In Vasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci as we now read it there are some
variations from the first edition. There, the painter who has fixed the
outward type of Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator,
holding lightly by other men's beliefs, setting philosophy above
Christianity. Words of his, trenchant enough to justify this impression,
are not recorded, and would have been out of keeping with a genius of
which one characteristic is the tendency to lose itself in a refined and
graceful mystery. The suspicion was but the time-honoured mode in which
the world stamps its appreciation of one who has thoughts for himself
alone, his high indifference, his intolerance of the common forms of
things; and in the second edition the image was changed into something
fainter and more conventional. But it is still by a certain mystery in
his work, and something enigmatical beyond the usual measure of great
men, that he fascinates, or perhaps half repels. His life is one of
sudden revolts, with intervals in which he works not at all, or apart
from the main scope of his work. By a strange fortune the works on which
his more popular fame rested disappeared early from the world, as the
Battle of the Standard; or are mixed obscurely with the work of meaner
hands, as the Last Supper. His type of beauty is so exotic that it
fascinates a larger number than it delights, and seems more than that of
any other artist to reflect ideas and views and some scheme of the world
within; so that he seemed to his contemporaries to be the possessor of
some unsanctified and sacred wisdom; as to Michelet and others to have
anticipated modern ideas. He trifles with his genius, and crowds all his
chief work into a few tormented years of later life; yet he is so
possessed by his genius that he passes unmoved through the most tragic
events, overwhelming his country and friends, like one who comes across
them by chance on some secret errand.
His legend, as the French say, with the anecdotes which every one knows,
is one of the most brilliant in Vasari. Later writers merely copied it,
until, in 1804, Carlo Amoretti applied to it a criticism which left
hardly a date fixed, and not one of those anecdotes untouched. The
various questions thus raised have since that time become, one after
another, subjects of special study, and mere antiquarianism has in this
direction little more to do. For others remain the editing of the
thirteen books of his manuscripts, and the separation by technical
criticism of what in his reputed works is really his, from what is only
half his, or the work of his pupils. But a lover of strange souls may
still analyse for himself the impression made on him by those works, and
try to reach through it a definition of the chief elements of Leonardo's
genius. The legend, corrected and enlarged by its critics, may now and
then intervene to support the results of this analysis.
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 Francis the First at the Chateau de Clou. The
dishonour of illegitimacy hangs over his birth. Piero Antonio, his
father, was of a noble Florentine house, of Vinci in the Val d'Arno, and
Leonardo, brought up delicately among the true children of that house,
was the love-child of his youth, with the keen, puissant nature such
children often have. We see him in his youth fascinating all men by his
beauty, improvising music and songs, buying the caged birds and setting
them free, as he walked the streets of Florence, fond of odd bright
dresses and spirited horses.
From his earliest years he designed many objects, and constructed models
in relief, of which Vasari mentions some of women smiling. His father,
pondering over this promise in the child, took him to the workshop of
Andrea del Verrocchio, then the most famous artist in Florence.
Beautiful objects lay about there--reliquaries, pyxes, silver images for
the pope's chapel at Rome, strange fancy-work of the middle age, keeping
odd company with fragments of antiquity, then but lately discovered.
Another student Leonardo may have seen there--a boy into whose soul the
level light and aerial illusions of Italian sunsets had passed, in after
days famous as Perugino. Verrocchio was an artist of the earlier
Florentine type, carver, painter, and worker in metals, in one;
designer, not of pictures only, but of all things for sacred or
household use, drinking-vessels, ambries, instruments of music, making
them all fair to look upon, filling the common ways of life with the
reflexion of some far-off brightness; and years of patience had refined
his hand till his work was now sought after from distant places.
It happened that Verrocchio was employed by the brethren of Vallombrosa
to paint the Baptism of Christ, and Leonardo was allowed to finish an
angel in the left hand corner. It was one of those moments in which the
progress of a great thing--here, that of the art of Italy--presses hard
and sharp on the happiness of an individual, through whose
discouragement and decrease, humanity, in more fortunate persons, comes
a step nearer to its final success.
For beneath the cheerful exterior of the mere well-paid craftsman,
chasing brooches for the copes of Santa Maria Novella, or twisting metal
screens for the tombs of the Medici, lay the ambitious desire of
expanding the destiny of Italian art by a larger knowledge and insight
into things, a purpose in art not unlike Leonardo's still unconscious
purpose; and often, in the modelling of drapery, or of a lifted arm, or
of hair cast back from the face, there came to him something of the
freer manner and richer humanity of a later age. But in this Baptism the
pupil had surpassed the master; and Verrocchio turned away as one
stunned, and as if his sweet earlier work must thereafter be distasteful
to him, from the bright animated angel of Leonardo's hand.
The angel may still be seen in Florence, a space of sunlight in the
cold, laboured old picture; but the legend is true only in sentiment,
for painting had always been the art by which Verrocchio set least
store. And as in a sense he anticipates Leonardo, so to the last
Leonardo recalls the studio of Verrocchio, in the love of beautiful
toys, such as the vessel of water for a mirror, and lovely needle-work
about the implicated hands in the Modesty and Vanity, and of reliefs
like those cameos which in the Virgin of the Balances hang all round the
girdle of Saint Michael, and of bright variegated stones, such as the
agates in the Saint Anne, and in a hieratic preciseness and grace, as of
a sanctuary swept and garnished. Amid all the cunning and intricacy of
his Lombard manner this never left him. Much of it there must have been
in that lost picture of Paradise, which he prepared as a cartoon for
tapestry, to be woven in the looms of Flanders. It was the perfection of
the older Florentine style of miniature-painting, with patient putting
of each leaf upon the trees and each flower in the grass, where the
first man and woman were standing.
And because it was the perfection of that style, it awoke in Leonardo
some seed of discontent which lay in the secret places of his nature.
For the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts; and this
picture--all that he had done so far in his life at Florence--was after
all in the old slight manner. His art, if it was to be something in the
world, must be weighted with more of the meaning of nature and purpose
of humanity. Nature was "the true mistress of higher intelligences." So
he plunged into the study of nature. And in doing this he followed the
manner of the older students; he brooded over the hidden virtues of
plants and crystals, the lines traced by the stars as they moved in the
sky, over the correspondences which exist between the different orders
of living things, through which, to eyes opened, they interpret each
other; and for years he seemed to those about him as one listening to a
voice, silent for other men.
He learned here the art of going deep, of tracking the sources of
expression to their subtlest retreats, the power of an intimate presence
in the things he handled. He did not at once or entirely desert his art;
only he was no longer the cheerful, objective painter, through whose
soul, as through clear glass, the bright figures of Florentine life,
only made a little mellower and more pensive by the transit, passed on
to the white wall. He wasted many days in curious tricks of design,
seeming to lose himself in the spinning of intricate devices of lines
and colours. He was smitten with a love of the impossible--the
perforation of mountains, changing the course of rivers, raising great
buildings, such as the church of San Giovanni, in the air; all those
feats for the performance of which natural magic professed to have the
key. Later writers, indeed, see in these efforts an anticipation of
modern mechanics; in him they were rather dreams, thrown off by the
overwrought and labouring brain. Two ideas were especially fixed in him,
as reflexes of things that had touched his brain in childhood beyond the
measure of other impressions--the smiling of women and the motion of
great waters.
And in such studies some interfusion of the extremes of beauty and
terror shaped itself, as an image that might be seen and touched, in the
mind of this gracious youth, so fixed that for the rest of his life it
never left him; and as catching glimpses of it in the strange eyes or
hair of chance people, he would follow such about the streets of
Florence till the sun went down, of whom many sketches of his remain.
Some of these are full of a curious beauty, that remote beauty
apprehended only by those who have sought it carefully; who, starting
with acknowledged types of beauty, have refined as far upon these, as
these refine upon the world of common forms. But mingled inextricably
with this there is an element of mockery also; so that, whether in
sorrow or scorn, he caricatures Dante even. Legions of grotesques sweep
under his hand; for has not nature too her grotesques--the rent rock,
the distorting light of evening on lonely roads, the unveiled structure
of man in the embryo, or the skeleton?
All these swarming fancies unite in the Medusa of the Uffizii. Vasari's
story of an earlier Medusa, painted on a wooden shield, is perhaps an
invention; and yet, properly told, has more of the air of truth about it
than any-thing else in the whole legend. For its real subject is not the
serious work of a man, but the experiment of a child. The lizards and
glow-worms and other strange small creatures which haunt an Italian
vineyard bring before one the whole picture of a child's life in a
Tuscan dwelling--half castle, half farm--and are as true to nature as
the pretended astonishment of the father for whom the boy has prepared a
surprise. It was not in play that he painted that other Medusa, the one
great picture which he left behind him in Florence. The subject has been
treated in various ways; Leonardo alone cuts to its centre; he alone
realises it as the head of a corpse, exercising its powers through all
the circumstances of death. What may be called the fascination of
corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty.
About the dainty lines of the cheek the bat flits unheeded. The delicate
snakes seem literally strangling each other in terrified struggle to
escape from the Medusa brain. The hue which violent death always brings
with it is in the features: features singularly massive and grand, as we
catch them inverted, in a dexterous foreshortening, sloping upwards,
almost sliding down upon us, crown foremost, like a great calm stone
against which the wave of serpents breaks. But it is a subject that may
well be left to the beautiful verses of Shelley.
The science of that age was all divination, clairvoyance, unsubjected to
our exact modern formulas, seeking in an instant of vision to
concentrate a thousand experiences. Later writers, thinking only of the
well-ordered treatise on painting which a Frenchman, Raffaelle du
Fresne, a hundred years afterwards, compiled from Leonardo's bewildered
manuscripts, written strangely, as his manner was, from right to left,
have imagined a rigid order in his inquiries. But this rigid order was
little in accordance with the restlessness of his character; and if we
think of him as the mere reasoner who subjects design to anatomy, and
composition to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have of him that
impression which those about him received from him. Poring over his
crucibles, making experiments with colour, trying, by a strange
variation of the alchemist's dream, to discover the secret, not of an
elixir to make man's natural life immortal, but rather of giving
immortality to the subtlest and most delicate effects of painting, he
seemed to them rather the sorcerer or the magician, possessed of curious
secrets and a hidden knowledge, living in a world of which he alone
possessed the key. What his philosophy seems to have been most like is
that of Paracelsus or Cardan; and much of the spirit of the older
alchemy still hangs about it, with its confidence in short cuts and odd
byways to knowledge. To him philosophy was to be something giving
strange swiftness and double sight, divining the sources of springs
beneath the earth or of expression beneath the human countenance,
clairvoyant of occult gifts in common or uncommon things, in the reed at
the brook-side, or the star which draws near to us but once in a
century. How, in this way, the clear purpose was overclouded, the fine
chaser's hand perplexed, we but dimly see; the mystery which at no point
quite lifts from Leonardo's life is deepest here. But it is certain that
at one period of his life he had almost ceased to be an artist.
The year 1483--the year of the birth of Raffaelle and the thirty-first
of Leonardo's life--is fixed as the date of his visit to Milan by the
letter in which he recommends himself to Ludovico Sforza, and offers to
tell him, for a price, strange secrets in the art of war. It was that
Sforza who murdered his young nephew by slow poison, yet was so
susceptible of religious impressions that he blended mere earthly
passions with a sort of religious sentimentalism, and who took for his
device the mulberry-tree--symbol, in its long delay and sudden yielding
of flowers and fruit together, of a wisdom which economises all forces
for an opportunity of sudden and sure effect. The fame of Leonardo had
gone before him, and he was to model a colossal statue of Francesco, the
first Duke of Milan. As for Leonardo himself, he came not as an artist
at all, or careful of the fame of one; but as a player on the harp, a
strange harp of silver of his own construction, shaped in some curious
likeness to a horse's skull. The capricious spirit of Ludovico was
susceptible also of the charm of music, and Leonardo's nature had a kind
of spell in it. Fascination is always the word descriptive of him. No
portrait of his youth remains; but all tends to make us believe that up
to this time some charm of voice and aspect, strong enough to balance
the disadvantage of his birth, had played about him. His physical
strength was great; it was said that he could bend a horse-shoe like a
coil of lead.
The Duomo, the work of artists from beyond the Alps, so fantastic to the
eye of a Florentine used to the mellow, unbroken surfaces of Giotto and
Arnolfo, was then in all its freshness; and below, in the streets of
Milan, moved a people as fantastic, changeful and dreamlike. To Leonardo
least of all men could there be anything poisonous in the exotic flowers
of sentiment which grew there. It was a life of brilliant sins and
exquisite amusements: Leonardo became a celebrated designer of pageants:
and it suited the quality of his genius, composed in almost equal parts
of curiosity and the desire of beauty, to take things as they came.
Curiosity and the desire of beauty--these are the two elementary forces
in Leonardo's genius; curiosity often in conflict with the desire of
beauty, but generating, in union with it, a type of subtle and curious
grace.
The movement of the fifteenth century was twofold; partly the
Renaissance, partly also the coming of what is called the "modern
spirit," with its realism, its appeal to experience: it comprehended a
return to antiquity, and a return to nature. Raffaelle represents the
return to antiquity, and Leonardo the return to nature. In this return
to nature, he was seeking to satisfy a boundless curiosity by her
perpetual surprises, a microscopic sense of finish by her finesse, or
delicacy of operation, that subtilitas naturae which Bacon notices. So
we find him often in intimate relations with men of science,--with Fra
Luca Poccioli the mathematician, and the anatomist Marc Antonio della
Torre. His observations and experiments fill thirteen volumes of
manuscript; and those who can judge describe him as anticipating long
before, by rapid intuition, the later ideas of science. He explained the
obscure light of the unilluminated part of the moon, knew that the sea
had once covered the mountains which contain shells, and the gathering
of the equatorial waters above the polar.
He who thus penetrated into the most secret parts of nature preferred
always the more to the less remote, what, seeming exceptional, was an
instance of law more refined, the construction about things of a
peculiar atmosphere and mixed lights. He paints flowers with such
curious felicity that different writers have attributed to him a
fondness for particular flowers, as Clement the cyclamen, and Rio the
jasmin; while, at Venice, there is a stray leaf from his portfolio
dotted all over with studies of violets and the wild rose. In him first
appears the taste for what is bizarre or recherche in landscape; hollow
places full of the green shadow of bituminous rocks, ridged reefs of
trap-rock which cut the water into quaint sheets of light--their exact
antitype is in our own western seas; all the solemn effects of moving
water; you may follow it springing from its distant source among the
rocks on the heath of the Madonna of the Balances, passing, as a little
fall, into the treacherous calm of the Madonna of the Lake, next, as a
goodly river, below the cliffs of the Madonna of the Rocks, washing the
white walls of its distant villages, stealing out in a network of
divided streams in La Gioconda to the seashore of the Saint Anne--that
delicate place, where the wind passes like the hand of some fine etcher
over the surface, and the untorn shells are lying thick upon the sand,
and the tops of the rocks, to which the waves never rise, are green with
grass, grown fine as hair. It is the landscape, not of dreams or of
fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand
with a miracle of finesse. Through Leonardo's strange veil of sight
things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light
of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or
through deep water.
And not into nature only; but he plunged also into human personality,
and became above all a painter of portraits; faces of a modelling more
skilful than has been seen before or since, embodied with a reality
which almost amounts to illusion, on dark air. To take a character as it
was, and delicately sound its stops, suited one so curious in
observation, curious in invention. So he painted the portraits of
Ludovico's mistresses, Lucretia Crivelli and Cecilia Galerani the
poetess, of Ludovico himself, and the Duchess Beatrice. The portrait of
Cecilia Galerani is lost; but that of Lucretia Crivelli has been
identified with La Belle Feroniere of the Louvre, and Ludovico's pale,
anxious face still remains in the Ambrosian library. Opposite is the
portrait of Beatrice d'Este, in whom Leonardo seems to have caught some
presentiment of early death, painting her precise and grave, full of the
refinement of the dead, in sad earth-coloured raiment, set with pale
stones.
Sometimes this curiosity came in conflict with the desire of beauty; it
tended to make him go too far below that outside of things in which art
begins and ends. This struggle between the reason and its ideas, and the
senses, the desire of beauty, is the key to Leonardo's life at
Milan--his restlessness, his endless re-touchings, his odd experiments
with colour. How much must he leave unfinished, how much recommence!
His problem was the transmutation of ideas into images. What he had
attained so far had been the mastery of that earlier Florentine style,
with its naive and limited sensuousness. Now he was to entertain in this
narrow medium those divinations of a humanity too wide for it, that
larger vision of the opening world, which is only not too much for the
great, irregular art of Shakspere; and everywhere the effort is visible
in the work of his hands. This agitation, this perpetual delay, give him
an air of weariness and ennui. To others he seems to be aiming at an
impossible effect, to do something that art, that painting, can never
do. Often the expression of physical beauty at this or that point seems
strained and marred in the effort, as in those heavy German
foreheads--too German and heavy for perfect beauty.
For there was a touch of Germany in that genius which, as Goethe said,
had "thought itself weary"--muede sich gedacht. What an anticipation of
modern Germany, for instance, in that debate on the question whether
sculpture or painting is the nobler art.* But there is this difference
between him and the German, that, with all that curious science, the
German would have thought nothing more was needed; and the name of
Goethe himself reminds one how great for the artist may be the danger of
overmuch science; how Goethe, who, in the Elective Affinities and the
first part of Faust, does transmute ideas into images, who wrought many
such transmutations, did not invariably find the spell-word, and in the
second part of Faust presents us with a mass of science which has almost
no artistic character at all. But Leonardo will never work till the
happy moment comes--that moment of bien-etre, which to imaginative men
is a moment of invention. On this moment he waits; other moments are but
a preparation, or after-taste of it. Few men distinguish between them as
jealously as he did. Hence so many flaws even in the choicest work. But
for Leonardo the distinction is absolute, and, in the moment of
bien-etre, the alchemy complete: the idea is stricken into colour and
imagery: a cloudy mysticism is refined to a subdued and graceful
mystery, and painting pleases the eye while it satisfies the soul.
*How princely, how characteristic of Leonardo, the answer, Quanto piu,
un'arte porta seco fatica di corpo, tanto piu e vile!
This curious beauty is seen above all in his drawings, and in these
chiefly in the abstract grace of the bounding lines. Let us take some of
these drawings, and pause over them awhile; and, first, one of those at
Florence--the heads of a woman and a little child, set side by side, but
each in its own separate frame. First of all, there is much pathos in
the reappearance in the fuller curves of the face of the child, of the
sharper, more chastened lines of the worn and older face, which leaves
no doubt that the heads are those of a little child and its mother. A
feeling for maternity is indeed always characteristic of Leonardo; and
this feeling is further indicated here by the half-humorous pathos of
the diminutive, rounded shoulders of the child. You may note a like
pathetic power in drawings of a young man seated in a stooping posture,
his face in his hands, as in sorrow; of a slave sitting in an uneasy
inclined posture, in some brief interval of rest; of a small Madonna and
Child, peeping sideways in half-reassured terror, as a mighty griffin
with batlike wings, one of Leonardo's finest inventions, descends
suddenly from the air to snatch up a lion wandering near them. But note
in these, as that which especially belongs to art, the contour of the
young man's hair, the poise of the slave's arm above his head, and the
curves of the head of the child, following the little skull within, thin
and fine as some seashell worn by the wind.
Take again another head, still more full of sentiment, but of a
different kind, a little drawing in red chalk which every one remembers
who has examined at all carefully the drawings by old masters at the
Louvre. It is a face of doubtful sex, set in the shadow of its own hair,
the cheek-line in high light against it, with something voluptuous and
full in the eyelids and the lips. Another drawing might pass for the
same face in childhood, with parched and feverish lips, but with much
sweetness in the loose, short-waisted childish dress, with necklace and
bulla, and in the daintily bound hair. We might take the thread of
suggestion which these two drawings offer, when thus set side by side,
and, following it through the drawings at Florence, Venice, and Milan,
construct a sort of series, illustrating better than anything else
Leonardo's type of womanly beauty. Daughters of Herodias, with their
fantastic head-dresses knotted and folded so strangely to leave the
dainty oval of the face disengaged, they are not of the Christian
family, or of Raffaelle's. They are the clairvoyants, through whom, as
through delicate instruments, one becomes aware of the subtler forces of
nature, and the modes of their action, all that is magnetic in it, all
those finer conditions wherein material things rise to that subtlety of
operation which constitutes them spiritual, where only the finer nerve
and the keener touch can follow: it is as if in certain revealing
instances we actually saw them at their work on human flesh. Nervous,
electric, faint always with some inexplicable faintness, they seem to be
subject to exceptional conditions, to feel powers at work in the common
air unfelt by others, to become, as it were, receptacles of them, and
pass them on to us in a chain of secret influences.
But among the more youthful heads there is one at Florence which Love
chooses for its own--the head of a young man, which may well be the
likeness of Andrea Salaino, beloved of Leonardo for his curled and
waving hair--belli capelli ricci e inanellati--and afterwards his
favourite pupil and servant. Of all the interests in living men and
women which may have filled his life at Milan, this attachment alone is
recorded; and in return Salaino identified himself so entirely with
Leonardo, that the picture of Saint Anne, in the Louvre, has been
attributed to him. It illustrates Leonardo's usual choice of pupils, men
of some natural charm of person or intercourse like Salaino, or men of
birth and princely habits of life like Francesco Melzi--men with just
enough genius to be capable of initiation into his secret, for the sake
of which they were ready to efface their own individuality. Among them,
retiring often to the Villa of the Melzi at Canonica al Vaprio, he
worked at his fugitive manuscripts and sketches, working for the present
hour, and for a few only, perhaps chiefly for himself. Other artists
have been as careless of present or future applause, in
self-forgetfulness, or because they set moral or political ends above
the ends of art; but in him this solitary culture of beauty seems to
have hung upon a kind of self-love, and a carelessness in the work of
art of all but art itself. Out of the secret places of a unique
temperament he brought strange blossoms and fruits hitherto unknown; and
for him, the novel impression conveyed, the exquisite effect woven,
counted as an end in itself--a perfect end.
And these pupils of his acquired his manner so thoroughly, that though
the number of Leonardo's authentic works is very small indeed, there is
a multitude of other men's pictures through which we undoubtedly see
him, and come very near to his genius. Sometimes, as in the little
picture of the Madonna of the Balances, in which, from the bosom of His
mother, Christ weighs the pebbles of the brooks against the sins of men,
we have a hand, rough enough by contrast, working upon some fine hint or
sketch of his. Sometimes, as in the subjects of the Daughter of Herodias
and the Head of John the Baptist, the lost originals have been re-echoed
and varied upon again and again by Luini and others. At other times the
original remains, but has been a mere theme or motive, a type of which
the accessories might be modified or changed; and these variations have
but brought out the more the purpose, or expression of the original. It
is so with the so-called Saint John the Baptist of the Louvre--one of
the few naked figures Leonardo painted--whose delicate brown flesh and
woman's hair no one would go out into the wilderness to seek, and whose
treacherous smile would have us understand something far beyond the
outward gesture or circumstance. But the long, reedlike cross in the
hand, which suggests Saint John the Baptist, becomes faint in a copy at
the Ambrosian Library, and disappears altogether in another, in the
Palazzo Rosso at Genoa. Returning from the last to the original, we are
no longer surprised by Saint John's strange likeness to the Bacchus
which hangs near it, which set Theophile Gautier thinking of Heine's
notion of decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves, after the fall of
paganism, took employment in the new religion. We recognise one of those
symbolical inventions in which the ostensible subject is used, not as
matter for definite pictorial realisation, but as the starting-point of
a train of sentiment as subtle and vague as a piece of music. No one
ever ruled over his subject more entirely than Leonardo, or bent it more
dexterously to purely artistic ends. And so it comes to pass that though
he handles sacred subjects continually, he is the most profane of
painters; the given person or subject, Saint John in the Desert, or the
Virgin on the knees of Saint Anne, is often merely the pretext for a
kind of work which carries one quite out of the range of its
conventional associations.
About the Last Supper, its decay and restorations, a whole literature
has risen up, Goethe's pensive sketch of its sad fortunes being far the
best. The death in childbirth of the Duchess Beatrice was followed in
Ludovico by one of those paroxysms of religious feeling which in him
were constitutional. The low, gloomy Dominican church of Saint Mary of
the Graces had been the favourite shrine of Beatrice. She had spent her
last days there, full of sinister presentiments; at last it had been
almost necessary to remove her from it by force; and now it was here
that mass was said a hundred times a day for her repose. On the damp
wall of the refectory, oozing with mineral salts, Leonardo painted the
Last Supper. A hundred anecdotes were told about it, his retouchings and
delays. They show him refusing to work except at the moment of
invention, scornful of whoever thought that art was a work of mere
industry and rule, often coming the whole length of Milan to give a
single touch. He painted it, not in fresco, where all must be impromptu,
but in oils, the new method which he had been one of the first to
welcome, because it allowed of so many afterthoughts, so refined a
working out of perfection. It turned out that on a plastered wall no
process could have been less durable. Within fifty years it had fallen
into decay. And now we have to turn back to Leonardo's own studies,
above all to one drawing of the central head at the Brera, which, in a
union of tenderness and severity in the face-lines, reminds one of the
monumental work of Mino da Fiesole, to trace it as it was.
It was another effort to lift a given subject out of the range of its
conventional associations. Strange, after all the misrepresentations of
the middle age, was the effort to see it, not as the pale Host of the
altar, but as one taking leave of his friends. Five years afterwards the
young Raffaelle, at Florence, painted it with sweet and solemn effect in
the refectory of Saint Onofrio; but still with all the mystical
unreality of the school of Perugino. Vasari pretends that the central
head was never finished; but finished or unfinished, or owing part of
its effect to a mellowing decay, this central head does but consummate
the sentiment of the whole company--ghosts through which you see the
wall, faint as the shadows of the leaves upon the wall, on autumn
afternoons; this figure is but the faintest, most spectral of them all.
It is the image of what the history it symbolises has more and more
become for the world, paler and paler as it recedes into the distance.
Criticism came with its appeal from mystical unrealities to originals,
and restored no lifelike reality but these transparent shadows, spirits
which have not flesh and bones.
The Last Supper was finished in 1497; in 1498 the French entered Milan,
and whether or not the Gascon bowmen used it as a mark for their arrows,
the model of Francesco Sforza certainly did not survive. What, in that
age, such work was capable of being--of what nobility, amid what racy
truthfulness to fact--we may judge from the bronze statue of Bartolomeo
Colleoni on horseback, modelled by Leonardo's master, Verrocchio (he
died of grief, it was said, because, the mould accidentally failing, he
was unable himself to complete it), still standing in the piazza of
Saint John and Saint Paul at Venice. Some traces of the thing may remain
in certain of Leonardo's drawings, and also, perhaps, by a singular
circumstance, in a far-off town of France. For Ludovico became a
prisoner, and ended his days at Loches in Touraine;--allowed at last, it
is said, to breathe fresher air for awhile in one of the rooms of a high
tower there, after many years of captivity in the dungeons below, where
all seems sick with barbarous feudal memories, and where his prison is
still shown, its walls covered with strange painted arabesques, ascribed
by tradition to his hand, amused a little, in this way, through the
tedious years:--vast helmets and faces and pieces of armour, among
which, in great letters, the motto Infelix Sum is woven in and out, and
in which, perhaps, it is not too fanciful to see the fruit of a wistful
after-dreaming over all those experiments with Leonardo on the armed
figure of the great duke, that had occupied the two so often during the
days of his good fortune at Milan.
The remaining years of Leonardo's life are more or less years of
wandering. From his brilliant life at court he had saved nothing, and he
returned to Florence a poor man. Perhaps necessity kept his spirit
excited: the next four years are one prolonged rapture or ecstasy of
invention. He painted the pictures of the Louvre, his most authentic
works, which came there straight from the cabinet of Francis the First,
at Fontainebleau. One picture of his, the Saint Anne--not the Saint Anne
of the Louvre, but a mere cartoon, now in London--revived for a moment a
sort of appreciation more common in an earlier time, when good pictures
had still seemed miraculous; and for two days a crowd of people of all
qualities passed in naive excitement through the chamber where it hung,
and gave Leonardo a taste of Cimabue's triumph. But his work was less
with the saints than with the living women of Florence; for he lived
still in the polished society that he loved, and in the houses of
Florence, left perhaps a little subject to light thoughts by the death
of Savonarola--the latest gossip (1869) is of an undraped Monna Lisa,
found in some out-of-the-way corner of the late Orleans collection--he
saw Ginevra di Benci, and Lisa, the young third wife of Francesco del
Giocondo. As we have seen him using incidents of sacred story, not for
their own sake, or as mere subjects for pictorial realisation, but as a
symbolical language for fancies all his own, so now he found a vent for
his thoughts in taking one of these languid women, and raising her, as
Leda or Pomona, Modesty or Vanity, to the seventh heaven of symbolical
expression.
La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the
revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness,
only the Melancholia of Duerer is comparable to it; and no crude
symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We
all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in
that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea.
Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least.* As often
happens with works in which invention seems to reach its limits, there
is an element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In that
inestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession of Vasari, were
certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty that
Leonardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to
connect with these designs of the elder, by-past master, as with its
germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of
something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work.
Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image
defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express
historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady,
embodied and beheld at last. What was the relationship of a living
Florentine to this creature of his thought? By means of what strange
affinities had the person and the dream grown up thus apart, and yet so
closely together? Present from the first incorporeally in Leonardo's
thought, dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio, she is found present
at last in Il Giocondo's house. That there is much of mere portraiture
in the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, the
presence of mimes and flute-players, that subtle expression was
protracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and by renewed
labour never really completed, or in four months and as by stroke of
magic, that the image was projected?
*Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson in the lips and
cheeks, lost for us.
The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is
expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to
desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are
come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out
from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange
thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a
moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of
antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the
soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience
of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of
power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of
Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its
spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world,
the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she
sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the
secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their
fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern
merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint
Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound
of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has
moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.
The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand
experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of
humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of
thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of
the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.
During these years at Florence Leonardo's history is the history of his
art; he himself is lost in the bright cloud of it. The outward history
begins again in 1502, with a wild journey through central Italy, which
he makes as the chief engineer of Caesar Borgia. The biographer, putting
together the stray jottings of his manuscripts, may follow him through
every day of it, up the strange tower of Siena, which looks towards
Rome, elastic like a bent bow, down to the seashore at Piombino, each
place appearing as fitfully as in a fever dream.
One other great work was left for him to do, a work all trace of which
soon vanished, The Battle of the Standard, in which he had Michelangelo
for his rival. The citizens of Florence, desiring to decorate the walls
of the great council-chamber, had offered the work for competition, and
any subject might be chosen from the Florentine wars of the fifteenth
century. Michelangelo chose for his cartoon an incident of the war with
Pisa, in which the Florentine soldiers, bathing in the Arno, are
surprised by the sound of trumpets, and run to arms. His design has
reached us only in an old engraving, which perhaps helps us less than
what we remember of the background of his Holy Family in the Uffizii to
imagine in what superhuman form, such as might have beguiled the heart
of an earlier world, those figures may have risen from the water.
Leonardo chose an incident from the battle of Anghiari, in which two
parties of soldiers fight for a standard. Like Michelangelo's, his
cartoon is lost, and has come to us only in sketches, and in a fragment
of Rubens. Through the accounts given we may discern some lust of
terrible things in it, so that even the horses tore each other with
their teeth; and yet one fragment of it, in a drawing of his at
Florence, is far different--a waving field of lovely armour, the chased
edgings running like lines of sunlight from side to side. Michelangelo
was twenty-seven years old; Leonardo more than fifty; and Raffaelle,
then nineteen years old, visiting Florence for the first time, came and
watched them as they worked.
We catch a glimpse of him again, at Rome in 1514, surrounded by his
mirrors and vials and furnaces, making strange toys that seemed alive of
wax and quicksilver. The hesitation which had haunted him all through
life, and made him like one under a spell, was upon him now with double
force. No one had ever carried political indifferentism farther; it had
always been his philosophy to "fly before the storm"; he is for the
Sforzas, or against them, as the tide of their fortune turns. Yet now in
the political society of Rome, he came to be suspected of concealed
French sympathies. It paralysed him to find himself among enemies; and
he turned wholly to France, which had long courted him.
France was about to become an Italy more Italian than Italy itself.
Francis the First, like Lewis the Twelfth before him, was attracted by
the finesse of Leonardo's work; La Gioconda was already in his cabinet,
and he offered Leonardo the little Chateau de Clou, with its vineyards
and meadows, in the pleasant valley of the Masse, just outside the walls
of the town of Amboise, where, especially in the hunting season, the
court then frequently resided. A Monsieur Lyonard, peinteur du Roy pour
Amboyse--so the letter of Francis the First is headed. It opens a
prospect, one of the most interesting in the history of art, where,
under a strange mixture of lights, Italian art dies away as a French
exotic.
Two questions remain, after much busy antiquarianism, concerning
Leonardo's death--the question of the precise form of his religion, and
the question whether Francis the First was present at the time. They are
of about equally little importance in the estimate of Leonardo's genius.
The directions in his will about the thirty masses and the great candles
for the church of Saint Florentin are things of course, their real
purpose being immediate and practical; and on no theory of religion
could these hurried offices be of much consequence. We forget them in
speculating how one who had been always so desirous of beauty, but
desired it always in such definite and precise forms, as hands or
flowers or hair, looked forward now into the vague land, and experienced
the last curiosity.
1869.