In the autumn of 1504 Leonardo da Vinci made an inventory of his wardrobe. He had to leave Florence on a military mission, and so he stored some of his most precious possessions in two chests at a monastery, one of which contained his books. But if his reading material offers insights into his mind, his handwritten description of the contents of the other box gives us a uniquely intimate glimpse of his daily existence.
Leonardo wrote his clothing inventory in a notebook (known today as Madrid Codex II) which he carried around with him from 1503 to 1505 and filled with notes that abound with insight into his life in Florence in those years. His inventory brings us disconcertingly close to the very skin of this Renaissance dandy:
One gown of taffeta
One lining of velvet that can be used as a gown
One Arab cloak
One gown of dusty rose
One pink Catalan gown
One dark purple cape, with big collar and hood of velvet
One gown of Salaì, laced à la Française
One cape à la Française, that was Duke Valentino’s, of Salaì
One Flemish gown, Salaì’s
One purple satin overcoat
One overcoat of crimson satin, à la Française
Another overcoat of Salaì, with cuffs of black velvet
One dark purple camel-hair overcoat
One pair of dark purple tights
One pair of dusty-rose tights
One pair of black tights
Two pink caps
One grain-coloured hat
One shirt of Reims linen, worked à la Française
This is an exquisite’s costume chest. Not the least striking of its contents are four garments specified as “di Salaì”—meaning that Leonardo’s clothes were mixed up with those of his workshop assistant Salaì. In the sixteenth century it was said this Salaì “was most attractive in grace and beauty, having beautiful hair, curly and bright, in which Leonardo delighted much.” Salaì first joined the workshop as an apprentice in 1490, when he was ten; his master was shocked to find the boy an accomplished thief, taking money out of his own and friends’ purses, and bitterly summed up the kid’s personality as “thief, liar, obstinate, glutton.” But by the early 1500s Salaì—whether or not his character had improved—was the unquestioned leader of Leonardo’s workshop, and people who needed to speak to the absent-minded genius found themselves dealing with this young man whose curly hair and slightly podgy face make him look in drawings by Leonardo like a decadent young Roman emperor. The list of clothes reveals how close they were: there’s even an alteration where “di Salaì” was added later, as if there were some dispute over who owned what.
Yet the garments ascribed to Salaì are far more conventional than Leonardo’s own clothes. The coat with black velvet cuffs that belongs to the assistant could have come straight out of numerous sixteenth-century portraits of stylish young men, such as the disdainful individual in black portrayed by Lorenzo Lotto in 1506–8 against a white curtain that emphasises his severe dress. When Salaì went around in clothes that were obviously expensive yet muted in hue, he showed fashionably restrained good taste. Leonardo by contrast dressed almost exclusively in pink and purple, a delicate palette that harmonised with his own paintings. It was as if he were a character escaped from a fresco.
Surely this was a deliberate badge of professional identity—wearing colours that might have been mixed in his own workshop. Leonardo believed in painting as a vocation, an ethos, a way of life. The painter, he exulted, “sits in front of his work well-dressed and moves a very light brush with lovely colours, and is adorned with clothes as he pleases …” He mentions the painter’s excellent clothes and freedom of dress twice in this passage, which also stresses that painting is the manipulation of colour. In fact Leonardo’s taste in dress was of a piece with his aspirations as a painter. From his very earliest works, one of his overriding fascinations is with how oil paints can reproduce the transparencies and opacities, folds and twists, brightness and darkness of textiles. Among the first drawings that can be ascribed to him are studies of drapery which convey not just the weight of cloth as it hangs in mountainous creases, the shadowy valleys between folds, but the very grain of woven fabric. In his youthful Annunciation, both Mary and the angel are decked out in garments of almost curdling richness and a colour range of great complexity and power. Mary has blue skirts which turn into a robe covering her right shoulder, a glow of gold satin at her elbow and over her midriff, and beneath all this, a red dress with pale purple belt and collar. The angel wears a white tunic tied at the arm with a violet ribbon, a drapery of green, and long, dark red robes. It is as if they were waiting patiently while Leonardo draped them according to his fantasy—for Mary’s blue skirts are not really skirts at all but an enormous cloth he has arranged on her shoulder and legs, spreading it over a chair arm whose form becomes an enigmatic bulge.
From the clinging dresses of goddesses carved on the pediment of the Parthenon in fifth-century-B.C. Athens to the precious work of Leonardo’s teacher Verrocchio with its ribbons fluttering in the air, textiles swag the history of art. Yet no one has ever painted clothes quite as consummately as Leonardo. If he does have predecessors, they are the Gothic painters of fifteenth-century Germany and the Netherlands. The massive capaciousness of Leonardo’s draperies, the apparently arbitrary spread and redundant quantity of cloth, resembles the heavy fabrics of North European art. There are strange rewards for the curious eye in watching him pour deep shadows down valleys of satin, weaving mysterious daydreams and conjuring phantom forms in an art that begins by dwelling on powerfully coloured, ornately folded draperies and evolves to encompass the most gossamer of translucent gauzes.
This evolution is apparent in the first and second versions of his composition The Virgin of the Rocks, which he first painted in the 1480s and then re-created in a picture still unfinished in 1506. The earlier version has an angel swathed in bright, bulky red and green satin; the angel in the later painting wears a sleeve whose gold-embroidered tracery floats on transparent layers of light-filled, colourless material gradually forming into a white creaminess. It is a stupefyingly intricate effect—precisely the type of challenge Leonardo sought as a painter, although how much of this second version is by his own hand will never be certain. In The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, which he worked on more or less to the end of his life, he again gives the Virgin a semi-transparent filigree sleeve. Having learned from the Gothic-tinged training of his youth in 1460s and ’70s Florence to depict draperies with a crisp attention to their folds, he became in his maturity obsessed with the ambiguous semi-transparency of gauzes and veils.
That is how Leonardo hangs clothes on women and angels. Women appear in far more of his surviving paintings than men do—four portraits of women exist by him. Even Ginevra de’ Benci, who posed for one of his earliest and plainest paintings in about 1474, sports a black velvet scarf that contrasts sensually with her simple brown dress and pale skin. There’s only one portrait of a man, a young musician whose costume isn’t especially interesting or well preserved.
There is, however, one painting by Leonardo that is full of male figures nobly robed. The Last Supper started to rot and flake the second he set down his brush for the last time in the monks’ canteen of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan in 1497–8. Restorations and repaintings over the centuries added layer on layer of glue and pigment to try and preserve what people thought—long after living memory was lost—the picture must have looked like. The most recent (perhaps quixotic) restoration pared away these later layers to get as close as possible to the “original” paint. The fragmented result is infinitely paler and drier than any of the artist’s better-preserved paintings, with scarcely a hint of the low-toned ambiguities he loved. While this makes it hard to interpret the appearance of the clothes, it is apparent that he arranged the men’s robes as freely and sculpturally as he layered satins and gauzes on his female models. At the far end of the table on our left, Bartholomew stands up from his seat in shock at Christ’s revelation that one of the disciples will shortly betray him; the heavy green robe over his thin blue tunic gathers in a bunch on his shoulder and hangs in the air, defying gravity as impossibly as the crinkly satin garments that float unsupported in Leonardo’s laterVirgin and Child with St. Anne.
Look again at the same disciple. What is the green drapery I’ve called a robe? It falls in a mass onto the table, bunches extravagantly on Bartholemew’s back, and is piled around his lower body. It is just as wilful and gratuitous as the voluminous skirts of the Virgin in his youthful Annunciation. In fact all the disciples at Leonardo’s table are just as artfully clad. What is the garment slung over one shoulder of the feminine-looking John, seated at Christ’s right hand? It is simply a loose cloth, there at the painter’s whim and as pink as the clothes in his own wardrobe. Further along the table, James the Minor’s crinkly shift is also pink.
Long before he painted this heroic and tragic scene, Leonardo drew the portrait of an executed criminal. He was still in his twenties when, in December 1479, he stood in the high, narrow courtyard of the Palace of the Podestà—today’s Bargello Museum—in Florence and recorded the appearance of a hanged man in a few perfect pen strokes. Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli swings, in Leonardo’s drawing, from a rope that inclines, like his mirror-inverted writing, leftward on the page. The dead man’s hands are tied behind his back and his legs hang limply. The terrible thing about him is his face. The eyes are deep dark voids, already looking like the empty sockets of a skull. The skin, Leonardo suggests in a couple of lines, is discoloured. There are clear signs of rot and postmortem decay on this face, the only part of Baroncelli’s body that is naked.
The rest of his body may be equally emaciated and skeletal, but it looks more alive, more human, because every part of it except the face is concealed by clothes. Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli was hanged in Florence in the last days of 1479 for his part in a conspiracy that had claimed the life of Giuliano de’ Medici, brother to the city’s ruler, Lorenzo the Magnificent. It was said that Baroncelli plunged the first dagger into the victim, but while his fellow conspirators rapidly suffered horrible retribution, he escaped to Constantinople. When he was finally dragged back from the Ottoman city, he was hanged still wearing the Turkish coat and slippers in which he had disguised himself.
Leonardo dwells on the assassin’s exotic clothes, already a bit big for the corpse that shrinks within their bulk. He captures with his pen the soft folds of a long coat, the distinctive bobble buttons on its collar, and its fringe of fur. He records the executed assassin’s slippers and skullcap and tights. In a note written as a column next to the swaying body he gives precise descriptions of each garment:
A little tan cap
A black satin doublet
A black jerkin with a lining
A Turkish jacket lined
with foxes’ throat fur,
and the collar of the jacket
covered with velvet stippled
black and red;
Bernardo di Bandino
Baroncelli;
black tights.
Although this was written a quarter of a century before Leonardo’s inventory of his own clothes, the mature artist’s list contains a peculiar echo of the youthful drawing, which lingers with fascination on the dress of a hanged criminal.
Among the clothes Leonardo placed in a chest for safekeeping in 1504 he mentions “one cape in French style, which belonged to Duke Valentino; of Salaì.” “Duke Valentino” was the name by which contemporaries knew Cesare Borgia—son of the Pope and commander of the papal armies, who cut a terrifying path through central Italy in the first years of the sixteenth century as he conquered one small city-state after another in his drive to build an empire for his family. Borgia had menaced Florence itself; his men perpetrated atrocities in its countryside. To most Florentine citizens in 1504, his name was diabolical; a diarist called him “this serpent.” But for Leonardo, this murderous prince was apparently as darkly seductive as the hanged assassin had once been. Why else dress Salaì in Valentino’s old clothes?
It is no small thing to be able to list the exact clothes a particular human being wore in everyday life half a millennium ago. The 1504 inventory of Leonardo’s wardrobe is the next-best thing to possessing the clothes themselves. It is an archaeological fragment that allows us to reconstruct one part of his physical being, to see what he wore as he walked the streets of Florence. In fact his notebooks abound in odd physical details of his life. Sometimes there will be a list of groceries, or calculations of household expenses. All such glimpses delight. But the inventory of his clothes is special because it lends startling substance to one of the most amazing, even embarrassing, anecdotes that sixteenth-century gossips told about him.
The book is a lovely thing to hold, like touching a pebble worn smooth by the sea. A creamy-white binding, flattened and honed by time, swings open to reveal paper whose yellowed edges and soft textures tell its age. It breathes out its four-and-a-half centuries (and more) when opened, as when an ancient attic is unlocked and the trespasser coughs on dust. The slippery, leathery paper leaves a smell on one’s hands—not unpleasant. Each page is printed in thick black type. The title page is designed like a fantastic window, with robed women supporting a marble pediment upon which play little winged boys, holding between them a shield emblazoned with six spheres. Through the window, beneath the shield, one can see a walled city in a hilly landscape, dominated by a vast cathedral dome and a formidable fortress.
In the time-stained sky above the city framed by the window is the book’s title and author:
LA TERZA ET
ULTIMA PARTE
DELLE VITE DE
GLI ARCHITETTORI
PITTORI
ET SCULTORI
DI
GIORGIO VASARI
ARETINO
It has been printed and reprinted many times in many languages; there are currently at least three rival popular editions in English, but this is how it first appeared in the world in 1550. The wondrous artefact we’re admiring in the rare-books room of a great library is the very first edition of the sixteenth-century artist Giorgio Vasari’s extravagant, gargantuan literary masterpiece, The Lives of the Architects, Painters, and Sculptors.
One of the most productive crafts in Renaissance Italy was storytelling. Before Spanish and English writers invented the novel, there were Italy’s novelle—brief tales, tragic or comic, assembled in generous, expansive collections in a genre whose timeless classic is the fourteenth-century Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio’s bawdy masterpiece the Decameron. Shakespeare was to get some of his most famous plots from these Italian story collections: Romeo and Juliet and Othello started their lives in Italian books ofnovelle. It is tempting to wonder what might have happened if, in addition to the tales of Matteo Bandello in which Romeo and Juliet can be found, Shakespeare had known Vasari’s tales of murderous rivals and star-crossed lovers. Vasari’s book is so rich in narrative that it sometimes seems less a history than a collection of novelle. Although it is full of brilliant descriptions of works of art and acute critical observations, and has a serious argument to make about the progress of culture, its facts are mixed with fiction to a riotous degree.
Vasari’s “Life of Leonardo da Vinci” is his most intoxicated, and intoxicating, parable of genius, a mythic tale whose hero is super-humanly intelligent. Vasari’s tone is rhapsodic, the man he evokes magical—“marvellous and celestial,” “mirabile e celeste,” was this boy born in 1452 in the country town of Vinci, in the hills to the west of the great art capital that was Florence. One day when he was still a teenager, Vasari tells us, Leonardo was asked by his father, Ser Piero da Vinci, to turn a twisted piece of wood into a shield as a favour for a peasant who worked on the family estates. First Leonardo got the roughly shield-shaped wood smoothed to a convex disc. Then he went out into the countryside to collect the strangest-looking animals he could find: beetles and butterflies, lizards of all shapes and sizes, bats, crickets, and snakes. He killed these animals and took them to his private room, where he started to dissect them and select components of their bodies—wing of bat, claw of lizard, belly of snake … Leonardo took no notice of the growing stench as he worked on these dead animals, stitching bits of them together to create a composite monster. He also added something extra, by means Vasari does not explain, for the monster he made “poisoned with its breath and turned the air to fire.”
Once Leonardo had created his monster, he sat down to paint its portrait on the round shield. Finally, he invited his father to see the result. The painting was so realistic that when the door opened on the teenager’s darkened room, it looked as if he had some hideous living creature in there that belched fire. Ser Piero was terrified; his son was delighted, for this was the desired effect.
Vasari also tells how, after Leonardo completed his apprenticeship in Verrocchio’s painting-and-sculpture workshop, the young genius went to Milan to play for its ruler Ludovico Sforza on a grotesque-looking lyre of his own invention. Later he relates how Leonardo made a robot lion to greet the king of France that walked forward, then opened to reveal a cargo of lilies; and how sometimes for fun he would inflate a pig’s bladder like a balloon, pumping it up until it filled an entire room. One might take these to be tall tales. But Leonardo really did move from Florence to Milan in 1481–2, working there for Ludovico Sforza until 1499; he really did make a robot lion; and he wrote in his notebooks about how to create bizarre effects such as an explosion inside a room.
Leonardo’s death offers Vasari a final folkloric image of fame. Having left Italy to end his days as court painter to the French king, the old artist was visited on his deathbed by the monarch in 1519: “A paroxysm came to him, the messenger of death; on account of which the King having got up and taken his head in his arms to help him and favour him, in order to ease his pain, his spirit, which was so divine, knowing it was not possible to have a greater honour, expired in the arms of that King, in his seventy-fifth year.”
If Vasari’s image of the death of Leonardo is poignant, his explanation of how it was that such an eminent Florentine genius ended his days not just far from Florence but outside Italy itself is one of the most extravagant claims in his entire book. It seems that Leonardo had a potent enemy: their rivalry bordered on vendetta: “There was very great disdain [sdegno grandissimo] between Michelangelo Buonarroti and him; because of which Michelangelo departed from Florence for the competition, with the permission of Duke Giuliano, having been called by the Pope for the façade of San Lorenzo. Leonardo understanding this departed, and went to France …” Of all the anecdotes in Vasari’s “Life of Leonardo,” this is the most tantalising.
Vasari was not the first writer to tell tales about Leonardo’s strained relationship with Michelangelo. Anecdotes about artists were part and parcel of the storytelling culture of Renaissance Italy. This goes back ultimately to the ancient Roman author Pliny the Elder, who included anecdotes about famous Greek artists in his Natural History. Boccaccio himself includes a funny story about the painter Giotto in the Decameron. One of the earliest accounts of Leonardo was written by the novelist Matteo Bandello, who, having as a novice monk at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan in the 1490s witnessed the painting of The Last Supper, introduces Leonardo as a character in his Novelle and even has him narrate a tale of his own, about the amorous friar and painter Filippo Lippi.
Rumours of some vicious, irreconcilable enmity between Leonardo and his younger contemporary started to circulate in Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century. Such a feud was bound to fascinate a culture in which ritualised vendetta was practised as readily by artists as by aristocrats. The autobiography of the Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini is full of stories about his rivalries, grudges, and brutal acts of revenge. This was a fiercely competitive world and also one obsessed with “honour,” with the public image of a man and his family, which must not be sullied by insults or slights. Vasari tells tales in which artists do not merely try to outdo one another but even in one case commit murder out of professional jealousy. The story that the century’s two greatest artists loathed each other found a ready audience.
In the 1540s—that is, before the publication of Vasari’s Lives—an anonymous Florentine author compiled a manuscript collection of reminiscences about artists that anticipates his comment on the geniuses’ mutual “disdain.” This writer, known as the Anonimo Magliabechiano, tells how Leonardo was walking in Florence “by the benches at Palazzo Spini, where there was a gathering of gentlemen debating a passage in Dante’s poetry. They hailed Leonardo, asking him to explain it to them.” Leonardo’s brilliance was, it would seem, well-known to Florentine citizens. But he passed on the compliment:
It happened that just then Michelangelo passed by and one of them called him over. And Leonardo said: “Michelangelo will explain it to you.” It seemed to Michelangelo that Leonardo had said this to mock him. He replied angrily: “You explain it yourself, you who designed a horse to be cast in bronze but couldn’t cast it and abandoned it in shame.” And having said this, he turned his back on them and left. Leonardo remained there, his face turning red.
A precious clue testifies to the reliability of this tale—a striking, physical clue. It seems that the Anonimo’s informant had an excellent visual memory of Leonardo, for his story of the insult at Palazzo Spini is preceded by a precise pen portrait of Michelangelo’s victim in what must have been about 1504: “[Leonardo] cut a fine figure, well-proportioned, pleasant and good looking. He wore a pink [rosato] cloak …”
That pink cloak is a startling detail. In the painter’s inventory of the clothes chest he left in the monastery, the predominant colours in his wardrobe are pink and purple. The colour terms rosa and rosato recur so often that it’s safe to say this was the colour you were most likely to remember Leonardo wearing if you’d seen him around Florence. Among the items he mentioned were:
Una gabanella di rosa seca [one dusty-rose-coloured gown]
Un catelano rosato [one rose-pink Catalan cloak]
Un pa’ di calze in rosa seca [one pair of rose-pink hose]
Due berette rosate [two rose-pink caps]
Leonardo’s rosy clothes were memorable—so memorable that an eyewitness accurately recalled their hue forty years later, along with bitter words exchanged between famous men in the street.
The clothing inventory that Leonardo left in Madrid Codex II gives a good story the colour of an authentic eyewitness account. It is not a secondhand bit of information retold years later, but a note from Leonardo’s hand that puts him in pink clothes, just as the witness remembered, that day in front of the Palazzo Spini.
The Spini is a formidable survivor, an urban castle with crenellated battlements that glower on the swanky shopping street that is today’s Via Tornabuoni. At once toweringly Gothic and discreetly elegant, its façade bowed and twisted by the irregularities of the medieval city and perforated by arched windows that glisten with wealth, in the twenty-first century Palazzo Spini is home to an eminent fashion house, its tough stone mass the perfect foil for displays of blue and yellow patent-leather shoes. It was outside this building that Michelangelo insulted Leonardo.
The triangular space to the north of the Spini is the kind of Italian urban setting, formed naturally in the course of time by a gathering of mighty façades closing off a little piazza, that feels like a purpose-designed theatrical stage. Florence specialises in such superb sets for impromptu street theatre. On a summer night, mopeds are parked here, lovers sit close together on marble ledges. The walker southward past the palace soon comes to the river Arno, where, in the summer dark, teenagers perch dangerously above the black waters on the stone pontoons of Ponte Santa Trinità, savouring the eerily beautiful midnight view of the Ponte Vecchio, its freight of ancient craftsmen’s workshops glowing in the velvet dark.
The “Chain Map” of Florence, circa 1480. Young men fish in the river Arno and palaces crowd within the walls in this image of the fifteenth-century city. (illustration credit 1.1)
In the early 1500s there was a public space outside Palazzo Spini where citizens sometimes congregated. The gatherings were all-male. In Italian cities five hundred years ago the only time respectable women were seen in numbers on the street was during their early-morning walk to church. The rest of the time, the drama of civic life was masculine. To taste its flavour, look at Leonardo’s fresco The Last Supper. All the men here, like the “gathering of gentlemen debating a passage in Dante’s poetry” that day in front of the palazzo, are passionate and argumentative. They make their emotions visible through hand gestures. When the great German poet and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote about The Last Supper in the early nineteenth century, he compared the disciples’ gestures with the hand signals people still used for emphasis on Italian streets in his day.
In his play La Mandragola, a grittily real comedy of city life set in 1504, although first performed in 1525, Niccolò Machiavelli has a character go looking for someone in what would, at that time, have been all the obvious places: “I’ve been at his house, on the Piazza, the Market, the Spini Works [Pancone delli Spini], the Loggia of the Tornaquinci …” Thus the Spini was one of the places where a bad penny would turn up. He also mentions Tornaquinci, a nearby corner where five streets meet, in fact a brief walk further north on Via Tornabuoni. One of the most vivid records of everyday life in Renaissance Florence is the diary of Luca Landucci, an apothecary who kept a shop at Tornaquinci. One day in February 1501 he came out of his shop to watch a blistering scene. Two convicted murderers were being driven through the streets of Florence
on [a] cart, being tormented very cruelly with pincers all through the city; and here at Tornaquinci the stove for heating the pincers broke. And not much fire being seen, and with it failing to flame, the officer, threatening the executioner, made him stop the cart, and the executioner got off and went for charcoals to the charcoal-burner, and for fire to Malcinto the baker, and took a pot for the stove, with which he made a great fire. The officer yelled constantly: “Make it scorching”; and it was as if all the people wished to do them great harm without pity. And the boys wanted to assassinate the executioner if he didn’t torture them well, for which reason they [the condemned men] screamed most terribly. And all this I saw here at Tornaquinci.
The style of theatre that took place on the streets of a Renaissance city was bloody and extreme. Without having to leave his own shop, Landucci saw a drama of intense physical suffering, terror, hate: prisoners’ flesh being torn from their bodies with hot pincers, an officer roaring at his underling, a mob on the verge of taking the law into its own hands.
This is not the Florence one sees today, looking down from the hill of San Miniato just outside the city walls. The skyline, to be sure, is remarkably unchanged. All the landmarks that dominate the vista of Florence on a bronze summer evening are the same today as on old maps: the slender pink, white, and green ribbon of Giotto’s Campanile; the tall, sloping roof of Santa Croce; the spire of the Badia; the tall watchtower of the fortified Palazzo Vecchio brown and fierce near to the glowing river; and, at the heart of everything, the Cathedral Dome, that white-ribbed terracotta imitation of the vault of heaven itself. The city lies there in the warm air like a set of jewels, and it would take an insensitive soul to resist a romantic sigh. But this beauty was always in tension with a gory, visceral, earthy everyday life of conflict, individualism, competition, violence. Today the street life of Florence is genteel and touristy—half a millennium ago it was far more vital. What has vanished is the human past. What we fail to hear as we contemplate the beauty of Florence are the screams of prisoners having their flesh ripped off with hot pincers.
The row between Michelangelo and Leonardo that day at the Spini palace was as typical a scene of this world as the spectacle of public torture. Giving—and replying to—insults was a Florentine obsession. The entire Sixth Day of Boccaccio’s Decameronconsists of stories about “those who, tried by some graceful witticism, have roused themselves to make a prompt riposte, escaping loss, danger or scorn.” The heroes of these stories demonstrate superior wit and mental agility by thinking up a reply to their verbal attacker: a brilliant comeback that turns the insulted victim into the witty victor. Leonardo shared this admiration for the barbed reply. Indeed, in a part of the Madrid Codex II that dates from the time of his confrontation with Michelangelo he tells his own story about a man who was insulted: “Someone once told off a man of worth for not being legitimate. To which the man replied that he was legitimate according to the conventions of the human species and the laws of nature. But that his accuser on the other hand according to nature’s laws was a bastard, because he had the habits more of a beast than a man, while by the laws of men he could not be certain of being legitimate …” Here Leonardo imagines the insulted man replying with devastating force. There is surely a personal animus in his calling the unnamed accuser the real bastardo, who behaves more like a wild animal than a man. It sounds as if he himself endured the insult and now is replying in fantasy—as if someone was hateful enough to upbraid Leonardo da Vinci for being illegitimate, as in truth he was, for Ser Piero had conceived him out of wedlock while sowing his wild oats with Caterina, a farmer’s daughter.
Once again, Leonardo’s recorded thoughts and feelings tantalisingly strengthen the lurid narratives of the first biographers. And his imagined reply is curious. His antagonist has “the habits more of a beast than a man,” he rages. Leonardo penned an attack on the characters of sculptors which contains a personal caricature of the most famous one he knew:
Between painting and sculpture I find no difference, except that the sculptor undertakes his works with greater strain of body than the painter, and the painter undertakes his works with greater strain of mind, which is proved to be true because the sculptor in making his works does so by force of arm and of percussion to wear away the marble or other stone and uncover the figure enclosed within, which is a most mechanical exercise often accompanied by great sweat, compounded with dust and turning to mud, with a face all pasted and floured with marble dust that makes him look like a baker, and he is covered with tiny fragments, so he seems to have snow on his back, and his house is dirty …
This text appears in the Codex Urbinas, a manuscript compiled from Leonardo’s writings after his death by his pupil and companion Francesco Melzi, so there is every chance that it was written late and refers directly to the person it seems to portray—Michelangelo Buonarroti. Sculpture did not always mean chipping away marble to reveal an image—in the Verrocchio workshop where Leonardo trained, bronze and terracotta were used as well as stone—but it is how Michelangelo defined it. There’s a suggestive fit between this image of the Michelangelesque sculptor as a dusty mechanical who lives like a pig and the reply of an insulted man that his accuser has bestial habits.
The insults are flying thick and fast now. We have put Leonardo outside the Palazzo Spini in his rosy clothes in about 1504, victim of Michelangelo’s brutal verbal onslaught. But what did Michelangelo say, exactly, and how did Leonardo respond? He may indeed have said, as the Anonimo claims, “You explain it yourself, you who designed a horse to be cast in bronze but couldn’t cast it and abandoned it in shame,” or he may have said something still more vicious. He may have called Leonardo a bastard. In fact the answer is there in the Anonimo’s manuscript, for it seems there was more than one meeting, more than one insult. On another occasion, Michelangelo challenged his enemy this way: “And those capons of Milanese really believed in you?” The manuscript states that he uttered this insult volendo mordere Lionardo—“wishing to bite Leonardo.”
So there stands Leonardo da Vinci speaking to the gathering of Florentine citizens outside the Palazzo Spini in his rose-coloured cloak, and perhaps in a rosy cap, too.
In the Romantic age and after, there was huge demand throughout Europe and America for scenes from Renaissance history. The nineteenth-century painter Lord Leighton, in a picture so admired in its day that it was bought by Queen Victoria after a triumphant exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, visualises Vasari’s story of how an altarpiece by the medieval master Cimabue was carried aloft through the streets of Florence by a grateful populace. Leighton’s imagined medieval Tuscans in their tights and headdresses march before a view of the hill of San Miniato that is meticulously observed from life. Just as in such works, by now we have assembled enough details of costume, setting, and character to imagine our own history painting of the meeting in the heart of Florence of the city’s two most eminent artists of all time. Leonardo, an immaculately turned-out and handsome man in his early fifties with long hair and pink dandified garments, stands with the crowd of dignified gentlemen in their red and black robes in front of the tall, harsh Spini Palace. Michelangelo remains some distance off—a man who has not yet turned thirty, with messy black hair, a lump of a nose. The expression on his face as he utters his biting words may be imagined from the sculptors’s youthful self-portrait, in which a fierce boy stands with his right fist clenched at his side (it originally held a sword or dagger) and a face of concentrated rage. Deep incisions cleave his brow above eyes that glare unforgivingly. Moral outrage grips this face; intensity transfigures it. He is a rebel, an avenger, a martyr.
Michelangelo carved his self-portrait into a little marble figure of St. Proculus in a church in Bologna in 1494–5. Proculus had been a Roman soldier who took the side of the Christians during their persecution in ancient Bologna: this violent revolutionary hero, this justified killer, had turned his weapon on a Roman official and died for his heroic crime. Michelangelo gave the soldier-saint’s face furious life—it is hard not to see this as an act of empathy and identification. For proof that it represents the young Michelangelo’s formidable self-image, one must look from his face to his feet. Why does the young man have leather boots on? Ancient Romans, as Renaissance artists knew, wore sandals or, in the case of soldiers, open-toed caligae. St. Proculus, however, has these boots of soft hide that enclose his feet cosily. They are made for comfort rather than style; it seems strange that a sculptor would have chosen to give a heroic figure such unflattering footwear. The decision to clad St. Proculus in snug, unaesthetic boots is a provocative act of realism. But what is its meaning?
Fifteen years later, in 1509–10, when Michelangelo was in his mid-thirties, a rival artist portrayed him. Raphael was working on a wall painting of a gathering of ancient Greek philosophers, known as The School of Athens, in a room of the Vatican palace for Pope Julius II. Meanwhile, Michelangelo was at work for the same employer in the nearby Sistine Chapel. Raphael wittily included Michelangelo in his mural, brooding massively, leaning his head in his hand while he scribbled poetry on a sheet placed on the stone block beside him. His face is cast down in introspection beneath his unkempt black hair. This man is a stern, unyielding, dark presence among the graceful Greeks. He is emotional while they are rational. His powerful knees are naked beneath his short, shapeless purple tunic. On his feet are soft, comfortable, style-less boots.
When Vasari’s Lives was published in 1550, most of the artists whose stories it tells were dead. One whose life is heroically told in its pages was, however, very much alive. Michelangelo’s life is the last, and the biggest, in the first edition. It is more than that: it is the book’s logical climax, for in Vasari’s eyes Michelangelo’s works represented the summit of artistic endeavour. Vasari was fascinated by the “celestial” Leonardo but reserved his ultimate praise for Michelangelo. Born in 1475, this Florentine sculptor, painter, architect, and poet was to live an epic life, dying in 1564, just short of his ninetieth year. When Vasari wrote his biography Michelangelo was still in the midst of his works, an old man with a young man’s energy. Vasari tells his story as a great adventure—how Michelangelo trained as a boy in the Florentine workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio till he was spotted by the ruler of Florence, “il Magnifico,” Lorenzo de’ Medici, while trying to carve a faun’s head in Lorenzo’s sculpture garden. How he amazed everyone with his youthful sculptures of Bacchus, the Pietà, and David until Pope Julius II asked him to design his tomb. This led to his painting the Sistine ceiling, a work unrivalled by any artist, living or dead. Michelangelo is simply the greatest artist in history, declares Vasari—he is nothing less than a gift from God.
Michelangelo read this and was ambivalent. Having sent Vasari a poem praising him for bringing so many dead artists back to life, he got his own pupil Ascanio Condivi to take a break from making paintings based on Michelangelo’s drawings in order to write an official life of his master.
Condivi’s Life of Michelangelo, published in 1553, set out to correct errors in Vasari—and to overturn facts Michelangelo didn’t like, such as Vasari’s entirely accurate claim that he had been Ghirlandaio’s apprentice. What makes it fascinating is the sense that Condivi is closely reporting Michelangelo’s own opinions and memories. One of the glimpses of his master that Condivi imparts concerns his favoured footwear: “In more robust days, many times has he slept in his clothes and with the ankle boots [stivaletti] on his legs that he has always worn on account of cramp, from which he has suffered constantly, as much as for any other reason.” So Michelangelo had “always” worn stivaletti, just as he does in Raphael’s painting, and just as St. Proculus does on the shrine in Bologna. The boy in short, soft boots that Michelangelo carved in 1494–5 is indeed a symbolic, expressive self-portrait that acknowledges his own nature, for which the word “fiery” would be a pathetic understatement. Pope Leo X, who as the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent had known Michelangelo in his youth and apparently didn’t wish to have him around too much when he became Pope, said he was “terribile,” terrifying and sublime. The young man’s face in Bologna holds the promise of trouble. One senses he will always find a cause that justifies his fury. It is marvellous, this fury. It is moral, one intuits—it is righteous. He will always see his enemies as moral inferiors.
That Michelangelo invested his own anger, his own moral disdain in the figure of St. Proculus is astonishing, and unprecedented in the history of art. He is the first creator in history—certainly in the visual arts, surely in all the arts—to comprehensively, insistently break apart the smooth surfaces of craft with the force of personal and autobiographical emotion. His works are part of him in a radical and extreme way—when you look at a Michelangelo you feel the presence of his body working the stone, stretching up to paint the vault.
This strange and magnificent conception of his relationship to his work, perfectly encapsulated in the figure of St. Proculus, means that Michelangelo’s emotions are still visible today. Even something as intangible and interior as his dislike of Leonardo da Vinci has resisted the oblivion of time.