by Andrew Marr
It collapsed, as we have seen, partly because the Christian West was not prepared to come to its help; and, indeed, led by the Venetians, had done its best to fatally weaken it. It should be remembered that some Venetians and Genoese, as well as Spaniards (and perhaps a single Scot), rallied to Byzantium’s cause in its final struggle, and died there. A Venetian ship had managed to slip past the Turkish blockade and sail through the Aegean, looking for a relief expedition, but had found nothing. The captain had asked his crew to have a vote about what to do – sail home to Venice, giving up Constantinople as doomed, or return to give the emperor the bad news and die alongside him. Only a single sailor voted to go home, and was shouted down: they returned, and died too.46
Yet the odd thing is that the fall of Constantinople, though a hugely symbolic event for Christian and Muslim civilizations alike, did not itself have world-shaking consequences. Very soon after they had absorbed the news, the Venetians and the Genoese were back again to negotiate new trading deals. Business never sleeps.
The Ottomans seized the Balkans, getting as far as Vienna, but they failed to overwhelm Western Europe and establish Islam across Christendom, as they had hoped to do. Quite soon, with its varied population and grand court, its eunuchs and stately rituals, Ottoman Constantinople seemed not so very different from what had preceded it. Even turned into a mosque, the magnificent church remained oddly familiar. Byzantium’s artistic and literary influence, which had arrived in Italy, France and Germany as loot, increased with the revival of interest in classical Greece, which in turn would play a part in the Renaissance.
Leonardo
‘The Moor’, they called him, perhaps for his dark looks: Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. One day, the duke received a remarkably boastful letter from a would-be military engineer. This young adventurer was offering to come and build light, portable bridges that would allow troops to chase the enemy, or flee from them, as he put it. ‘Also I will make covered cars, safe and unassailable, which will enter among the enemy with their artillery, and there is no company of men at arms so great that they will not break it’; and he could make cannon, mortars, catapults, fireproof ships, underground explosions – you name it. The letter-writer, who was from the south, from a workshop in Florence, added that ‘in time of peace’ he could design buildings and aqueducts. ‘I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever can be done, as well as any other.’
Ludovico knew his art, and he wanted a giant bronze horse made in memory of his father; he also knew his warfare, and must have been intrigued by this arms-dealer in ideas. Ludovico was not exactly old aristocracy. His father, Francesco, had been a mercenary warlord, who changed sides so many times he must have been perpetually dizzy. Need to fight the next city along the river? Francesco was willing. Take on the French? The pope? Simple.
The Italian Renaissance, apart from being a great age of devotional painting and Church architecture (not to mention slavery, riot and assassination), was an age of warlords. The civic-minded, peaceable citizenry of the towns of Lombardy and Tuscany were not natural fighters, yet they were often in conflict; so they hired warrior-leaders, the condottieri. Francesco Sforza had been typical of the breed. This thick-necked, heavy-eyed fighter, the illegitimate son of a mercenary and famous for being able to bend metal bars with his bare hands, had a knack of ending up on the winning side. He had fought almost everyone, including his own brother, a son, a son-in-law, and most of the possible enemies to be found in northern Italy.
When the Duke of Milan died without an heir, the city briefly returned to a form of republic, but factional fighting and famine brought a further crisis; the burly old soldier had moved in and taken over. To general surprise, he proved to be a shrewd and popular ruler, but when Francesco died and his oldest son Galeazzo Maria Sforza took the reins, he proved to be a different proposition altogether. A sadist and a rampant womanizer, he was said to have had a poacher executed by forcing a hare, fur and all, down his throat; to have nailed another man alive into his coffin; and to spend his leisure hours inventing tortures for his enemies. Pleasingly, he was assassinated. His son, aged seven, inherited; but Uncle Ludovico became regent, the son mysteriously died, and Ludovico found himself Duke of Milan.
Ludovico’s story was not so surprising in the Italy of the time. English playwrights would soon be scouring histories of the ruling Italian families for the plots of their bloodthirsty tragedies. Nor was Ludovico uncultured. He had been taught by one of the great humanist scholars of the day – the ‘humanists’ being those who studied the Latin and Greek literature and philosophy emerging from al-Andalus and elsewhere, bringing old truths to young cities. He needed clever men around him, and to turn Milan into a truly brilliant court he needed culture – sculpture, music and painting.
So in October 1481, a strong, good-looking young man of thirty, wearing a short pink tunic and a curly beard arranged in ringlets, presented himself to the Sforza court. He was carrying a specially made lyre, because the effective ruler of Florence, Lorenzo the Magnificent, had sent him in the first instance as a musician and singer, as a kind of present to his Milanese ally.47 With him was a sixteen-year-old youth who would later become a musician and actor. Tongues may have wagged: the Florentines were famous throughout Italy as sodomites. And in this case, tongues were almost certainly right, for the boastful singer and military engineer, who could also turn the odd picture, was history’s famous homosexual artist, Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo, like Sforza’s father, was illegitimate, the son of a multiply married Florentine pen-pusher and a peasant girl born in a small village. But his father had spotted the boy’s precocious talents and had him apprenticed in the workshop of one of Florence’s star sculptors and metalworkers, Andrea del Verrocchio. By the 1460s the great days of the small, independent-minded Italian city-republics were mostly long gone, but the tradition of guilds and workshops that had underpinned them lived on. The communes they then formed, in famous towns such as Pisa, Lucca, Mantua, Siena, Bologna, Verona, Padua, Genoa and Perugia, as well as Florence and Venice, had begun to emerge in the late eleventh century as the old imperial powers lost their grip.48 Competing amongst themselves and specializing in particular skills and products, these cities had complex systems of election and justice, which generally shared power between local landowners and the tradesmen and craftsmen.49
For a while, particularly in Tuscany and Lombardy, it had seemed a hugely successful and novel system, more vigorous than the larger enclaves such as the Papal States, and Naples to the south. But factionalism, revolts by poorer, excluded citizens, as well as fighting among the richer families, reduced their influence, until one by one most of the city-state republics succumbed to the rule of local grandees, dukes and princes. Venice mostly managed to stick with its old, intricate republican system, but powerful, swaggering Florence was more typical of the contemporary trend. After bitter disputes between rival parties and factions, it eventually fell under the spell of a family of hugely rich bankers, the Medicis. In the same year that Leonardo joined Verrochio’s workshop, Lorenzo de’ Medici, ‘the Magnificent’ and grandson of Cosimo, the first Medici ruler, had just taken over.
Leonardo would do his apprenticeship in the busy, communal and relatively democratic worlds of the guild and the workshop, two building blocks of the Italian city-state. For tradesmen and professionals – doctors and sculptors, leather-workers and goldsmiths – the guilds were the key institutions that allowed them to play a full part in the life of the city. The guilds established and policed standards, organized religious processions, funded hospitals, and acted as mutual-aid and political networks. The workshops were mini-factories and at the same time offered a system of higher education, which gave young men the chance to learn directly from leading masters until they qualified to set up in business themselves.
In the 1470s, Verrocchio’s was one of the leading artistic workshops in Florence. According to the art historian and
biographer Giorgio Vasari, he had studied the sciences, particularly geometry, and worked as a goldsmith. He had then visited Rome and encountered the craze for sculpture based on works from classical times, which ‘were being unearthed every day’ there.50 He had turned to sculpture, and afterwards to painting. As a brilliant, radical and intensely curious man he was the perfect teacher for Leonardo. In these studios a lot of collaboration took place; when Leonardo one day painted an angel into a work of Verrocchio’s, Vasari tells us, and did it better than his master, Verrocchio simply gave up the brush and stopped painting. He had already been outmatched.
Leonardo had to leave the comradely world of the workshop and join the search for grand patrons. The old days of working for the whole community, in a spirit of city pride, were over. Artists and engineers needed rich dukes, bankers and bishops if they were to survive.
Leonardo did well enough in Florence under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici; but clearly, he was not considered essential there, given that he was sent off to Milan to present himself as the ultimate all-rounder. In Vasari’s biography there is already a faint note of warning. Although a genius, brilliant with pen and brush, interested in everything and a great model-maker, ‘Leonardo started so many things without finishing them; for he was perfectly convinced that his hands, for all their skill, could never perfectly express the subtle and wonderful ideas of his imagination.’
In Milan, Leonardo would prove the truth of this. He made some beautiful pictures, decorated a chamber of the palace and bombarded the duke with drawings and plans for ingenious war machines. He designed pageants and helped with architectural rebuilding.51 But his grand plan for a huge equestrian monument for the first Sforza came to nothing. It was too ambitious. The bronze collected for it was eventually used for cannon to be deployed against an invading French army. Then, when it came to the most famous commission of Leonardo’s Milanese years, one of the most celebrated paintings ever, the phenomenally inventive artist-inventor overreached himself.
The Last Supper, painted during 1495–7 in the refectory of the Santa Maria delle Grazie convent in Milan, was in many ways the perfect challenge for an ambitious student of Verrocchio’s, fascinated as he was, in particular, by lighting and perspective. The commission required Leonardo to make a massive painting extending to well above head height, which would allow the viewer to see Christ and his disciples clearly and appear to be a natural part of the chosen room, rather than simply attached to a wall. Leonardo solved the problems of lighting and perspective brilliantly, producing such strong effects that Christ’s head seems to attract the viewer towards him.
Leonardo scoured the streets, and his notebooks, to find models for the disciples. When the prior complained about his habit of merely coming in on some days and staring at his work-in-progress, Leonardo was called before the duke. He explained that he needed to look and think before he could know what to do with his hands; and suggested that since he had not yet found a face with the malevolence and cruelty of a Judas, he could always use the prior’s. The duke, apparently, roared with laughter.
Unfortunately, Leonardo was also experimenting with the paint itself. The traditional method of painting on walls was fresco, which involved putting wet plaster on the section to be painted, then applying watercolour quickly, before it set. This produces bright, fresh colours but allows for no second thoughts, and it did not suit Leonardo’s slow, deliberate brushwork. So he tried something new. He coated the wall of the refectory with a mixture of pitch, gum and chalk and then painted on it dry, using tempera, the egg-bound paint that normally lasts very well. It did not, however, last well on the prepared wall that Leonardo was working on. Less than twenty years after he had finished, the painting was starting to flake, and forty years after that it was described as ‘ruined’. The cultured nouveau-riche duke would never have known this, however, because long before the painting had begun to deteriorate he was captured by the French, and died in 1508 in an underground dungeon.
Leonardo may have been mortified – but perhaps not: he was a compulsive dabbler and experimenter, and with his fizzing butterfly mind, easily bored. He used other new (and unsuccessful) painting techniques later, infuriated a pope who claimed he never finished anything, and produced hundreds of designs for hundreds of objects – which, given the relatively primitive technology of his day, would never have actually flown, attacked soldiers, flooded enemy cities or blown up castles – the list is very long indeed. He produced gloriously beautiful drawings and a few of the most exquisite and enigmatic paintings ever executed.
But at the centre of his lifelong search was his dream of uncovering a small number of underlying principles and patterns that would explain all of nature. His notebooks are crammed with pictures and speculations about the structure of vortexes, heart valves, cloud shapes; the designs of leaves, human veins, bones and levers; about how character is expressed in the shape of faces. Everywhere, he is looking for correspondences. Are flowing human locks like rivulets of water? Are human arms like birds’ wings? Are there perfect proportions for the human body, and do they relate to the proportions of horses’ legs and muscles? What are the symmetries in plant forms, and what are the rules that guide them? In Leonardo’s world there is not yet a clear divide between ‘science’ and ‘art’. They are the same thing. The artist coldly analyses form, perspective and the effect of distance on colours, which will give his pictures their impact. The artist uses lenses, learns how to cast metals, and works on his equations so he knows how to support the dome of a new church.
For Verrocchio and Leonardo, ‘science’ simply means learning and understanding; it is the practical preparation that allows buildings, sculptures and paintings to be properly made.
This hunger for knowledge, not least his interest in forces and engineering and such things as levers, has led Leonardo to be called the original ‘Renaissance man’. The image that blurs into our idea of Leonardo himself is that of his perfectly proportioned nude standing inside a square and circle, Vitruvian Man, the complete human, executed about 1487.
But what does this have to do with the Renaissance, if strictly defined as the rebirth of classical learning, as the humanists taught? Leonardo was not educated in – or apparently much interested in – Roman and Greek writers. He was looking for patterns and symmetries around him in a way that is much closer to the concerns of modern biologists and physicists than to Aristotle or Cicero. Yes, the Renaissance was inspired by all those statues dug up in Rome, and by the translation of old texts. This was the decoration, the trimming, of the age. Beefy cardinals, meanwhile, were enjoying the violent, sexually explicit stories of old Rome, and decorating their family palaces with soft porn lightly covered in a classical gauze. But Leonardo, like the best artists, remains alive because he was about looking – looking harder, looking afresh – looking ahead – and not about looking back.
Leonardo benefited from learning transmitted through the Muslim world – for instance on optics – and from the wealth brought to southern Europe by the new trade routes. Christian Europe had advanced not simply through her own exertions, but because of changes beyond her borders, from Genghis’s annihilation of the core of Asian Islam, to inventions made in China under the Song and new thinking about God and the world that emerged in al-Andalus. Leonardo has become not simply the archetype of the Renaissance man, but of the European spirit at its boldest and most optimistic. But the West had moved beyond her old status as muddy melting pot long before he first picked up a brush. Now she was ready to explode outwards.
Part Five
THE WORLD BLOWS OPEN
1492–1640: Europe Erupts in All Directions, While the Rest of the World Struggles On
It is said – rightly – that the two most significant changes in human history were the invention of agriculture, upon which everything else depended, and the industrial revolution, which shaped today’s world. Some think the latest advances in digital technology and brain science add up to a third
leap; others disagree. But if farming and capitalism were the first and second leaps, perhaps we need to add one more stage, a kind of half-leap forward, or just a purposeful stride.
This stage is global trade, which emerged out of the age of discovery. It was driven by the unequal distribution of plants, minerals and animals around the world, creating flows of sugar, tobacco, spices, and money. Without it, we would never have had capitalism and so we would never have had the industrial revolution – at least, not in anything like the way it actually happened.
We have seen plenty of examples of local trading systems extending huge distances. The achievement of the Arab sailors in linking India and the Mediterranean, and thus connecting with the sailing traders of the Far East, was one. The caravan traffic across the Sahara was another; the river system exploited by the Vikings, leading to the creation of Russia, a third. But it was only when Western European sailors, exploiting new ocean-going sailing ships, forged their way from continent to continent, that the real global trading system began. They were demonstrating a classic instance of incremental technology. A wooden bucket made of ropes, new keel and rudder developments and new ways of rigging sailcloth suddenly becomes a galleon, guided by compasses and star-reading instruments, and soon armed with cannon. These vessels had evolved over centuries from the galleys of the ancient world and from the old rounder, sea-going cargo boats.