The Creators by Daniel J. Boorstin

Author:Daniel J. Boorstin [Boorstin, Daniel J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81721-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Leonardo could not have painted the work so sporadically if it had been fresco, which would have incorporated his labors into the body of the wall. Fresco had to be painted speedily and on schedule while the plaster was still moist. Instead, Leonardo painted The Last Supper with oil and varnish, the wall was damp, and the paint quickly deteriorated. By 1556 Vasari reported “nothing visible except a muddle of blots.” In the following centuries the painting has been repeatedly “restored.” And Leonardo’s greatest work, despite expert modern efforts, survives only as a ghost of itself.

Leonardo secured his most important commission in Florence in 1503 through his friend Machiavelli (1469–1527), then a city official. This was to paint a monumental mural (twenty-three by fifty-six feet; twice as large as The Last Supper) for the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. For his subject he chose the Battle of Anghiari, where, in 1441, the Florentines had defeated the Milanese forces of the pope. Leonardo intended to depict the moment of victory when the enemy’s standard was captured. In a Florence of so many artists, to be chosen for this work was a great honor. But Leonardo’s pleasure was diluted a few months later when a commission for the other half of the wall went to his youthful archrival Michelangelo. Leonardo, who had long wanted to paint a battle, luxuriated in notebook visions of leaping horses and “the conquered and beaten pale, their brows raised and knit, and the skin about their brows furrowed with pain, the sides of the nose with wrinkles going in an arch from the nostrils to the eyes, and … the nostrils drawn up and the lips arched upwards discovering the upper teeth; and the teeth apart as with crying out and lamentations.” His many preparatory sketches of men and horses captured the fury of battle, incorporated in a cartoon of the large design that has not survived.

The Battle of Anghiari, the commission for which he was probably best known in his own time, was never painted, for Leonardo delayed this work to take on still another assignment, an urgent invitation from the governor of Milan to return there for three months “to furnish us with a certain work [perhaps the London version of The Virgin of the Rocks] which we have had him begin.” When the governor of Milan asked Leonardo to stay on, the Council of Florence complained that “Leonardo da Vinci … has not borne himself as he ought to have done towards this republic, in that he has received a good sum of money and has made little beginning of a great work which he is under obligation to execute, and has already comported himself as a laggard.” Leonardo returned to Florence briefly in 1507, not to fulfill his commission but to bring a lawsuit against his brothers over his father’s estate.

Although he made no effort to complete the Battle of Anghiari, Leonardo had prepared for it by putting binder on the wall. But it soon peeled off.

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