_Leonardo da Vinci_ (Florentine: 1452-1519).
There is no more fascinating and illustrious name in the annals
of art than Leonardo, of Vinci, a town in the Val d'Arno below
Florence. He has been well called, from the many-sidedness of
his efforts, the Faust of the Renaissance. The great public
which knows him best by his few pictures and many drawings does
not always remember that he was also musician, critic, poet,
sculptor, architect, mechanist, mathematician, philosopher,
and explorer. In a letter addressed to Ludovico il Moro,
Prince of Milan, in whose service he lived for sixteen years
(1483-1499), he enumerates as his chief qualification his
skill in military engineering, and throws in his art as an
incidental accomplishment. "I will also undertake any work in
sculpture, in marble, in bronze, or in terra-cotta; likewise
in painting I can do what may be done as well as any man, be
he who he may." The range and amount alike of his theoretical
discoveries and practical ingenuities were extraordinary. He
divined the circulation of the blood. He anticipated Copernicus
in propounding the theory of the earth's movement. He declared
that "motion was the cause of all life." He forestalled
Lamarck's classification of vertebrate and invertebrate. He
takes his place, in virtue of his researches into rocks and
fossils, with the masters of modern science who have proclaimed
the continuity of geological causes. He was the first inventor
of screw propulsion. He made paddle-wheels. He attacked the
problem of aerial navigation. He invented swimming belts. He
anticipated by many years the invention of the camera obscura.
He was great alike as a civil and a military engineer. He
watered the Lombard plain by the invention of sluices; he
was one of the first to recommend the use of mines for the
destruction of forts, and he anticipated the inventions of
our time in suggesting breech-loading guns and mitrailleuses.
He shrank neither from the highest speculations nor from the
humblest contrivances. For centuries after his death the
burghers of Milan minced meat for their sausages with machines
invented by the painter of "Monna Lisa."
This marvellous curiosity in science and invention could
not but profoundly influence Leonardo's work as an artist.
One result is as obvious as it was unfortunate. He paid the
penalty of versatility in undertaking more than he could
fulfil. His dilatoriness is well known. He went once to Rome,
but the Pope, Leo X., offended him by exclaiming, "Ah! this
man will never do anything; he thinks of the end before the
beginning of his work" (He had made elaborate preparations
for varnishing his picture before he began it.) Many of his
works were thus unfinished, and others, owing to premature
experiments in material, are ruined--especially his famous Last
Supper at Milan, of which there is an original drawing at the
Royal Academy. "Leonardo's oil painting," says Ruskin,--not,
however, without a touch of exaggeration--"is all gone black
or to nothing." "Because Leonardo made models of machines,
dug canals, built fortifications, and dissipated half his
art-power in capricious ingenuities, we have many anecdotes
of him;--but no picture of importance on canvas, and only a
few withered stains of one upon a wall" (_Queen of the Air_, §
157). But Leonardo's curiosity, his wide outlook, his sense of
the immensities, added something to his art which otherwise it
might not have contained, and which is intensely characteristic
of it. Who, for instance, has ever penetrated the secret of
Leonardo's smile?--of the ineffable, mysterious, plaintive,
and haunting smile that has fascinated and perplexed the world
century after century in the portrait of La Gioconda? That
unfathomable smile, with so much of mystery and with something
of weirdness in it, was the reflection of Leonardo's mind,
which had explored the depths and heights, and ever came back
from the pursuit with the sense of the inscrutable Mystery
beyond. "What is that," he asks, "which does not give itself to
human comprehension, and which, if it did, would not exist? It
is the infinite, which, if it could so give itself, would be
done and ended." In the "Last Supper," says M. Müntz, "he had
realised his ideal." Leonardo himself would not have said so.
His was one of those lofty minds before which an unattainable
ideal ever hovers. "It is of a truth impossible," said a friend
of the master to him, "to conceive of faces more lovely and
gentle than those of St. James the Great and St. James the
Less. Accept thy misfortune, therefore, and leave thy Christ
imperfect as He is, for otherwise, when compared with the
Apostles, He would not be their Saviour and Master." Leonardo
took the advice, and never finished the head of Christ. But he
fixed the outward type of Christ for succeeding generations.
Apart from the credit due to Leonardo as an ennobler of style
in art, he stands out further in the history of painting as the
first who investigated the laws of light and shade. There are
"three methods of art, producing respectively linear designs,
effects of light, and effects of colour. In preparing to draw
any object, you will find that practically you have to ask
yourself, Shall I aim at the colour of it, the light of it,
or the lines of it? The best art comes so near nature as in a
measure to unite all. But the best art is not, and cannot be,
as good as nature; and the mode of its deficiency is that it
must lose some of the colour, some of the light, or some of
the delineation. And in consequence, there is one great school
which says, 'We will have delineation, and as much colour and
shade as are consistent with it.' Another, which says, 'We
will have shade, and as much colour and delineation as are
consistent with it.' The third, 'We will have the colour, and
as much light and delineation as are consistent with it.' The
second class, the Chiaroscurists, are essentially draughtsmen
with chalk, charcoal, or single tints. Many of them paint, but
always with some effort and pain. Leonardo is the type of them"
(compressed from _Ariadne Florentina_, §§ 18-21).
To his artistic genius and intellectual alertness, Leonardo
added great personal beauty ("the radiance of his countenance,
which was splendidly beautiful, brought cheerfulness," says
Vasari, "to the heart of the most melancholy") and great
physical strength. He could bend a door-knocker, we are told,
or a horse-shoe as if it were lead. He was left-handed and
wrote from right to left. Besides his physical strength,
Vasari mentions his kindness and gentleness, and tells us
how he would frequently buy caged birds from the dealers, in
order to give them back their liberty. Scandalous accusations
were at one time brought against him, but researches made
in the archives during the last few years have effectually
disposed of the charge. One curious trait in the character
of Leonardo remains to be noticed. In his art he created a
feminine type of extraordinary and haunting beauty. "And yet,"
says his latest biographer, "Leonardo, like Donatello, was
one of those exceptionally great artists in whose life the
love of woman seems to have played no part.... The delights
of the mind sufficed him. He himself proclaimed it in plain
terms. _Cosa bella mortal passa e non arte._' Fair humanity
passes, but art endures.'" This extraordinary man was the son
of a peasant-mother, Caterina, and was born out of wedlock,
his father being a Florentine notary; and amongst Leonardo's
manuscripts is a record of a visit to Caterina in the hospital,
who soon after his father's death had married in her own
station, and of expenses paid for her funeral. His life has
three divisions--thirty years at Florence, nearly twenty years
at Milan, then nineteen years of wandering, till he sinks to
rest under the protection of the King of France. (1) Leonardo
was the pupil of Verrocchio (see 296), "a master well chosen,
for in his earnest and discursive mind were many points of
contact with that of his illustrious pupil." Leonardo seems
to have retained his connection with Verrocchio until 1477,
but the records of his Florentine period are very scanty. His
earliest undoubted work is the unfinished "Adoration" in the
Uffizi. To this period also belongs the head of the "Medusa" in
that collection, celebrated in Shelley's verses--a work, says
Mr. Pater, in which "the fascination of corruption penetrates
in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty." (2) In 1483
Leonardo removed to Milan to take service with Ludovico Sforza.
He served his patron in those multifarious ways for which
his talents fitted him,--as musician and improvisatore, as
director of court pageants, as sculptor, painter, and civil
and military engineer. To this Milanese period belong two of
the master's most celebrated productions--the present picture
and the "Last Supper," executed in oil colours on an end wall
of the refectory in the Dominican Convent of S. Maria della
Grazia. At Milan, Leonardo founded the famous Vincian Academy
of Arts over which he presided, which attracted so many pupils,
and which may be said to have established a new Milanese
School. For his Academy he made the elaborate notes for a
Treatise on Painting which were posthumously published.(3) In
1500, consequent upon the flight of the Duke before the French
army, Leonardo left Milan and returned to Florence. His stay,
however, was not long, for he took service for a time with
Cæsar Borgia as architect and military engineer. He was again
in Florence in 1503, and was commissioned with Michelangelo to
paint the Hall of Council in the Palace of the Signory. His
subject was the Battle of Anghiari. The painting was begun
but never completed. The cartoon, now lost, remained and
excited the greatest admiration, "The man who had presented
the solemn moment of the Last Supper with a dignity and pathos
never equalled, who could portray feminine loveliness with
a sweetness and grace peculiar to his pencil, was no less
successful in bringing before the eye the turmoil of battle and
the fierce passions inspired by the struggle for victory." One
great work of his of this period (1504) happily survives--the
famous portrait of Monna Lisa, known as La Gioconda, in the
Louvre. For the next ten years (1506-1516), Leonardo alternated
between Milan, Florence, and Rome. Other works of this period
are the "St. Anne" and "St. John," also in the Louvre. In 1516
he accompanied the French King, Francis I., to France, who
lodged him and his faithful friend Melzi in the Château de
Cloux, near Amboise. Three years later he died, having made
his will (the text of which has recently been discovered) a
week before the end--"considering the certainty of death and
the uncertainty of the hour, of its approach." He was buried,
by his own instructions, in the church of St. Florentin at
Amboise. Of Leonardo as a young man, no authentic portraits
exist. In the Royal Collection at Windsor and at Turin there
are portraits of himself in red chalk; and on the Sacro Monte
at Varallo, one of Gaudenzio Ferrari's sculptured figures
is a portrait of the great master. Leonardo's drawings are
very beautiful and numerous--the Windsor Collection being the
richest; they show us with what infinite searching the master
drew near to his ideals. The picture before us makes upon the
spectator the impression of rapid and spontaneous creation;
but the drawings for it show that it was in fact one of the
most laborious of Leonardo's works (see on this subject Müntz's
_Leonardo da Vinci_, i. 162 in the English translation. This
is the best life of the master. The most penetrative study of
Leonardo remains Mr. Pater's, in his _Renaissance_).
This beautiful picture is very characteristic of Leonardo in its
effects of light and shade, in grace and refinement of delineation, in
felicity of gesture, and in the curious beauty of the types. Leonardo
makes out of his subject a charming idyll, into which the spectator
may read his own meanings. "In St. John the Baptist," says Lomazzo,
writing in 1584, "we may see the motive of obedience and child like
veneration, as he kneels with joined hands and bends towards Christ; in
the Virgin, the feeling of happy meditation as she beholds this act;
in the angel, the idea of angelic gladness, as he ponders the joy that
shall come to the world from this mystery; and in the Infant Christ we
behold divinity and wisdom. And therefore the Virgin kneels, holding
St. John with her right hand and extending her left, and the angel
likewise supports Christ, who, seated, regards St. John and blesses
him." A modern poet, adding to the picture a beautiful thought of
his own, has suggested that in the valley of the shadow of death the
Virgin brings the soul of a dead child for her son's blessing (see an
interesting discussion of "The Louvre Sonnets of Rossetti," by W. M.
Hardinge, in _Temple Bar_, March 1891):--
Mother, is this the darkness of the end,
The Shadow of Death? and is that outer sea
Infinite imminent Eternity?[212]
And does the death-pang by man's seed sustain'd
In Time's each instant cause thy face to bend
Its silent prayer upon the Son, while He
Blesses the dead with His hand silently
To His long day which hours no more offend?
Mother of grace, the pass is difficult,
Keen as these rocks, and the bewildered souls
Throng it like echoes, blindly shuddering through.
Thy name, O Lord, each spirit's voice extols,
Whose peace abides in the dark avenue
Amid the bitterness of things occult.