oxford art j 2006 burke 77 91

jillrkeMeaning and Crisis in the EarlySixteenth Century: Interpreting

Leonardo’s Lion

Jill Burke at Bar Ilan U

niversity on October 30, 2015

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Meaning and Crisis in the Early Sixteenth Century:Interpreting Leonardo’s Lion

Jill Burke

Bound between folios 16 and 17 of volume F.P. II. IV, 171 in Florence’sBiblioteca Nazionale is a scrap of paper. On one side is a hastily pennedreceipt – obviously never handed over – recording that a certain Vierifrom Castiglione gave the writer, Piero Parenti, two Marks on 24th March1509. The other side contains a note Piero wrote later on that year,perhaps meaning to include it in the history of Florence he was currentlywriting. This previously unpublished note reads as follows:

When the King entered Milan, besides the other entertainments, Lionardo da Vinci, the

famous painter and our Florentine, devised the following intervention: he represented a lion

above the gate, which, lying down, got onto its feet when the King came in, and with its

paw opened up its chest and pulled out blue balls full of gold lilies, which he threw and

strewed about on the ground. Afterwards he pulled out his heart and, pressing it, more gold

lilies came out, showing how the Florentine Marzocco, represented by such an animal, had

his guts full of lilies. Stopping beside this spectacle, [the King] liked it and took much

pleasure in it.1

This slip of paper is one of several bound into the fifth and final volume ofParenti’s History of Florence, a work that has not yet been fully published.2

A potential editor would have a difficult task. Compared to the previousvolumes in Parenti’s History, the text is discontinuous and fragmentary,full of scribbled emendations and marginal additions. This is rawmaterial for a history that Parenti never had time to organise into ameaningful expository narrative.3 In this article I seek to rescueParenti’s note about Leonardo’s lion from its fragile position, wedgedinto the marginalia of history, by considering the significance – andsignifications – of the lion in the context of broader issues about theproduction of visual meaning during the Italian wars, a period oftenreferred to in Art History as the High Renaissance. Using the lion as astarting point, I explore how living in a time of crisis may have affectedthe beholder’s understanding of imagery in this period, and conditionedhis or her attitudes towards interpretation. Through this case study, Ihope to suggest that a consideration of audience expectations mayprovide fruitful avenues for a rearticulation of what is distinctive aboutearly sixteenth-century visual art.First of all, Parenti’s jotting needs to be inserted into its physical and

historical context. Like the other scribbled aides-memoires dottedthrough the volume, this slip of paper is placed near a section oftext the binder deemed to be relevant, and dating from around thesame period. Thus, on fol. 17r, we see the following passageconcerning the entry of Louis XII into Milan in May 1509: ‘On thefirst of the month his Majesty the King of France entered Milan withas many entertainments and clamour of bombardments as one couldimagine’.4

1. Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, FondoPrincipale II. IV. 171, unpaginated slip of paperbetween fols. 16 and 17: ‘In sulentrata del Re inmilano, oltre al altre ghale, Lionardo da Vinci,pictor famoso e nostro fiorentino excogito unatale intramesse. Figuro un lione [above line:sopra la porta] el quale giacendo, alle venute delre si levo in pie: e colla brancha s’appersi ilpecto e di quello trasse palle azurre piene digigli d’oro; quali gitto e semino per terra. Dipoisi trasse il cuore e premendolo n’usciremedesimamente gigli d’oro. A dimostrationecome marzoccho dei fiorentini figurato per taleanimale haveano [le crossed out] piene le visceredi gigli: fermossi oltre ad tale spectacolopiaqueli e molto se ne allegro’.

2. Joseph Schnitzer, Quellen und Forschungen zurGeschichte Savonarolas, Vol. 4: Savonarola nach denAufzeichnungen des Florentiners Piero Parenti(Duncker & Humblot: Leipzig, 1910) haspublished part of this manuscript where itrelates to Savonarola and his followers. For moreon Parenti, see the published first volume of hishistory, Piero Parenti, Storia Fiorentina1476–1478, 1492–1496 (ed. Andrea Matucci,Olschki: Florence, 1994); Andrea Matucci,‘Note per l’edizione della ‘Storia Fiorentina’ diPiero Parenti’, Rinascimento, Vol. 30, 1990,pp. 257–69; Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli andGuicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (W.W. Norton and Company:New York and London, 1984), pp. 228–9;Guido Pampaloni, ‘Piero di Marco Parenti e lasua ‘Historia fiorentina’, Archivio Storico Italiano,Vol. 127, 1959, pp. 147–53; and for his earlylife and education, Mark Phillips, The Memoir ofMarco Parenti: A Life in Medici Florence (PrincetonUniversity Press: Princeton, N.J., 1987),pp. 37–50.

3. Discussed in Andrea Matucci, ‘Piero Parentinella storiografia fiorentina’, in Studi di Filologiae Critica offerti dagli allievi a Lanfranco Caretti(Salerno Editrice: Rome, 1985) Vol. 1, p. 161.

4. ‘A dı primo del mese entro la maesta del redi Francia in Milano contanta [magnificentiacrossed out, then above pompa crossed out] ghalee strepito di bonbardi quanto imagginare sipossi’.

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On the next page, however, is a mention of another entry of the Frenchking into Milan two months later, on 1 July:

On the return of the King of France to Milan. He entered there with very great magnificence.

Lionardo da Vinci, our famous Florentine painter, worked very hard in the design of the pomp:

he did many ornaments for triumphal arches placed through the streets covered with many

kinds of draperies and with a triumph behind of Victory with many images of conquered cities

and so on.5

It has long been assumed that Leonardo played a part in designing this festival,though this passage provides the first contemporary documentary evidencefor this to my knowledge. There are several other accounts that detail theevents of Louis XII’s entries into Milan in May and July 1509, and thoughnone of them mention a lion that corresponds to Parenti’s description, itseems most likely that Parenti’s note refers to the July spectacle. Mostsources agree that there was relatively little pomp during the King’s entryin May. The Florentine ambassadors, for example, say Louis entered‘ordinarily, without ceremony, riding on a charger, to show himself ingood form’.6 The only notable display put on by the city to welcome him –and Parenti mentions this too – was a great amount of artillery set off inthe Piazza of the Castello, which ended up killing a member of the Frenchcourt.7 As I discuss below, the July entry was a splendid affair with severaltriumphal arches and festive chariots. Unless further documentation isfound, it seems best to assume that Leonardo’s lion was one of the‘ornaments for triumphal arches’ Parenti says Leonardo invented in July1509. Also worthy of notice, however, is that a similar mechanical lionhas long been known to art historians in other contexts – according to themost recent monographs, Leonardo created such an automaton to appear atthe entry of Francis I into Lyons in 1515.8 In fact, once I started looking,robotic lions started to appear everywhere.

Leonardo’s Mechanical Lion(s)

There are three well-known sources concerning a mechanical lion that aregenerally cited in the Leonardo literature. The earliest is Giorgio Vasari’sLives of the Artists. In both 1550 and 1568 editions, he reports: ‘During[Leonardo’s] time in Milan, the King of France came; because he askedLeonardo to make something eccentric [bizzarra], he made a lion thatwalked a few steps, then opened his chest and showed that it was fullof lilies’.9 This account is virtually repeated in Giovanni PaoloLomazzo’s Libro dei Sogni of 1564, but slightly changed in his Trattatodell’Arte della Pittura, published twenty years later.10 There he writes‘Once in front of Francis I, King of France, [Leonardo] made a lionwalk to his place in a hall, made with amazing skill, and then stopping,it opened its chest which was filled with lilies and various flowers’.11

Finally, in 1600, Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger wrote that anautomaton of a lion, also with a chest full of lilies, featuring in thewedding celebrations of Maria de’ Medici was ‘similar to that whichLeonardo da Vinci realised for the Florentine Nation on the occasion ofFrancis I’s entry into Lyons’.12

Since Carlo Pedretti published this last account in 1978, the assertion thatthe lion mentioned by Vasari made its appearance in Lyons in 1515 has beengenerally accepted and given the same interpretation as that suggested by

5. On f. 28r: ‘Nel ritorno del Re di Francia inMilano. Vi entro con grandissimamagnificentia[.] Adoperassi assai nel disegnodella pompa Lionardo da Vinci famoso nostropictore fiorentino, il quale fece molti ornamentia uso d’archi triomfali per le strade coperte conmolte diversita di tende e con trionfo drietodella victoria con molte imagini di Citta[crossed out in figure delle] expugnate etc’.

6. Published by Abel Desjardins, Negociationdiplomatiques de la France avec la Republique deFlorence pendant le XIVe e le XVe siecle (ImprimerieImperial: Paris, 1861) Vol. 2, pp. 310–11:‘Questa mattina e entrata la MaestaCristianissima in Milano, ordinariamente, senzacerimonie, cavalcando un corsiere per mostrared’essere in buon punto’.

7. Mentioned by at least two other sources forthis entry: Giovanni Andrea Prato, ‘Storia diMilano dall’anno 1499 sino al 1519’, ArchivioStorico Italiano, Vol. 3, 1842, p. 269 and I Diaridi Marino Sanuto (ed. N. Barozzi, Forni Editore:Venice, 1882), Vol. 8, col. 184. Interestingly,the only other source I have found that assumesthat there were more formal festivities for theKing’s May entry is another Florentine, PieroVaglienti, who claims vaguely that the Milanese‘fe’ gran magnificenze’. See Vaglienti, Storia deisuoi tempi 1492–1514, (ed. Giuliana Berti,Michele Luzzati, Ezio Tongiorni, Nistri-Lischi ePacini: Pisa, 1982), p. 221.

8. See Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: TheMarvellous Works of Nature and Man (HarvardUniversity Press: Cambridge, Mass., andLondon, 1981), p. 347.

9. Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ Piu EccellentiPittori, Scultori e Architettori nelle redazioni del1550 e 1568 (ed. Rosanna Bettarini and PaolaBarocchi, Sansoni: Florence, 1976) Vol. 4,p. 28: ‘Venne a suo tempo in Milano il re diFrancia; onde pregato Lionardo di far qualchecosa biz[z]arra, fece un lione che caminoparecchi passi, poi s’aperse il petto e mostrotutto pien di gigli’.

10. Lomazzo, Libro dei Sogni in his Scritti sullearti (ed. Roberto Ciardi, Marchi e Bertolli:Florence, 1973), vol. 1, p. 153.

11. Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte de la pittura,Scoltura et Architettura, in Scritti sulle arte, Vol. 2,p. 96: ‘una volta dinanzi a Francesco primo, redi Francia fece caminare da sua posta in una salaun leone fatto con mirabile artificio, e dipoifermare, apprendosi il petto tutto ripieno digigli e diversi fiori. Il che fu di tanta meraviglia aquel re et a tutti i circonstanti’.

12. The front of this pamphlet is reproduced inCarlo Pedretti, Leonardo Architetto (Electa:Milan, 1978), p. 322. The relevant text in fullreads: ‘Nella testa della tavola di mezzo di

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Parenti – the friendship between Florence and France.13 At first, given thenew information at my disposal, I was sceptical of Buonarroti’s evidence. Hewas writing at a distance of almost a century from the event in question, withthe clear aim of celebrating a Franco-Florentine alliance. It seems likely thatwhoever designed the lion in 1600 did so having read Lomazzo and Vasari –perhaps Buonarroti provided their accounts with a context that wasconvenient for his celebratory pamphlet. The Medici-French marriage of1600 was presaged by the union of Giuliano de’ Medici and Francis I’sniece, Philaberta of Savoy just before the king’s 1515 entry.Accepting Buonarroti’s account as the one authentic appearance of the lion

also seems problematic as it ignores clashing information in the two earlieraccounts. Lomazzo specifically says that the lion appeared to Francis I ‘in ahall’ – strange for a civic entry, whereas Vasari claims that Leonardomade the lion whilst in Milan, without specifying the name of the FrenchKing. By the 1560s, both these writers were in contact with FrancescoMelzi, Leonardo’s executor and his pupil from some time before 1510;indeed Lomazzo explicitly states he gained his information about the lionappearing in front of Francis I from Melzi.14 At first, I thought thatVasari’s account, as the one that most clearly relates to Parenti’s, was themost accurate, Lomazzo and Buonarroti offering a garbled version ofevents. However, I hesitated when noting another incident of aLeonardesque mechanical lion in two letters first published by EdmondoSolmi in 1924.15

The lion in this case appears as one of a complex series of allegorical setpieces staged for Francis I and his entourage at Argentan in October 1517.A member of the audience, Rinaldo Ariosto, explained to Federico Gonzaga:

Then a hermit appeared in front of the King, and kneeling down indicated that he was told by

God about his coming to liberate the earth and countries from a fierce lion, which was

destroying everything: thus he supplicated his majesty to accept the task and carry out divine

will. He accepted, and, taken to where the lion was, hit it with a rod that the hermit had

given him, and this lion opened itself up, and inside it was all azure, which signifies love

according to the custom here.16

A few days later, Fra Anastasio Turrioni wrote to Federico about the sameevent, describing how: ‘In the street there was a fierce lion: a hermit gavehis majesty a staff with which he hit the lion three times. And it allopened. The colour inside was turquoise with a lily in the middle’.17

The fact that these two accounts differ should not surprise us – it is notuncommon for people to notice, remember and understand different thingsfrom the same event, as I discuss in more detail below. They do, however,provide a firm indication that a Leonardesque mechanical lion was beingdisplayed for the pleasure of the French court in October 1517, and,indeed are the only eyewitness accounts we have of such a lion.18

This testimony convinced me that my initial desire to find the ‘true’version of the lion was misguided. Lomazzo in his Idea del Tempio dellaPittura of 1590 mentions Leonardo’s ability ‘to have lions move by thepower of wheels’, which would suggest that this occurred on more thanone occasion.19 A recent article has suggested that in a series of drawingsin the Codex Atlanticus, Leonardo had worked out the mechanism forautomating such a device as early as 1478.20 Tom Tolley has kindly sharedwith me an account of yet another similar contraption: during the entry ofCharles VIII into Lyons in 1490 a lion that seemed to be guarding a gardenapproached the king, lifted itself up and presented him with the keys of

quelle, per colmare la maraviglia, in aspettofiero un Leone ebbe, che posando suquattropiedi, allora, che a tavola elle si misero,predendo moto, e sollevandosi in due, aprirsi ilseno si vide, e pieno di gigli mostrarlo,convertendosi appresso in aquila da due fronti:concetti simile a quello, il quale Lionardo daVinci nella Citta di Lione nella venuta del ReFrancesco, mise in opera per la nazion’fiorentina’.

13. See, for example, Pedretti, LeonardoArchitetto, p. 322; Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci,p. 347.

14. See Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte de la pittura,in Scritti sulle arte vol 2, p. 96; for Melzi andVasari, see Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci, pp. 346–7.

15. Edmondo Solmi, ‘Documenti inediti sulladimora di Leonardo da Vinci in Francia nel 1517e 1518’, reprinted in his Scritti Vinciani. Le fontidei manoscritti di Leonardo da Vinci e altri studi(La nuova Italia: Florence, 1976), pp. 609–29.

16. Solmi, Scritti Vinciani, p. 612: ‘Apresocomparse uno heremita avanti al Re, etinchienochiatosi dimostrava essere inspirato daDio de la venuta sua per liberare la terra etpaesse da uno fero leone, che tutto distrugeva:cosı supplicava sua Maesta ad acceptare limpresaet exequire el volere divino. Epsa accepto; etcondutta dove era il Leone, lo battete cum unavirga che li havea dato il predicto heremita, etepso Leone si aperese, et dentro era tutto azuro,che significava amore secondo il modo di qua’.

17. Solmi, Scritti Vinciani, p. 613: ‘Nella via eraun leone feroce: uno heremita dette a sua maestauna bachetta cum la quale percosse el leone 3volte. E tucto se aperse. El color de dentro eraturchino cum un giglio in mezo’.

18. As Solmi points out (Scritti Vinciani, p. 344)Sanuto also mentions the lion in hisDiarii,Vol. 25, col. 32, saying that the kingkilled a lion that was devastating his country,and ‘alcune fictione molto belle’ emergedfrom its body.

19. Lomazzo, Idea del Tempio della Pittura, in hisScritti sulle arte, vol. 1, p. 259: ‘andar i leoni perforza di ruote’.

20. Mark Elling Rosheim, ‘L’automaprogrammabile di Leonardo: (Codice Atlantico,f. 812 r, ex 296 v-a)’, Lettura Vinciana, Vol. 40,2001.

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the city – the beast here being emblematic of the town.21 Lions wereobviously in vogue at the turn of the sixteenth century.The device was clearly sought after by patrons – it had the value of

combining familiar heraldic devices (the lion and the lily) in a dramaticmoving tableau, which also titillated its audience with the ferocity andexoticism of real lions, whose nature was quelled by the presence of asuperior civilising force, the French King.22 Judging by the differinginterpretations of Parenti in 1509 and Rinaldo Ariosto in 1517, it also hadthe advantage of being a flexible allegory. In the latter case, instead of agesture of fealty from a strong heraldic Florentine beast giving its heart toits French master, the lion represents a destructive force to be conqueredby the king with the help of divine will. The revealing of the lily in itsinterior is a metaphor for the lion’s destruction rather than its allegiance.Given the repetitious use of the same device in different contexts, withclearly different meanings, can we be sure that Parenti’s interpretation ofthe 1509 lion was shared by all its audience?

The Entry of July 1509

The historical context in which the 1509 lion appeared undermines Parenti’sassertion that it represented Florentine fealty to France. The late spring andsummer of 1509 was a tumultuous period for the Italian peninsular. TheLeague of Cambrai, consisting of the Kings of France and Spain, the HolyRoman Emperor and the Pope, was formed at the end of 1508 with thegoal of wresting back territory from the Venetian Republic. Louis XII’sentry into Milan on 1 May 1509 marked the beginning of this campaign. Intwo weeks, the French had won an overwhelming victory at the Battle ofAgnadello, when 12,000 Venetian troops were wiped out. Within days, asits holdings on terra firma hurried to capitulate to the French, Venice lostalmost its entire territory on the Italian mainland.23 These stunning Frenchvictories prompted Louis XII’s triumphal entry into Milan on 1 July.There are several accounts of the 1509 entry, which have been usedpreviously to help reconstruct the appearance of the festive apparatus andprocessions, and I make no attempt to reconstruct the festival in detailhere.24 Instead, I wish to consider the discrepancies in interpretationbetween the contemporary descriptions, and the kind of interpretativeTower of Babel they create.I am aware of accounts relating to this festival from four nationality

groups–Florentine, Venetian, Milanese, and French–in the form ofletters, chronicles and celebratory poems. The Venetian sources remind usthat accurate information was not always easy to get hold of, especially intimes of war. The letter that Marino Sanuto copied into his diary from an‘explorer’ in Milan elided all of the festive allegories onto oneoverburdened triumphal cart.25 Sanuto’s compatriot, Girolamo Priuli, mayhave been correct when he complained that ‘from explorers like this, onecan never, or rarely understand the truth’.26

If the Venetians found it difficult to get basic information, other accountsof the entry also, of course, have their own distortions. The French accountsare, without exception, highly valedictory about the festival, praising itthrough comparisons with great classical triumphs. Thus Robert deFleuranges, one of the king’s entourage, claimed in his journal that ‘theygave [Louis] the greatest entertainment and triumph that were ever givento a prince; because they did his whole entry according to the ancient

21. M. F. Rolle, ‘Jean de Paris: Documents surles Travaux de cet Artiste pour la Ville de Lyon(1483–1528)’, Archives de L’Art Francais Ser. 2,Vol.1, 1861, pp. 20–1: ‘Le quel jardin seragarde par une Lion grant et esleve, figure parune vrai Lion, le plus pres que faire se pourra . . .lequel Lion, estant pres du Roy, se levera,et avec sa pacte, presentera au Roys les clefzde la ville’.

22. For contemporary understanding of lions,and other wild animals, in renaissance Italy, seeClaudia Lazzaro, ‘Animals as Cultural Signs:A Medici Menagerie in the Grotto at Castello’,in Claire Farago (ed.), Reframing the Renaissance:Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America1450–1650 (Yale University Press: New Havenand London, 1995), pp. 197–227.

23. The Battle of Agnadello on 14 May 1509 isgenerally seen as a key date in Venetian history.See, for example Felix Gilbert, ‘Venice in theCrisis of the League of Cambrai’, in John Hale(ed.), Renaissance Venice (Faber and Faber:London, 1973), pp. 274–92; and Edward Muir,‘Was there Republicanism in the RenaissanceRepublics? Venice after Agnadello’, in JohnMartin and Dennis Romano (eds), VeniceReconsidered: The History and Civilization of anItalian City-State, 1297–1797 (Johns HopkinsUniversity Press: Baltimore and London, 2000),pp. 137–67.

24. I am indebted to Bonner Mitchell’sdiscussion of the sources for this festive entry inhis Italian Civic Pageantry in the High Renaissance: ADescriptive Bibliography of Triumphal Entries andSelected Other Festivals for State Occasions (Olschki:Florence, 1979), pp. 83–5.Mitchell reconstructsevents in more detail in The Majesty of the State:Triumphal Progresses of Foreign Sovereigns inRenaissance Italy (1494–1600) (Olschki: Florence,1986), pp. 102–4. Another important account,concentrating more on the French side of events iscontained in Robert Scheller, ‘L’union desprinces: Louis XII, his Allies and the VenetianCampaign, 1509’, Simiolus, Vol. 27, no. 4, 1999,pp. 235–9; and Luisa Giordano ‘Les entrees deLouis XII en Milanais’, in Jean Balsamo (ed.),Passer Les Monts. Francais en Italie – l’Italie en France(1494–1525) (Honore Champion Editeur; Parisand Florence, 1998), pp. 139–48. Also importantis Jean Chartrou, Les Entrees Solennelles ettriomphales a la renaissance (1484–1551) (LesPresses Universitaires de France: Paris, 1928),pp. 76–7.

25. I Diari di Marino Sanuto, Vol. 8, col. 184

26. I Diarii di Girolamo Priuli 1499–1512 (ed.Roberto Cessi) Vol. 4, part of Rerum ItalicarumScriptores Vol. 24, 1938–46, pp. 122–3: ‘dasimili exploratori mai se poteva over rare volteintendere la veritade’.

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custom of the Romans’.27 The official court poet, Jehan Marot, suggested that‘Never were Scipios, Pompeys, or Caesars entering Rome under triumphalarches so much honoured for one day’.28 It served the French to comparetheir king to ancient Roman generals, and also the Milanese to suggest thatthey were able to provide such magnificent festive trappings: the Milanesediarist, Giovanni Andrea del Prato, claimed that the king ‘was received bythis benevolent city with such pomp, that I burn to liken it to Romantriumphs’.29 The emphasis on the unusual splendour of this festival and itskeen intentions to restage an authentic Roman triumph have been echoedby the secondary sources.30 It was not shared by all the onlookers,however. The Florentine ambassadors, Alessandro Nasi and FrancescoPandolfini, seem to be stifling yawns when they reported that the Milanese‘honoured the King as much as they could and knew how to; although alltheir inventions were unfinished as they did not have the time theydesired’, complaining that the floats were ‘poor things’ and the climax ofthe festival, a gilded triumphal chariot, was ‘not very big’.31 GirolamoPriuli, perhaps not surprisingly for a Venetian, seemed to see the festivalin almost apocalyptic terms. So many nobles went to meet the king that itwas impossible for people to move through the streets, and so muchartillery was fired ‘that it appeared that the world would be destroyed’.32

If Leonardowas in charge of the feast, he certainly did ‘work hard’ to impresshis audience. According to Del Prato and Marot, there were five triumphalarches placed along the ceremonial route from the Porta Romana to theCastello in Milan.33 The first three of these are not described, and it could bethat the mechanical lion that Parenti mentions appeared on the top of one ofthem–he does say it was ‘sopra la porta’. We do not know what the fourthgate, outside the Duomo looked like either, but Del Prato tells us it carriedthe inscription ‘Laqueus contritus est. Nos liberati sumus’, taken from Psalm123, a hymn giving thanks for divine help against being swallowed up by ‘thewaters’ of the enemy, and presumably an allusion to the marine empire ofVenice being conquered by God’s will in the hands of Louis XII.The arch that was constructed in front of the Castello, and formed the

climax of the procession, is the only one described in any detail. It was,according to Del Prato, more than 50 braccia (about 34 metres) tall – as‘high as a church’ one French onlooker exclaimed – with depictions ofthe battles of the Venetian campaign carved upon it and topped by a gildedequestrian statue of the King.34 Flanked by two gigantic figures, one ofthe King’s hands, according to Marot, seemed to threaten Venice, adescription reminiscent of classical sculptures known to have influencedLeonardo in his other equestrian compositions – the statue of MarcusAurelius in Rome and the Regisole, nearby in Pavia.35 Perhaps some of thesketches now thought to relate to the Trivulzio monument – an equestrianstatue above a tomb enclosed in a triumphal arch, in planning around thistime – could instead be related to Leonardo’s preparations for the July1509 entry.36 For many Milanese onlookers, this ephemeral sculpture musthave evoked memories of Leonardo’s doomed project for the bronzeequestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, that was also to be placed in thepiazza in front of the Castello – and this must surely have been deliberate.37

Most of the sources agree that the King was followed through the city by afestive chariot displaying the spoils of war, five chariots representing theVenetian cities and fortresses conquered by the French, and a triumphalchariot. This last one attracted much comment. It included three femalefigures, obviously allegorical, though exactly what they were representing

27. Memoires du Marechal de Florange dit le jeuneadventureux (ed. R. Goubaux and P.-AndreLemoisne, 2 vols, Paris, Librairie Renouard,1913) pp. 40–1: ‘on luy fist la plus grant chiereet triumphe que jamais fut faict a prince; car illuy fierent toutte son entree selon l’anciennecoustume des Romains’; English translationfrom Mitchell, The Majesty of State, pp. 102–3.

28. Jehan Marot, Le Voyage de Venise (ed.Giovanna Trisolini, Librairie Droz S. A: Geneva,1977), p. 144: ‘Onques Scipions, Pompees ouCesars, / A Rome entrans, dessouz triumphansarcs, / Ne furent tant pour une jour decorez’.

29. Prato, ‘Storia di Milano’, p. 277: ‘da questabenigna citta fu recevuto con tanta pompa, cheio ardisco equipararala a li triumfi Romani’.

30. For example, Chartrou, Les Entrees Solennelles,pp. 76–7;Mitchell,TheMajesty of State, pp.102–4.

31. Desjardins, Negociation diplomatiques, Vol. 2,p. 385. The full passage reads: ‘Questi della cittae con parare le strade ed archi trionfali in piuluoghi, quanto hanno potuto e saputo lo hannoonorato; nonostante che tutte le invenzioni lorosono sute imperfette, per non avere il tempo chedesideravano. Trovo allo intrare della porta, insue carrette tirate da piu cavalli, tutte le citta edue o tre castelli piu famosi di carta impostati,pure cose deboli; cosı un carro, benche nonmolto grande, dove era una sedia con tre donne,cioe la vittoria, la Fama e la Felicita, chetenevano una corona in mano per incoronare chidoveva triomphare; uno elmetto per cimiere unatesta di lione scorticata, a similitudine d’ averespogliato e Veneziani dello stato, ecc.’

32. Priuli, I Diarii, Vol. 4, p. 122: ‘che aparevache il mondo ruinasse’.

33. Del Prato, ‘Storia di Milano’, p. 277 andMarot, Le Voyages de Venise, pp. 153–4.

34. Del Prato, ‘Storia di Milano’, p. 277,unnamed French source published by Giordano,‘Les entrees de Louis XII’, p. 143

35. Marot, Le Voyage de Venise, pp. 154–5; forequestrian monuments that were precursors forLeonardo, see Dario Covi, ‘The Italian Renaissanceand the Equestrian Monument’ in Diane Cole Ahl(ed.), Leonardo da Vinci’s Sforza Monument Horse:The Art and the Engineering (Associated UniversityPresses: London, 1995), pp. 40–56.

36. See, for example, the sketches of equestrianstatues on top of triumphal arches in Windsor,Royal Library, 12,353. One of these also includestwo large figures; drawings of machinery, perhapsconnected with the festival, surround this.

37. For the history of the model of the Sforzahorse, see Carlo Pedretti, ‘The Sforza Horse inContext’ in Cole Ahl (ed.), Leonardo da Vinci’sSforza Monument Horse, pp. 27–39.



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was a little harder to judge. They were ‘three goddesses’, according to oneFrench account; Marino Sanuto’s ‘explorer’ described them as three virtues;Marot understood them as personifications of Strength, Prudence, and Fame;the Florentine ambassadors saw Victory, Fame, and Happiness.38 Themisunderstanding over the women represented on the chariot was nothingcompared to the confusion over what happened next. An old man recited apoem to the King and invited him to mount the triumphal chariot, but herefused to do so. It may well be, as Robert Scheller believes, that this waspart of the festive rhetoric, but it was by no means universally understoodas such by the onlookers.39 Marot, possibly taking the official line, claimsthat Louis failed to mount the chariot as a sign that he attributed hisvictory to ‘the king of heaven’; Del Prato wrote that the king was worriedthat the action would seem too playful, and presumably open to ridicule;whereas Priuli assumed Louis thought the chariot was over the top(‘superflua’).40

Throughout, the accounts betray an expectation to find further meaningbehind the festive allegories, but an uncertainty as to the correctinterpretation. It is likely, therefore, that the lion described by Parentiwould have been interpreted in various ways by its audience. Given thekey importance of Venice in the July entry, it is not surprising that anylions mentioned by sources are assumed by the writers to be representativeof the Venetian republic’s patron, St Mark, and they tend to come to abad end. The Florentine ambassadors mention that the crest of a helmetrepresented on the triumphal chariot was ‘a flayed head of a lion, in thelikeness of despoiling Venice of its state’.41 Marino Sanuto tells of atriumphal carriage that was placed in the Duomo after the ceremony,which included ‘a lion wounded in the sea, which a dragon was chasing,and at the banks of the earth a cock was pecking out his eyes’.42

The Venetian lion of St Mark had been identified with the city since thetenth century, and was in many cases a victim of the wars of 1509.Relentlessly parodied in the woodcuts of French and Imperial propaganda,effigies of the lion were also systematically destroyed in the towns that theFrench army passed through, often by willing members of the elite keento display their allegiance to their new overlords.43 Sanuto, for example,tells us how in Vicenza ‘in their fury the . . . citizens knocked down amarble [lion] of St Mark that was in the piazza, which broke into pieces,but the common people gathered all the pieces up and tried to save thembecause they were greatly afflicted by this change of government’.The violence meted out towards the lion and the attempts to save itspeak clearly of how physical objects symbolising authority becomepsychologically charged at times of crisis.44 It also suggests that when mostpeople saw a symbol of a lion in northern Italy in the weeks afterAgnadello, Florence probably was not the first city that would come tomind. The sight of a lion eviscerating itself to display lilies, would surelyhave been understood by much of the audience in Milan as a reference toVenice being despoiled of its territorial ambitions. In this reading, theVenetian lion is forced to spill its metaphorical guts as French lilies aresown on terra firma, just as the automaton that appeared at Argentan in1517 was understood to be a metaphor for French victory over a foe.This is not to say that Parenti was wrong, however. As he knew well, the

republic of Florence, like that of Venice, was often represented by a lion. TheFlorentine Marzocco, in the form of a gilded lion, was the only sculpturaladornment to the Piazza della Signoria, the centre of Florentine communal

38. The French account quoted in Giordano,‘Les entrees de Louis XII’, p. 143; I Diari diMarino Sanuto, Vol. 8, col. 184; Marot, LeVoyages de Venise, p. 142; Desjardins, Negotiationsdiplomatiques, Vol. 2, p. 385.

39. See Scheller, ‘L’Union des Princes’,p. 238.

40. Marot, Le Voyages de Venise, p. 142; DelPrato, Storia di Milano, p. 277; I Diari diGirolamo Priuli, Vol. IV, p. 123.

41. Desjardins, Negociation diplomatiques, Vol.2, p. 385: ‘uno elmetto per cimiere una testa dilione scorticata, a similitudine d’ avere spogliatoe Veneziani dello stato ecc.’

42. I Diari di Marino Sanuto, Vol. 8, col. 511:‘quel caro triumphal, li e sta porta quando el’intro in Milan, e sta apichato soto il tecto dildomo, dove uno lion ferito in mar, qual undrago el caza, et e a la riva di terra, dove un galloli cava li ochii, poi e una bandiera d’oro di SanMarco, apichata e le ruode di ditto charo’.

43. See Alberto Rizzi, ‘Leontoclastiacambraica’, in Renato Polacco (ed.), Storiadell’arte marciana: sculture, tesoro, arazzi. Atti delConvegno internazionale di studi Venezia, 11–14ottobre 1994 (Marsilio Editori: Venice, 1997),pp. 21–33; Scheller, ‘L’Union des Princes’,pp. 201–4 and 224–34.

44. This instance discussed by Muir, ‘Was thereRepublicanism in the Renaissance Republics?’,pp. 149–50.

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government, for most of the fifteenth century. Two recent articles havestressed the importance of the Marzocco as a key symbol of Florentinecivic and particularly Guelf identity.45 Like the Venetians, the Florentinesplaced the Marzocco in the public areas of subject towns and villages inthe contado, and this symbol was often the focus for anti-Florentinesentiment. The Florentine apothecary and chronicler, Luca Landucci, forexample, noted how the Pisans celebrated the repossession of their city in1494: ‘pulling down a certain marble lion [marzocco] [they] dragged it allover Pisa, and then [threw it] into the Arno, crying Liberta.’46 The samediarist notes that the Marzocco on the Piazza della Signoria was crownedto celebrate the news of the capture of the Duke of Milan by the King ofFrance in April 1500.47

While late spring 1509 brought defeat for the Venetians, it saw a long-awaitedvictory for the Florentines, as they finally won back Pisa, the republic’s gateway tothe sea, after fifteen years of war. Although the recalcitrant city came back to thefold without any military intervention by the French, it was widely believed thatthe victory at Agnadello was what finally prompted the besieged Pisans to give uptheir freedom. Venice’s fall signalled Florence’s rise.48 In letters written on 10and 11 June 1509, the Florentine ambassadors gleefully report that the Frenchking declared that ‘in Italy there is no greater republic [than Florence]’ andthen ‘in the presence of a world of people said “you have surely become thehighest power in Italy. What shall we call you now? Most Serene or MostIllustrious?”’.49 Just as the French King appropriated the honorifics generallygiven to Venice and princely states to refer to Florence’s seemingly meteoricrise in summer 1509, Parenti provided a Florentine context for the reading ofthe mechanical lion’s actions, giving it a meaningful role in his projectedhistorical narrative.50 It would not necessarily have made sense to a Milanese,Venetian, or even French commentator.The festival of 1509 saw the coming together of various groups with

differing native symbolic traditions, an already confusing atmosphereexacerbated by the fact that these festive allegorical figures were couched ina classicising idiom that was still relatively unfamiliar.51 Unsurprisingly,given the political and social upheaval of the era, this was far from anisolated incident in the thirty or so years after the first French invasion of 1494.

Finding Meaning in the Italian Wars

Four years after Louis XII entered Milan, the political situation in manyItalian states had, once again, completely changed. The success of the HolyLeague led by Pope Julius II had led to the French being driven out ofMilan, the Medici family returning to Florence after their 18-year exile,and Venice regaining some territory on the mainland.52 It was in thesecircumstances that the new, youthful leading citizen of Florence, Lorenzode’ Medici, decided to stage a lavish festival in honour of John the Baptist,the city’s patron saint. Days before the celebrations were due to start, herealised that there might be a problem with the interpretation of the mainfestive procession. He explained his difficulties to Francesco Pandolfini,who remained as the Florentine ambassador to Louis XII:

. . . because there is going to be a triumphal chariot representing when Camillus liberated

Rome from the siege of the barbarians [‘gauls’ crossed out] we are concerned that [the

French] should not put an interpretation on this thing as having liberated and wanting to

liberate Italy from their hands, to which, in fact, it does not allude, but rather to the expulsion

45. Geraldine Johnson, ‘The Lion on thePiazza: Patrician Politics and Public Statuary inCentral Florence’, in Phillip Lindley andThomas Frangenberg (eds), Secular Sculpture1300–1550 (Shaun Tyas: Stamford, 2000),pp. 54–73; Adrian Randolph, ‘Il Marzocco:Lionizing the Florentine State’ in Lars Jones andLouisa Matthew (eds), Coming About – AFestschrift for John Shearman (Harvard UniversityArt Museums: Cambridge, Mass., 2001),pp. 11–18.

46. Landucci, A Florentine Diary 1450–1516,trans. A. de Rosen Jervis (J. M. Dent and Sons:London, 1927), p. 65.

47. Landucci, A Florentine Diary, p. 167.

48. Luca Landucci was typical in asserting thatwhen the Pisans saw what the French armiescould do, they decided to capitulate to theFlorentines as quickly as possible in case theFlorentines’ most important ally should thenturn its sights on them: Landucci, A FlorentineDiary, p. 234. The vicissitudes of the fortunes ofthe Italian states in this period is described byFrancesco Guicciardini, The History of Italy,trans. and ed. by S. Alexander (PrincetonUniversity Press: Princeton, N.J., 1969),pp. 194–207.

49. Desjardins, Negotiations Diplomatiques,pp. 365–7: ‘non restava in Italia maggiorerepublica’; ‘alla presenza d’un mondo di gente,disse “voi siate pure venuti el primo potentatodi Italia. Come vi chiamerete voi ora?Serenissimi o Illustrissimi?”’

50. Michael Bury has also pointed out to methat many onlookers may have interpreted blueballs with lilies on them as a reference to theMedici family, who won the right to bear theFrench lily on one ball in their coat of arms in1465. ‘Palle’ (balls) was a rallying cry forMedici supporters – an interpretation Parenti, afervent anti-Medicean, chose to suppress.

51. For the different traditions ceremonialmodes informing Italian and Northern Europeantriumphal entries, see Gordon Kipling, Enter theKing: Theatre, Liturgy and Ritual in the MedievalCivic Triumph (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1998)p. 5. For the diverse uses of symbolism in thepropagandistic pamphlets of various nations inthe Cambrai war, see Scheller, ‘L’Union desPrinces’, pp. 195–200.

52. Once again, Guicciardini, History of Italy,pp. 236–78, provides a detailed account ofthese events.



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and then to the recalling of the house of Medici in order to liberate [Florence]. I would be

grateful if you could make this understood to his Majesty and the other lords of the King’s

council, truly telling, reading and interpreting this festival to them to show why this triumph

is being held . . . and with these and other words which occur to you about this matter, make

him understand what is the truth, that is that we are not doing it on his account.53

The air of panic seeping from this text was warranted. The story of Camillus,as told by Plutarch, relates that the former dictator of Rome had gone intovoluntary exile after alleged financial misdeeds. He was implored to returnto the city after threats from marauding Gauls, and entered Rome intriumph after duly subduing the barbarian invaders. Lorenzo was playingon a family tradition by using the story of this republican hero: Camillus isone of the famous men depicted in the Sala dei Gigli of the Palazzo dellaSignoria, and often rhetorically linked with the return of Lorenzo’sillustrious forebear, Cosimo il Vecchio, from exile in 1434.54 However,the topic of triumph over the Gauls could also easily be understood astying in with the ‘Italia Liberata’ theme so important to the festivals ofJulius II in Rome in 1512 and 1513.55 Moreover, in terms of domesticpolitics, the implication that the Medici would like to ‘expel thebarbarians’ from Italy would have met with approval from much of theaudience. Just the year before, Machiavelli had dedicated the Prince toLorenzo, a work that ended with the exhortation to the Medici family to‘liberate Italy’ from foreign powers.56

It seems that Lorenzo was playing a rather unsubtle double game by usingthis imagery – bolstering his position at home by persuading a Florentineaudience of his family’s intentions to become the saviour of Italy, whilstattempting to persuade his potential foe that this was really just a matterof domestic politics. In the letter he deliberately makes a play on thepotential ambiguities of festive allegory in order to extricate himself froma sticky situation. The stakes were especially high as his uncle, Pope Leo X,was playing a careful diplomatic game with France at this point, beingopenly loyal to the Holy League while privately entering into negotiationswith Louis.57 The relationship between sign and signified, appearance andmeaning, was complex and unstable – and the interpretation could be ofcritical importance.The protean nature of allegorical symbolism was by no means confined to

festive contexts, but acts as a connecting thread through many aspects of earlysixteenth-century culture. Earlier, for example, the fortunes of the Medicifamily had been responsible for a more renowned example of creativerecontextualisation, in the movement of Donatello’s bronze David andJudith and Holofernes from the Medici palace to the Palazzo della Signoriaafter the expulsion of the family in 1494. Originally casting the Medicifamily in the roles of protectors of republican liberty, the movement ofthe sculptures transformed the Medici into the vanquished tyrants,overthrown by a godly opponent.58

Repeated political crises also led to the creative rereading of existingimagery to fulfil the popular demand for prophetic texts, which reachedtheir apex of popularity between 1494 and 1530. Ottavia Niccoli notesseveral examples of old prophecies being revived to apply to newcircumstances during the period of the Italian wars, to the extent that theywere ‘capable of illustrating whatever political trauma came along, with noneed for modification’.59 The prophecy of St Bridget, for example, wasdeemed to be a prediction of both the French invasion of 1494 and the

53. Archivio di Stato di Firenze, MediceoAvanti il Principato 141, f. 40r: ‘Et perche evinterviene uno carro trionphale che e quandoCamillo libera Roma dalla assedio de’ barberi[galli crossed out] di che dubitando checotestoro non si risemissino con interpetraretale cosa allo havere liberata et volere liberareItalia dalle mani loro ad che in facto non siallude, ma si ha ala chacciata et dipoi allarevocatione della casa de’ Medici per liberarela Citta. Harei caro facessi intendere a cotestaMaesta et altri Signori del Consiglio del Reveramente questa festa narrando, leggiendo etinterpretando loro ad che fine sia facto questotriompho . . . Et con queste et altre parolesecondo vi occorrera in sul facto vedrete di farlicapace di quello che e la verita cioe che non si faper conto loro’. This document was noted,though not extensively discussed, by WilliamRoscoe in The Life and Pontificate of Leo X(Lorenzo Press: Philadelphia, 1806) vol 2,p. 377, and recently in Anthony M. Cummings,The Politicized Muse: Music for Medici Festivals,1512–1537 (Princeton University Press:Princeton, 1992). Like the rest of the MAParchive, this document can now be consultedonline through the Florentine Archivio di Statowebsite (www.archiviodistato.firenze.it).

54. Melinda Heggarty, ‘Laurentian Patronage inthe Palazzo Vecchio: The Frescos of the Sala deiGigli,’ Art Bulletin, Vol. 78, 1996, pp. 273–5and Alison Brown, ‘The Humanist Portrait ofCosimo de’ Medici’, Journal of the Warburg andCourtauld Institutes, Vol. 24, 1964, pp. 188–9.

55. See Christine Shaw, Julius II: The WarriorPope (Blackwell: Oxford, 1993) p. 296 andCharles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (IndianaUniversity Press: Bloomington, 1985) p. 38.

56. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince,trans. G. Bull (Penguin: London, 1999), ch. 26.

57. Guicciardini, History of Italy, pp. 210–11.

58. The history of the reappropriation of theseimages on the return of the Medici in 1512 isdiscussed by Luca Gatti: ‘Displacing Images andDevotion in Renaissance Florence: The Return ofthe Medici and an order of 1513 for the Davit andthe Judit’, Annali della Scuola normale Superiore diPisa, Vol. 23, 1993, pp. 349–73. A perhapsdefinitive account of present knowledge about theoriginal commission and subsequent movement ofthese sculptures is provided by FrancescoCaglioti,Donatello e i Medici. Storia del David e dellaGiuditta (2 vols., Olschki: Florence, 2000).

59. Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People inRenaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (PrincetonUniversity Press: Princeton, 1990), p. 20 forquotation, pp. 3–29 for a general discussion of therelationship between thewars and taking propheticreadings from existing texts and visual symbols.

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Sack of Rome of 1527. Even the mosaics at San Marco were taken to beprophetic of Venetian problems in the wars at Cambrai.60

Two of the most celebrated literary productions of the early Cinquecento,Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and Machiavelli’s The Prince, also play on thedissonance between appearance – presenting a fashioned face to the world –and true motivations or feelings. Thus a central concept of Castiglione’s,sprezzatura, involves a kind of contrived spontaneity, making somethingdifficult look easy and natural. At one point he suggests that courtiers maysometimes need to ‘become another person’ (vestirsi un’altra persona) tokeep the favour of his prince.61 Machiavelli famously advises his Prince to‘appear to be compassionate, faithful to his word, kind, guileless anddevout . . . But his disposition should be such that, if he needs to be theopposite he knows how’ as ‘everyone sees what you appear to be, fewexperience what you really are’.62 Moreover, both these texts themselvesare deeply ambiguous, sparking off a search for settled meaning in theiraudiences.63

No wonder, perhaps, that a discourse about the dangers of misinterpretingexternal appearances becomes so marked in the same period. GirolamoSavonarola, the Dominican preacher whose teachings remained influentialwell into the sixteenth century, framed much of his message aboutrepentance in terms of the propensity for his audience to be tricked by theallure of visual beauty, which hid sin below it. ‘Beautiful ceremonies,churches full of drapes and organs . . . are not mental form nor interiorcult, but the images and colours are solely outside’ he thundered in asermon of 1496. Later in the same year he went on to stress that the newrealism achieved by contemporary painters was symptomatic of the gapbetween actual and apparent truth: ‘there are certain painters who makefigures that seem alive, but those who have good eyes and good imaginationimmediately that they see this figure, judge that it is dead and not alive;but those who have bad eyes will sometimes be tricked’: the ignorant areparticularly susceptible to being led astray by misinterpreting what they see.64

I could give more examples, but hope that the sheer eclecticism of thesesources suggests a culture imaginatively gripped by the elusiveness ofmeaning, which betrayed itself in a near fetishisation of symbolicambiguity, its creative possibilities and its potential dangers. The vastart historical literature searching for iconographical solutions to earlysixteenth-century works by artists such as Giorgione, Titian andMichelangelo would, in itself indicate that this cultural strand found itsway into painting and sculpture.65 Leonardo’s paintings and drawings areno exception: many of them could be seen as reflecting and contributingto the discourse on the truth of appearances and the search for meaning.Take, for example, this contemporary account of Leonardo’s lost cartoonof the Virgin and Child with St Anne:

[The cartoon] depicts the baby Christ of around a year old who, almost leaving his mother’s

arms, takes a lamb, and it seems as if he [wants to] clasp it. His mother, half-rising from

Saint Anne’s lap, takes the baby to get him away from the lamb (the sacrificial animal) that

signifies the Passion. Saint Anne, raising herself from her seat a little, seems as if she wishes

to restrain her daughter so she would not separate the baby from the lamb, which perhaps

signifies that the Church would not want to prevent the passion of Christ.66

This passage, written by the general of the Carmelite order in Florence, FraPietro Novellara, to Isabella d’Este, is concerned with a cartoon that wasdisplayed at the church of SS. Annunziata in 1501 and which, according to

60. Niccoli, Prophecy and People, pp. 23–5.

61. Castligione, The Book of the Courtier, trans.George Bull (Penguin: London, 1967), p. 127.

62. Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 28, pp. 57–8.

63. The bibliography considering the meaningof both texts is immense. See Peter Burke, TheFortunes of the Coutier: The European Reception ofCastiglione’s Cortegiano (Polity: Cambridge,1995) for different understandings ofCastiglione; and for the ambiguity of this workbeing in tune with a wider culture; RobertHanning and David Rosand (eds), Castiglione:The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture (YaleUniversity Press: New Haven and London,1983), p. viii; for the deliberate difficulties ofinterpreting The Prince: Peter Donaldson,Machiavelli and Mystery of State (CambridgeUniversity Press: Cambridge and New York,1988).

64. This concept is ubiquitous throughoutSavonarola’s sermons. The examples given are from1495 and 1496, published respectively in RobertoPalmarocchi (ed.), Prediche Italiane ai Fiorentini (Lanuova Italia: Perugia, 1933) Vol. 3, part 1, p. 414and Vol. 3, part 2, p. 98. I discuss Savonarola inrelationship to late fifteenth-century Florentinevisual culture in Changing Patrons: Social Identity andthe Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (PennsylvaniaState University Press: University Park, PA.,2004), pp. 155–87. For Savonarola’s continuinginfluence, see Lorenzo Polizzotto, The Elect Nation:The Savonarolan Movement in Florence, 1494–1545(Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1994).

65. For further bibliography about some of themost iconographically challenging works of theseartists, see: Salvatore Settis, Giorgione’s Tempest:Interpreting the Hidden Subject (Universityof ChicagoPress: Chicago, 1990); Tiziano: amor sacro e amorprofano (Electa: Milan, 1995); W. Wallace (ed.),Michelangelo: Selected Scholarship in English, 5 Vols.(Garland: Hamden, CT, 1995).

66. First published in Luca Beltrami (ed.),Documenti e memorie riguardanti la vita e le opere diLeonardo da Vinci: in ordine cronologico (FratelliTreves: Milan, 1919), pp. 65–6: finge uno Christobambino de eta cerca uno anno che uscendo quaside bracci ad la mamma, piglia uno agnello et pareche lo stringa. La mamma quasi levandose degrembo ad S.ta Anna, piglia el bambino perspiccarlo da lo agnellino (animale immolatile) chesignifica la Passione. Santa Anna alquanto levandoseda sedere, pare che voglia ritenere la figliola chenon spicca el bambino da lo agnellino, che forsi volefigurare la Chiesa che non vorrebbe fussi impedita lapassione di Christo.



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Vasari, attracted great crowds of onlookers.67 Novellara’s descriptioncombines the qualities of a quest for visual meaning combined with aninterpretative uncertainty. It is informative to compare his comments withan extant work of a similar subject. Leonardo’s Louvre Virgin and Child withSt Anne and A Lamb (Fig. 1), painted around 1509, contains many of thequalities of uncertainty conveyed in Novellara’s description. Here St Anne,her head forming the apex of the composition, rests her left hand upon herhip as she looks beatifically down beyond the back of her daughter’s head.Sitting on Anne’s lap, Mary reaches out to the Christ child who is balancedbetween her legs. His gestures, particularly of his right arm and left knee,are a deliberate visual echo of hers, as he reaches out to grasp the lamb’sears and athletically puts his left leg behind its head. Mother and child gazeat each other despite the difficulties of their postures. Indeed, the centralgroup seem on the verge of collapse. The seeming geometric strength ofthe figural triangle is undercut by the Virgin’s physical instability as shereaches out to her son in an ambiguous gesture – she may be holding himback, or steadying him. Christ’s intentions towards the lamb are equallyhard to gauge – he grasps it, almost as if he wants to ride on its back, acompositional device suggesting the playful character of an infant, severelyundercut by the dour symbolism of sacrifice. Even the landscape setting ispuzzling: the fantastic hazy mountain peaks of the background are oddlyjuxtaposed with the fastidiously depicted realism of the tree that frames thecomposition on the right-hand side.One of the things that makes the painting so compelling, and that probably

also applied to the lost cartoon, is Leonardo’s use of frozen gestural action –in Martin Kemp’s words these works suggest ‘past actions and immanentintentions’.68 The viewer is implicitly requested mentally to complete thevisual narrative, and Fra Pietro responds to this by the repeated use of presentparticiples in his descriptive language: Christ is ‘almost leaving’ the Virgin’sarms, while she is ‘half-rising’ and St Anne ‘raising herself from her seat’;the intended actions of the figures are explicitly guessed at – Christ ‘seems asif’ he will clasp the lamb, while St Anne ‘seems as if’ she wants to restrainthe Virgin. With the exception of the lamb, such a familiar sign of thesacrifice of the passion for a Christian audience, Novellara’s description of themeaning of this composition is similarly tentative and unresolved.Many commentators have discussed how many of Leonardo’s works,

including the Louvre St Anne, have a disquieting quality, which not onlymakes them difficult to interpret, but also suggests that they contain buriedhints to their meaning.69 I will not attempt to engage with these argumentshere, but suggest, as Leo Steinberg has of Leonardo’s Last Supper, that oneof the reasons for the number of these interpretative forays is becauseambiguity is a central feature of this work.70 The unsteady positioning ofthe figures suggests a narrative outside the image where the physicalrelationships will be resolved, yet they are frozen in an ambiguous pose. Asviewers we are asked to go beyond the external appearance of the paintingto try to find a persuasive meaning, an inner truth, but our attempts arealways foiled because we can never know if we are correct.I am not simply attempting to assert in a generalised way that signification

depends on context, or that people could understand very different thingsfrom the same visual stimulus, depending on the visual vocabulary andinterpretative frameworks they bring to the situation.71 Rather, thismarked interest in uncertainty was grounded in historical circumstances.Italy, during the period of the French wars of the early sixteenth century,

67. Vasari, Le Vite, Vol. 4, pp. 29–30. Fordiscussions of the historical context of thedisplay of this cartoon, see Frederick Hartt,‘Leonardo and the Second Florentine Republic’,Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, Vol. 45, 1986,pp. 95–116; Robert Maniura, ‘Voting withtheir Feet: Art, Pilgrimage and Ratings in theRenaissance’, in Gabriele Neher and RupertShepherd (eds), Revaluing Renaissance Art(Ashgate: Aldershot, 2000), pp. 187–200.

68. Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 227.

69. For a broad discussion of this in connectionwith historical narratives, see Michael AnneHolly, ‘Writing Leonardo Backwards’, in herPast Looking: Historical Imagination and theRhetoric of the Image (Cornell University Press:Ithaca and London,1996), pp. 112–48. Themost renowned interpretation of the LouvreSt Anne is by Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinciand a Memory of His Childhood, ed. JamesStrachey, trans. A. Tyson (Norton: New York,1910), and its well known art historical repostby Meyer Schapiro: ‘Leonardo and Freud: AnArt-Historical Study’, Journal of the History ofIdeas, Vol. 17, 1956, pp. 147–78. For morerecent additions to the meaning debate: AvigdorPoseq, ‘The case of the two-headed figure andthe elusive lamb’, Achademia Leonardi Vinci,Vol. 7, 1994, pp. 81–95; J. Maidani Gerard,‘Alter ego, 1501: l’agneau et ledevidoir’in Achademia Leonardi Vinci, Vol. 6,1993, pp. 79–89.

70. Leo Steinberg, Leonardo’s Incessant LastSupper (Zone Books: New York, 2001).

71. This, of course, is not a historically boundobservation. For a discussion of howconsiderations of meaning in literary theoryhave been employed by art historians, seeNorman Bryson, ‘Semiology and VisualInterpretation’ and S. Melville, ‘Reflections onBryson’, in Norman Bryson, Michael AnneHolly and Keith Moxey (eds), Visual Theory:Painting and Interpretation (Polity: Cambridge,1991), pp. 61–78.

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Fig. 1. Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child with St Anne, c. 1510, oil on wood, Musee du Louvre, Paris (Photo: # Photo SCALA, Florence, Louvre 1990).

This figure has been intentionally left blank.Oxford University Press apologizes for

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provided an unusually fertile soil for mutual misunderstanding, and we canunderstand the cultural production of this period better by taking this intoaccount. The introduction of previously unfamiliar classicising modes ofvisual and verbal expression, in style as well as subject matter, had beengaining ground for a century. From 1494 onwards, this combined with theinterpretative chaos of war: the coming together of different nationalities,sudden and frequent changes in government, and social unrest due toeconomic hardship. Instability in meaning therefore became both an urgentpolitical issue and a cultural preoccupation.

The Crisis of the High Renaissance

Stressing instability, disharmony, and crisis as key terms for the culturalproduction of the early sixteenth century goes against the dominanthistoriographic interpretation of the visual arts of this period, often calledthe High Renaissance. Essentially formulated in Heinrich Wolfflin’sconception of ‘Classic Art’, in his book of the same name of 1899, formuch of the twentieth century, the visual production of the early 1500shas been represented as a culmination of the ideal of ‘equilibrium,harmony, gravity, and restraint’ associated with classical art, in contrastwith the ‘distortions’ of mannerism that occurred after Raphael’s death in1520.72 This periodisation leads to a fault line in the historiography of theperiod that sees religious, social and cultural crisis related to the‘tortuous’ style of the visual arts from the 1520s onwards, whereasthe stylistic developments that occurred around 1500 appear independentof a broader cultural context. Rather, High Renaissance art is still oftenpresented as the inevitable culmination, the high point, of the renaissancecultural movement, that in its perfection of classicising forms bears littleor no relation to the chaotic political situation of the Italian peninsula.73

Thus Giovanni Previtali observed that the first two decades of thesixteenth century saw ‘the greatest divergence between political andcultural events that had so far occurred in the history of Italy’.74

Over the last decade, some art historians have started to object to thischaracterisation of the High Renaissance, largely on stylistic grounds. It hasbeen argued that this monolithic term does little to help us appreciate thesheer visual diversity of early sixteenth-century art. Scholars have arguedthat even paintings and buildings that have traditionally been interpreted asthe apex of High Renaissance style do not necessarily possess the stylisticattributes laid down by Wolfflin and his followers.75 A recent conferenceon the period saw paper after paper emphasise the eclecticism of visualsource material employed, the close relationship between the work ofRaphael and his ‘mannerist’ followers and novelty and experimentation inartistic practice.76

If scholars have reached a relative consensus that the early sixteenth-century visual arts were not the culmination of an idealised classicism,there is less agreement about how we should characterise the art of thisperiod – or, indeed, if it is valid to retain this periodisation at all.Elizabeth Cropper, in 1995, argued for the importance of Petrarchanconceptions of unattainable beauty and thwarted desire in understandingart in the first half of the Cinquecento. She argues that the turn of thecentury saw ‘the expression of desire for the impossible object – thesearch to fill absence with a presence that was not only consoling orexemplary but pleasurable to contemplate – became both the means and

72. See Heinrich Wolfflin, Die klassische Kunst:Eine Einfuhrung in die italienische Renaissance(F. Bruckmann: Munich, 1899), translated byLinda and Peter Murray as Classic Art: AnIntroduction to the Italian Renaissance (Phaidon:London, 1953), and also highly influential,Sydney J. Freedberg, Painting of the HighRenaissance in Rome and Florence (HarvardUniversity Press: Cambridge, MA, 1961). Myquotations are taken from Marcia Hall’s recentanalysis of Wolfflin’s and Freedberg’s ideasabout High Renaissance style. See her AfterRaphael: Painting in Central Italy in the SixteenthCentury (Cambridge University Press:Cambridge and New York, 1999), p. 7, termsthat Hall nuances, but essentially agrees with.

73. For a recent characterisation of the periodfor a non-specialist audience, see ManfredWundram’s entry in the Grove Dictionary ofArt Online: ‘It is generally accepted that artistsof the High Renaissance developed moremonumental forms and created unified andharmonious compositions’. Manfred Wundram,‘Renaissance #4: High Renaissance’, The GroveDictionary of Art Online, (Oxford UniversityPress, Accessed 28 July 2004: http://www.groveart.com).

74. Giovanni Previtali, ‘The Periodization ofthe History of Italian Art’, in Peter Burke (ed.)History of Italian Art (Cambridge: Polity Press,1994) Vol. 2, pp. 53–4, the translation of anarticle that appeared first in Italian in 1978.

75. Janis Bell, ‘Revisioning Raphael as a‘Scientific Painter’’ in Claire Farago (ed.),Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europeand Latin America 1450–1650 (Yale UniversityPress: New Haven and London, 1995), pp. 91–112; Hellmut Wohl, The Aesthetics of ItalianRenaissance Art (Cambridge University Press:Cambridge and London, 1999); David Franklin,Painting in Renaissance Florence 1500–1550 (YaleUniversity Press: London and New Haven,2001).

76. This conference, ‘Revisioning HighRenaissance Rome’, took place in the Universityof Edinburgh, 4–5 April, 2005. Selected papersand commissioned essays are to be published in aforthcoming book, Rethinking the HighRenaissance, that I am editing.

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end of painting, as it was for poetry’. Thus the role of the subjective beholderbecame paramount, as opposed to Quattrocento art and rhetoric thattypically privileged ‘public oratory and persuasion to virtue . . . aboveindividual style or emotion’.77

My suggestion that much of the imagery of the first decades of thesixteenth century should be read as semiotically unstable and bound up inbroader crises accords with Cropper’s emphasis on the newly importantrole of the subjective observer in this era, the ‘impossible object’ in thiscase being fixity of meaning. The Italian elite’s favouring of the Petrarchanmode that stresses the individual relationship between image and viewercould perhaps be understood as a symptom of wider unrest, where, as Ihave discussed, the flexible relationship between object and meaning wasoften forcefully demonstrated. If we are to argue for a distinctive qualityin the visual arts of the early sixteenth century – a rearticulation of the‘High Renaissance’ – considering the experience of the beholder providesus with a promising starting point. This is not least because it offers ameans through which to build a bridge between artistic and social changewithout recourse to the idea that the artist acts as a passive vessel forbroader historical forces.Thus, Piero Parenti’s account of the shape-shifting lion provides us with a

prism through which we can examine a key aspect of the visual culture ofthis era: a preoccupation with the volatility of meaning and the elusivenessof truth. The lion itself could be seen as a playful disquisition on thepossibilities of hidden significances and the deception of surfaceappearance. An automaton, it seems to act without any outside control,yet it is not a living creature made by God, but a machine made by man.The naturalistic reproduction of this wild animal in motion is juxtaposedwith its explicitly unnaturalistic, heraldic behaviour. When the onlookerfirst sees the beast, it seems to threaten him or her, by rising to its feet,or walking nearer, yet it stops short before damage is done, and reveals itsguts: the allure of possible truths within.For Parenti, along with several of his contemporaries, writing history in

itself was a way of wresting back some narrative coherence in a world ofrapid change and felt discontinuity.78 Some time in the second half of1509, Parenti hastily scribbled his note about Leonardo’s lion on the backof a receipt, and stuck it along with the rest of his papers. It remains anelusive text: the lion has a hazy relationship with contemporary accountsof the Milanese entry, and an uncertain association with all the other lionsthat appeared before and after. The difficulty of making a coherent story ofLeonardo’s lion from the partial and sometimes contradictory traces thatremain to us, is a salutary reminder that discontinuities, rupture andmisunderstanding are to be expected in periods of war and social upheaval,times when the gaps between political rhetoric, allegorical symbol and feltreality can be very large indeed.

The research for this article, part of a larger project concerned with imagery and crisisin early sixteenth-century central Italy, was mainly carried out whilst a postdoctoralresearch fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies inFlorence (Villa I Tatti), and completed during a research fellowship for the CourtCulture in Early Modern Rome project, funded by the Arts and HumanitiesResearch Council. I would like to express my gratitude to both institutions, as wellas to Michael Bury, David Rosenthal, Patricia Rubin, and Tom Tolley for theirinvaluable comments and suggestions on the draft.

77. Elizabeth Cropper, ‘The Place of Beauty inthe High Renaissance and its Displacement inthe History of Art’, in Alvin Vos (ed.), Place andDisplacement in the Renaissance (Medieval andRenaissance Texts and Studies: Binghamton,New York, 1995), pp. 159–205, quotationfrom p. 192.

78. For a discussion of the writing of history asan attempt to understand political change duringthe period of the Italian wars, Gilbert,Machiavelli and Guicciardini.



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