It happened at this time that Piero Soderini [Vasari wrote], having seen it in place, was well pleased with it, but said to Michelangelo, at a moment when he was retouching it in certain parts, that it seemed to him that the nose of the figure was too thick . . . . [I]n order to satisfy him [Michelangelo] climbed upon the staging, which was against the shoulders, and quickly took up a chisel in his left hand, with a little of the marble-dust that lay upon the planks of the staging, and then, beginning to strike lightly with the chisel, let fall the dust little by little, nor changed the nose a whit from what it was before. Then, looking down at the Gonfaloniere, who stood watching him, he said, “Look at it now.” “I like it better,” said the Gonfaloniere, “you have given it life.” And so Michelangelo came down, laughing to himself at having satisfied that lord, for he had compassion on those who, in order to appear full of knowledge, talk about things of which they know nothing.
Vasari’s anecdote recalls Leonardo’s dismissal in The Art of Painting of “certain presumptuous persons,” and Machiavelli’s similar claims for the unique perspective of “a man of low and poor station.” Soderini comes off as a pompous know-it-all, played for a fool by the humble artist.
These are archetypal stories of the new age in which talented men of the people could dare to match wits against those born into privilege. In the prologue to La Mandragola, Machiavelli informs any member of the audience who might wish to disparage his little comedy “that the author, too, knows how to find fault, and that it was his earliest art . . . [nor] does he stand in awe of anybody, even though he plays the servant to such as can wear a better cloak than he can.” This is a pugnacious dig at those who think that it is jewels and fine silk rather than quality of mind that defines a person’s worth.
Machiavelli, like Leonardo and Michelangelo, belonged to the client class, that vast, restless swarm of the ambitious and the penurious buzzing about their rich and powerful patrons. They are Figaros running rings around the hapless Count. Though none of them consciously strove to shake up the social order, their achievement stands as a reproach to the static hierarchy. Many of the names that have come down through history from this most creative moment are men on the margins of respectability whose ambition was fired by their sense of social insecurity. Michelangelo was descended from the minor but impoverished nobility, the same group from which Machiavelli sprang. (Like Bernardo Machiavelli, Ludovico Buonarotti was both proud and poor, boasting “I never practiced any profession; but I have always up to now lived on my slender income, attending to those few possessions left to me by my forebears.”) Michelangelo’s disdainful treatment of the Gonfaloniere was the act of a proud man forced to bow to fools who believed that wealth and power entitled them to speak on subjects beyond their competence.
To be fair, those who ruled Florence were keenly aware of the value of men like Leonardo and Michelangelo who could add luster to the state when military and political prestige were sorely lacking. Despite Soderini’s quibbles, those in the government and the wider populace immediately recognized the importance of Michelangelo’s achievement. The only debate was how best to honor and profit from what everyone recognized was a masterpiece. So vital was the new work to the government’s self-esteem that a panel of wise men was convened (including Leonardo, who put aside any feelings of competition with his younger colleague) to determine how best to display the statue. The panel ultimately decided to place the David on the platform before the Palazzo della Signoria as the majestic embodiment of the republic. Here, every day on his way to work, Machiavelli passed the sculpture Florentines knew simply as Il Gigante, the Giant. It is unlikely the majestic figure inspired in him the requisite feelings of awe and reverence. Well armed with a sense of irony, the Second Chancellor almost certainly regarded with wry amusement the contrast between the heroic ideal displayed outside the door and the petty compromises demanded of those inside.
* * *
i The painting, now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, clearly reveals the hand of the young Leonardo in the kneeling angel on the far left. The softness and idealization contrast with the more brittle realism of Verrocchio’s style.
ii The topographical studies Leonardo made for this project influenced his landscapes, including the bird’s-eye view of a river valley that forms the backdrop of the Mona Lisa.
iii Although The Battle of Anghiari must be included among those tragic missteps that marred the artist’s career, the lost masterpiece enjoyed a long and productive twilight existence. During the years it remained, damaged but still impressive, on the walls of the Hall of the Great Council, artists studied it attentively and drew inspiration for their own work. Its savage depiction of what Leonardo himself called “the beastly madness” of war, whose violence he captured in a swirling maelstrom of horses and horsemen, changed the course of art history. Among those overwhelmed by Leonardo’s conception (in this case the preparatory drawings for the painting, rather than the work itself, which had already disappeared from view) was Peter Paul Rubens, whose brilliant copy of Leonardo’s work profoundly influenced the Baroque era.
iv Like Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari, Michelangelo’s painting had enormous influence through the drawings he made for the project that inspired future generations of artists.
v Though deeply moved by Savonarola’s religious fervor, Michelangelo remained suspect as the protégé of Lorenzo de’ Medici. The climate for art had been more favorable in the Rome of Alexander VI than in Florence under the austere rule of the friar.
vi A braccia (literally “arm”) was a Florentine measurement equal to a little under a yard.
VII
THE STARS ALIGN
“Each day I discover in you a greater prophet than the Jews or any generation ever possessed.”
—FILIPPO CASAVECCHIA TO MACHIAVELLI
ON DECEMBER 28, 1503, ON THE BANKS OF THE GARIGLIANO River some thirty miles north of Naples, the French army in Italy suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Spanish forces under Gonzalvo de Cordoba. The news, arriving in Florence a few days later, caused near panic in the government palace. The republic’s fate had long been linked to the success of the French, and with their ally now retreating before the hostile Spaniards, Florence’s future as an independent republic appeared in jeopardy.
The news, however, was not universally bleak. Among the casualties of the battle was Piero de’ Medici, who had drowned in the swift-flowing stream while trying to evade capture by the victorious Spanish forces. While Piero’s death did not end the threat from the exiled Medici, the new head of the family, his younger brother Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, was a far more prudent man. Their father was once reported to have remarked: “I have three sons: one is foolish, one is clever, and one is kind.” With the foolish son now out of the way, Florentines thought they might have better luck with the clever Giovanni and mild-mannered Giuliano.
For the Second Chancellor and Secretary to the Ten of War, the shift in the balance of power in Italy posed new challenges. With the goal of subjugating Pisa no closer to completion than it had been when Machiavelli first entered office, the beleaguered republic could ill afford to fight on a second front. Should the victorious Spaniards choose to march north, Florence had nothing to block them but a few mercenaries whose performance before the walls of Pisa had given little reason for encouragement. On January 14, 1504, Machiavelli was again dispatched to the court of the French King to “make it clearly understood,” according to Niccolò Valori’s instructions, “that we are not in a position to gather troops sufficient for our defense, and that accordingly we should be obliged to turn for aid wherever it was to be found.” In other words, he was to make it plain to the French that should they be unwilling or unable to help, Florence might be forced to throw herself into the arms of Spain. Fortunately, such a scenario was never put to the test. The Spaniards, it turned out, were stretched too thin both militarily and financially to pursue their advantage. On February 11 the warring nations signed a thre
e-year truce that guaranteed, at least for the time being, the survival of the republic.
But while the immediate threat had dissipated, Florence’s position remained precarious. Machiavelli’s agitated state of mind at the time is evident in his First Decennale, an epic poem on current affairs he completed in November 1504 and dedicated to his early patron, Alamanno Salviati.i After chronicling the tumultuous ten years just passed, Machiavelli captures the uncertainty of the times he was living through:
[M]y spirit is all aflame; now with hope, now with fear,
it is overwhelmed, so much that it wastes to nothing bit by bit;
because it seeks to know where your ship can sail, weighted with
such heavy weights, or into what harbor, with these winds.
Likening Florence to a storm-tossed boat unable to steer its own course through turbulent waters, he nonetheless ends on an optimistic note:
Yet we trust in the skillful steersman, in the oars, in the sails, in
the cordage; but the voyage would be easy and short if you
would reopen the temple of Mars.
The “skillful steersman” is Piero Soderini, with whom Machiavelli had struck up a close personal and professional relationship. Most intriguing is the closing line about the “temple of Mars,” the first explicit reference to the project that dominated the remainder of his time in office and that would first catapult him to fame as the hero of the reinvigorated Florentine Republic before reducing him to the role of scapegoat, blamed for its sudden collapse.
From the moment he was elected Second Chancellor in the spring of 1498, Machiavelli was consumed by a single idea: How could his beloved republic halt the steady decline of her fortunes? In centuries past she had been the capital of a proud and growing empire; now, with no standing army of her own, she was forced to throw herself into the arms of one protector or another. “[T]he worst thing about weak republics,” he wrote in The Discourses, “is that they are irresolute, so that all the choices they make, they are forced to make.” Instead of being masters of their fate, Florentines had been reduced to pawns in a high-stakes game played by those with little reason to consider their interests. During the reign of Lorenzo de’ Medici, adroit diplomacy had masked inherent weakness. The French invasion of 1494 had exposed the impotence of all the states of Italy, but none more starkly than Florence, which for centuries had relied on paid mercenaries to compensate for her own lack of martial vigor. Machiavelli felt the humiliation keenly as he represented the republic in foreign courts, where he was dismissed as a man of no account serving a state that had long ceased to matter on the world stage.
As a careful student of ancient history, Machiavelli knew there was another way. Like many Florentines, he was a great admirer of the Roman Republic, whose citizen soldiers had set out from their farms and shops to conquer the known world. What, Machiavelli asked himself, allowed these simple folk to face down the armies of Sparta and Persia, while his compatriots hardly ever picked up a sword unless it was to avenge a petty insult from a rival family? Florentines had forgotten the ways of war. They had, in his memorable phrase, closed the temple of Mars.
Machiavelli’s first mission as Secretary to the Ten of War, in March 1499, had been to the camp of Jacopo of Piombino, where he tried to coax the disgruntled and underpaid condottiere from his tent. In the years since, hardly a month passed without a similar incident involving one of the many mercenary generals in Florentine employ, in which accusations of treachery on one side were met by countercharges of bad faith on the other. The most serious ended with the beheading of Paolo Vitelli, though there must have been many times before and since where Machiavelli felt that the ax man’s services were called for.
Instructed by the Ten to offer Gianpaolo Baglioni a contract, Machiavelli unleashed a diatribe against the man in particular and the breed in general: “[H]e was like the other pillagers of Rome, who are thieves rather than soldiers, and whose services are sought for the sake of their names and influence, rather than for their valor, or the number of men at their command. Moved as they are by personal interests, the alliances they make last till it suits their purpose to break them.”
By contrast, he observed, armies made up of citizen conscripts fighting for hearth and home were far more effective. The massive French army combined a hardened professional force of Swiss pike men with peasants and laborers levied from the local populace, while the militias instituted by Cesare Borgia and Remirro that Machiavelli had reviewed during his tour of the Romagna were an essential ingredient in Valentino’s early success. But Machiavelli’s faith in a citizen army went beyond empirical observation; he had an almost mystical belief in the virtue of the citizen soldier and a visceral hatred for the hired gun—a conviction that a man who refused to fight on behalf of his own country was no man at all, and that a nation that relied on its purse rather than its people would soon be reduced to slavery. In the final chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli urges Lorenzo de’ Medici to free Italy from foreign domination, telling him “above all other things, it is necessary . . . to provide yourself with your own army; for there cannot be more faithful, truer, or better soldiers than these.” These loyal soldiers stand in stark contrast to those who sell their services to the highest bidder:
Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous, and anyone who founds his state on such men will never know stability or security, because they are disorganized, ambitious, without discipline or faith. Brave among friends, they are cowards before their enemies. They have no fear of God nor loyalty to men. Ruin can be avoided only by avoiding action. In peace the prince will be despoiled by his own men, in war he will be despoiled by his enemies. The reason for this is that they have no loyalty, nothing that keeps them in the field, but a little bit of money insufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are happy to be your soldiers as long as you avoid war, but when war comes they will desert or flee.
I hardly need to trouble myself persuading anyone of the truth of what I say since Italy’s ruin can be traced to no other cause than her reliance, for so many years, on mercenary armies.
For Machiavelli, the use of mercenary armies was not only impractical—it represented an acute moral failing. Free men did not pay others to fight for them but defended their liberty with their blood. “[W]here military organization is good,” he wrote in The Discourses, “there must needs be good order.” Only a corrupt and sybaritic people would stoop to hiring professional soldiers, who inevitably gained a stranglehold over those who employed them. Passionately patriotic and proud of the city’s history of independence, Machiavelli concluded that Florence would never equal past glories unless she revived the ancient tradition of the citizen army.
This would require a reversal of almost two centuries of military policy. More importantly, it would involve a radical shift in the way the citizens viewed their obligations to the state. Florentines, as Machiavelli recognized, had long since forgotten the discipline of war; they had grown prosperous and complacent. They paid taxes reluctantly, using all manner of trickery to hide their assets, and then grumbled when the armies they hired on the cheap failed to meet their objectives. Given the generally low sense of civic duty, it was certain they would howl at any attempt to drag them from their comfortable homes to drill on the parade ground and resist any policy that might endanger life and limb on the field of battle.
Perhaps even more difficult to overcome was the near paranoia regarding any policy that led to the arming of the common people. While the prosperous middle class had no desire to take up arms, it was equally averse to placing weapons in the hands of employees who might be tempted to turn on their masters. The uprising by impoverished workers in 1378 known as the Revolt of the Ciompi had instilled in the ruling elite an almost hysterical fear of class warfare. In 1466 a coup against the Medici failed in large part because, according to one eyewitness, they feared “that the little people, all in arms . . . would be so aroused that, having tasted the sweetness of
such destruction, would turn against other magnates, thinking in this way to relieve their poverty.” If these poor, hungry laborers were conscripted, how long would it be before they asserted their political and economic rights?
Machiavelli understood the difficulties involved, but frustration with the army’s recent shameful performance had grown so great that most now admitted there was a problem, even if they still disagreed on a solution. The key figure in all this was the Gonfaloniere. Fortunately, Soderini had come to rely on the Second Chancellor’s sound judgment and to appreciate his tireless dedication. Machiavelli had made a convert of Cardinal Francesco Soderini, whose enthusiasm for the project rubbed off on his brother. “Your letter being longer,” the Cardinal wrote to Machiavelli, “gave us all the more pleasure, because we now understand more clearly your new military strategy, which corresponds to our hope for the health and dignity of our country, is progressing . . . . And it must be no small satisfaction that it is from your hands that such an honorable undertaking should have begun. So persevere and bring this affair to the desired end.”
Machiavelli Page 20