St. Jerome by Leonardo da Vinci. This painting was discovered in the nineteenth century. It was in two pieces, one of which was being used as a tabletop.
Bernard Berenson, the art critic who introduced the word connoisseur into the English language, called Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi (left) “truly a great masterpiece” and added, “Perhaps the quattrocento produced nothing greater.” Preparatory work for the Adoration below.
The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. Imagine looking at this painting through the eyes of the monks who commissioned it. “Never before,” comments art historian E. H. Gombrich, “had the sacred episode appeared so close and so lifelike.”
Leonardo da Vinci: Study for the Sforza equestrian monument.
When he wasn’t charming Ludovico’s court or creating transcendent paintings, Leonardo was busy with studies of anatomy, astronomy, botany, geology, flight, and geography and plans for inventions and military innovations. He also received an important commission from the Moor to build an equestrian monument honoring his father, Francesco Sforza, the previous grand duke of Milan. After exhaustive researches into the anatomy and movement of horses, Da Vinci crafted a plan to create what critics agree would have been the greatest equestrian statue ever produced. After more than a decade of work Leonardo constructed a model twenty-four feet high. Vasari wrote that “there was never a more beautiful thing or more superb.” Leonardo calculated that casting this masterpiece would require more than eighty tons of melted bronze. The bronze, unfortunately, was not forthcoming, as Ludovico needed it to build cannons to stave off invaders. He failed, and in 1499 the French overwhelmed Milan and drove Sforza into exile. In a historical act of bad taste and barbarism that ranks with the Ottoman army’s blowing the nose off the Sphinx, and the Venetian fleet’s landing a mortar projectile on the Parthenon, the French archers destroyed the model horse by using it for target practice.
“About the horse I will say nothing for I know the times.” – From Leonardo’s letter to Ludovico on learning that the bronze for the monument would not be supplied.
Ludovico’s defeat meant that Leonardo was without a patron or a home. He found his way to Florence in 1500 and the next year he unveiled his preparatory drawing for The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and the Infant St. John, commissioned by the Servite Friars. Describing the public reaction, Vasari writes that the painting “not only filled every artist with wonder, but when it was set up … men and women, young and old, flocked for two days to see it, as if in festival time, and they marveled exceedingly.” Although Leonardo never completed the painting for the Servites, his drawings formed the basis of a later work, the exquisitely tender Virgin and Child with St. Anne, now in the Louvre.
In 1502 Leonardo shifted his attention from the sublime evocation of divine femininity to take up an appointment as chief engineer to the infamous commander of the papal armies, Cesare Borgia. He traveled extensively for the next year, making six remarkably accurate maps of central Italy for his new patron. Despite his access to Leonardo’s maps and military innovations, Cesare saw his battlefield fortunes wane. The Signoria of Florence sent Niccolò Machiavelli to advise Borgia in his struggles, but the great strategist was unable to prevent the collapse of Borgia’s forces. Machiavelli did, however, befriend Leonardo during this period, a friendship that set the stage for the maestro to receive an important commission from the Signoria of Florence after his return in April 1503.
Ludovico “the Moor” Sforza, regent of Milan and patron of Leonardo.
Leonardo’s Drawing of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.
During the same period that he was struggling with The Battle of Anghiari, Leonardo painted a portrait, according to Vasari, of the third wife of a Florentine nobleman, Francesco del Giocondo. Madonna Elisabetta, nicknamed Mona Lisa, was to be immortalized in history’s most famous and mysterious painting. Leonardo took the painting with him when he returned to Milan, this time in the service of Louis XII’s viceroy, Charles d’Amboise. During his second stay in Milan, Leonardo focused on studies in anatomy, geometry, hydraulics, and flight while designing and decorating palaces, planning monuments, and building canals for his patron. Leonardo also managed to paint his St. John and Leda and the Swan.
Peter Paul Rubens’s rendition of The Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo da Vinci.
In 1512 Lodovico’s son Maximilian drove the French out of Milan and established a short reign before being deposed. Leonardo fled to Rome, where he sought the patronage of Leo X, the new Medicean pope, whose brother arranged for him to receive a stipend and lodging at the Vatican. Although the pope was an art lover, he was too preoccupied with the commissions he had already granted Michelangelo and Raphael to pay much attention to the sixty-year-old Da Vinci. Leonardo rarely held a paintbrush during this time, concentrating primarily on studies of anatomy, optics, and geometry. He did, however, meet and profoundly influence the young Raphael.
The lukewarm support he received from the Vatican disappeared altogether with the death of his sponsor in 1516. As Leonardo noted before leaving Rome in disappointment, “The Medici made me and destroyed me.”
William Manchester comments on Da Vinci’s lack of papal support: “… of all the great Renaissance artists, Da Vinci alone was destined to fall from papal grace.… In a larger sense he was a graver menace to medieval society than any Borgia. Cesare merely killed men. Da Vinci, like Copernicus, threatened the certitude that knowledge had been forever fixed by God, the rigid mind-set that left no role for curiosity or innovation. Leonardo’s cosmology … was, in effect, a blunt instrument assaulting the fatuity which had, among other things, permitted a mafia of profane popes to desecrate Christianity.”
Niccolò Machiavelli. Machiavelli’s The Prince, a masterpiece of pragmatism, is one of the most influential books in the Western canon.
Cesare Borgia. A study of the Borgia family makes the most scandalous modern soap opera look tame.
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s get ready to rumble! Welcome to the Sala del Gran Consiglio of the Palazzo Vecchio for the All-Time Heavyweight Painting Championship of the World. On the wall to the right with the scruffy smock and broken nose, the challenger, Michelangelo Buonarroti, will paint The Battle of Cascina, and on the opposite wall, wearing his trademark rose-colored tunic and carefully groomed blond, curly beard, the champion, Leonardo da Vinci, will paint The Battle of Anghiari.
It really happened, thanks largely to Machiavelli’s influence. The Battle of the Battles is the quintessentially Florentine event, expressing the competitive, sharp-edged attitude of that city’s fathers, eyes focused clearly on their legacy. Sadly, we know both works only through sketches, copies, and written description. Leonardo attempted an experiment for fixing the paint on the wall that failed; he left the unfinished work as it began to deteriorate, returning