Legendary filmmaker Orson Welles once famously remarked: “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; and they had 500 years of democracy and peace — and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Delightfully mordant — and so paradoxical! All you need between the artist and the bloodthirsty warrior of that age of humanism is the philosopher. Paul Strathern’s book The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior knits three grand threads of Italian Renaissance into one immense, captivating story: the lives of three iconic, larger-than-life figures brought together and shaped by destiny in ways that bewilder and fascinate even today. Strathern — prize-winning writer and author of The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance — gives us a sumptuously recounted popular history that draws on extensive research — despatches, academic work, travelogues, articles, diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, encyclopaedias, art works and much else — and spins it into a dark yet luminous tale.
How did the lives of Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia intersect? The three men were, says Strathern, “a unique constellation — each in his own way emblematic of a distinct aspect of humanity — its art, its philosophy, its wars… Borgia was the actor, Machiavelli plotted the devious script and Leonardo painted the set and designed the ingenious mechanical devices that shifted the scenery.”
In the late 15th century, even as the Renaissance was under way and the Medicis — the premier banking family of Florence — were the high patrons the arts, Italy hurtled from one crisis to another, perpetually and violently destabilised, as its states — Naples, Milan, Venice, Florence and the Papal States — fought for power and prestige.
Cesare Borgia is the nodal figure in this tale. Son of the power-hungry Pope Alexander V1, Borgia was intelligent, callous and inordinately ambitious with an animal cunning. Few could match his depravity and treachery.
In 1502, as he embarked on his third campaign into Romagna in northern Italy — erstwhile under papal rule — Borgia wanted the unequivocal support of Florence. The frightened Florentine authorities sent a two-man team — Bishop Soderini and Machiavelli, their most able diplomatic negotiator — to Urbino to talk. Machiavelli was near mesmerised by Borgia but his keen mind understood that Borgia was bluffing. So how did he bargain?
On a previous occasion, Borgia had met Leonardo and been so attracted by him that he had offered him a job. Leonardo had refused. Now, the great artist who was also Italy’s most talented engineer was poised to become a pawn in the dangerous game of bloodlust and conflict. In the parleys, and to save Florence, Machiavelli offered Borgia the services of Leonardo.
Those years were the best of times and the worst of times: years of great art and demonic acts; of rational thought and superstition; of unparalleled papal power and republicanism (as practised then); of monstrous destruction and the most ambitious scientific projects.
It is against these shifting sands that the lives of these three greats played out. Strathern’s engaging tale marshals their backgrounds, their rise to eminence, the plottings and schemings in the land, the interference and invasions of foreign powers — particularly France and Spain — and the venality of the Church.
In ways that were not immediately clear, the meeting in Urbino was to have a lasting impact on both Machiavelli and Leonardo. Through his many subsequent diplomatic missions, through his encounters with a range of leaders — many of them petty tyrants — Machiavelli the intellectual and iconoclast, was to learn how to discern the truth behind political machinations. And though he fibbed and spied, he would seek a scientific basis for what he had learned — that truth could be gleaned only through perception and observation; that in politics, power was the effective principle (terrified though he was of Borgia’s crimes, “only such a man could save Italy from self-destructive wars,” he noted); to gain it and retain it was the truth that underlay human affairs. All of this found expression in The Prince (1513), his “notorious” treatise on governance and power. “Whoever is responsible for allowing another to become powerful, only ruins himself, for this power is brought into being either by ingenuity or force, and both of these work against the power which allows it.”
Cesare Borgia would “embody the ruthless application of this principle of political truth.” This handsome, shrewd, resilient, unprincipled man was the subject of the most lewd rumours: “Cesare murdered his brother, slept with his sister, spent the treasures of the Church and was the terror of his father.” A libertine, he contracted syphilis and in his later years (he died at 32); he would mask his face to hide the pustules that disfigured it. But he was a child of the Renaissance too — handsome, well-educated and a brilliant mind.
What made Leonardo accept Borgia’s offer? There is no straightforward answer. Leonardo, the quintessential Renaissance figure, was enigmatic, unable to finish the projects he undertook. Like Machiavelli, he, too, believed in perception and observation and rejected classical authority. He is known to have made three red chalk sketches of Borgia that probed the ruler’s face psychologically. As he toured Romagna, he studied the landscape, mountains, valleys and bridges for the work he would have to do to fortify Borgia’s defences (the five-arched bridge over the river Arno, says Strathern, is regarded as the mysterious background to Mona Lisa, which, he tells us later in the story, ended up in the bathroom of the Francis 1, the French king in whose arms Leonardo died). Leonardo thought up of all manner of lethal weapons: whirring blades that could rip man and beast in two, earth-moving machines, mechanical diggers, draining a moat during a siege, destroying citadels, digging tunnels noiselessly, and much else; he drew flying machines, diving suits, even a bicycle; yet he was a pacifist, a vegetarian and an animal lover, and called war the “most brutal madness”.
Gradually, as he witnessed or heard of Borgia’s massacres, he lost interest in all this science which had once been his “pride and joy”, and refused to “publish” his ideas (i.e., bring them out into the open) because of what he called the “evil nature of men”, for “the most wicked act of all is to take the life of a man… he who does not value (life) does not himself deserve to have it.”
In the midst of what reads like a litany of mayhem are long passages on the lives of rapacious, influence-wielding Popes, especially Alexander V1. As Venetian ambassador Antonio Giustinian declared: “There is no difference between the papacy and an eastern market: everything goes to the highest bidder.” So wrapped was Alexander in stratagem, power-play and family and territorial gain that he (like others) stopped at literally nothing: he made and broke cardinals and alliances, betrayed, killed, embezzled and hoarded with shameless greed.
Rumours of incest (with his daughter Lucrezia) abounded; he placed her in a convent, and when convenient, married her off to different men, obtaining divorces when necessary, even getting one husband butchered.
He attended sex orgies which he regarded as a spectator sport! In what, then, can be termed poetic justice, his death was monstrous and pathetic. Within minutes, his bedroom was ransacked for jewellery and, as his body was carried across St Peter’s, a scuffle broke out over the gold candlesticks. In the process, the corpse was “unceremoniously dumped, abandoned and later, when picked up for burial, it was swollen, decayed, hideous.” The coffin was too narrow, and the body was stuffed and pummelled to make it fit.
Borgia, too, died a terrible death, in an ambush on an obscure battlefield in Navarre, stabbed and stripped naked with a flat stone placed on his genitals.
All three men, says Strathern were not “moral” in the Christian sense of the word. Leonardo refrained from “publishing” but continued his investigations, recognising, presumably, his own and man’s duality; “The hypocrisy of the crocodile: this animal catches a man and straight away kills him,” he wrote, “after he is dead, he weeps for him with a lamentable voice and many tears. Then… it cruelly devours him…”
Machiavelli, too, recognised it. “I know of no better precept than the ones derived from Borgia’s actions… For politics to become a true science, it would have to accept the amorality of science (i.e., human behaviour).
Three lives of the high Renaissance, three tales, three philosophical lessons for posterity…