I
What counts, certainly, for much of what is so extraordinary in the
genius of Leonardo da Vinci--who died exactly five hundred years ago--is
the fact that the noble blood he inherited (the so-called dishonor that
hangs over his birth being in his case a singular honor) is curiously
like the stain of some strange color in one of his paintings; he being
the least of all men to whom there could be anything poisonous in the
exotic flowers of evil that germinated in Milan; where, as in Venice and
in Rome, moved a changeful people who, in the very midst of their
exquisite and cruel amusements, committed the most impossibly delicious
sins, and without the slightest stings of conscience. Savonarola, from
whom, in the last years of his life, Botticelli caught the contagion of
the monk's fanaticism, was then endeavoring to strip off one lovely veil
after another from the beauty of mortal things, rending them angrily;
for which, finally, he received the baptism of fire. Rodrigo Borgia--a
Spaniard born in Xàtiva--then Pope Alexander VI, was fortunate enough
to possess in his son, Cesare, a man of sinister genius--cruel,
passionate, ardent--who had the wonderful luck of persuading Leonardo to
wander with him in their wild journey over Central Italy in 1502, as his
chief engineer, and as inspector of strongholds. Not even the living
pages of Machiavelli can give us more than a glimpse of what those
conversations between two such flame-like creatures must have been; yet,
we are aware of Cesare being condemned by an evil fate, as evil as
Nero's, to be slain at the age of thirty-one, and of Leonardo, guided by
his good genius, living to the age of sixty-seven.
The science of the Renaissance was divided, as it were, by a thousand
refractions of things seen and unseen; so that when Leonardo, poring
over his crucibles, desires no alchemist's achievement, but the
achievement of the impossible, his vision is concentrated into infinite
experiences, known solely to himself; exactly as when, in his retirement
in the villa of the Melzi, his imagination is stirred feverishly as he
writes detached notes, as he dashes off rapid drawings; and always not
for other men's pleasure, but simply for his own; careless, as I think
few men of genius have ever been, of anything but the moment's work, the
instant's inspiration. And, what is also certain is that Da Vinci like
Shakespeare created, ambiguously for all the rest of the world, flesh
that is flesh and not flesh, bodies that are bodies and not bodies, by
something inexplicable in their genius; something nervous, magnetic,
overwhelming; and, to such an extent, that if one chooses to call to
mind the greatest men of genius who have existed, this painter and this
dramatist must take their places beside Aeschylus and beside Balzac.
Of Leonardo da Vinci, Pater has said: "Curiosity and the desire of
beauty--these are the two elementary forces in his genius; curiosity
often in conflict with the desire of beauty, but generating in union
with it, a type of subtle and curious grace." Certainly the desire of
perfection is, in Da Vinci, organic; so much so that there remains in
him always the desire, as well as the aim, of attaining nothing less
than finality, which he achieves more finally than any of the other
Italian painters; and, mixed with all these, is that mystery which is
only one part of his magic.
Is all this mystery and beauty, then, only style, and acquired style?
Fortunate time, when style had become of such subtlety that it affects
us, to-day, as if it were actually a part of the soul! But was there
not, in Leonardo, a special quality, which goes some way to account for
this? Does it not happen to us, as we look at one of his mysterious
faces, to seem to distinguish, in the eyes reluctant to let out their
secret, some glimpse, not of the soul of _Monna Lisa_, nor of the Virgin
of the Rocks, but of our own retreating, elusive, not yet recognized
soul? Just so, I fancy, Leonardo may have revealed their own souls to
Luini and to Solario, and in such a way that for those men it was no
longer possible to see themselves without something of a new atmosphere
about them, the atmosphere of those which Leonardo had drawn to him out
of the wisdom of secret and eternal things. With men like Leonardo style
is, really, the soul, and their influence on others the influence of
those who have discovered a little more of the unknown, adding, as it
were, new faculties to the human soul.
Raphael, I have said elsewhere, could "correct" Michelangelo, could make
Michelangelo jealous; Raphael, who said of him that he "treats the Pope
as the King of France himself would not dare to treat him," that he goes
along the streets of Rome "like an executioner;" Raphael who for the
remaining years of his life paces the same streets with that grim
artist; of Raphael, may it not be asked: who in the Vatican has not
turned away from the stanza a little weary, as one turns aside out of
streets or rooms thronged with men and women, happy, vigorous, and
strangers: and has not gone back to the Sistine Chapel, and looked at
the ceiling on which Michelangelo has painted a world that is not this
world, men and women as magnificent as our dreams, and has not replunged
into that abyss with a great sense of relief, with a supreme
satisfaction?
Is this feeling of a kind of revulsion, before so many of his pictures,
really justifiable? Is it, I ask myself, reasonable to complain, as I
was obliged to complain in Rome, that his women have no strangeness in
their beauty: that they do not brood over mysteries, like _Monna Lisa?_
Might it not be equally reasonable to complain of the calm, unthinking
faces of Greek statues, in which the very disturbance of thought--not of
emotion--is blotted out, as it might be among beings too divine for any
meaner energy than that of mere existence, "ideal spectators" of all
that moves and is restless?