappointments, costly in both blood and treasure, desperation was the mother of invention.
Ironically, the Pisans seemed to have more faith in the project than most Florentines. An interrogation of captured residents of the city revealed “that the defenders feared only one thing, that the Florentines would divert the Arno and so dry up its outlet to the sea, depriving Pisa of the help they had been receiving from ships paid for by Lucca, Siena and Genoa.” Work on the massive project began late in the summer of 1504. The diversion was to take place at Stagno, a few miles to the south of Pisa, near the port of Livorno, where engineers hoped to create a new mouth for the Arno that would serve the double purpose of starving Pisa and nourishing Florence by opening a navigable passage to the sea that circumvented the old port. The hydraulic engineer Colombino was hired to supervise the two thousand laborers who set to work building weirs and digging ditches.
But as men moved tons of rock and mud, three-dimensional reality began to diverge from the two-dimensional blueprint drawn up by Leonardo. Those on the scene, forced to deal with uncooperative laborers, unenthusiastic supervisors, and constant harassment from Pisan soldiers, cut corners to save money and adapted Leonardo’s plans to facts on the ground. Machiavelli was initially reluctant to interfere in technical matters—defending Colombino as “an excellent expert on this hydraulic engineering”—but soon he began to fret about the halfhearted efforts and jerry-built modifications. On September 21 he wrote to the engineers: “Your delay makes us fear that the bed of the ditch is shallower than the bed of the Arno; this would have negative effects and in our opinion it would not direct the project to the end we wish.” His concerns proved well founded. At the beginning of October a violent storm damaged the Florentine fleet guarding the mouth of the river and flooded the ditches. A few days later the emboldened Pisans emerged from their defensive works and set about punching holes in the weirs. The labor of months was destroyed in a matter of hours, and the entire project collapsed amidst the usual finger-pointing and recrimination. Francesco Soderini, the Gonfaloniere’s brother and newly minted Cardinal, offered his sympathy, begging Machiavelli not to blame himself for the failure: “Notable man and very dear compare. It gave us great pain that so great an error should have been made in those waters that it seems impossible to us that it should not have been through the fault of those engineers, who went so far wrong.”
Unfortunately, the Cardinal was one of the few willing to go on record to defend the Second Chancellor. No one was more closely associated with Leonardo’s discredited project, and he was an easy target for those already unhappy with the regime. Even before the disaster, discontent with Piero Soderini had been growing, particularly within the “aristocratic” faction, led by Alammano Salviati. This was particularly awkward, since Salviati, Piero de’ Medici’s son-in-law, had been one of Machiavelli’s original patrons. Their close ties were evident when, during Machiavelli’s embassy to Imola, Salviati had tried unsuccessfully to secure his release from the onerous position. Commiserating with Machiavelli over the disappointing results of his efforts, he signed his letter “your devoted friend.” But by 1506, Salviati’s feelings had clearly changed, as Biagio Buonaccorsi, always an incorrigible gossip, reported to his friend. “ ‘I have never commissioned anything from that clown [Machiavelli] since I have been one of the Ten,’ ” a mutual friend overheard Salviati saying, to which Buonaccorsi added conspiratorially: “I could write you many other things, but more when we are together.”
The growing friction between Machiavelli and Salviati reflected a widening split within Florence’s ruling elite between the aristocratic faction, led by men like Salviati—many of whom were associated with the old Medici regime—and the Gonfaloniere’s party, which was increasingly identified with the populists. Salviati had originally supported Soderini, but he had grown disenchanted with the head of state, whose policies—particularly when it came to taxes—he believed favored the popolani over magnate families like his. This meant that Machiavelli, who was increasingly seen as the Gonfaloniere’s man, was caught uncomfortably between old friends and his current boss. The collapse of the Arno diversion scheme enraged the aristocratic faction further against the head of government, in large part because the money lost on the project had once been in their pockets. Machiavelli, for his part, was fed up with his former patrons. His speech, “Some words to be spoken on the matter of raising revenue, after a brief preamble and a few words of excuse,” was directed at men like Salviati, whose patriotism waned as soon as their profits were threatened.
Given the hardening divisions between rival factions within the government, it should be possible to determine where Machiavelli, the most political of men, stood. But in fact it is surprisingly difficult to pin him down. On the question of taxes and the prosecution of the war with Pisa, he certainly stood with the Gonfaloniere, but his dedication in 1504 of the poem The First Decennale to Alamanno Salviati reveals that he had not burned his bridges with the ottimati. In part this ambivalence can be attributed to his status as a client of powerful men whose favor he had to cultivate. He was the consummate bureaucrat, willing to serve whichever side had the upper hand regardless of ideology. But there was more to this than simple opportunism. He embodied the ethos of the civic functionary, dedicated to the abstract concept of the state whose interests he elevated above loyalty to any individual or party. His ideological slipperiness was a result of his ardent patriotism. As a servant of the republic, he remained as much as possible aloof from political infighting, and while his patrons owed their primary allegiance to powerful clans from which they sprang, Machiavelli favored those he believed put the interests of the nation first. Early on he embraced the ottimati when they offered the best chance of restoring the republic after the excesses of Savonarola, but he distanced himself when their selfish opposition to additional taxes threatened the war effort. For all his tactical flexibility, which has enraged generations of critics who see him as a man without principle, he never lost sight of the basic goal—to defend and promote the cause of the Florentine Republic and the Italian people.
The perspective of the government functionary shaped in crucial ways the development of his thought. It allowed Machiavelli to break free from the intellectual framework established by Plato and Aristotle and adapted by philosophers like Thomas Aquinas for the Christian world. For the Greeks and their medieval followers, theories of government were based on the assumption that societies, no matter how corrupt they might be in practice, aspired to some sort of ideal—whether the aristocracy of the mind favored by Plato or the “City of God” imagined in different forms by Augustine and Aquinas. Machiavelli had little patience with such vague abstractions, as he makes clear in The Prince. “[I]t seems best to me to go straight to the actual truth of things rather than to dwell in dreams,” he declares in a stern rebuke to his predecessors. “Many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen nor known to exist. But there is such a chasm between how men actually live and how they ought to live that he who abandons what is for what should be will discover his ruin rather than his salvation.”
This simple statement is at the core of Machiavelli’s revolutionary approach. It establishes him as the father of modern political science, a field whose proper subject is “the actual truth of things” rather than “dreams.” His hardheaded analysis is the source of his originality, as well as all those morally dubious propositions that have troubled later generations. As a bureaucrat who dedicated every waking hour to the state, he took as his starting point the welfare of that impersonal and amoral organism. “For when the safety of one’s country wholly depends on the decision to be taken,” Machiavelli proclaims, in what amounts to the bureaucrat’s Hippocratic Oath, “no attention should be paid either to justice or injustice, to kindness or cruelty, or to its being praiseworthy or ignominious. On the contrary, every other consideration being set aside, that alternative should be wholeheartedly adopted which will save the life and preserve the freedom of one’s country.” Though Machiavelli did not coin the phrase raison d’état, the ideology that animated the careers of statesmen from Richelieu to Kissinger was first articulated by the humble Florentine chancellor.
• • •
Machiavelli clearly appreciated Leonardo’s engineering skills. What is unclear is whether he appreciated Leonardo’s talent in less practical areas. There is little evidence, in fact, that Machiavelli cared deeply about art. Though he was born and raised in a city whose greatest glory was its art and architecture, little in his writing or his life demonstrates a keen interest in either. In his political writings, Machiavelli focuses narrowly on issues of power and governance. Only rarely does his view of society expand to encompass the vast array of activities that people engage in that constitute the core of what makes us human. Perhaps his most glaring oversight is the short shrift he gives to economic factors in determining political structures. One of the few times he looks up to survey the broader terrain comes in a chapter in The Prince titled “What a Prince Must Do to Be Esteemed.” But even here, cultural endeavors are viewed merely as tools of statecraft: “A prince must show himself a lover of virtue, supporting gifted men and by honoring in the arts . . . . He must, in addition to this, at the appropriate time of year, keep the populace occupied with feasts and spectacles.” A similar passage can be found near the end of his Florentine Histories, where he summarizes Lorenzo de’ Medici’s contribution to his native land. “[H]e turned to making his city more beautiful and greater,” he notes approvingly. “[H]e kept his fatherland always in festivities: there frequent jousts and representations of old deeds and triumphs were to be seen; and his aim was to keep the city in abundance, the people united, and the nobility honored. He loved marvelously anyone who was excellent in an art; he favored men of letters.” In neither passage does Machiavelli show an appreciation of art for art’s sake. Instead, art is a tool in the hands of the shrewd leader who employs it to distract the people and retain power.
Reducing art to “bread and circuses” is perhaps a surprising attitude in someone with Machiavelli’s creative gifts. He was a more than competent poet and perhaps the greatest prose writer of his day, so one might expect him to possess a greater sensitivity to the arts and artists. But it is clear that the fine arts were, at best, only of secondary importance. He makes his dismissive attitude clear in his preface to Book I of The Discourses:
When, therefore, I consider in what honor antiquity is held, and how—to cite but one instance—a bit of an old statue has fetched a high price that someone may have it by him to give honor to his house and that it may be possible for it to be copied by those who are keen on this art; and how the latter then work with great industry and take pains to reproduce it in all their works; and when, on the other hand, I notice that what history has to say about the highly virtuous actions performed by ancient kingdoms and republics, by their kings, their generals, their citizens, their legislators, and by others, who have gone to the trouble of serving their country, is rather admired than imitated; nay, is so shunned by everybody in each little thing they do, that of the virtue of bygone days there remains no trace, it cannot but fill me at once with astonishment and grief.
His most sustained discussion of art, then, is an opportunity to deride those connoisseurs who admire the skill of ancient sculptors who shaped bronze and marble while ignoring those statesmen who were molders of men and morals.
But while Machiavelli exhibited no particular feeling for the visual arts, he could not help but get caught up in a culture where painting, sculpture, and all manner of fine craftsmanship were essential ingredients of everyday life. To the rest of the world Florence was synonymous with high achievement in the arts, and Machiavelli, always attuned to the way his city was perceived abroad, appreciated the favorable impression this artistic achievement made. The fame of artists like Leonardo and Michelangelo, he knew, helped burnish the city’s reputation when the conduct of her armies was having the opposite effect. Art in Florence—carried out on an almost industrial scale in large workshops like Verrocchio’s or Ghirlandaio’s that employed dozens of apprentices churning out altarpieces, portraits, and more ephemeral items for festivals—was a propaganda tool, and this was something Machiavelli understood and cared about deeply.
In the fall of 1503, before his plans to divert the Arno had been finalized, Leonardo was given the commission to fresco the Hall of the Great Council in the Palazzo della Signoria, perhaps the most significant honor the republic could bestow on an artist. The vast room had just been built to house the large assemblies resulting from the Savonarolan reforms of 1494, which had opened up the government to the entire citizen class of Florence. It was thus a potent symbol of the city’s republican regime, and it was vital that the art should convey an appropriately patriotic message. That Machiavelli himself was instrumental in securing the commission is suggested by the fact that it was his assistant in the chancery, Agostino Vespucci, who transcribed in Leonardo’s own notebook the text on which the painting, The Battle of Anghiari, was based. Vespucci’s services were probably required since Leonardo’s command of Latin was imperfect, but the participation of this civil servant reveals the extent to which the government was intimately involved in every detail of such an important public commission. Whether or not Machiavelli himself conceived the subject for the painting—which commemorated the last major triumph of Florentine arms more than sixty years earlier—its militaristic theme coincided perfectly with the Second Chancellor’s own views of a citizen republic sustained by the martial valor of its people.
In fact at the very same moment Leonardo was designing his fresco Machiavelli was drawing up his initial plans for reinstituting a citizen militia, and the martial theme may well reflect an attempt on his part to gin up enthusiasm for this still unpopular undertaking. By recalling past triumphs, Leonardo’s painting would restore Florentines’ faith in their own valor while reminding them, by way of contrast, how poorly the current crop of mercenary captains stacked up.
Like so many of Leonardo’s undertakings, the painting’s execution was fraught with difficulty, much of it the artist’s own making. Leonardo was easily distracted and easily offended. He dawdled while bureaucrats withheld payment, each side blaming the other for the stalemate. As the process dragged on, Leonardo began to lose interest while the government—now facing the prospect of having invested in another failed venture—grew increasingly impatient with the temperamental genius who never seemed to fulfill his promises. On May 4, 1504, after months of recriminations, a new contract was signed spelling out in greater detail the obligations of each party. The document, which provides a schedule of payments upon the completion of certain benchmarks, ends with the following Latin inscription: “Enacted in the palace of the aforementioned Lords, in the presence of Niccolò son of Bernardo Machiavelli, Chancellor of the aforementioned Lords, and Marco, of ser Giovanni Romenea, citizen of Florence, as witnesses.”
Machiavelli’s intervention ensured that work would continue, though Leonardo once again failed to live up to expectations. For a time he set to work with renewed vigor, but his penchant for experimentation, and his tendency to lose interest in a project after the initial stages, all but guaranteed failure. Leonardo chafed at the limitations of the fresco technique. This time he mixed oils into the water-based medium, causing the plaster to dry slowly and unevenly. Even before the monumental mural was completed it began sliding from the wall. In a little more than fifty years the painting had deteriorated so badly that it was painted over by that mediocre dauber (and first-rate art historian) Giorgio Vasari.iii
Though ultimately a grand failure, The Battle of Anghiari offers an instructive illustration of the way the government deployed artists to further its political agenda. By depicting a heroic chapter in Florence’s history Soderini’s regime hoped to wrap itself in past glories, particularly since success on the battlefield had been so conspicuously absent of late.
Indeed, Leonardo was not the only artistic giant whose work on behalf of the Florentine government was less than a success. The Palazzo della Signoria where Machiavelli worked, in particular the Hall of the Great Council, had the distinction of simultaneously playing host to two of the greatest artistic fiascoes of all time, at least if one measures disaster by the distance between promise and achievement. Working alongside Leonardo in 1504 was Michelangelo Buonarotti who had been commissioned to paint The Battle of Cascina to complement Leonardo’s fresco on the other half of the main wall in front of which the nation’s leaders sat in regal splendor. Even more explicitly than the great cavalry clash depicted by Leonardo, Michelangelo’s frieze of monumental nudes seems to have been intended to promote Machiavelli’s plan for a revived citizen militia. The scene depicts a moment in Florence’s last (and more successful) campaign against Pisa in the fourteenth century, when the courage and quick thinking of the Florentine commissioner, Manno Donati, saved the citizen army from a surprise attack after its commander, the mercenary captain Galeotto Malatesta, had taken to his bed. As Donati raises the alarm, the soldiers, according to a contemporary account, “Florentines who had voluntarily joined on horseback in order to do honor to their fatherland,” hurriedly pull on their clothes and gird for battle, successfully repelling the enemy attack. Few images could have appealed to Machiavelli as much as this scene of citizens routing a professional army, a vivid illustration of his own political philosophy.
Rarely have two men of such towering genius worked side by side as colleagues and rivals; rarely have two works begun with such great promise ended in such disappointment. Ultimately the two aborted masterpieces complemented each other only in the magnitude of their failure.iv While Leonardo’s painting began to deteriorate before it was completed, Michelangelo barely got past the initial drawing. Even before he had a chance to transfer the design to the wall he was called away to Rome by the new Pope, Julius II, who demanded the services of the rising star of Italian art for his own vast projects, a request that Soderini, anxious to maintain cordial relations with his neighbor to the south, could ill afford to ignore.
Fortunately, not everything Michelangelo produced on behalf of his native land was a flop. In fact the commission for the vast fresco was his reward for an earlier spectacular success. Michelangelo had returned to Florence in 1501 after a seven-year absence following the overthrow of the Medici regime.v Six years younger than Machiavelli, Michelangelo had traveled in the same circles before 1494, when Piero de’ Medici’s expulsion transformed the prospects of the clients of the ruling family. They certainly knew each other and had friends in common, but there is no indication the two men were ever close. In fact if Machiavelli’s relationship with Leonardo lacks a certain inspirational quality, the few documented points of contact between Michelangelo and the Second Chancellor are mundane in the extreme, proving that when two great minds meet the results can be trivial. One well-documented encounter came in 1506, when Machiavelli was in Rome on an embassy to Pope Julius. At the time the artist was working for both the Florentine government and the Pope, who had commissioned him to sculpt his tomb. Since Michelangelo was frequently shuttling between Florence and the Eternal City, Biagio Buonaccorsi entrusted him with a menial task: “[T]hus with the sculptor Michelangeloacting as deputy,” he wrote to Machiavelli, “I have sent you the money for the courier . . . . He told me he would be there next Sunday and would find you, since he also has some of his own business to do.” This minor incident says nothing about Machiavelli’s appreciation of the artist’s talent, but it captures a world in which geniuses were a common enough sight around town that it did not seem strange to employ them as errand boys.
Michelangelo had originally been enticed back to his native city with the promise he would be allowed to work on a legendary block of marble that had lain half ruined in a yard near the Duomo. “This block of marble was nine bracciavi high,” recorded Michelangelo’s friend and colleague Vasari, “and from it, unluckily, one Maestro Simone da Fiesole had begun a giant, and he had managed to work so ill, that he had hacked a hole between the legs, and it was altogether misshapen and reduced to ruin, insomuch that the Wardens of Works of S. Maria del Fiore [in charge of the cathedral], who had the charge of the undertaking, had placed it on one side without troubling to have it finished.” Never one to duck a challenge, Michelangelo was also hoping to forestall the commission being offered to Leonardo, the only man he regarded as a worthy rival. After spending time with the magnificent but damaged block, Michelangelo was inspired to carve a figure that would symbolize the republic, an underdog warrior taking on and besting his more powerful adversary. The colossal statue that emerged cut by cut from the marble was the David. All Florence followed its progress as diligently as they followed the less happy course of Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari. Among those stopping by the stonecutter’s yard was the Gonfaloniere himself:
It happened at this time that Piero Soderini [Vasari wrote], having seen it in place, was well pleased with it, but said to Michelangelo, at a moment when he was retouching it in certain parts, that it seemed to him that the nose of the figure was too thick . . . . [I]n order to satisfy him [Michelangelo] climbed upon the staging, which was against the shoulders, and quickly took up a chisel in his left hand, with a little of the marble-dust that lay upon the planks of the staging, and then, beginning to strike lightly with the chisel, let fall the dust little by little, nor changed the nose a whit from what it was before. Then, looking down at the Gonfaloniere, who stood watching him, he said, “Look at it now.” “I like it better,” said the Gonfaloniere, “you have given it life.” And so Michelangelo came down, laughing to himself at having satisfied that lord, for he had compassion on those who, in order to appear full of knowledge, talk about things of which they know nothing.
Vasari’s anecdote recalls Leonardo’s dismissal in The Art of Painting of “certain presumptuous persons,” and Machiavelli’s similar claims for the unique perspective of “a man of low and poor station.” Soderini comes off as a pompous know-it-all, played for a fool by the humble artist.
These are archetypal stories of the new age in which talented men of the people could dare to match wits against those born into privilege. In the prologue to La Mandragola, Machiavelli informs any member of the audience who might wish to disparage his little comedy “that the author, too, knows how to find fault, and that it was his earliest art . . . [nor] does he stand in awe of anybody, even though he plays the servant to such as can wear a better cloak than he can.” This is a pugnacious dig at those who think that it is jewels and fine silk rather than quality of mind that defines a person’s worth.
Machiavelli, like Leonardo and Michelangelo, belonged to the client class, that vast, restless swarm of the ambitious and the penurious buzzing about their rich and powerful patrons. They are Figaros running rings around the hapless Count. Though none of them consciously strove to shake up the social order, their achievement stands as a reproach to the static hierarchy. Many of the names that have come down through history from this most creative moment are men on the margins of respectability whose ambition was fired by their sense of social insecurity. Michelangelo was descended from the minor but impoverished nobility, the same group from which Machiavelli sprang. (Like Bernardo Machiavelli, Ludovico Buonarotti was both proud and poor, boasting “I never practiced any profession; but I have always up to now lived on my slender income, attending to those few possessions left to me by my forebears.”) Michelangelo’s disdainful treatment of the Gonfaloniere was the act of a proud man forced to bow to fools who believed that wealth and power entitled them to speak on subjects beyond their competence.
To be fair, those who ruled Florence were keenly aware of the value of men like Leonardo and Michelangelo who could add luster to the state when military and political prestige were sorely lacking. Despite Soderini’s quibbles, those in the government and the wider populace immediately recognized the importance of Michelangelo’s achievement. The only debate was how best to honor and profit from what everyone recognized was a masterpiece. So vital was the new work to the government’s self-esteem that a panel of wise men was convened (including Leonardo, who put aside any feelings of competition with his younger colleague) to determine how best to display the statue. The panel ultimately decided to place the David on the platform before the Palazzo della Signoria as the majestic embodiment of the republic. Here, every day on his way to work, Machiavelli passed the sculpture Florentines knew simply as Il Gigante, the Giant. It is unlikely the majestic figure inspired in him the requisite feelings of awe and reverence. Well armed with a sense of irony, the Second Chancellor almost certainly regarded with wry amusement the contrast between the heroic ideal displayed outside the door and the petty compromises demanded of those inside.
i The painting, now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, clearly reveals the hand of the young Leonardo in the kneeling angel on the far left. The softness and idealization contrast with the more brittle realism of Verrocchio’s style.
ii The topographical studies Leonardo made for this project influenced his landscapes, including the bird’s-eye view of a river valley that forms the backdrop of the Mona Lisa.
iii Although The Battle of Anghiari must be included among those tragic missteps that marred the artist’s career, the lost masterpiece enjoyed a long and productive twilight existence. During the years it remained, damaged but still impressive, on the walls of the Hall of the Great Council, artists studied it attentively and drew inspiration for their own work. Its savage depiction of what Leonardo himself called “the beastly madness” of war, whose violence he captured in a swirling maelstrom of horses and horsemen, changed the course of art history. Among those overwhelmed by Leonardo’s conception (in this case the preparatory drawings for the painting, rather than the work itself, which had already disappeared from view) was Peter Paul Rubens, whose brilliant copy of Leonardo’s work profoundly influenced the Baroque era.
iv Like Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari, Michelangelo’s painting had enormous influence through the drawings he made for the project that inspired future generations of artists.
v Though deeply moved by Savonarola’s religious fervor, Michelangelo remained suspect as the protégé of Lorenzo de’ Medici. The climate for art had been more favorable in the Rome of Alexander VI than in Florence under the austere rule of the friar.
vi A braccia (literally “arm”) was a Florentine measurement equal to a little under a yard.