Andrew GRAHAM DIXON RENAISSANCE Ep 3 of 6 Journey of the Magus

The great Renaissance palaces might seem irrelevant to the contemporary world, but if you examine what really went on in these opulent surroundings, I don't think it's too far-fetched to say that this was where the modern artist first emerged. And whether you think of him as a bohemian starving in his garret, or as a near-psychotic cutting off his ear, such archetypes, and the very idea of creative genius itself, first came into existence in the Renaissance court. It was the Medici who played midwife at the birth of creative genius. They were fabulously rich bankers with their own coat of arms, made up of pills which symbolised the medical connotations of their name. But what the word Medici really conjures up is great artistic patronage. In Florence in the mid-15th century, the family paid for the construction of a whole building, the Dominican Monastery of San Marco, and employed the painter Fra Angelico, himself a Dominican monk, to work his way around the cloisters and the interior. These frescoes are realistic, but the aim isn't to depict the real world, rather it's to create a contemplative state of mind. There'd never been a commission on this scale before, or one that followed such a single-minded artistic purpose. This made it a visionary commission, the one which other patrons would seek to imitate throughout the Renaissance. San Marco was an ideal Medici commission, because it allowed the family to show off its status, but quietly, and all for the greater glory of God. Ethically, the Florentine Republic remained wedded to Christian virtue, and the austerity of the Roman Republic, not the pomp and display of the Roman Empire. This was an expression of magnificence with which no one could take issue, severe, minimalist even. The Medici put their money at the service of piety, but it was understood on both sides that the transaction should not corrupt the monastic ideal in any way. To underline the point, in this fresco of the Virgin, there's an ever-present reminder of the Dominicans' vow of poverty. The text which Saint Dominic himself opens up to the world as a warning says, Have charity. Preserve humility. Possess voluntary poverty. I invoke God's curse and mine on the introduction of possessions into this order. The force of the curse sends a shiver down the spine, but it's also testimony to the power of the new money, as if it might career out of control, and take on a fearsome life of its own, swamping faith itself. In San Marco, Cosimo, the head of the Medici, had his own chapel with a wall painting by Bonazzo Gozzoli, Fra Angelico's pupil. The atmosphere is still monastic, but warmed up with the luxury of more space and a bigger image, on a theme which would preoccupy rich patrons throughout the 15th century. Not Christ's crucifixion, but his adoration by the Magi, learned men traveling from the east with gifts. This space is just as devotional as any of the monks' cells, although the meaning of the frescoes in here wasn't purely religious. The adoration of the Magi, the three kings who brought gifts to baby Jesus, was an appropriate theme to set before a Medici, whose family had invented international banking. The painter Bonazzo Gozzoli was paying tribute to his patron's wealth and wisdom, although the style of the paintings remained simple and direct. As if in keeping with the austerity of the monastic ideal. But when the artist was commissioned to paint the same subject for the Medici's private palace, the result was a very different kind of chapel, in which it feels as though devotion has been transferred from Christ to the pageant of wealth. Although as an architectural space the Medici's private palace clearly didn't need to conform to monastic discipline, caution was still the watchword. In fact, it was built by the same architect who'd been responsible for San Marco, Bartolomeo Michelozzo. And although everything here is on a grander scale, with more lavish detail, the whole did have to appear restrained. You could show your wealth, but not show off. This chapel is a spiritual place, a room for contemplation, but the images on view are barely religious. It's as if the worship which was the strict preserve of the deity was being shifted onto the secular, from god to mammon. From now on, people would invest secular images with all the aura of the religious. Godzilla's fresco makes a cult out of the Medici to the extent that their portrayal is indistinguishable from that of the Magi. Magi and Medici melt into one, as they did when the confraternity of the Magi gathered. This powerful cabal of Florentines would dress up as the wise men, and with their entourage, they'd process to San Marco, a stone's throw away from the Medici palace. The procession reenacted the journey of the Magi towards Bethlehem and Jesus. The religious intention would have excused, but not hidden the fact that in this piece of theatre, the Medici were playing with other meanings, cloaking themselves in metaphors of wealth, power, travel, wisdom and magic. All traditional attributes of the Magi but also very much the aspirations of the Medici. There's a man in the picture who didn't need to be so covert in parading his ambition, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. He'd observed the Medici at close quarters, but when he returned to his fiefdom of Rimini, he didn't have the Florentine distrust of ostentation to contend with, or have to pay lip service to Roman republican virtue. He could do what he pleased, behaving more like a Roman fallen into the decadence of late empire. Sigismondo Malatesta tortured people for his own personal pleasure. He was a thief, a pederast and a murderer. He held orgies and indulged in all kinds of vomitous excess. At least that's what Pope Pius II said about him, before having him burned in effigy and condemned to hell. For his part, Sigismondo just carried on lording it over Rimini. He'd already had the church of San Francesco turned into a huge monument to himself, stamping it with his personal insignia. S.I. is short for Sigismondo, and you're not allowed to forget it. It's everywhere. According to a more fanciful reading of the abbreviation, the S.I. stands for Sigismondo and his otter, his third wife. Testimony not to the prince's megalomania, but to a folly d'amour. The elephants are here to ram home the point that while this is God's church, he'll always have to share it with Sigismondo. These animals identified Sigismondo with Scipio Africanus, the Roman general who gave Hannibal a taste of his own medicine. The Carthaginians' elephants had trampled across Italy and threatened Rome. But Scipio's army, equipped with its own elephants, raised Carthage to the ground. The elephant was a fitting emblem because Sigismondo was a military man, a mercenary or condottieri. His campaigns paid for eight richly decorated chapels. Although this type of personalised display wouldn't have been acceptable in Florence, much of the carving in the church was in fact carried out by a Florentine sculptor, Agostino di Duccio, who'd been expelled from his native city for theft. The height of the chapels and the white marble gives the church an airy, spacious feel. It's classicism of incredible lightness, more suited to the recreational than to the ecclesiastical. The exterior of San Francesco harks back to antiquity in a more solid, straightforward way. It's the work of the architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti. He encased the original building within a framework of Roman arches, as if putting classical clothes on a Gothic body. This cladding was partly inspired by the Arch of Augustus, still standing in the centre of Rimini. Its form and detail echoed on the outside of the church. The builders would also have been aware of the arched structure of the main bridge in town, which is still used to this day. A great dome was planned for the church, and there's an inkling of what it might have looked like on a medal struck at the time. But Sigismondo, for all his emulation of Scipio, lost too many battles, and the money ran out before the final flourish, which would have made the church every inch the classical temple. With plans like that, it's no surprise that inside, classical and pagan motifs outnumber traditional Christian themes. The chapel of the planets is covered in zodiacal and astrological symbols. Pride of place going to cancer, Sigismondo's birth sign. All the more appropriate for the ruler of a town by the sea. At first glance, this chapel, with its sunburst, suggests the worship of the sun god Sol, not the one true god. But I think later historians have overplayed its pagan dimension. And there was a long and venerable tradition of looking into the myths and religions of the past for parallels with Christianity. What was new was the way in which a whole range of classical references had become part of the church's decorative scheme. A learned Renaissance patron like Sigismondo could engage with all the pagan references while remaining a believer. But the mass of Christians, who were illiterate, would have felt excluded by these bold syntheses. It's all the more ironic that this was originally a Franciscan church, where images would have been used to get the Christian message as simply as possible to the poor and the outcast. Pope Pius II's eternal damnation of Sigismondo shouldn't be taken at face value. They were political enemies and the pope had an axe to grind. On his knees in prayer before his namesake, Saint Sigismondo, Malatesta doesn't exactly come across as the devil incarnate. The fresco is by Piero della Francesca and in spite of fading, it shows off his studied, highly symmetrical way of placing figures in space. The more adventurous artists of the time were increasingly aware of the market for their talents, such as the ability to depict the natural fall of light or to paint in precise, mathematically calculated perspective. Such techniques were highly sought after in the Renaissance courts and that in turn enabled an artist such as Piero della Francesca to operate much more freely than he could within the traditional structure of the painter's guilds. As artists travelled from one place to another, a new role was emerging for them. They weren't just practitioners of manual skills, but bearers of knowledge. It wasn't just artists who travelled from one court to another. There was also a traffic of movers and shakers, men of ideas who'd form intellectual collaborations with artists and influence what kind of work courts might want to commission. Typical was the Dominican monk, Luca Pacioli, who broadcast ideas about perspective in his book called Concerning Divine Proportions, a large proportion of which, in fact, came from a book by Piero della Francesca. The painter and the monk were from the same town, Sansepolcro. Piero became particularly associated with a court inland from Rimini, which dwarfed the ambitions of the Princeton-by-the-Sea, Urbino. This was the court as a high and mighty concept. It was an attempt to realise a visionary blueprint, putting into practice many of the current ideas about architectural space, which had been prompted by looking back to Roman classical antiquity. But Urbino doesn't feel backward-looking. There's something almost futuristic about this attempt to realise an intellectual ideal, a dream. The ducal court has the quality of a plan or a painting that's been brought to life. The space in The Ideal City, a painting from the 1470s, is highly charged. There's a sense of the uncanny, as if the place itself has taken on a personality, the human presence in the emptiness. I think it's to do with the way the proportions relate harmoniously to the human form. What the painting hints at in theory, the palace embodies in practice. These are spaces which are really only complete when people inhabit them. Luciano Laurana was one of the architects of the palace. He'd worked with Michelozzo, who was responsible for San Marco and the Medici Palace in Florence. Here the scale is bigger, and the attention to detail, which is really attention to not having the clutter of detail, is more marked. Less is more. This simplicity is epitomised by the bold Latin inscription in praise of the man behind the Urbino dream, Federico da Montefeltro, whose power was symbolised by the eagle. There was no political pressure on him to do so, but Federico chose a style in tune with Florentine austerity. This is magnificence clothed in sobriety and restraint. It's there on a minute scale in the Chapel of Forgiveness, where Federico used to pray. Not much bigger than a telephone box, the human form fits hand in glove. Piero della Francesca came to Urbino to work for a prince who was richer than Sigismondo Malatesta, who was a better soldier. He beat him in a decisive battle, and who was also much uglier, having lost the top of his nose and his right eye in a jousting accident. Federico da Montefeltro was always painted in profile. It disguised his disfigurement, but he would have insisted on it anyway, because that's how the Roman emperors have always been portrayed. This portrayal of Federico is by Piero della Francesca. Like the anonymous painter of the ideal city, Piero was fascinated by architectural space. It's a preoccupation that runs throughout his work. Piero's flagellation is surrounded by an air of mystery. No one knows the exact location for which it was intended. But despite its ugly protective case, the painting sits well in the palace. As if it belongs here. It's been interpreted as an allegory about the perils of the church in the east, threatened by the Muslim advance. There again, it's been seen as a set of references to a menace closer to home, the plague. And other meanings may have been plotted into the geometry of this tiled space, given Piero's interest in numerology, perspective, and the play of light. It's a picture of two halves held in perfect symmetry. The three standing figures have been given pride of place spatially. But the sheer momentousness of the event behind them, the scourging of the son of God, means your attention is constantly divided. The middle of the three foreground figures is himself divided. As if he's thinking about what's going on behind his back. Perhaps he's Barabbas, who in the gospels faced execution. But the Jews forced Pilate's hand and the political seditionary was released and Jesus crucified instead. The interpretations are endless. And the more there are of them, the greater the enigma of this picture. Federigo de Montefeltro probably ordered a few scourgings and worse. As the most ruthless condottieri of his time, he was richly rewarded in money and honors. He even received the Order of the Garter from King Edward IV of England. Often the mere fact of his being hired was enough to cow the enemy. Such was the fear of what he might do were he really to go into action. Whatever brutal profile Federigo showed the world, he was above all a man who aspired to the intellectual heroics of the gallery of wise men who ring his study or studiolo. From Aristotle to St. Augustine, from Homer to Thomas Aquinas. He amassed one of the great European libraries, a fact that's proudly displayed in the inlaid wooden panels or intarsia that decorate the study. Federigo led from the front on the battlefield, but he also believed in the advancement of learning. So you could say that he was part of an intellectual advance guard, an avant-garde even. Knowledge was a weapon as indispensable to him as his sword. And this was the room where he could draw on all the information he'd stockpiled on every subject under the sun. There's nothing fockish or dilettante about the studiolo. It's not a library tower. It's an intellectual arsenal. There's no more graphic image of the double-barrelled nature of this arsenal, knowledge plus professional aggression, than this grenade exploding above a keyboard. I think Federigo was the most idealistic of the Renaissance hard men. It's as if, as well as wanting to divide up and rule the world, he wanted to understand and improve it. He came under the sway of Neoplatonic thinking, which taught that life should be a series of ever-advancing stages, each marked by a greater knowledge and refinement of the soul. Steps taken here on earth to heaven, to the city of God and of light. At the top of his palace, Federigo could count himself lord of all that he surveyed. He could also imagine that he'd mastered his world intellectually, as well as territorially, as if he descended to some higher, ideal level of existence. But in the long run, it wouldn't be the rulers of Renaissance Italy who would soar to the very highest peaks, but the people whom they employed, artists. Painting had traditionally been work for artisans, a craft. But by the middle of the 15th century, its status was changing dramatically. It could be placed on the same pedestal as history, music and mathematics, if it was driven by big enough ideas. Imbued with a higher form of consciousness, painting could be more than just manual labor. It could become a godlike activity. Like many of his contemporaries, Andrea Mantegna found his driving ideas in the world of antiquity. He wasn't just a student of the classics, well-versed in ancient poetry, philosophy and history, but someone who was fascinated by its physical remnants. Sailing on Lake Garda with his friends one day in 1464, within sight of Catullus's grotto and dressed as a Roman, he declaimed passages of Latin. Mantegna's commission to paint this room wasn't a dry academic exercise. He was after the thrill of discovery, like finding something exciting on an archaeological dig and bringing it home. The court of Mantua, between Bologna and Milan, was where Mantegna got the chance to show that he wasn't just a talented workman carrying out orders, but his own man, with a degree of creative freedom. The ducal palace was presided over by the Gonzaga dynasty, and it was the wedding of Ludovico Gonzaga to Barbara of Brandenburg, which led to Mantegna's commission to paint this room, the Camera degli Sposi. Palace walls were often covered with tapestries, which were more highly prized than paintings, because they cost more time and money to produce. Mantegna's fresco creates the illusion of a tapestry being pulled back to reveal a scene. It's as if he's putting one over on the weavers, showing the superiority of his realism to anything they could produce, and saying, this is art, not craft. With the trompe l'oeil effects, the swarming cherubs, and the formality of the court scenes depicted, the room comes across like a chamber dedicated to artifice, where etiquette and social ritual have reached their apotheosis. But Mantegna's portrayal of surfaces doesn't make him superficial. His realism, the portrait-like concentration on the face, as if to gain access to the soul, gives these scenes psychological depth. Mantegna seems to probe beneath the surface in other ways. The social parade of protocol is overtaken by the cloak and dagger of political intrigue. There's a cloud over some of these faces, an insecurity, or a sense of foreboding. Who will be next to get it in the back of the neck? Mantegna does more than reveal the sinister intrigues behind the courtly frippery. His gaze goes beyond the aristocratic sphere, glimpsing the world of work and some uncomfort. There's no advance, no civilization without labor. Where there's wealth, there's been violence, repression. Look closely, and a speck just beyond the crossroads, between city walls and classical columns, proves to be a gibbet. Society is founded upon crime, and a social order clothes and hides its dark deeds and dirty secrets in opulence. Unlike artists who traveled from one court to another, Mantegna was retained in Mantua by the Gonzaga's, with a contract to work in one place and for one patron. But he was no mere servant. His work was so valued, he could dictate his own terms. He even reinvented himself as a sort of prince, which in the currency of the 15th century, meant acquiring the trappings of a Caesar. To the victor, the laurels. Mantegna's house in Mantua was like a small palace, courtyard and all. He was the first artist to build a house as a demonstration of his status. He was even allowed to adopt a Gonzaga emblem, the star, as his own. But that didn't stop him from devising his own coat of arms too. The church of Sant'Andrea in the center of Mantua is partly by Alberti. And inside, Mantegna was given his own grand burial chapel, complete with his bust and a tomb sunk into the floor. His legacy is a troubling one. Nowhere more so than in the triumphs of Caesar, where archaeological accuracy has been pursued to the point where the picture feels more like a reincarnation than a reconstruction. You're confronted by a gleeful parade of the spoils of war. The empire is what it is thanks to merciless savagery and exploitation. Yet like Caesar, one of the trophy bearers is strangely pensive. Are they in a moral dilemma, thinking twice about their actions? Or just dreaming of their next conquest? Mantegna would have been aware of the moral question here. Christianity and Roman republican virtue, they could be married. But Christianity and imperialism? 350 years later, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche became obsessed by the same dilemma and concluded that the eagle of empire cannot lie down with the lamb of God. It would simply and unquestioningly kill it. Much closer to Mantegna's own time, less than 30 years after he painted the triumphs, Machiavelli, in his book on political power, The Prince, was to measure the gulf between Christianity and pagan Rome. For Machiavelli, there could be no bridge across that gulf. The Renaissance prince could still remain a believer, but only in church. Everywhere else, he must do as the Romans did. Go, see, conquer, and return in triumph. It's as if Mantegna prophetically depicted Machiavelli's dirty political realism, creating a world where flesh and blood are as unrelenting as stone. It's a disconcerting achievement, visually magnificent, but morally terrifying. As the poet William Blake wrote, the greatest poison ever known came from Caesar's laurel crown. The 1490s in Mantua, when Mantegna completed the triumphs, was the heyday of Isabella d'Este, the wife of Francesco Gonzaga II, and an extremely dynamic patron in her own right. Built in the 1500s, her grotto is a later version of Federico's Studiolo in Urbino. Though there's a greater sense of seclusion. It's not at the centre of the palace, but hidden away. Paintings like Mantegna's Palace Expelling the Vices used to cover the walls, and there was a collection of artefacts from antiquity. Maybe it was here that she leafed through Pacioli's Book of Games, which the scholar monk dedicated to her. In the kinds of pictures she commissioned, and in the artists she chose, I think Isabella was the true forerunner of the modern art collector. But I don't think you can understand her and what she represented without reference to her upbringing in the place which moulded her, Ferrara. In the 15th century, Ferrara was a university town, a centre of learning, known for its strong links with the Arab world, and its philosophy, science and mathematics. Many of these influences are brought together in Francesca del Cossa's 1470s frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia. The study of the zodiac and its symbolism was very much an Arab phenomenon, reinforcing the Western notion which grew up around the cult of the Magi, that knowledge of the stars, the heavens, comes from the east. The lower band shows more realistic scenes from contemporary life, each depicting an activity associated with the month of the year, which is why this part of the palace is called the Room of the Months. At the top, a strain of mythology has been given free reign, even though real-life characters also pop up, including Leon Battista Alberti. He's there in imperious profile, holding a book, perhaps, appropriately, the one in which he recommended mythological themes as a subject for painting. You can never be fully confident about the real extent of Alberti's architectural hand, but the bell tower in Ferrara is said to be his work, as well as the tiny classical arch with its equestrian statue. Leon Battista Alberti left his architectural mark on just about every Italian Renaissance city. In fact, he was so prolific, it's hardly surprising many of his buildings never actually got completed. But that doesn't take anything away from his true importance as an intellectual missionary. He persuaded princes and patrons to build in the classical style and on a grand scale. He proselytised on behalf of the leading artists of his time, and in one of his books, he single-handedly raised the status of painting from mere craft to art with a capital A. Architect, agent, critic, theorist, there's no single modern job description that will quite do justice to Alberti. He was more than the sum of his parts, so I think of him as the first genuine Renaissance man. The name of the Palazzo Schiapanoia literally means escape from every nuisance, but it was only an escape for the courtiers and select visitors who would have been allowed in. This was ostentation verging on narcissism, a depiction of pleasure done so that the court could admire the image of itself at play. The frescoes marked the emergence of a purely secular genre of painting, the courtly fantasia, commissioned for private consumption and enjoyment, laden with meanings and intellectual innuendo, the significance of which would be obscured to all but the happy, rich few. Mythological painting was taken to a new level of refinement by Francesco del Cossa's Florentine contemporary, Sandro Botticelli. Painted in the late 1470s, the Primavera was a wedding picture for the Medici. The artist has drawn promiscuously on a mass of classical sources, but you don't have to be a Neoplatonic scholar to spot Botticelli's preoccupation with the female body. Its delicate eroticism is often placed in close proximity to the male sexual principle. All that huffing and puffing, the man determined to have his wicked way. This motif is there even more overtly in The Birth of Venus, another marriage picture for the Medici. Crossing it and drawing attention to its central theme of a sexual rite of passage is a jet of breath from the west wind, Zephyr. Following its trail, we see that it's directed straight towards Venus' maidservant, between her legs, where it has agitated her clothing. The Holy Ghost, the third person of the Holy Trinity, is, in his earthly manifestation, breath or wind. The Annunciation, when Mary conceived of the Holy Ghost, was just such a visitation of the Holy Spirit. And I think you're made very aware of such scriptural parallels by the virginal pose, recalling the virgin, Mary, the mother of God. She's defensive, protecting her sex. Yet all is revealed in other ways, because the hair she gathers around her virginity is moulded into a vulva-like shape, the clear imprint of all that is hidden. Yet more explicitly, part of the cape about to be thrown over her has been shaped like a vagina and is penetrated by a leaf blown by Zephyr. The Birth of Venus has the profundity of a religious painting, because even though its subject, sexual initiation, is human, not divine, it's been invested with a sense of religious mystery. Symbolic power is also drawn from the setting by the seashore, source of life and image of eternity. This was the period when the floodgates were thrown open for a far more secular art. Botticelli's work came out of a tradition, one anticipated not just in the Schifferneuer, but also present in Agostino di Duccio's work for Sigismondo Malatesta. A lot of the new secular painting wasn't anchored to a particular setting, like, for example, an altarpiece. This was the moment when the portable art object really came into its own. Just as artists circulated between courts, so there was a traffic in works of art. They were exchangeable, like commodities. The modern art market was only just over the horizon. Isabella, one of its first speculators. While Isabella d'Esti was hungry for all kinds of knowledge, she was insatiable for art, appetitosa in her own words. But whereas noble women had traditionally commissioned religious works, Isabella wanted pictures on themes of her own choosing and by the best artists of the day. She didn't just create one of the very first art collections. She also personified a vital shift in attitudes towards art itself. Isabella embodied a new kind of aesthetic sensibility, which could take pleasure in. Even become obsessed by art for its own sake. Without the obligation to illustrate specific passages from the Bible, the boundaries of the strange and the grotesque could be explored, as Mantegna did for Isabella in work like Palace Expelling the Vices. But this was just the beginnings of something much bigger. And you don't need to go far in Mantua to find it. Just around the corner, in fact, to a slightly later Gonzaga Pleasure Palace, the Palazzo del Te. Artists and their patrons were seeking out the novel and the perverse. Art could be what you wanted it to be. A foretaste of the modern attitude, which has set huge store by novelty and radical change for its own sake. Put your ear to the ground and you can already hear the trample of art movements and the clamor of manifestos. It didn't take long for the courtly fantasia to become overripe. Too fantastical for its own good. And during this process, it's almost as if Renaissance artists had developed a more inflated view of themselves. They'd realized that they could be giants too. And a new kind of mystique had grown up around them. Patrons had already begun to make allowances for exceptionally gifted artists, like the famously difficult Mantegna. The idea of the genius, brilliant but capricious, had come to be. The man who most fully embodied this new archetype wasn't in fact a painter prince like Mantegna, but Leonardo da Vinci. Genius is spirit, energy, willful and turbulent, like the genie or jinn who escapes from the bottle, a creature from the Orient. Genius is also from the Latin generare, the same root as generate, to give birth to. Many of these ideas come together in Leonardo da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi. It's not just the atmosphere of this unfinished painting which is turbulent and elemental. The figures are too. These are disturbed magi, traumatized rather than entranced by the nativity. Perhaps they're reliving their own birth pains, the pains of generation, of creation itself. We've seen literal depictions of the magi, and magi who were more like Medici. But these could almost be self-portraits, versions of Leonardo himself, of the artist as genius, magus, ruler from a learned kingdom. Certainly, Leonardo said the painter was another god, a man who held the secrets of the universe. We're uncertain whether the leading king is laying down his crown before Jesus, or scrabbling to pick it up, a hubristic claim on the throne. An over-reacher like Faust, prepared to do a deal with the devil. We think about Leonardo's life and work in such epic, even tragic terms. But the actual career is oddly unremarkable, with even a touch of farce, because he was a bit of a failure in terms of the court system. When Leonardo came to Milan, it was the stronghold of the Sforza. But he never became an intimate of the dynasty, and was only ever asked to paint one room in their palace. The Sala delle Asi. Even then, he was the second choice artist. And Leonardo wasn't given much scope to show what he could do anyway. Just asked to paint intertwined leaves and branches ad nauseam. This is more craft than art. And it's as if Leonardo's true genius could only flourish underground. Painting the roots of all this growth, he's created what amounts to an x-ray, a botanical study. The artist wants to record and engage with the physical world, but see through it as well. Find out the rules which govern it. He's the magus again. An initiate into nature's mysteries. Milan was the biggest and wealthiest of the courts. Even richer in opportunity than Urbino or Mantua. But more competitive too, because the Sforza didn't believe in retaining court artists. They could pick and choose from the talent clamouring for their attention. So it was very much a case of every painter for himself. Leonardo proposed plenty of grandiose schemes for the Sforza, including one for a huge equestrian statue, never commissioned. It's as if in a city the size of Milan, swelled by growing numbers of textile workers and abuzz with the escalation in commerce and the banking system, Leonardo wasn't just up against court patronage on a bigger scale, but a new kind of market altogether. An open market, with all its attendant risk and uncertainty. In fact, the very size and impersonality of the Sforza court had hurried along this process, dissolving the system of court patronage from within and freeing artists to roam the marketplace. You might think Leonardo would have manipulated the system rather better, given that he had Luca Pacioli as a friend if he'd wanted help in negotiating the bewilderment of Milan. Pacioli was both a court operator and a bit of a financial wizard, the father of modern accountancy in that he codified double entry bookkeeping, debit and credit. And what are those double columns? In the red and in the black, other than monetary perspective, a way of rationalizing the potential chaos of the market, just as visual perspective is an ordering of space. Leonardo's only big commission in Milan wasn't for the Sforza Palace, but for the Dominican church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. It was the last supper in the refectory. Within the cave-like perspective of the painted room, the artist has presented us with a moment, or several moments, laid out as if they were one, as all the disciples react simultaneously to Jesus's statement that one of them will betray him. Its faded condition is the result of an experiment gone wrong in combining oil paints with Presco to achieve greater light and shade. Despite its parlous state, you can still decipher Leonardo's intentions. The disciples' actions are frozen, as in some 19th century photographic experiment in time and motion by Edward Muybridge. Every one of the emotions has been made part of a single current of feeling. What's been rendered in space is time. These lives will change profoundly after this split second. Leonardo wasn't only a great painter of the human moment, but of nature's moods, too. He didn't just use mathematically calculated perspective, with its single vanishing point drawing the eye through space to the back of the picture. In his work, distance comes at us in layers, swathes of atmospherics. So according to their distance from the viewer, we see grey, black, or blue-rendered hills. Leonardo brings atmosphere, the spaces between, truly to life. Despite the statuesque quality of the figures in his paintings, there's the sense that they, too, are as changeable as the weather and the ever-shifting world that surrounds them. Atmospherics, anatomy, geology. Leonardo is the artist who wants to see and understand everything. His paintings, even the religious ones, are about knowledge, understanding the physical universe, not just the scriptures. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Perhaps there's a price to pay for knowledge. Forbidden fruit of the tree in the Garden of Eden. The church and the guilds had offered a shared symbolic order. This sense of orthodoxy and of the communal was being challenged by the new learning. But not everybody could take part in this brave new world of secular knowledge. The audience for what an artist produced could now be fragmentary, drawn from a particular and usually wealthy section of society. And while the courts and the marketplace offered the artist greater worldly rewards, it was an audience which the artist had to win. He had to earn his keep as well as his individuality. But what if he didn't? Fame and fortune, farmer and fortuner could turn fickle. Buffeted by the vagaries of the market, he might be prey to occasio, chance. As Picasso said, what the artist gains in liberty, he loses in the way of order. Uneasy lies the head that wears the maker's crown.