Painting the town: Florence in 1504
By Sarah Dunant
Published on 15 November 2024
Discover the political and cultural landscape of Florence at the turn of the 16th century, when Renaissance masters Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael worked in the city.
From the Autumn 2024 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.
14 May 1504: “In the evening, the marble giant was brought out from the workshop, and they had to break down the wall above the door so that it could come through… It went very slowly, being bound in an upright position… moved along by more than 40 men.”
So wrote local apothecary and diarist Luca Landucci, whose gossipy entries over 60 years light up the history of Renaissance Florence, from the latest heinous crime or natural disaster (there were many of both), to the price of corn or the journey of “the giant made by Michelangelo Buonarroti” from the workshop of the Duomo, where its construction had been hidden from public view, to its home on the plinth outside the Palazzo Vecchio, replacing Donatello’s sculpture of Judith beheading Holofernes.
Exactly where to put Michelangelo’s marble giant David had been a hotly debated subject inside the Florentine republic. Indeed, a council of artists and architects had been formed specifically to decide that. Among its members were an elderly Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, the architect Giuliano da Sangallo and another recently returned, much garlanded, native artist of the city, Leonardo da Vinci.
Michelangelo and Leonardo had arrived back in Florence around the same time and were both in high demand. While Michelangelo was labouring amid clouds of marble dust, Leonardo was working on what is now known as the Burlington House Cartoon (The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist, c.1506–08), as well as employing a group of musicians (if the Renaissance chronicler Giorgio Vasari is to be believed) to amuse the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant whose portrait he had been commissioned to paint. Whether the sitter’s enigmatic little smile came from enjoyment or resigned boredom we will never know.
On the surface such a catalogue of creativity suggests an altogether confident Florentine state. The political reality, however, was very different. By the turn of the 16th century Florence was a long way from the glory years of the first generations of Medici rulers, Piero and his son Lorenzo the Magnificent. Having thrown out Lorenzo’s lacklustre son in the early 1490s and survived the turmoil of the messianic theocracy of the monk Savonarola, the republic was now back, though fighting to keep its head above water as the landmass of Italy was beset by foreign invasions and warring mercenary armies. Dozens of stable city states would change hands. In 1499, the great Sforza court of Milan, where Leonardo had risen to fame as a portrait painter and engineer, had been overrun by the French, before being occupied by the marauding army of Pope Alexander VI’s sociopathic son, Cesare Borgia, as he cut a swathe through central Italy, stalking the borders of Florence and forcing the city to pay him off in hard cash to survive.
Fortunately for the new-born republic, it had a core of strong government. Piero Soderini, recently appointed Gonfaloniere (leader), was a moderate, seasoned politician, and the diplomatic corps included an energetic young man, fast gaining a reputation for his political acumen as well as a ribald sense of humour. His name: Niccolò Machiavelli.
It was Machiavelli who, drawing on his experiences in the cut-throat world of realpolitik, pushed for the formation of a new citizen militia, a force which could be called upon to stand in for, or to defend the city against, mercenary forces from outside. He even helped recruit and train the men himself. It was Machiavelli, too, who championed an ambitious scheme to change the route of the River Arno, in partnership with Leonardo, with whom he had struck up a friendship when the latter was working as an engineer for Cesare Borgia. Had the plan succeeded it would have effectively cut off supplies to the enemy state of Pisa and given Florence a route to the sea. We know that Leonardo himself attended a site meeting on the Arno in 1503 and made drawings for the project. Though the work came to a halt after only a few months, the ideas would percolate into the artist’s lifelong passion for rivers and water engineering.
Florence, then, was doing her best to punch above her diplomatic weight. And nowhere was that confidence more keenly felt than in her cultural commissioning. The creation of David was a masterstroke: not only a sublime work of sculpture, but a stunning piece of civic propaganda: the underdog who slays the giant Goliath. A symbol of a city defiant in the face of her enemies.
David was not yet quite finished when the government committed to an equally bullish commission: the painting of the great hall (Sala del Gran Consiglio) in the Palazzo Vecchio. Built originally under Savonarola and big enough to take an expanded council of citizens, it was still undecorated. What else to put on the two main walls than paintings to commemorate great battles of Florentine history? And who better to paint them than the city’s two returning artistic heavyweights? Civic celebration, artistic brilliance and the spice of rivalry.
It would have been a considerable undertaking in any circumstances, and Soderini and his government must have known there was a risk that the two giants might struggle to deliver a final product. Leonardo because of his impatience and sometimes slapdash methods (the Medici pope Leo X would put it best: “this man will never get anything done, for he is thinking about the end even before he begins”), and both of them because they were in constant demand from more powerful patrons of the time.
In the event, the project got as far as the exhibition of two cartoons (full-scale drawings) in spring 1505. Soon after, Michelangelo was called back to Rome to work on a megalomaniac scheme of the new pope Julius for his grand marble tomb in old St Peter’s. Leonardo had barely put his brush onto the walls when he was ‘invited’ to Milan, under French rule, to work for the governor there. You can almost hear the groan in Soderini’s voice as he writes to Milan in 1506, reminding the governor that Leonardo has already accepted a large sum of money and yet hardly begun on the mural. It was to no avail. One did not start a fight over art with the dominant power on the Italian Peninsula.
By the end of 1507 they had both gone for good. Michelangelo to Rome again, this time for Julius’s latest madcap scheme – the decoration of the Sistine Chapel – and Leonardo into the service of the French king.
Fortunately for history, what would be preserved was a host of drawings that both artists had made in preparation of the murals, a rich selection of which are now gathered together for the RA exhibition – a fabulous window into the skill and preoccupations of both men. The now-lost cartoons of the murals had an immediate impact at the time they were made: their influence on a particular wunderkind who, having heard about the projects, arrived in Florence in the autumn of 1504 expressly ‘to learn’ (per imparare, he wrote in a letter) from these masters.
Just when you think the cast list couldn’t get any starrier, enter Raffaello Sanzio.
Young, certainly, but already accomplished. Raphael’s native city, Urbino, under the ruling family of Montefeltro, had long been a thriving centre of Renaissance culture housing one of the great libraries and art collections of its age. Raphael’s own father had been the court painter. He was only 11 when he died, but it seems the boy soon had a hand in running the family business, while also training in the workshop of the Tuscan artist Perugino, where he had proved himself to be a precocious draftsman with the ability to absorb, sponge-like, the techniques and style of whoever he came into contact with.
And so to Florence. Though we can piece together quite a lot of the city’s history at this time, we have, alas, no reliable record of first-hand encounters between these three great figures of the Renaissance. (There are stories of course: one in particular tells of a clash between Michelangelo and Leonardo on the streets, with the older Leonardo goading the younger man on his lack of education, while Michelangelo hits back, mocking his rival for leaving Milan with his great equestrian statue unfinished.) But when it comes to Raphael’s connection with either or both of them, the proof is on the page. One only has to look at extant images from Leonardo’s Leda and the Swan and then compare Raphael’s perfectly rendered homage (1505-08). Or turn from the Burlington House Cartoon (named after the Royal Academy building where it was once part of the collection) to The Esterházy Madonna (c.1508) by Raphael to see both the debt and achievement. Clearly he has drunk deeply from Leonardo’s poetic fluidity of line and his dynamic composition of figures, but the young man’s version (in a scene which would soon become his trademark) already shows a quite different sense of human intimacy and sweetness. Or fast forward to Raphael’s first big commission after Florence, The Deposition of Christ (1507) for a church in Perugia, to appreciate how much the physicality of Christ’s body and the straining realism of the men carrying it owes to Michelangelo. Yet in both cases Raphael’s paintings are already his own.
The pleasure of the Royal Academy show then is many layered, from seeing masters at work close up to an understanding of the power of disegno: that staple of Florentine art training which saw drawing as, to quote Vasari, “the animating principle of all creative process… the father of all arts”. Sheet after sheet filled with helmeted warriors, flailing horses, distorted torsos, agonised faces, a tumult of half-naked figures caught in dust-strewn violence, bear witness to the intense journey of the eye through the hand to the page; spontaneity, concentration, curiosity, all conveying a vibrancy and immediacy that the finished product, however impressive, sometimes lacks. At the same time, they illuminate another keystone of Renaissance culture: the way so many of its artists drew (literally) from the past, be it the excavated Roman ruins and statues, or the work of their immediate masters, and so by copying and absorbing grew to develop their own originality. Genius developed from rich soil rather than springing fully formed from the head of Zeus.
There would never be a finished grand salon for Luca Landucci to write about in his diary. The little work that Leonardo had done on his wall would peel and fade away (some say he used too much heat to quicken the drying, others that he was working with inferior linseed oil). Meanwhile, the days of the last Florentine republic were numbered. By 1512, a Medici faction backed by a Spanish army had ousted the government. Piero Soderini fled to Dalmatia and Machiavelli went into exile in his Tuscan farmhouse where, in his frustration to get back into politics, he wrote a small treatise on the working of power and princes, destined to become one of the most important and famous works of political philosophy.
The last gasp of the Italian republic may have been brief, but it was astonishingly colourful and creative. Stand for long enough in front of these drawings and you could almost imagine yourself being there.
Sarah Dunant is a novelist and broadcaster. Her five novels set in Renaissance Italy include In the Name of the Family and The Birth of Venus (both Virago).
Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c. 1504 is at the Royal Academy of Arts from 9 November 2024 – 16 February 2025. Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in partnership with Royal Collection Trust and the National Gallery, London.
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