We don’t know what classical models Donatello may have used. Surely, he couldn’t have come up with this shameless child without having encountered some Greek-like sculptures, or parts of sculptures, or cartoons of sculptures in forms now lost to us. We are at a total loss to explain how Donatello could have conceived such a statue—such a Presence—because nothing still extant from his time gives us the least hint. In the words of Kenneth Clark, “How pleasure in the human body once more became a permissible subject of art is the unexplained miracle of the Italian Renaissance. We may catch sight of it in the Gothic painting of the early fifteenth century, revealed in the turn of a wrist and forearm or the inclination of a neck; but there is nothing to prepare us for the beautiful nakedness of Donatello’s David.”
Even more shocking, this David is no mere copy of a Greek original. Though it refers to the long-lost tradition of classical sculpture in its life-size boldness, its stand-alone uniqueness, its utter nudity, and its many anatomical perfections, it uses all these things—in fact, plays with them—by way of allusion, as if the sculptor were telling us, “Yes, yes, I know all about the great Greco-Roman tradition and I treasure it, but I wish to give you something New.”
Which he has. Unlike the chunky, chesty gods and athletes immortalized by the Greeks, with their perfect limbs and blank faces, their absolution from all normal human trials, and their unwillingness to take the least notice of us, their spectators, this child is not quite so absolved or abstracted. He seems rather pleased with himself as his left foot toys with the decapitated giant’s beard. What, for Heaven’s sake, is that serpentine thing slithering its way up David’s right leg and almost reaching his joining thighs? Why, it’s the tickling wing of Goliath’s helmet. How extraordinary, what can it be meant to mean? And the pose: almost Greek but more insouciant, more provocative, more (dare one say?) sexually inviting. The nearly thrust-out pelvis, the narrow, girlish breasts, the slightly exaggerated but gracefully balanced sway of the figure, the left hand on the hip virtually summoning us to take a walk around and examine the swelling buttocks—dear God, what a breathtaking display!
I am trying here not only to give voice to reactions of our contemporaries but to imagine the reactions in Donatello’s own day, when no one had ever seen anything remotely like this statue. Since we now have no record of any reaction whatever, we can only speculate. Are there no records because people didn’t trust themselves to say anything publicly? Was everything done sub rosa and behind the scenes, the statue banished to some private garden where it would not disturb the public? (We do know that whatever the original, and undoubtedly public, purpose of this commission, the figure ended up in the private courtyard of the Palazzo Medici.) I imagine an Italianate version of the reaction of Dorothy Helms, wife of the self-proclaimed “redneck” Senator Jesse Helms, as she inspected for the first time the homoerotic photography of Robert Mapplethorpe: “Lawd, Jesse, Ah’m not believin’ what Ah’m seein’!” Subsequently, Senator Helms did everything he could to blacken Mapplethorpe’s reputation and destroy any American gallery, museum, or government body that would sponsor his work. (Of course, Helms succeeded only in helping to ensure Mapplethorpe’s enduring reputation.)
We don’t even know when this second David was made. It might have been in the 1420s or ’30s or, most likely, ’40s, by which time Donatello would have reached his fifties. In the late 1970s, one art historian, H. W. Janson, at last uncovered a clue that the statue itself had concealed all along but that no one had previously decoded. Goliath’s highly unusual winged helmet had always been a stumper. Janson realized that the winged helmet was an emblem of the Viscontis, dukes of Milan, Florence’s mortal enemy. Thus was David, intended by Donatello to represent little Florence, able to slay even monstrous Milan. But this David with his pornographically high boots, his belaureled, pretend-butch huntsman’s hat, and his narcissistic visage is most unlikely to have appealed to aggressive Florentines as their military symbol. Even to the artistically dim, he must have looked too much like the toyboy of an aging artist. This was a kid who may have conquered Donatello but was hardly up to the task of conquering Florence’s enemies. So he ended up closeted in a private garden, rather than displayed as a public statement. “With Donatello,” remarks John M. Hunisak of this image, “we discover the first modern instance of the fusion of art and autobiography.”
Donatello has provided us with other expressions of autobiography, none more poignant than his Mary Magdalene [Plate 2], carved in wood for Florence’s famous Baptistry. Here, toward the end of his life, Donatello gives us a figure as far removed from the teasing provocation of the David as can be imagined: Magdalene, the penitent prostitute, as a desert figure like John the Baptist, clothed in rough animal skin, her old, emaciated limbs the opposite of the David’s self-satisfied plumpness (or the plumpness of virtually any other Renaissance figure). Her face speaks only of regret. One could misinterpret this depiction by suggesting that, in Donatello’s eyes, boys are for pleasure, women for pain and suffering, but I doubt Donatello would have had any difficulty imagining himself as a woman. Here is a figure that, unlike the David, might have been carved at almost any time in the Middle Ages. It leads us to contemplate faith and repentance, not Neoplatonic perfection. Like Lorenzo the Magnificent’s deathbed confession, it is an echo of an earlier time.
But to place Donatello’s scandalous David more securely in its historical context, we have only to ask ourselves: who was the next artist to sculpt a David and what did it look like? It took thirty years or more before another artist dared try his hand. The supremely competent Verrocchio, once the student of Donatello, cast his David [Plate 3] in 1476 or so. The result imitates Donatello, if in a wishy-washy way. Verrocchio imagined a young David, as had Donatello, who had succeeded in wiping away the former depiction of David as an aged musician. Like the earlier David, this one is cast in bronze, but at scarcely more than four feet it is somewhat shorter than life-size. And there is almost nothing in Verrocchio’s version to provoke the viewer’s lust. Here is a genial, skinny young fellow, a little bland, only the flowery nipples of his breastplate hinting at anything remotely unusual. Like Donatello’s Magdalene, this David would have been at home in an earlier age—as a figure in a Gothic niche.
But does the faint suggestion of a smile remind you of anyone? Perhaps of the Mona Lisa? At the time Verrocchio cast his David, the young Leonardo da Vinci was his apprentice and may even have served as a model for Verrocchio’s David—which may cast some light on what the statue does not say. For in 1476, the same year Verrocchio was casting this piece, complaints were twice put before the magistracy of Florence that Leonardo and other young artists were engaging in sodomy with (it would seem) a willing seventeen-year-old named Jacopo Saltarelli.
These incidents occurred two decades before Savonarola’s attempts to rid Florence of its sodomites by burning them all alive. What the anonymous accusers may have meant by sodomy and what the magistrates may have taken them to mean may remain a trifle unclear—and, in any case, it appears that the accusations were never proved. But we may note that, not only was there a marked tendency among Florentine artists and other humanists to engage in homosexual (as well as heterosexual) relations; they found their high-minded justification for these practices in the works and lives of the most admired Greek and Roman poets, artists, and philosophers. Though there was not a whisper of justification for such activities in Judeo-Christian sources (in which only the sternest condemnations could be found), there were many laudatory references to homosexual love in Greek art and literature and (more occasionally) in Roman poetry.
It is likely that the sodomy charge had some basis in reality. Leonardo never married and is known to have cohabited with a succession of young men. Some of his drawings and paintings would certainly indicate that he had an intense interest in beautiful male bodies. At the same time, there is no definitive proof, and there are even contrary indications—evidence that Leonardo may have been celibate, if
not for his entire life, at least in his later years. I would speculate that the public accusations were sufficiently unsettling to Leonardo that they may have pushed him into a lifetime of concealment—his whereabouts in the years immediately following the accusations are unknown, but if he remained in Florence he was probably hiding out with the Medici—and that they even impelled Verrocchio, then at work on his David, to similar concealment, which is why this David is so sweetly bland. At the same time, nothing of Verrocchio’s ever created a scandal: he was a consummate professional who always satisfied his customers—which is why his extant works never rise to the level of Donatello’s or Leonardo’s. In the end, we are left with irreducible mystery.
Leonardo himself would have approved our tact, our unwillingness to reach beyond the evidence. He had an instinctive dislike of precipitate generalization. “Abbreviations,” he wrote in one of his famous notebooks, elaborate but unrevealing of his personal life, “do harm to knowledge and to love, seeing that the love of anything is the offspring of this knowledge, the love being the more fervent in proportion as the knowledge is more certain.… It is true that impatience, the mother of stupidity, praises brevity, as if such persons had not life long enough to serve them to acquire a complete knowledge of one single subject.”
Well, though he might have admired our tact, I have to admit that he would most certainly not have approved our morning bus tour of Renaissance art. This is the authentic voice of Leonardo: considered, exploring all angles, willing to wait as long as need be for knowledge, inspiration, insight, enlightenment. So willing was he to wait till a given task could be undertaken properly that his life was punctuated by partial, unfinished, and collaborative works.
The first of these should be accounted a painting once ascribed wholly to Verrocchio but later understood to be partly the work of Leonardo, a Baptism of Christ [Plate 4], dating to 1472, four years prior to the accusations, when Leonardo was just turning twenty. The angel on the far left is Leonardo’s—and how angelic and mysterious is this curly-haired visitor in contrast to Verrocchio’s pug-faced, earthbound child. The main action of Jesus and John the Baptist, surmounted by trinitarian symbols, is conventional and unremarkable. But the background, by Leonardo, speaks to us of mystery, surprise, delight, as does the landscape that, more than thirty years later, will frame Mona Lisa. As Yeats would describe such vistas:
Quattrocento put in paint
On backgrounds for a God or Saint
Gardens where a soul’s at ease;
Where everything that meets the eye,
Flowers and grass and cloudless sky,
Resemble forms that are or seem
When sleepers wake and yet still dream,
And when it’s vanished still declare,
With only bed and bedstead there,
That heavens had opened.
After this collaboration with his assistant, Verrocchio gave up painting altogether, devoting himself wholly to sculpture and goldsmithery. No more dreamscapes for him.
Despite Verrocchio’s ceding the field to Leonardo, the younger man’s first solo outing, The Annunciation [Plate 5] of the same year (or perhaps the following), is endearingly tentative. The perspective is carried out as if taken directly from a student manual—the vanishing point in the exact middle of the horizon and just two-thirds up from the bottom of the picture. There is something wrong with the positioning of the awkwardly elephantine lectern, the feet of which sit closer to the viewer than the Virgin’s right hand could possibly do, though both furniture feet and human hand all appear intended to occupy nearly the same plane. Leonardo was left-handed; and, as I know from personal experience, it takes left handers a bit longer to get such things right.
But for me the great charm of the conception lies in Mary’s attitude. Though she has yet to learn just who this deeply bowing visitor may be, she is slightly annoyed at being interrupted in her reading and, determined not to lose her place, has put the index finger of her right hand on the passage she was reading. Her raised left hand politely salutes the angel, another of Leonardo’s curly-haired marvels, but her right hand announces her hope that, whatever her winged visitor may have to say, he will keep it brief.
Of Leonardo’s own mother we know almost nothing, save that her name was Caterina and that she was a peasant girl who had an affair with a local notary named Piero, a man who had a “Ser” (Sir) in front of his name. She bore Leonardo out of wedlock; and though Caterina and Piero, being of different classes, never married, Piero acknowledged his son and maintained a relationship with him, later bringing him from their outlying village of Vinci to Florence and apprenticing him to Verrocchio, the best artist he could find. We have documentation indicating that in her later years Caterina lived with her son after he had moved to Milan and that she died there in his house. So Leonardo seems to have had a decent relationship with each of his parents, however brief their mutual relationship may have been; and I would guess that the quiet self-possession of Mary, herself a peasant girl, in the face of an angel invading her privacy is a hidden homage by Leonardo to the independent spirit of his own dear mother.
I would even take this unprovable speculation a bit further and wonder if Mary’s face—in its uncompromisingly realistic stare—may be a somewhat idealized version of Caterina’s. She doesn’t look much like Leonardo’s many other Marys, for whom he no doubt used local models. But her face, though unsmiling, does rather closely resemble the face of Verrocchio’s David.
At any rate, Leonardo’s interest in faces never lessens. One of his earliest completely self-assured works, The Virgin of the Rocks [Plate 6] of 1482–83, is a triumph of faces. Mary kneels before her infant son, her right hand encouraging the infant Baptist-to-be in his worship of his cousin Jesus, who raises his right hand in priestly blessing. The fourth figure, another curly-haired angel, is the most unearthly of all. But all four are profoundly, mysteriously otherworldly; their beautifully modeled light-dark faces speak of inner spiritual life, of individual selves connected to an unseen reality immensely larger than anything our eyes can see. And their pageant-like interactions are exquisitely framed by the mysterious but earthy rock formations that surround them. The figures are enclosed in an invisible triangle, which works in tension with the invisible column in which the Christ Child sits, formed by the pointing right hand of the angel and the protective yet demonstrative left hand of the Virgin. Her encouraging right hand and the shielding sweep of her cape protect not only the Baby Baptist but us, the human race—exules filii Evae, the banished children of Eve—whose representative he is meant to be.
“The design,” as Clark remarks of a much later painting of Leonardo’s,1 “has the exhilarating quality of an elaborate fugue: like a masterpiece of Bach it is inexhaustible. We are always discovering new felicities of movement and harmony, growing more and more intricate, yet subordinate to the whole; and, as with Bach, this is not only an intellectual performance; it is charged with human feeling.”
Leonardo’s interest in faces can take a comic turn, as in his sketch of a comely but diffident youth being inspected by a grotesque old man. The youth is almost certainly Giacomo Salai,2 who, though in Leonardo’s own words was a “thief, liar, pigheaded glutton,” boarded with Leonardo and was, despite his social faults, protected by the artist for years and even mentioned in his will. No one knows who the old uncle may be.
(illustration credit 63)
Both comedy, of a prickly kind, and mysterious beauty are to be found in the faces of those gathered for The Last Supper, one of Leonardo’s three most famous images. But this image, or what survives of it, must be accounted one of Leonardo’s great failures. It is still evident that Leonardo intended to bring a fresh sensibility to this scene. Whereas earlier artists had sought to portray the moment at which the central Christ figure institutes the Eucharist of bread and wine (“This is my Body”; “This is my Blood”), Leonardo meant to portray the moment at which Jesus predicts that “One of you will betray me” a
nd the ensuing buzz of speculative interaction among the twelve apostles. (“Is it me?” “Is it him?”) But the wall on which Leonardo painted—in the refectory of the Dominican friary of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan—was damp. Moreover, Leonardo failed to employ standard fresco technique to fix the image to the wall.3 Rather, he worked on the project off and on for most of a year, 1497, and used a medium that contained oil and varnish. It was perhaps an experiment on his part. But even in his lifetime the painting began to disappear. By the mid-sixteenth century, the great Renaissance art critic Giorgio Vasari visited the friary and wrote that “there is nothing visible but a muddle of blots.” What we see today is the result of multiple “restorations,” seven or more, carried out by a variety of artists of varying skill, vision, and style over several centuries. It is scarcely possible to speak now of Leonardo’s Last Supper, but perhaps some may find a sort of defense in Leonardo’s most famous quotation: “L’arte non è mai finita, solo abbandonata” (Art is never finished, only abandoned).
As famous as this abused image is the Mona Lisa. Though her fate has been less terrible, she has hardly survived unscathed. To protect the painting from its millions of admirers, the countless tourists who flock to see it every year, the Louvre has elected to place it high on a wall, framed within a bizarre structure that almost gives the impression that the painting is submerged. Here is Vasari’s description of his unmediated encounter with the Mona Lisa:
The eyes had that lustre and watery sheen which is always seen in real life, and around them were those touches of red and lashes which cannot be represented without the greatest subtlety.… The nose, with its beautiful nostrils, rosy and tender, seemed to be alive. The opening of the mouth, united by the red of the lips to the flesh tones of the face, seemed not to be colored but to be living flesh.
Heretics and Heroes Page 11