FLORENCE, c . 1504: AN INTRODUCTION
scott nethersole and per rumberg
On 25 January 1504, Florence’s leading artists gathered to advise on an appropriate location for Michelangelo’s David (fig. 1). The monumental statue, originally commissioned from Agostino di Duccio, had remained unfinished until, in 1501, the Opera del Duomo contracted Michelangelo to revisit the abandoned block of marble known as ‘il gigante’. By the time the David was nearly finished, the authorities decided that it should no longer be placed on one of the buttresses of the Duomo, as originally intended, but somewhere more prominent.
The 1504 committee consisted of government officials as well as 30 painters, sculptors and architects, including Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Piero di Cosimo and Giuliano da Sangallo. Among them was also Leonardo da Vinci, who – like Michelangelo – had only recently returned to Florence. The committee discussed various possible sites for the statue. Two of these, both in the Piazza della Signoria, were especially favoured: the Loggia dei Priori (now known as the Loggia de’ Lanzi), a proposal made by the architect Giuliano da Sangallo and supported by Leonardo, supposedly to protect the work from inclement weather conditions; and the platform (ringhiera) in front of the Palazzo della Signoria (now known as the Palazzo Vecchio), next to the main entrance, where it would replace Donatello’s bronze Judith and Holofernes. Hailed as a symbol of the Republic of Florence, Michelangelo’s David was eventually installed on the ringhiera on 8 September.1
Only a few months earlier, in October 1503, the Republican government had commissioned Leonardo to paint a monumental mural, the Battle of Anghiari, in the Sala del Gran Consiglio, its newly constructed council hall in the Palazzo della Signoria. In late August or early September 1504, shortly after the David had been set up outside the building, Michelangelo received the commission to paint an accompanying mural, the Battle of Cascina. Into this arena of artistic battles arrived the young Raphael, probably in late 1504. If a much-discussed letter of introduction by Giovanna Feltria della Rovere is to be believed, he wanted to ‘spend
3 THE BATTLES OF LEONARDO AND MICHELANGELO
scott nethersole
As we have seen, Leonardo’s and Michelangelo’s battle murals were never finished. Yet they have had an inestimable impact, resonating most loudly in the work of those sixteenth-century artists who saw the full-scale cartoons they had prepared. Michelangelo’s biographer, Ascanio Condivi, even described his mural as ‘illuminating all those that subsequently took up the brush’.1 Two works of art, then, which never existed, have nonetheless influenced countless artists. Unfixed from their time and place, this is their poetry, their wistful legacy: the longing for what might have been and the slow realisation of their placelessness. They have not been lost; they simply never were.
As originally conceived, however, the two murals were far from lacking in context.2 They were commissioned for the newly built Sala del Gran Consiglio (fig. 23), the Great Council Chamber, in the Palazzo della Signoria. They were to form part of a wider programme of decoration that glorified the Florentine Republic, freed from Medici tyranny. Lined with wooden panelling, the room was to have been overseen by a statue of Christ the Saviour by Andrea Sansovino on the east wall, opposite an altarpiece by Fra Bartolommeo (fig. 21; see Chapter 2) that had originally been commissioned from Filippino Lippi. This grand plan was never fully realised, but the room still impressed Luca Landucci: ‘When an ambassador came to visit the Signoria,’ he wrote in his daybook, the room ‘stupefied those who saw it, when they entered into such a great place and came before such an impressive council of citizens.’3
Leonardo was awarded the commission by the gonfaloniere Piero Soderini sometime before 24 October 1503.4 The mural was to depict the Battle of Anghiari, a Florentine victory over Milan fought on 29 June 1440. Leonardo, who knew the area around Anghiari well, worked from an account in Leonardo di Piero Dati’s Trophaeum Anglaricum (1443), which had been translated for him by Agostino Vespucci and is preserved in the Codex Atlanticus (fols 202a, 202b). That same October, Vespucci glossed his copy of Cicero’s Epistulae ad familiares (cat. 45) with the words ‘we
the centre of the tondo, thus following convention rather than the more innovative design Michelangelo had proposed in the Taddei Tondo. Raphael had come to Florence to learn, and the drawings discussed above provide a fascinating glimpse over the artist’s shoulder as he studied Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo. He seems to have been particularly intrigued by the way the Christ Child conveys a sense of movement, and went to great pains to adapt the motif for his Bridgewater Madonna. Raphael also looked at Leonardo, but the latter proved influential in different ways. Although he seems to have had access to Leonardo’s paintings, and studied them, he was arguably more affected by Leonardo’s works on paper, and his own drawings from the period reveal just how much he admired their playful curiosity.
Fig. 18 Raphael, The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist (‘The Alba Madonna’), c. 1510. Oil on panel transferred to canvas, 94.5 cm (diameter).
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Andrew W. Mellon Collection, inv. 1937.1.24
will see what he will do in the Hall of the Great Council, which he has now agreed with the gonfaloniere. 1503, October’.5 Payments for paper appear in February 1504 and Leonardo’s contract was renewed in early May of that year, despite his lack of progress.6 He probably started working on the wall in the spring, experimenting with a novel, but disastrous, oil technique. He was certainly on the scaffold by 6 June 1505, when he left a famous record in a notebook now in Madrid.7 He was to leave the mural unfinished the following year, having been called to Milan. Various attempts to compel him to return to Florence went unheeded (see Chapter 2). Whatever survived of his painting was destroyed (or covered up) in the third quarter of the century, when the room was redecorated by Giorgio Vasari.
At some point in the late summer or early autumn of 1504, a year after Leonardo received his commission, Michelangelo was handed the task of painting the accompanying mural. It was to show the Battle of Cascina, fought against the Pisans in 1364. Michelangelo probably worked from Filippo Villani’s account in his Cronica from the 1390s, or from Poggio Bracciolini’s printed version in the vernacular from the early 1490s.8 Michelangelo laboured on his cartoon in the sala grande of the Ospedale dei Tintori, and payments were made for the acquisition of paper in October and December 1504.9 In the spring of 1505 Michelangelo left for Rome to work for Pope Julius II, but he was back in Florence the following year, from at least 2 May to 14 August, and probably resumed work on the commission.10 There is no evidence that he ever transferred his design to the wall.
The intended locations of the two murals remain controversial, and opinion is divided on whether both were intended for the east wall, or whether they were to face each other on opposite walls. Bartolomeo Cerretani recorded that Leonardo’s scene was above the seats of the Dodici Buonuomini – a college of twelve men who advised the government – but otherwise little can be determined for certain.11 The compositions, as they have come down to us, are lit from different sides, but whether they flanked the same window, or were lit from separate windows at each end of the room, is impossible to say – although current thinking tends to favour a shared position on the east wall.12
The surviving preparatory drawings, as well as copies after the cartoons (or perhaps, in the case of Leonardo, after the unfinished mural), are limited only to particular episodes: Leonardo’s Fight for the Standard
Attributed to Francesco Rosselli and Workshop View of Florence from the South-west, c. 1495 Tempera and oil on panel, 96 × 146 cm Victoria and Albert Museum, London, inv. E.539-2015. Accepted by HM Government in lieu of Estate Duty and allocated to the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2015. Supported by Art Fund and Ida Carrara. In memory of Herbert and Lieselotte Bier
Bastiano da Sangallo, after Michelangelo Buonarroti
The Battle of Cascina (‘The Bathers’), c. 1542
Oil on panel, 78.8 × 132.3 cm
Holkham Hall, Norfolk, Collection of the Earl of Leicester. By kind permission of the Earl of Leicester and the Trustees of Holkham Estate
Seated Male Nude, c. 1504–06
Pen and brown ink with white chalk and wash on paper, 41.9 × 28.6 cm
The Trustees of the British Museum, inv. 1887,0502.116
Three Male Nudes, One Seen from Behind, Climbing the Bank of a River (‘The Climbers’), 1510
Engraving, 28.8 × 22.9 cm
The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna, inv. DG1971/437
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