Leonardo’s battles (Codex A, ff. 111r e 110v, «Modo di figurare una battaglia»)
Italiano

Carlo Vecce
Professor of Italian Literature at the Faculty of Lingue e letterature straniere, University of Naples "L'Orientale"

Saturday 16 April 2011, 10.30am
Vinci, Biblioteca Leonardiana

How can a battle be represented visually? More than ten years before the Battle of Anghiari, Leonardo had already fully expounded the problem in Codex A (1492), jotting down an extraordinary text amongst the notes destined to become the oldest core of a ‘book of painting’. The title, Modo di figurare una battaglia (‘How to depict a battle’), seemed to announce a simple didactic text, nothing more than a compositional grid for painting battles. In fact, the ‘battle’ was a highly successful genre in Quattrocento art (from Paolo Uccello to Piero della Francesca), and the invention and composition of the ‘story’ was considered a difficult test of an artist’s skills. But the word figurare had a deeper significance for Leonardo. It was more directly linked to descrivere (‘describe’), to the use of verbal language, the instrument required to ‘recount’ the event as a whole and to recreate its temporality from within: and the comparison can be found both in the contemporary texts of the so-called Paragone and in those of the folios on anatomy. The outcome is paradoxical: like the late Diluvii, so too the battles of Leonardo proved ‘impossible’ to figurare. Above all this is because they are modern battles: no longer heroic clashes between medieval cavalry, with shining armour and banners fluttering in the breeze, but confused scrums in a mist produced by the gunpowder of the artillery, a chaos of sounds and smells in which men and animals move around like ghosts. Dantesque visions, these battles render visible an earthly inferno, created by human folly (pazzia bestialissima) itself, and ‘measurable’ through observations of a physical and mechanical nature: the lightness and density of smoke and dust, the upward and downward movements of the air, the mixing of fluids (blood, water, mud). The battle also offers an enormous spectrum of human body movements and of inner feelings exteriorized in facial expressions – a beautiful and terrible spectacle which introduces in almost sacred and ritual terms an essential theme of all of Leonardo’s work: the aesthetics of violence. However, its modernity lies in the artist’s treatment of point of view: that of a soldier who is in the midst of the battle, knows he is part of it and that he may be overrun and killed at any moment (as in the battles described in modern literature by the likes of Stendhal, Tolstoy, Crane and Fenoglio). Perhaps only the cinema would manage to give a unitary thread to the different sequences, through the editing process – and it is no accident that one of the most attentive readers of Modo di figurare una battaglia was the master of Alexander Nevskij, Sergei Eisenstein.