The sinister side of Leonardo da Vinci's genius leads him to the
execution of the most prodigious caricatures ever invented; that is to
say, before the malevolent and diabolical and macabre and malignant
creations in this genre of Goya. In his _Caprichos_ one sees the man's
immense arrogance, his destructive and constructive genius, his
rebellion--perhaps even more so than Leonardo's--against old tradition;
which he hated and violated. Dramatic, revolutionary, visionary in his
somber Spanish fashion, it seems to me that this--one of the supreme
forms of his art--is, in the same sense as Villon's _Grand Testament_,
his Last Testament: for in both poet and painter the nervous
magnificence seen equally in the verse and in the painting is created,
almost literally, out of their life-blood.
Only, in Leonardo, visions shape themselves into strange
perversities--not the pensive perversities of Perugino--and assume
aspects of evasive horrors, of the utmost ugliness, and are transformed
into aspects of beauty and of cruelty, as the artist wanders in the hot
streets of Florence to catch glimpses of strange hair and strange faces,
as he and they follow the sun's shadow. He seizes on them, furiously,
curiously, then he refines upon them, molding them to the fashion of his
own moods; but always with that unerring sense of beauty which he
possesses supremely--beauty, often enough, in its remoteness from actual
reality. With passion he tortures them into passionate shapes; with
cruelty he makes them grimace; abnormally sensitive (as Rodin often
enough was) he is pitiless on the people he comes in contact with,
setting ironical flames that circle round them as in Dante's Inferno,
where the two most famous lovers of all time, Francesca and Paolo,
endure the painted images of the fires of hell, eternally unconsumed.
When he seeks absolute beauty there are times when it is beyond the
world that he finds it; when he seeks ignominy, it is a breath blowing
from an invisible darkness which brings it to his nerves. In evoking
singular landscapes, he invents the _bizarre._ When he is concerned with
the tragic passions of difficult souls, he drags them suddenly out of
some obscure covering, and seems, in some of his extravagances, to set
them naked before us.
As it is Pater who says that inextricably mingled with those qualities
there is an element of mockery, "so that, whether in sorrow or scorn, he
caricatures Dante even," I am reminded of certain of Botticelli's
designs for Dante's _inferno_, in which I find the element of
caricature; as, for instance, when the second head grows on Dante's
shoulders, looking backward; as, in the face of Beatrice, which is
changed into a tragic mask, because in the poem she refrains from
smiling, lest the radiance of the seventh heaven, drawn into her eyes,
shall shrivel Dante into ashes.
Nearest to Leonardo in the sinister quality of his genius is El Greco. I
have never forgotten his _Dream of Philip II_, in the Escurial, where
there is a painted hell that suggests the fierce material hells of
Hieronymus von Bosch: a huge fanged mouth wide open, the damned seen
writhing in that red cavern, a lake of flame awaiting those beyond,
where the king, dressed in black, kneels at the side. It is almost a
vision of madness, and as if this tormented brain of the fanatic, who
built these prison walls about himself, and shut himself living into a
tomb-like cell, and dead into a more tomb-like crypt, had wrought itself
into the painter's brain; who would have found something not uncongenial
to himself in this mountainous place of dust and gray granite, in which
every line is rigid, every color ashen, in a kind of stony immobility
more terrible than any other of the images of death.
I am tempted to bring in here, by way of comparison with these two
artists, Jacques Callot, a painter of extraordinary genius, born at
Nancy, in Lorraine, in 1592; who, in many of his works, created over
again ancient dragons and devils: created them with the fury of an
invention that never rested. In his engraving of the hanged men there is
that strangeness in beauty which takes away much of the horror of the
actual thing; and in his monstrous and malignant _Fantasie_, where two
inhuman creatures--in all the splendor of caricature--grind I know not
what poison, in a wide-mouthed jar, plumed and demoniacal.
_La Tentation de Saint Antoine_, done in 1635, is stupendous. High in
the sky is the enormous figure of a reptile-faced Satan, who vomits out
of his mouth legions of evil spirits; he is winged with ferocious wings
that extend on both sides hugely; one of his clawed hands is chained,
the right hurls out lightning. There is Chaos in this composition; it is
imaginative in the highest degree of that satanical quality that
produces monstrosities. There are clawed creatures that swim in the air,
unicorns with stealthy glances. And, with his wonderful sense of design,
the saint is seen outside his cave, assailed by legions of naked women,
winged and wanton, shameless and shameful. And what is the aim, what is
the desire of these evil creatures? To seduce Saint Antony of the
Temptations.
Another picture painted on the same subject is that of Gruneweld in the
Cologne Museum, which represents a tortured creature who has floated
sheer off the earth in his agony, his face drawn inward, as it were,
with hideous pains; near him a crew of red and green devils, crab-like,
dragon-like, who squirm and gnaw and bark and claw at him, in an obscene
whirl and fierce orgy of onslaught. Below, a strange bar of sunset and
at the side a row of dripping trees; behind, a black sky almost
crackling with color. In some of the other monstrous pictures I saw
suggestions of Beardsley; as in the child who kisses the Virgin with
thrust-out lips; in those of Meister van S. Severin, in which I found a
conception of nature as unnatural and as rigid as that of the Japanese,
but turned hideous with hard German reality, as in the terrifying dolls
who are meant to be gracious in the Italian manner. And in this room I
was obliged to sit in the midst of a great heat, where blood drips from
all the walls, where tormented figures writhe among bright-colored
tormentors; where there is a riot of rich cloths, gold and jewels, of
unnatural beasts, of castles and meadows, in which there is nothing
exquisite; only an unending cruelty in things. The very colors cry out
at one; they grimace at you; a crucified thief bends back over the top
of the cross in his struggles; all around monsters spawn out of every
rock and cavern and there is hell fire.
To turn from these to the Cranachs in Vienna is to be in another world
of art: an art more purposely perverse, more curiously unnatural; but,
where his genius is shown at its greatest, is in an exquisite Judith
holding the head of Holofernes, which lies, open-eyed, all its red
arteries visible, painted delicately. She wears orange and red clothes,
with collars and laces, and slashed sleeves through which many rings are
seen on her fingers; she has a large red hat placed jauntily on her
head. She is all peach-blossom and soft, half-cruel sweetness with all
the wicked indifference of her long narrow eyes, the pink mouth and
dimpled chin. She is a somnambulist, and the sword she holds is scarcely
stained. There are two drops of blood on the table on which she rests
the great curled head with its open eyes; her fingers rest on the
forehead almost caressingly. She is _Monna Lisa_, become German and
bourgeoise, having certainly forgotten the mysterious secret of which
she still keeps the sign on her face.
Writing in Florence on Leonardo da Vinci I used by way of comparison two
Greek marbles I had seen in London; one, the head of an old man, which
is all energy and truth--comparable only in Greek work, with the drunken
woman in Munich, and, in modern art, with _La Vieille Heaulmière_ of
Rodin; the other, a woman's head, which ravishes the mind. The lips and
eyes have no expression by which one can remember them; but some
infinitely mysterious expression seems to flow through them as through
the eyes and lips of a woman's head by Leonardo. And all this reminds me
of certain unforgettable impressions; and, most of all, when in Bologna
I saw, in the Museo Civico, the spoils of Etruscan sepulchres, that
weighed on me heavily; and, at the same time, I felt an odor of death,
such as I had not even felt in Pompeii; where in so frightful a step
backward of twenty centuries, the mind reels, clutching at that somewhat
pacifying thought, for at least its momentary relief. Here were the
bodies of men and women, molded for ever in the gesture of their last
moment, and these rigid corpses are as vivid in their interrupted life
as the damp corpses in the morgue. In Bologna, as I was pursued by the
sight of the hairpins of dead women, there flashed on me this wonderful
sentence of Leonardo: "Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the
withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she
had twice been carried away."
But, as I walked back at night in those desolate streets--so essentially
desolate after the warmth of Naples--on my way back to the hotel where
Byron lived, before his evil genius hurried him to an early death, I
remembered these two sentences in his letters; one, when in Florence, he
returns from a picture-gallery "drunk with beauty"; one, where, as he
sees the painted face of a learned lady, he cries: "This is the kind of
face to go mad for, because it can not walk out of its frame." There, it
seems to me, that Byron, whose instinct was uncertain, has, by instinct,
in this sentence, anticipated a great saying of Whistler's. It was one
of his aims in portrait painting to establish a reasonable balance
between the man as he sits in the chair and the image of the man
reflected back to you from the canvas. "The one aim," he wrote, "of the
unsuspecting painter is to make his man 'stand out' from the
frame--never doubting that, on the contrary, he should, and in truth
absolutely does, stand within the frame--and at a distance behind it
equal to the distance at which the painter has seen it. The frame is,
indeed, the window through which the painter looks at his model, and
nothing could be more offensively inartistic than this brutal attempt to
thrust the model on the hither-side of this window!" He never proposed,
in a picture, to give you something which you could mistake for reality:
but frankly, a picture, a thing which was emphatically not nature,
because it was art; whereas, in Degas, the beauty is a part of truth, a
beauty which our eyes are too jaded to distinguish in the things about
us.
In the Ambrosiane in Milan, beside two wonderful portraits, once
attributed to Leonardo, and coming near to being worthy of him, are his
grotesque drawings that are astonishing in their science, truth and
naked beauty. Each is a quite possible, but horrible and abnormal,
exaggeration of one or another part of the face, which becomes bestial
and indeed almost incredible, without ceasing to be human. It is this
terrible seriousness that renders them so dreadful: old age, vice and
disease made visible.
In another room there are many of his miraculously beautiful
drawings--the loveliest drawings in the world. Note, for instance, the
delicious full face drawing of a child with an enchanting pout. The
women's faces are miracles. After these all drawings, and their method,
seem obvious. The perfect love and understanding with which he follows
the outline of a lovely cheek, or of a bestial snout; there is equal
beauty, because there is equal reverence, in each. After this the
Raphael cartoon (for the Vatican _School of Athens_) seems merely
skilful, a piece of consummate draughtsmanship; supremely adequate but
entirely without miracle.
In one of Leonardo's drawings in Florence there is a small Madonna and
Child that peeps sidewise in half reassured terror, as a huge griffin
with bat-like wings--stupendous in invention--descends suddenly from the
air to snatch up a lion wandering near them. This might perhaps have
been one of his many designs for the famous _Medusa--Aspecta Medusa_--in
the Uffizi; for to quote Pater's interpretation of this corpse-like
creation, "the fascination of corruption penetrates in every line its
exquisitely finished beauty. About the dainty lines of the cheek the bat
flies unheeded. The delicate snakes seem literally to strangle each
other in terrified struggle to escape the Medusa brain. The hue which
violent death brings with it is in the features." It is enough to
compare any grotesque or evil head in the finest of Beardsley's drawings
with Leonardo's head of Judas in the Windsor Library, or with one of
those malevolent and malignant heads full of the energy of the beasts he
represents and of insane fury which he scatters over the pages of his
sketchbook, to realize that, in Beardsley, the thing drawn must remain
ugly through all the beauty of the drawing and must hurt.
It hurts because he desires to hurt every one except himself, knowing,
all the time, that he was more hated than loved. Sin is to him a
diabolical beauty, not always divided against itself. Always in his work
is sin--Sin conscious of sin, of an inability to escape from itself;
transfigured often into ugliness and then transfigured from ugliness
back to beauty. Having no convictions, he can when he chooses make
patterns that assume the form of moral judgments.