On 4 May 1504, just days before the journey of Michelangelo’s David out of its birthplace in the Cathedral workshop, Leonardo da Vinci went to the Palazzo Vecchio to see Niccolò Machiavelli. It was an uneasy meeting. Leonardo had some explaining to do. He had been commissioned to paint his battle scene in the Great Council Hall the previous October. Nearly six months on, he hadn’t even finished his full-size cartoon. Machiavelli now signed, on behalf of the Republic, a new contract that tried to impose some order on the process. Negotiating the terms of your employment with the author of The Prince does not sound a cosy prospect, yet there’s no hint of Machiavellian ruthlessness in the piece of paper they both signed. On the contrary, it was the artist who befuddled his patron. You can almost see the sweat run on Machiavelli’s brow as he tries to keep up with the complex, ambiguous movements of the mind of Leonardo, the devious intricacy of the artist’s explanation for not having begun his painting.
The document points out peevishly that “several months ago Leonardo, the son of Ser Piero da Vinci, and a Florentine citizen, undertook to do a painting for the Hall of the Great Council.” It notes that “this painting [had] already been begun as a cartoon by the said Leonardo” and also that he had been paid thirty-five fiorini larghi in gold (the highest-valued denomination of Florentine currency) since he’d accepted the job. It stresses that matters are getting urgent: the Signori and the Gonfalonier desire “that the work be brought as soon as possible to a satisfactory conclusion.” But the measures the contract takes to ensure this are gentle and consensual, accepting the validity of Leonardo’s slow and thoughtful way of working. It agrees to go on paying him for his work on the cartoon at Santa Maria Novella, provided he finishes that in reasonable time: “The previously mentioned magnificent Signori … have decided etc. that the said Leonardo da Vinci must have entirely finished the said cartoon and carried it to its complete perfection by the end of the next month of February … without excuse, or argument or delay: and that the said Leonardo will be given in payment each month 15 fiorini larghi d’oro …” The contract threatens that after February, if he hasn’t finished the big drawing, he may have to pay back all the money and forfeit whatever portion of the cartoon has been completed by then, presumably so another artist can finish it and decorate the Great Council Hall.
The next paragraph reads as if Leonardo has already thought of a delaying tactic. Of course, if the artist should start painting in the Hall in the meantime, he can have longer to finish the cartoon. A final thought reassures him and protects his work: so long as Leonardo does keep to the contract, “the painting of this cartoon will not be allocated to another, nor will it be taken away in any manner whatever from the said Leonardo without his explicit consent …”
The contract shows no desire to strip Leonardo of his commission. It evinces every eagerness on the government’s part to see a masterpiece by him materialise in the Great Council Hall. He is a genius, after all—the new Apelles, as Machiavelli’s colleague Agostino Vespucci put it. Indeed, his inability to finish his works resembles that of Apelles, commented Vespucci. The contract that Machiavelli signed with Leonardo in May 1504 seems on the whole a sympathetic document.
What happened next was, however, punitive. It was clever, too. If you had to give a name to the tactic the Florentine government now applied, you might say it was Machiavellian.
In the summer of 1504, the young Michelangelo was invited to paint his own mural in the Great Council Hall to rival Leonardo’s putative picture. It seems he was to work at the opposite end of the very same huge wall that Leonardo was decorating. Only the Gonfalonier’s Loggia would stand between them. By this intrigue the Republic was undermining Leonardo without seeking direct confrontation. Perhaps the shock would goad him to finish, and if that failed there would in any case be a work by Michelangelo.
And so a competition was born.
Vasari’s account of the origin of Leonardo’s commission is faithful to the detailed evidence of letters, annotations, payment records, the contract. This is his version of what transpired next: “It happened that, while that rarest of painters Leonardo da Vinci was painting in the Great Council Hall, as narrated in his Life, Piero Soderini, then Gonfalonier, because of the great ability he saw in Michelangelo, got part of that Hall allocated to him; which was how it came about that he did the other façade in competition with Leonardo [a concorrenza di Lionardo] …” It would be impossible for anyone to mistake Michelangelo’s commission for anything except a directly competitive response to Leonardo for one simple reason. He was not simply required to paint a mural in the same room but to depict a second Florentine battle—a pendant to Leonardo’s picture, a mirror of its martial theme. He was to paint, on the same grand scale as Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari, a narrative of another famous Tuscan conflict.
Michelangelo’s subject was to be the Battle of Cascina, a collision between Florentine and Pisan forces in 1364. There were many other things the Republic might have required of him if it simply had wanted to add a work by Michelangelo to the planned glories of the Great Council Hall. It could have asked him to make a sculpture for the vast room—a new work in the art of which he was so evidently a master. One speaker at the meeting to site David had in fact suggested placing the biblical colossus in the Hall; an alternative would have been to order a new work in stone or bronze, like the bronze David commissioned as a diplomatic gift. Or, if Soderini really wished Michelangelo to try and paint, there was the option of getting him to finish the altarpiece originally commissioned from Filippino Lippi, who had since died. Michelangelo’s previous paintings that survive include two unfinished religious panels, The Entombment and The Manchester Madonna.
All these options would have fitted more logically into Michelangelo’s career so far than getting him to paint a mural. There was, however, an urgent reason for pushing him into the new territory of painting on a wall, and the reason is made explicit by the fact that his subject was a direct reflection of Leonardo’s. The doubling makes it clear that this parallel commission was intended as a competition.
From the fourteenth century onwards the idea of competition was fundamental to the culture of creative brilliance we call the Italian Renaissance. Artists in Italy began to stand out from those of other European countries in the age of Dante and Giotto. Just as Italian writers and scholars began in the 1300s to develop a new “Humanist” style of thought, based not on dogma but on the close reading of texts, so artists began to search for a new reality, an art that mirrored nature. As soon as artists began to experiment, they began to compete. Dante writes of it in the Divine Comedy:
In painting, Cimabue thought that
he held the field, and now Giotto has the cry,
so the fame of the other is obscured.
This is in the early 1300s, when Italian artists are just beginning to raise their status from that of mere craftsmen, and the idea of a famous artist is novel. By the time Leonardo and Michelangelo trained to be artists, the lessons they imbibed in Florentine workshops reflected two centuries of rivalrous excellence. Everyone knew the shining bronze gates at the east entrance of the Florentine Baptistery facing the Cathedral, with their sophisticated reliefs cast by Lorenzo Ghiberti, and everyone knew the story of how Ghiberti got the job. The Arte della Lana guild staged a formal competition to choose an artist (initially for the north doors); the competitors were challenged to make a single panel portraying the Sacrifice of Isaac. To this day, the rival Sacrifices cast by Ghiberti and his fellow competitor Filippo Brunelleschi remain on display in the Bargello Museum in Florence. It says something for the tastes of the judges that even after nearly six centuries of changing artistic values we can see Ghiberti’s is better.
Exactly why it is better repays a moment’s thought. Ghiberti’s panel is more organised and disciplined in its use of space: the relationships between the figures are more dynamic and realistic. In other words, when it comes to making a pictorial relief in metal, he was more advanced than Brunelleschi along the road of progress and improvement which Renaissance artists aspired to blaze. Their competitiveness was linked to this faith in progress. The most explicit statement of it is Vasari’s Lives. Beyond all his anecdotes, over and above his responses to particular works, Vasari presents a coherent history of the ascent of art. In the fourteenth century, he argues, artists first turned from dry Byzantine dreams to look at nature; in the next century they started to invent perspective to give depth to their pictures and to depict bodies with real volume in space. The early Renaissance was still, in his eyes, a period of research, and however innovative artists such as Uccello, Masaccio, Brunelleschi, and Ghiberti were, they were too obviously straining for technical mastery. Finally, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, artists attained total control, total ease. Art became beautiful and sublime in ways unimaginable before. The first artist of this “modern” age, according to Vasari, was Leonardo da Vinci, and its ultimate genius, Michelangelo.
Vasari didn’t create his grand theory out of thin air. It grew directly out of the sayings and potted histories that circulated in all the workshops in Florence. The idea that artists should aspire to originality, even to transform art itself, was inseparable from the culture of rivalry. Artists wanted to excel, which meant, literally, outdoing others. As Leonardo said, “Sad is the disciple who does not progress beyond his master.” This acute way of putting it is far more direct, somehow, far more cutting, than Vasari’s general theory. Every artist in the Renaissance had a “master.” Artists learned their craft in apprenticeships to qualified masters in a system regulated by the painters’ guild. Leonardo lived as a teenager in the house of his master Andrea Verrocchio with rivals like the young Pietro Perugino. He never forgot the experience. He says in another note that it’s good for young artists to work alongside others, precisely because this inculcates the competitive spirit: “I say and say again that to draw in company is much better than working alone, for many reasons, the first of which is that you would be ashamed to feel inferior to the other students, and this shame will make you study well; secondly good envy [la invidia bona] will stimulate you to be among the number who are more praised than you, and the lauding of the others will spur you on …” There’s a harsh social vision at work here, a tough and realistic anthropology that was learned the hard way, in the workshop. Leonardo postulates “good envy”; a vice become virtuous; envy isbona if it makes you work harder, think harder, strive to catch up with the others. This useful invidia, the gnawing pain of competition, can stimulate the artist to excel.
It was not wealth or taste or intellect that made Florence more creative than other cities, thought its inhabitants, but its rabid competitive individualism. Vasari tells many stories about artistic competition, but perhaps the most piquant is his tale of why Donatello chose to return to Florence after he had been welcomed by the people of Padua: “He was held to be a miracle by every intelligent person there, but he decided he wished to return to Florence, saying that if he stayed there, being so praised by all, he would forget everything he knew; and that he wished to return to his homeland, where he would be continually blamed; for that blame was a reason to study and consequently achieve greater glory.” It was the backbiting rivals denouncing his works that Donatello missed, the mean-minded critics he couldn’t do without. In this view even Michelangelo’s harsh words to Leonardo outside the Spini—“you who tried to cast a bronze horse …”—come straight from the bitter creative furnace of Florence.
Machiavelli, who was so closely involved with the Great Council Hall competition, fully shared this belief that Florence benefited from its surplus of antagonisms. In his Florentine Histories he chastises previous annalists of the city for suppressing its many feuds and factions in their glowing accounts. This is to miss the whole point of Florence, he says. No city has seen so many civil disorders, so much hate, and yet the mayhem goads its citizens on. The talents of Florence grew well on bloodied earth, insisted Machiavelli and Vasari alike.
Leonardo, meanwhile, fulfilled his own criterion for the “happy” pupil. He outstripped his master. He did it in public and with devastating finality, and for the ages. Every visitor to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence can see the divided nature of Verrocchio’s painting The Baptism of Christ (1470–5), can see profound variation in the quality of different parts of it. Verrocchio’s style is bony and harsh, effective at showing muscles but lacking vibrancy, lacking life—at least when you compare it, as how can you not? with the hand that painted the angel in profile at the left of the picture. Glowing with delicate warmth, the angel’s face has the softness of real flesh, remote from Verrocchio’s sinewy rigour. Its golden curls sign it as a Leonardo. Vasari relates that Verrocchio gave up painting, and stuck to sculpture, after this embarrassing defeat: “Leonardo painted an angel … and did it in such a manner, that the angel by Leonardo was much better than the figures by Andrea [Verrocchio]. This was the reason that Andrea no longer wanted to touch colours, ashamed that a boy know more than him.”
Leonardo had been Verrocchio’s apprentice as a child and teenager; in 1472, when he was twenty, he joined the Guild of St. Luke and became a painter in his own right. When he worked on The Baptism with Verrocchio, he seems to have been back in his old master’s house, “staying” with him, according to a court document. So it was while living with Verrocchio that he intervened in this painting and established once and for all that he had progressed beyond his teacher’s capacities.
In 1504, however, he was the mature master, and it was young Michelangelo who was going out of his way to knock him off his pedestal. Michelangelo was just a few years older than Leonardo had been when he painted the angel in Verrocchio’s Baptism. And Michelangelo was consciously, explicitly inviting comparison with the older man. It was no coincidence that when he insulted Leonardo in the street he drew attention to the unfinished project for a bronze horse in Milan. Yet this could never be a simple case of the pupil outstripping the master.
In the model of emulation and transformation of which Leonardo’s contribution to The Baptism is such a famous example, the older artist has long ago mastered a style. The youth absorbs this style and then mutates it: adds new insights and unexpected, unprecedented dimensions. Change happens, art grows, competition begets creativity—and age gives way.
Leonardo da Vinci, however, was not the practitioner of a settled style. He was still experimenting, still making discoveries. He was a rootless, courageous intellectual adventurer. And he was developing a new idea of art. He was making it bigger, in effect: making it clearer in its scope, grander in its imaginative reach. The curious thing is that Michelangelo was embarked on a very similar quest. A coincidence of biography had allowed them to develop along comparable paths, quite separately. Because Leonardo left Florence and worked as a court artist in Milan from the early 1480s until 1500, his art did not impose itself on Michelangelo when the younger artist was growing up. So Michelangelo thought himself to be unique when he independently began to enlarge his conception of art.
The grandeur of Michelangelo’s art hardly needs stressing. Here was an artist who started carving marble when he was a child and who worked naturally on a colossal scale. David, however, was not the first colossus of the Italian Renaissance. It was merely the first to be completed.
They sit high on their horses, the warriors and conquerors, bestriding the earth, crushing the defeated. In Rome, the statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, cast in the second century A.D., surveys the city from the Capitoline Hill on his great bronze horse, hand outstretched graciously. In Venice, the fifteenth-century mercenary commander, or condottiere, Bartolommeo Colleoni, cast in bronze by Verrocchio in imitation of such ancient works, glares menacingly, eyes in shadow beneath his helmet, body massive in armour, while his horse walks proudly forward through the sky.
Before the coming of modern warfare, the horse served in battle as tank, armoured car, and fighter jet. Cavalry were the aristocracy of war. In the ancient world, horses pulled chariots and carried soldiers on their backs. In the Middle Ages, to be a knight meant by definition to be mounted. In art, the horse from very early times has been the mobile throne of the ruler, the living engine of triumph. On a box decorated with shell, red limestone, and lapis lazuli in Mesopotamia in about 2000 B.C., known as the Royal Standard of Ur, military triumph is embodied by warriors in chariots: their horses, in an image that will be repeated again and again down the centuries, crush fallen enemies beneath their hooves. In ancient Egypt too, pharaohs were portrayed in their chariots riding roughshod over enemies—the king towers over the defeated in a relief of Seti I at Karnak, his chariot surging forward behind mighty rearing horses.
This ancient Middle Eastern and North African tradition was taken up in classical Greece and Rome, where the chariot is often displaced by a mounted warrior in the imagery of triumph. The figure of a cavalryman on a rearing horse with a fallen barbarian beneath his hooves appears, as an archetype of conquest and power, on military tombstones all over the Roman Empire. At its most sculpturally ambitious this becomes the lifesized equestrian figure, confident and graceful, his command of his elegant and powerful horse the physical manifestation of authority. In Renaissance Italy the equestrian statue was revived by artists determined to emulate the skill of ancient Greek and Roman sculptors. It was the most complex type of bronze figure that survived from antiquity: to cast a lifesized horse in bronze was a formidable technical challenge, to give it beauty and life even more difficult.
Equestrian statuary had not disappeared with the fall of Rome even though its grace had. In eighth-century Baghdad an automated statue of a warrior on horseback, armed with a long lance, stood atop the Green Dome of the royal palace at the very centre of the circular city. This image is identical to the way William of Normandy’s knights were portrayed on the Bayeux Tapestry in eleventh-century Europe. Lifesized stone statues of mounted warriors were carved for tombs and city squares from Magdeburg to Milan. The thirteenth-century Magdeburg Rider is very similar to Verona’s fourteenth-century equestrian statue of Can Grande della Scala and Milan’s mounted figure of Bernabò Visconti; all three stone horses stand rigid as wooden dolls, with all their legs firmly planted on the ground.
The challenge for sculptors in the early Renaissance was to transcend such gigantic inanimate toys and to revive the lifelike bronze equestrian art of antiquity. Florence cheated when it came to raising an equestrian monument to the fourteenth-century mercenary commander John Hawkwood. This fearsome English warrior who had a contract to command the armies of Florence was promised a marble statue. Instead, when he died in 1394, the painters Agnolo Gaddi and Giuliano Pesello painted a mounted Hawkwood in Florence Cathedral—a picture of an equestrian monument in place of the real thing. When Paolo Uccello repainted it in the fifteenth century, he created a dreamlike illusion of a real statue: using green pigment to suggest bronze, and making brilliant use of the new art of perspective to impart tremendous depth to the round, geometrical flanks of the horse and the rectangular masses and cornices of the imaginary statue’s classical base, he gave the dead soldier a robustly graceful equestrian monument. The fact that it is merely the painted illusion of a statue is overcome by the sheer power and naturalness of the depiction. And there is a very important innovation: this bronze horse has one hoof off the ground, breaking with the caution of the Gothic artists, reviving the sense of actual movement that ancient Greek and Roman horses have. This is not just a fantasy; it is a design for how such a bronze horse might—in Florence, where the arts of antiquity were being so brilliantly revived in Uccello’s time—be cast.
Uccello’s painting, done in 1436, was a challenge to Florentine sculptors. His contemporary Donatello took it up. Seven years later, in Padua in northern Italy, this Florentine artist cast a bronze statue of the Venetian mercenary commander Erasmo da Narni, nicknamed “Gattamelata,” or Honeyed Cat, on a mighty horse. This potent sculpture rivals the mounted emperors of the ancient world and in truth outdoes them in expressiveness, as Gattamelata’s tough face towers above the piazza and his horse strides almost angrily forward, as if eager to charge into battle. Just like the horse Uccello had painted in Florence Cathedral, this one raises a hoof and bends its other legs in lifelike movement—but Donatello really did cast his dynamic horse in bronze, a task at the cutting edge of late-medieval technology. In about 1481 Leonardo’s master Verrocchio—whose career as a sculptor survived Leonardo’s defeat of him as a painter—took on the commission to cast a bronze mounted monument to Colleoni in Venice that would rival Donatello’s masterpiece. At just the same time, his most gifted pupil wrote to the new ruler of Milan asking for work.
Ludovico Sforza, nicknamed “Il Moro” (the Moor), was the son of the mercenary commander Francesco Sforza, one of the most brilliant and dangerous soldiers in early fifteenth-century Italy, who achieved the dream of all mercenaries: instead of dying an unloved stranger, reliant like John Hawkwood on a city that had never really trusted him to provide a monument to his pride and strength, Sforza became the ruler of a city-state of his own—and not just any city. Milan was one of the biggest and most industrious cities in Italy, an ancient Roman town that still had early-Christian basilicas and classical gatehouses, and that rivalled Venice for dominance of the whole of northern Italy. Set on the Lombard plain in sight of the Alps, it resembled German and French cities both culturally and economically—its great arms-and-armour industry matched those of northern Europe, and its art was full of Gothic exuberance, expressed at its wildest in the vast Cathedral, whose spires and pinnacles were being raised in Germanic style even as domes and colonnades were transforming the appearance of more southerly Italian cities.
When Francesco Sforza made himself duke of Milan, he established despotic rule over this big, booming city. To this day the Sforza Castle from which he and his family wielded power dominates a large area at the centre of Milan, its massive round towers and long curtain walls concealing a wide outer courtyard leading to more enclosed, shaded spaces. In its vaulted inner chambers, the Sforza presided over a magnificent court. Ludovico was a usurper who seized power from his own nephew and would only, much later, become duke when the nephew conveniently died: if illegitimate, he was also a cultured ruler, determined to bring artists and intellectuals to Milan. Leonardo was to make many friends there, including the architect Bramante and the mathematician Luca Pacioli. But it’s impossible to walk around the menacing and formidable Sforza Castle without intuiting that Milan was a militarised city, a place ruled by the sword. The tournaments and banquets, masques and intrigues of the court took place behind stern walls: the civilisation inside the castle was sustained by arrogant might. “The House of Sforza has been and will be hurt more by the castle of Milan built by Francesco Sforza than by any disorder in that state,” warned Machiavelli, because stone walls were no substitute for the people’s love. Behind their castle walls the rulers of Milan were hated, pointed out Machiavelli—when their time came they would depart unmourned.
You still sense this today, in the way the castle seems to push the city’s life away from it, to skulk behind its outer walls like a recumbent giant. Leonardo da Vinci saw this too, and in the early 1480s he addressed Ludovico Sforza—for whom he would design his doomed bronze horse—as a man he assumed must be more interested in war than culture. In his letter, Leonardo did not offer his services primarily as an artist, but as an inventor. It was the first time he promoted himself as scientist, engineer, polymath. But it was exclusively military science over which he claimed mastery:
Having, my illustrious Lord, seen and sufficiently considered the works of all those who claim to be masters and makers of instruments of war, and that the inventions and operations of these instruments are no different from what is in common use: I will try, without denigrating anyone else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing you my secrets [li secreti mei] …
1. I have a type of very light and strong bridges, adapted to be most easily carried, and with these you can chase and at any time flee the enemy, and others safe and indestructible by fire and battle, easy and convenient to carry and place; and ways of burning and destroying those of the enemy.
2. I know how, when a place is besieged, to drain the moat …
3. If because of the height or strength of a place and its position it is impossible during a siege to use the method of bombardment, I have ways to destroy any rocca or other fortress, if it were built on a rock etc.
4. I have again types of bombard that are very convenient and easy to carry: and with these I can hurl small stones almost like a storm; and with the smoke of these can cause great terror to the enemy …
He went on to list his methods of mining underneath a fortress; his “covered chariots” (carri coperti); his guns “far from the usual type”; his catapults, mangonels, and indestructible ships; his “unusual and marvellous machines.” Only at the end of this work-seeking letter did Leonardo offer his talents as an artist, after adding that “in times of peace I believe I can give excellent satisfaction and equal any rival in architecture and the composition of public and private buildings: and in conducting water from one place to another.”
It suddenly makes sense, reading this letter, that Leonardo was still “staying” with his old teacher when he was in his mid-twenties and that he made no urgent effort to complete early works in Florence such as The Adoration of the Magi. He offers Ludovico Sforza a long list of military inventions—he must have spent time thinking about them. It seems likely he was already living, in Florence in his twenties, as he later would live: surrounded by notes, playfully conducting experiments, dreaming up inventions.
The position of court artist was perfect for Leonardo. It meant being someone the ruler could consult on all the arts, much as he might consult his astrologer on all matters relating to fortune and the heavens. It was, in other words, a chance to show off Leonardo’s infinite variety. Once in Ludovico’s employ, a lot of his ingenuity was dedicated to entertaining the court, designing fanciful tournament costumes, constructing elaborate stage machinery. His scientific research was released, not held back, by frivolity. Experiment and play are never far apart in his notebooks. Yet at the heart of his efforts in Milan was a single great project that welded together art and science, imagination and technology, the palace of beauty and the workshop of war. It was to be the summit of all his projects for nearly twenty years, to consume and justify enormous efforts of research and experiment, to tantalise his public and ultimately to remain a dream.
Leonardo offers to work on it in his letter to Ludovico at the start of the 1480s: “Again work could be taken up on the horse of bronze [cavallo di bronzo], which will be to the immortal glory and eternal honour of the happy memory of the lord your father and the illustrious house of Sforza.”
There were already plans to create an equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, to give Milan its rival to other horse statues in northern Italy. It made sense for Ludovico to raise a “horse of bronze” as a memorial to Francesco. As a usurper who could not yet claim the title duke, it would stress his lineage.
Leonardo did work on the design for the metal horse, but it was to become a utopian venture, a kind of myth. In 1489, when he had already been in Milan for at least six years, the Florentine ambassador there wrote to Lorenzo de’ Medici to say that Ludovico wanted to remember his father with an enormous equestrian statue. Although Leonardo had been entrusted to create a model, says the letter, can Lorenzo suggest a couple of artists who might be good at such work? In other words, six years or more after he offered to take it on, Leonardo’s progress on the cavallo di bronzo was not such as to fill his employer with confidence.
At least one other artist was in the running to make it: the Florentine painter and sculptor Antonio del Pollaiuolo drew a design for an equestrian monument with a man in armour on a mighty horse. The rider’s face is that of Francesco Sforza. This artist definitely knew how to cast bronze: in the 1480s, when Pollaiuolo drew this design, he was working on the formidable bronze tomb of Pope Sixtus IV, a fifteen-foot-long metal box on which the Pope sleeps above florid leaves, grotesque feet and heads, and allegorical personages. Pollaiuolo’s proposal for the Sforza monument is equally ambitious: it depicts the mighty, mercenary duke on a horse that rears up, its front legs suspended in space, above a fallen enemy. In a cunning technical ploy, the screaming, naked fallen man raises his arm defensively and it acts as a support for the rearing horse above him, as do cloth hangings which in reality would have functioned as metal scaffolding. In Leonardo’s early drawings for the Sforza horse he imagines exactly the same rearing pose. Pollaiuolo seems to have been offering a practical design to give reality to Leonardo’s vague fancies. Two drawings by Leonardo, done sometime between the mid-1480s and 1489, also make practical attempts to give this statue strength. In one, a conveniently placed tree stump connects with one of the horse’s raised hooves. In the other, a fallen warrior’s shield supports one of the legs.
Leonardo proposed to outdo statues that survived from ancient Rome and to trump the modern works of Donatello and Verrocchio. Having a horse stride forward with one foot in the air was nothing: his would rear up, its two front legs soaring. Ludovico Sforza apparently doubted this was feasible, and the drawings by Leonardo himself and by Pollaiuolo try to make it more practical. To support the horse in that pose you’d have to introduce some support which, however ingenious, would ruin its spectacular liberty. Only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would European sculptors develop means to cast rearing horses on a colossal scale. When Leonardo took up his grandiose scheme again in 1490, he would still try to have two feet off the ground—but this time it would be one front leg and one back leg as it strode purposefully on its plinth above the amazed populace.
“On the twenty-third day of April 1490 I commenced this book and recommenced the horse,” notes Leonardo in a manuscript in Paris. In the 1490s he made more dedicated efforts on his great work than ever before, building a full-scale clay model that captivated all who saw it. This model, recorded the mathematician Luca Pacioli in 1498, stood twelve braccia, or almost twenty-four feet, tall, the height of four tall men standing on each other’s heads, without the plinth, which might easily have added another ten feet. So it was to be a true colossus, a fantastically imposing creature of metal. Yet, in 1498, it still existed only as a giant clay model, and the bronze mass of 200,000 libbre that Pacioli calculated for it remained purely notional.
Witnesses to Leonardo’s life in Milan saw the horse as the centre of his labours—he appeared to be working on it constantly for nearly two decades. A revealing note suggests that this is how he too saw his time in that city: “You can see in the mountains of Parma and Piacenza a multitude of perforated shells and corals still stuck to the rocks, of which, when I was making the great horse at Milan, a large sack was brought to my workshop by certain peasants who had found them in that place.” In this glimpse of his life in his workshop in the Corte Vecchio, beneath the gargantuan building site of Milan’s Cathedral, the model of the horse is at the centre of everything: it makes sense of who he is and what he’s up to, because it is where his art and science meet. The mind that local peasants knew would find fossil shells fascinating was engaged and intrigued by every aspect of the cavallo. It was a work apparently without end that justified his passion for research.
Leonardo was licensed by his great sculptural project to study horses up close, draw them and measure their proportions. He became a regular visitor to the castle stables. On a sheet with a sketch of a horse’s foreleg, marked all over with measurements of the lengths and widths of its different parts, he notes, “The Sicilian of Messer Galeazzo.” In other words, this drawing done in the 1480s is an observation of a particularly fine horse in the Sforza stables, in whose excellent physique Leonardo was seeking general rules of proportion. He believed, following Vitruvius, that beauty was a quantifiable fact, the perfect proportions of a human or a horse measurable. Another drawing of a finely proportioned horse covered in scribbled dimensions is marked, “The big jennet of Messer Galeazzo.”
Leonardo’s visits to the stables were not just cold academic exercises. He always kept horses himself, claims Vasari. Perhaps it was concern for the animals’ welfare that made him design, in the late 1480s when he was making his studies of perfection in horses, a hi-tech stable with hay storage above the stalls that are served by a proper drainage system to take away waste. He didn’t like to see these beautiful creatures living in filth.
The cavallo di bronzo was a symbol of nature, a monument no longer to Francesco Sforza but to the power and grace of animal creation. When Leonardo went to look at an ancient equestrian statue in Pavia, what impressed him was its suggestion of movement and life: “The movement more than anything is to be praised … the trot is almost of the nature of a free horse.” What he wanted to create was an imitation of a living horse, a scientific simulacrum of organic, vital nature. This scientific ambition—to model life—is revealed by the strange slip that occurred as his design evolved.
Francesco Sforza vanished. From drawings in which a rider in armour controls his rearing horse, Leonardo progressed to designs of eerie purity in which, to clarify the horse’s lines and concentrate all eyes on its form, he did not encumber it with a rider or saddle. It is a “free horse.” Since he never did cast it, perhaps this was always left ambiguous in conversations with Ludovico Sforza, but in none of the later drawings for the horse and its casting machinery is there any hint of a plan to add Sforza’s father. The model was accepted and praised on these terms—as the cavallo, a self-contained and unique thing. It became a wonder, a marvel, a legend—the Horse of Bronze.
It took all of Leonardo’s science to calculate how he might cast the horse. Once his design was perfected and its colossal scale established, he started inventing machinery to make it. He studied how giant cannon were made in Milan’s foundries, and developed a complex way of casting modified from the ancient lost wax technique. From the giant clay model—the one stage he actually completed—he planned to create a hollow outer mould; this would be lined with wax, and against the wax he would build a strong inner sculpture of fire-resistant clay. After the central wax was melted out, the molten bronze could be poured into the gap. Leonardo invented pulleys and cranes for lifting the horse and its mould, a system of underground furnaces to melt the huge amount of bronze he planned to use. He gave Renaissance Italy its most captivating display of technological ambition.
Leonardo da Vinci, studies for the casting of the Sforza horse, early 1490s. The enormous bronze horse was at the heart of Leonardo’s thinking in Milan, yet was never cast. (illustration credit 5.1)
The loveliest relics of this effort are red chalk drawings in his notebook Madrid Codex II. A gigantic form for the horse’s neck is held inside a latticed iron frame: its sheer size and strength become poetic in this great drawing. Another red drawing in the same sequence shows the horse’s abstract-seeming mould, a gigantic cylinder on top of tubular legs, held within its wooden scaffolding like a rocket on a launch pad. The drawings are not just aesthetically ecstatic but minutely detailed: if Leonardo had any doubts that he could make this machinery and cast this horse, his drawings conceal them. It really looks as if, in the first years of the 1490s, he was on the verge of manufacturing his marvel. Beside his drawing of the neck’s vast mould in its latticed armature he wrote instructions that exude all the practicality of real plans for a real process:
These are the pieces of the forma of the head and neck of the horse with their armatures and irons. The piece of the forehead, that is, of its capa which has the thickness within of wax, must be the last thing to be secured, so that the male part can completely fill this window, that goes in the head, ears, and throat, and is surrounded by the wood and iron of its armature … In the muzzle there will be a piece, that will be fastened on both facets with 2 forming pieces of the upper cheeks. And below it will be fastened to the forma of the forehead and the forma under the throat. The neck must be held by 3 forming pieces, 2 of the parts and one in front, as is demonstrated in the drawing above.
He says in one note that the notebook will record “everything related to the bronze horse presently being executed” and dates this statement 1491. But three years later the great operation was still gathering steam.
In fact, a mass of bronze had been set aside for the horse, but Ludovico Sforza was as ambitious in his political schemes as Leonardo in his study of the natural world. Ludovico, in a stratagem that went badly wrong, encouraged the French king to pursue an old claim to the crown of Naples. In his attempt to use the French as a weapon in his own power struggle with Naples, he grotesquely miscalculated. When the French army came through the Alps in 1494, their train of cannon immediately threatened the security of Milan itself, just as the invasion would end Medici rule in Florence. The bronze set aside for the cavallo was sent to Ludovico’s relative Ercole d’Este of Ferrara to cast urgently needed artillery pieces. Leonardo, meanwhile, was given a new public commission sometime between 1493 and 1495: to paint a mural of the Last Supper in the monks’ refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. Yet he did not stop working on his design for the horse. Matteo Bandello remembers in his Novelle how as a young monk he would see Leonardo move meditatively between his two great monumental projects, “departing in the afternoon from the Corte Vecchia where he was creating his stupendous clay horse, and coming straight to the Grazie, ascend the scaffolding and give one or two little brushstrokes to one of the figures …”
In 1499 the clay model was used for target practice by Gascon bowmen after the French, five years after their first incursion, toppled Ludovico Sforza and seized Milan. That December, Leonardo left the city. “Of the horse I will say nothing because I know the times,” he had written to his prince after the disaster of 1494. Yet the model was, in its earthen beauty, a living project right up to the moment of Sforza’s fall and Leonardo’s flight. In about 1500 a Milanese armourer engraved a memory of it on a breastplate now in the Stibbert Museum, Florence. Even after the model was destroyed the horse lived on as legend.
“You explain it yourself, you who designed a horse to be cast in bronze but couldn’t cast it and abandoned it in shame”: Michelangelo’s words outside the Spini Palace make him one of the first critics ever to express what has since the sixteenth century been seen as the paradox, even the tragedy, of Leonardo da Vinci. Here was a mind of unparalleled beauty and sublimity, cavernous in its creativity, awe-inspiring in its abundance and plenitude of promise. And yet, for all the ambition and richness of Leonardo’s ideas, for all the unparalleled excellence of his abilities, how many works did he ever finish? The horse is the emblem of a life strangely lost in its own genius, a creator whose creations seem largely to have stayed in his own mind, recorded for posterity—mercifully—in the private world of his notebooks. “Truly marvellous and celestial was Leonardo,” says Vasari in the undercutting second paragraph of his—at first sight so enthusiastic—“Life.” “And he was outstanding in erudition and in the principles of letters, in which he would have done very well, if he had not been so changeable and unstable. For he tried to learn many things and, having begun them, abandoned them.” The bronze horse was the ultimate example of this: “He proposed to the Duke that he would make a marvellously big horse of bronze, in order to put the image of the Duke on it as a memorial. And so grandly did he begin it and develop it that to bring it to a conclusion was not possible. And there is an opinion of Leonardo, as with other things he did, that he began it without ever intending to finish it …”
It is precisely this strange inability to complete his works—or lack of interest in finishing them—that Sigmund Freud proposes to explain in his 1910 book Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. Even in the artist’s own lifetime, marvels Freud, this prodigy mystified people. Although he created masterpieces, his investigative spirit was constantly preying on his time and energy and distracting him from painting. Freud argues that Leonardo’s immense curiosity about everything ultimately became pathological.He was compelled to endless research on every subject because he was in reality sublimating a child’s sexual curiosity: not only was he homosexual, says Freud, but he was celibate, and the erotic side of his nature was transferred to a passion for research.
Long before Freud attempted to understand it, Michelangelo pointed out the strange disparity in Leonardo’s nature between infinite aspiration and limited public achievement. At the Spini, while the crowd listened amazed and Leonardo stood in red-faced silence, the young sculptor accused his elder of designing the horse, finding himself incapable of casting it, and giving up through “shame,” vergogna. The same manuscript compiled in 1540s Florence that relays this insult adds: “And again Michelangelo wishing to bite Leonardo, said to him: ‘And those capons of Milanese really believed in you?’ ”
This is a still more pointed remark. The bronze horse, by implication, was one of Leonardo da Vinci’s cons. Yet of course, it was nothing of the sort. It was not even a failure.
In the long white room, the soul is stilled by that same clear, lofty vision. The work that Leonardo did finish in Milan breathes softly, like a cool breeze in the hot Lombard afternoon. If pigment on plaster could flutter, it would be fluttering ever so gently in the motions of air that seem to emanate from its depths.
Of no other painting in the world is it so appropriate to say “depths.” So much of The Last Supper is lost, peeled away, smothered by restorers, peeled again. There are beauties here that are lost to us. What survives is the painting’s space, its creation of a world that is the sublime mirror of our own. Other paintings describe illusory worlds, but theirs are cheap tricks in comparison with the precisely calculated perspective of this room that recedes into the wall with such baffling conviction. Its surface is a shattered skin, a mosaic of fragments. Its colours don’t seem right. But the spatial illusion of The Last Supper is incontrovertible.
Thirteen men are seated at table. A terrible announcement has interrupted their simple repast. Christ’s declaration that one of the disciples gathered in an upper room will betray him has them all rise or stare or jolt back in horror, fury, fear. But the drama is suspended. It is held in this silent moment. As Christ looks down, the room behind the long white-clothed table rushes away towards its vanishing point. A coffered ceiling creates a grey grid that maps the diminishment of appearances with distance like a diagram above the disciples. Doors and hangings, faded badly, count down the shrinking walls towards zero. That zero is a cool quiet northern Italian landscape seen through an open window.
The vaulted hall that holds this fragile treasure was the refectory of a monastery. The monastery still functions; in its cloisters, the noise of modern Milan feels a long way off. Leonardo painted a scene to divert and chasten the monks at their meals, and his eye-fooling space is part of the serious joke. The room painted on the upper part of the wall that leads to the kitchens is as real as this one, yet it is a place where the carnal is transfigured. The grace of Leonardo’s composition makes flesh and pain equally ethereal. In that room, the horror of life is elevated into tragedy. As the disciples raise their hands and cry out, voiceless, pain is held and contemplated. It is a philosophical painting: it distils the chaos and frenzy of existence into measured intervals, visual music. The figures are essences of figures, their passions at once universal and abstract.
Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, circa 1495–7. The High Renaissance ideal of classicism was first and most purely stated in this calm distillation of drama. (illustration credit 5.2)
Call it mathematics, call it a new grasp of the principles of classical Greco-Roman art and architecture learned in his studies of Vitruvius and his conversations with the architect Bramante, but this painting at once grasps the richness of reality and finds order in the universe. Christ’s prophecy, his revelation of his own coming death and the treachery of Judas, is horrible, shocking. The company react accordingly. But they inhabit a lofty realm, a theatre of heroes. So massive are their forms, so sedate their hysteria, that suffering itself becomes a thing of perfection. The Last Supper offers the beholder an elevated experience. You are invited in. But it does not come out to you—does not come down to you. To experience it fully you must accept its philosophical rapture.
Leonardo worked on it like a philosopher developing an idea. Matteo Bandello watched: “I saw and observed him many times, going in the morning at a good hour and climbing his scaffolding, for the Last Supper is high up; often, I say, he would not put down his brush but would paint from dawn to dusk, forgetting even to eat or drink. Then for two, three or even four days he might not put his hand to it, but every day for one or two hours just contemplate, consider, examine and judge his figures.” This is a telling account of how Leonardo mulled over and pondered the picture, for its quality of meditation is what calms, and mystifies, in the refectory. Art that strives to induce meditation, to liberate the mystical impulse, often favours big, empty images. The large, calm face of Christ painted by the Russian icon master Andrei Rublev is a majestic example. The Last Supper too exploits scale and simplicity to free the mind. Its figures are almost like great blots of colour. Leonardo is expressing his ability to stand back from the immediate. It is a monastic work, in the end.
The Last Supper, like the bronze horse, is monumental. It achieves a grandeur that had not been seen in art since ancient times. You would have to go to the Parthenon in Athens—which was not accessible to Renaissance travellers—to find its like. Or to Rome, to see the youthful works of Michelangelo.
There is a symbiosis between these two very different artists despite themselves. In the 1490s both are transcending all the Renaissance has been up until that moment. They are ascending towards a higher conception of art—and a bigger one. Robust, absolute, universal figures replace the illustrative, imitative classicism of fifteenth-century art. Instead of archaeologically studying the remains of the ancient world, they are creating their own autonomous classical works whose spiritual ambition inspires awe and wonder. Art can say the deepest things imaginable about life and death. It can speak with sublime, pure eloquence. And it can heighten the experience of the beholder, like a bacchic ecstasy. All this art can do, in the hands of Leonardo and Michelangelo.
One thing they share is the fantasy of the colossus. Michelangelo dreamt of sculpting a statue out of a mountain—an idea even more surreal than Leonardo’s horse and no more practical. Another is an effortless heroism. Robed figures and pristine bodies express the anguish of humanity with oratorical dignity. But what is crucial to understanding their competition in Florence is that both believe in a public vocation for art. And monuments and frescoes are the appropriate forms for an art that is about to ascend to its true nobility.
In the Great Council Hall, bare walls awaited a new art. It was not just a rage for competition that gripped the Republic. Piero Soderini was astute. He wanted to dignify Florence, to raise it up. He wanted to fill its citizens with heroic self-respect. Nothing could do this more sublimely than the heightened art these two rivals had attained with David and the bronze horse, the Pietà and The Last Supper. The heroism of Leonardo and Michelangelo, however antagonistic, was truly sublime. It would surely make the Hall the most imposing room in all the world.