MONNA LISA GIOCONDA--1503-1506
'The darkness of that subterranean place was too deep, and when I
had passed some time therein, two feelings awoke within me and
contended--fear and curiosity; fear of exploring that dark depth;
curiosity as to its secret.'
LEONARDO DA VINCI.
I
Leonardo used to say:--
'For portraits, have a special studio; a court, oblong and rectangular,
ten _braccia_ in width, twenty in length, the walls painted black, with
a projecting roof and canvas curtains for the sun. Or, if you haven't
the canvas curtains, paint only in the twilight, or when it is clouded
and dull. That is the perfect light.'
Just such a court for the painting of portraits he had made for himself
in the house of the Florentine citizen who lodged him; a notable
personage, commissary of the Signoria, a mathematician, a man of
intellect and of amiability, his name Ser Piero di Braccio Martelli. His
house was the second in the Via Martelli, on the left as one goes from
San Giovanni to the Palazzo Medici.
It was a warm misty afternoon, towards the close of spring, in the year
1505. The sun shone through clouds; there was a dull light, which seemed
as if shining under water, throwing delicate liquid shadows--Leonardo's
favourite condition of the atmosphere; which, he thought, gave special
charm to the face of a woman.
'Will she come?' he asked himself, thinking of her whose portrait he had
been painting for nearly three years, with a tenacity and a zeal
unwonted.
He arranged the studio for her reception. Boltraffio, watching him,
marvelled at his unusual solicitude.
He prepared palette, brushes, and skins of paint, each one coated with a
transparent film of gum arabic. He removed the cover from the portrait,
which was disposed on a movable three-legged stand called a _leggio_. He
set the fountain playing in the middle of the court. It had been
constructed for her delight--falling streams striking against glass
spheres put them in motion and produced a strange low music. Her
favourite flowers had been planted round the fountain--pale irises--the
lilies of Florence. Then he crumbled bread in a basket for the tame doe
which lived in the court, and which she used to feed with her own hands;
lastly, he arranged her chair, of smooth dark oak with carved back and
arms; before it placed a soft rug, upon which was already curled and
purring a white cat of a rare breed, procured for her pleasure, a dainty
foreign beast with varicoloured eyes, the right yellow as a topaz, the
left sapphire blue.
Meantime, Andrea Salaino had begun to tune the viol; another musician,
one Atalante, whom Leonardo had known at the Milanese court, brought the
silver lyre, shaped like a horse's head, which the artist had invented.
The best musicians, singers, story-tellers, and poets, the most witty
talkers, were invited by Leonardo to his studio to amuse _her_, and
avert the tedium of her sittings. He studied the changeful beauty of
_her_ expression as reflects of thought and feeling were awakened by
talk, music, poetry, in turn.
Now all was ready, but still she delayed her coming.
'Where is she?' he thought; 'the light and the shadow to-day are just
her own. Shall I send to seek her? Nay, but she knows how ardently I
await her! She will come.'
And Giovanni noticed that his impatience grew.
Suddenly a light waft of the breeze swayed the jet of the fountain, the
delicate irises shook as the spray fell on them. The keen-eared doe was
on the alert, with outstretched neck. Leonardo listened. And Giovanni,
though he heard nothing, knew it was _she_.
First, with a humble reverence, came Sister Camilla, a lay-companion who
lived with her, and always attended her to the studio, sitting quietly
apart studying a prayer-book, and effacing herself, so that in three
years Leonardo had hardly heard her voice. The sister was followed by
the woman all expected; a woman of thirty, in a plain dark dress, and a
dark transparent veil which reached to the centre of her forehead--Monna
Lisa Gioconda.
She was a Neapolitan of noble birth; her father, Antonio Gherardini, had
lost his wealth in the French invasion of 1495, and had married his
daughter to the Florentine, Francesco del Giocondo, who had seen the
death of two wives already. Messer Francesco was five years younger than
Leonardo; was one of the twelve _Bonuomini_, and was likely later to be
made Prior. He was a mediocre personage, of a type to be found in every
country and in every age; neither good nor bad; busy in a commonplace
way, absorbed in his affairs, content with daily routine. He regarded
his young wife as nothing more than an ornament for his house. Her
essential charm he understood less than the points of his Sicilian
cattle, or the impost upon raw sheepskins. She was said to have married
this man solely to please her father, and by her marriage to have driven
an earlier lover to a voluntary death. It was also said that she still
had a crowd of passionate adorers--persevering, but hopeless. The
scandalmongers could find nothing worse than this to insinuate. Calm,
gentle, retiring, pious, charitable to the poor, she was a faithful
wife, a good housekeeper, a most tender mother to Dianora, her
twelve-year-old step-daughter.
Giovanni knew all this of Monna Lisa. Yet she never visited Leonardo's
studio without seeming to the pupil a wholly different person from
Messer Francesco's wife. She had been coming now for three years, and
Giovanni's first impressions had been only confirmed by subsequent
observations. He found something mysterious, illusory, phantasmal about
her which filled him with awe. Leonardo's portrait seemed more real than
she was herself. She and the painter--whom she never saw except when
sitting to him, and then never alone--appeared to share some secret; not
a love-secret, at least not in the ordinary sense of the term.
Leonardo had once spoken of the tendency felt by every artist to
reproduce his own likeness in his pictures of others, the reason of this
tendency being that both his own material semblance and his work are the
creation and manifestation of his soul. In this case Giovanni found that
not merely the portrait, but the woman herself, was growing daily more
like the painter. The likeness was less in the features than in the
expression of eyes and in the smile. But he had already seen this smile
on the lips of Verrocchio's Unbelieving Thomas; of Eve before the Tree
of Science, Leonardo's first picture; in the Leda; in the Angel of the
_Madonna delle Roccie_; and in a hundred other drawings, executed before
ever he had met Monna Lisa: as though, throughout life, he had sought
his own reflection, and had found it completely at last.
When Giovanni looked at that smile, he felt perturbed, alarmed, as if in
presence of the supernatural; reality seemed a dream, and the
dream-world reality; Monna Lisa, not the wife of Giocondo, the very
ordinary Florentine citizen, but a phantom evoked by the will of the
master, a female semblance of Leonardo himself.
Lisa took her seat, and the white cat jumped on her lap; she stroked it
with delicate fingers, and faint cracklings and sparks came from the
silky fur. Leonardo began his work; but presently he laid it aside and
sat silent, looking into her face with an intentness that no faintest
shadow of change in her expression could have escaped.
'Madonna,' he said at last, 'you are preoccupied--troubled about
something to-day.'
Giovanni had observed that to-day she did not resemble the portrait.
'I am a little troubled,' she replied; 'Dianora ails, and I have been up
with her the whole night.'
'Then you are wearied, and the pose will try you. We will defer the
sitting to another time.'
'Nay, we cannot lose this delightful day! See the misty sunlight and the
delicate shadows! It is _my_ day!'
There was a short silence. Then she went on: 'I knew you expected me. I
was ready to come earlier; but I was kept. Madonna Sophonisba----'
'Who? Ah, I know. She with the voice of a fishwife and the scent of a
perfumer's shop!'
Monna Lisa smiled quietly. 'She had to tell me about the fête at the
Palazzo Vecchio, given by Argentina, wife of the _Gonfaloniere_; of the
supper, the dresses, the lovers----'
'Ay, 'tis not Dianora's indisposition has disturbed you, but this
woman's senseless gossip. Strange case! Have you never noticed,
madonna, how sometimes a single absurdity on an indifferent subject from
an uninteresting person will throw a gloom over the mind, and afflict us
more than our proper cares?'
She bent her head silently; it was clear they understood each other too
well for words to be always necessary.
Leonardo again addressed himself to work.
'Tell me something!' she cried.
'What shall I tell you?'
She smiled. 'Tell me about _The Realm of Venus_.'
The artist had certain favourite stories for La Gioconda; tales of
travel, of natural phenomena, of plans for pictures. He knew them by
heart, and would recite always in the same simple half-childlike words,
accompanied by soft music, in his feminine voice, the old fable, or
cradle-tale. Andrea and Atalante took their instruments, and when they
had executed the _motif_ which invariably preluded _The Realm of Venus_,
he began:--
'The seafarers who live on the coasts of Cilicia tell of him who is
destined to drown, that for a moment, during the most tremendous storms,
he is permitted to behold the island of Cyprus, realm of the Goddess of
Love. Around boil whirlwinds and whirlpools, and the voices of the
waters; and great in number are the navigators who, attracted by the
splendour of that island, have lost ships upon its rocks. Many a gallant
bark has there been dashed to pieces, many sunk for ever in the deep!
Yonder on the coast lie piteous hulks, overgrown with seaweed, half
buried by sand. Of one the prow juts exposed; of another the stern; of
another the gaping beams of its side, like the blackened ribs of a
corpse. So many are they, that there it looks like the Resurrection Day,
when the Sea shall give up its dead! But over the isle itself is a
curtain of eternal azure, and the sun shines on flowery hills. And the
stillness of the air is such, that when the priest swings the censer on
the temple steps, the flame ascends to heaven straight, unwavering as
the white columns and the giant cypresses mirrored in an untroubled lake
lying inland, far from the shore. Only the streams that flow from that
lake, and cascades leaping from one porphyry basin to another, trouble
the solitude with their pleasant sound. Those drowning far at sea hear
for a moment that soft murmur, and see the still lake of sweet waters,
and the wind carries to them the perfume of myrtle and rose. Ever the
more terrible the outer tempest, the profounder that calm in the island
realm of the Cyprian.'
He ceased: the strains of lute and viol died away, and that silence
followed which is sweeter than any music. As if lulled by the words just
spoken, as if caught away from actual life by the long hush, a stranger
to all things except the will of the artist, Monna Lisa, like calm and
pure and fathomless water, looked into Leonardo's eyes with that mystic
smile which was the very counterpart of his own. Giovanni Boltraffio,
watching now one, now the other, thought of two mirrors, each
reflecting, absorbing the other into infinity.
II
Next morning Leonardo was working in the Palazzo Vecchio at his 'Battle
of Anghiari.'
In 1503, when he had come from Rome, he had received an order from Piero
Soderini, then the supreme authority in the republic, to paint some
memorable battle on the wall of the new council-chamber. He chose the
famous Florentine victory of 1440, over Niccolò Piccinino, the general
of Filippo Visconti, Duke of Lombardy.
A portion of the picture was already completed: four horsemen struggling
for possession of a standard--little more than a rag fluttering on a
staff, its pole snapped and about to be shivered into pieces. Five hands
have seized the shaft, and are pulling furiously in contrary directions.
Sabres cross in the air; mouths are opened in a horrific yell. The
distorted human faces are not less hideous than the jowls of the
monstrous creatures on their helmets. The horses have been infected with
the fury of their riders, and are rearing and striking each other with
their forelegs, their ears laid back, their eyeballs rolling and
glaring, as they gnash their teeth and bite like tigers. Below, in a
pool of blood, one man is killing another, clutching his hair and
dashing his head against the ground, not noticing that in a moment they
will both alike be trampled down by the advancing hoofs.
This was war in all its horror, the supreme folly of humanity, the 'most
bestial of madnesses,' according to Leonardo's own expression, 'which
leaves no footprint unfilled with blood.'
This morning the painter had scarcely taken his work in hand when he
heard steps upon the brick floor; he recognised them, and frowned
without looking up. It was Piero Soderini, the _Gonfaloniere_.
Soderini required a precise account of every _soldo_ advanced by the
treasury for the purchase of wood, lac, chalk, paints, linseed oil, and
other trifles. Never, when in the service of 'tyrants,' as the
_Gonfaloniere_ contemptuously called them, at the courts of Ludovico
Sforza, or of Cæsar Borgia, had Leonardo been subjected to such petty
interferences as here in the service of the free republic, in the region
of civil equality.
'For what had you hoped?' asked the painter with a certain curiosity.
'We had hoped that your work would immortalise the warlike renown of the
republic, and show the memorable exploits of our heroes; had hoped for
something to elevate the soul, to give a noble example of patriotism. I
grant you that war is as you have shown it; but, I ask you, Messer
Leonardo, why not ennoble and adorn it, and modify its extremes? for the
great thing is "moderation in all things!" I may be mistaken, but to my
thinking the painter's true business is to benefit the people by
instructing them.'
He had now touched on his favourite theme, and with brightened eyes he
talked on; his monotonous voice had the ceaseless trickle of water,
wearing away a stone. The painter scarcely replied; though, curious to
know what this worthy citizen really thought on the subject of art, he
listened at intervals with some attention. He felt as if he had gone
into a dark and narrow room, crowded with people, and with an absolutely
stifling atmosphere.
'Art which has no profit for the people,' said Messer Piero, 'is merely
an amusement for the rich, a distraction for the idle, a luxury for
tyrants. You agree, my good sir?'
'Certainly,' assented Leonardo, and he continued, sarcastic purpose
scarce visible in the twinkle of his eyes. 'Permit me, sir, to suggest a
practical method of terminating our perennial debate. Let the citizens
of the Florentine Republic assemble in this very chamber, and take a
vote on the question whether or no my picture be moral--that is,
popular. There would be great advantage in this course. The question
would be settled with mathematical certainty by counting heads; for the
voice of the people is, as you are aware, the voice of God.'
Soderini weighed the suggestion. He was so impressed by the virtue of
the black and white balls used for voting, that it never occurred to him
a mock could be made at the mystery. Presently, however, he understood,
and fixing his eyes on the painter, stared in blank astonishment, almost
terror. Yet he quickly recovered himself. Artists are known to be
persons unreliable and devoid of common sense, and it ill behoved him to
take offence at this painter fellow's gibe.
Messer Piero did not pursue the subject; in the tone of a superior
addressing a dependent, he mentioned that Michelangelo Buonarroti had
received an order to paint the second wall of the council chamber, and
curtly took his leave. Leonardo followed him with his eyes. Sleek, grey,
with crooked legs and a bent back, he seemed even more closely than
usual to resemble a rat.
III
On leaving the Palazzo Vecchio Leonardo paused in the piazza before
Michelangelo's 'David.' It stood as if on guard, a giant of white
marble, relieved against the background of dark stone. Young, thin,
naked, the veins swollen in his right hand which held the sling, his
left arm was raised in front of his breast, the stone within the hand.
His brows were knit, his gaze far away, like one taking aim. The curls
upon his low forehead seemed already the garland of victory. Leonardo
remembered the description in the Book of Kings; and seeing him stand
there where Savonarola had been burned, he thought of the prophet Fra
Girolamo had desired in vain, the hero for whom Machiavelli was still
waiting.
In this work of his rival's Leonardo recognised the expression of a soul
great as his own, but eternally opposed to it; opposed as action is to
contemplation, passion to apathy, storm to tranquillity. This alien
force attracted him; he felt the inevitable fascination of something
new, the desire to come close to it, to study, and understand it.
Two years earlier, among the building stones of Santa Maria del Fiore,
lay a huge block of white marble, spoilt by an unskilled sculptor. The
best masters had refused it, thinking it no longer good for anything. It
had been offered to Leonardo himself, and with his usual slowness he
had meditated, measured, calculated, hesitated. Then came another,
twenty-three years younger than he, who had undertaken the task without
misgiving; with incredible rapidity, working by night as well as by day,
he had made this giant in two years and one month. Leonardo had worked
for six years at the clay of his Colossus; he dared not think how long
he would have required for a marble statue like this David.
The Florentines had proclaimed Michelangelo Leonardo's rival in the art
of sculpture, and the young man had not hesitated to accept his
challenge. Now it seemed he was about to place himself in competition
with the older master as a painter also. He had yet hardly taken a brush
in his hand, but with a daring which might seem presumption, he was
about to paint the second war-picture in the council chamber.
Leonardo had met his youthful rival with goodwill and every
consideration; but Michelangelo hated him with all the fire of his
impetuous nature. Leonardo's calm he fancied contempt: he listened to
calumnies, he sought pretexts for quarrels, he seized every occasion to
damage his rival. When the 'David' was finished the best painters and
sculptors were invited by the Signoria to discuss where it should be
placed. Leonardo agreed with Giuliano da San Gallo, the architect, that
the most suitable position would be under the Loggia de' Priori, and
not, as others suggested, in front of the Palazzo della Signoria.
Michelangelo swore that Leonardo, prompted by envy, wished his rival's
work hidden in a corner where no one could properly see it.
Discussions on abstract questions were at this time much the vogue, and
on one occasion a company, including the brothers Pollaiuoli, the aged
Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Lorenzo di Credi, assembled in
Leonardo's studio to debate whether sculpture or painting held the
higher place among the arts. Leonardo quickly, with a whimsical
expression, gave his opinion thus:--
'The further art is removed from a handicraft the nearer it approaches
perfection. The major distinction between the two arts lies in the fact
that painting demands greater effort of mind, sculpture greater effort
of body. The shape, contained like a kernel in the block of marble, is
slowly set free by the sculptor's blows of chisel and mallet, needing
the exertion of all his bodily powers. Great fatigue ensues, the
labourer is drenched with sweat, which mingling with dust becomes a miry
crust upon his garments; his face is smeared and covered with white like
a baker's, his studio is filled with chips. Whereas the painter,
perfectly calm, in elegant habiliments, seated at ease in his chair,
plies a light brush and manipulates pleasant paints. His house is clean,
and quiet, so that his toil can be sweetened by converse, or music, or
reading, undisturbed by hammerings or scrapings.'
These words came to the ears of Michelangelo, who imagined them aimed at
himself. He took occasion to make venomous reply:--
'Let this Messer da Vinci, a kitchen-wench's bastard, be ashamed of
dirty work; I, the heir of an old and honourable house, despise neither
sweat nor mire. The dispute is foolish, for all the arts are equal,
proceeding from one source, aiming at one goal. He who maintains that
painting is nobler than sculpture knows no more of either than my
serving-maid.'
He set to work with feverish energy on his picture for the council
chamber, wishing to overtake his rival--a feat by no means difficult.
His subject was an incident in the Pisan campaign: a sudden attack by
the enemy while the soldiers were bathing. The men hurry to the bank,
scramble out of the pleasant waves, draw on their sweated and dusty
clothes, don their cuirasses and helmets, which are burning hot under
the fiery sunshine. Michelangelo thus showed war as a contrast to
Leonardo's representation: not as 'the most bestial of madnesses,' but
as the performance of hard and manful duty to the denial of ease and
pleasure; as the struggle of heroes for the greatness and glory of their
country.
The Florentines watched the growth of the two pictures and the rivalry
between the artists with all the keenness of spectators at a raree show;
and as strife unconnected with politics seemed to them tasteless as
broth without salt, they affirmed that Michelangelo was for the republic
against the Medici, Leonardo for the Medici against the republic. The
artistic duel now became intelligible to everybody; the town was divided
into two parties; and men, to whom art was a sealed book, declared
themselves the adherents of one or other of the two artists whose works
had become the ensigns of hostile camps. Stones were thrown secretly at
the 'David'; the rich accused the poor of this outrage, the demagogues
accused the substantial burghers; the artists, the pupils; and
Buonarroti, in the presence of the _Gonfaloniere_, asserted that
ruffians had been hired by Leonardo to damage his statue.
One day Leonardo, working at his portrait in the presence of Boltraffio
and Salaino, said to Monna Lisa:--
'Could I but come to speech with Messer Michelangelo, face to face, as I
speak with you, madonna, all would be explained, and no trace would
remain of this stupid quarrel. He would learn that I am not his enemy,
and that there is no man living could love him better than I.'
Madonna Lisa shook her head.
'Nay, Messer Leonardo, he would not understand you.'
'Such a man could not fail to understand. The mischief is that he is
diffident and has too little self-confidence. He fears and tortures
himself and is jealous, because he does not yet know his own strength.
It is folly in him. I would reassure him. What has he to fear in me? I
have seen his sketch for the 'Soldiers bathing' and, believe me,
madonna, I was astounded, and could scarce believe my own eyes. No one
can conceive the value of this young man, nor what he will rise to. Even
now he is not only my equal, but stronger than I. Deny it not, madonna,
for I speak what I know to be true: he is my superior.'
She smiled, reflecting his expression like an image in a mirror.
One day in Santa Maria del Carmine, in the Cappella Brancacci, where
were the famous frescoes of Tomaso Masaccio, the school of all the great
masters, he saw a lad, scarcely more than a boy, studying and copying as
he had done himself in his youth. He wore a paint-stained old black
frock, clean but coarse and homespun linen. He was tall and willowy,
with a slight neck, very white and long, delicate as a girl's. His face
was oval, clear cut, and pale, with a somewhat sensuous beauty, and
great dark eyes like those of the Umbrian peasant women from whom
Perugino painted his Madonnas, eyes with no depth of thought, deep and
void as the sky. Leonardo saw the youth a second time in the Sala del
Papa at Santa Maria Novella, where his own cartoon for the 'Battle of
Anghiari' was exhibited. This the lad was studying and copying with no
less care than he had bestowed on Masaccio's frescoes. He evidently
knew Leonardo by sight, but did not venture to speak to him.
The Master addressed him; and then hurriedly, excitedly, and with many
blushes, half-presumptuous yet childishly artless, the boy confessed
that he looked on Leonardo as his master, as the greatest of all Italian
masters, whose shoe's-latchet Michelangelo Buonarroti was not worthy to
unloose.
Leonardo examined his drawings, and after further converse, on other
occasions, became convinced that here was a great master of the future.
Sensitive and responsive as an echo to all voices, submissive to
influence as a woman, he at present imitated both Perugino and
Pinturicchio (with whom he had recently been working in the library at
Siena), and also Leonardo; but under this immaturity the latter found a
freshness of feeling in him superior to any he had met. And the lad
seemed to have already fathomed by guesswork the deepest mysteries of
art and life; had surmounted the greatest obstacles as if involuntarily,
lightly, by chance, almost in play. Every gift seemed to have been
bestowed on him freely; he knew no searchings of heart, no weary toil,
no hesitation, no despairing efforts, no hopeless puzzles, such as had
always been to Leonardo an incubus and a curse. And when the Master
spoke to him of the need for patient study of nature, and of the laws of
painting, the youth fixed on him soft wondering eyes, and, it was
evident, listened merely out of reverence for the great man's opinion.
One day he made an observation which surprised Leonardo by its depth:--
'I have noticed,' he said, 'that while one is painting one should not
think. Everything then turns out better.'
It seemed as if this youth's whole being was a proof that the perfect
harmony of reason and feeling, of love and science, which the Master
sought so ardently, did not, nor could not exist. And in face of the
modest and careless frankness which shone in those unanxious eyes,
Leonardo felt greater doubt of the work of his own whole life, greater
doubt of the future destiny of art, than had ever tormented him when
confronted by the rivalry and scorn of Michelangelo.
At one of their first meetings Leonardo had asked the lad his name,
parentage and native place.
'I come from Urbino,' he replied; 'my father is Giovanni Sanzio the
painter, and my name, Raphael.'
IV
The evening before Leonardo's departure from Florence to mend a dam
which had burst on the river Arno, he was returning from a visit to
Machiavelli, who had alarmed him by his admissions with regard to
Soderini.
He was crossing the bridge of the Santa Trinità, towards the Via
Tornabuoni. The hour was late, and few people were about; after a hot
day a shower had freshened the air. From the river came the sharp
perfume which water acquires in the warmth of summer; the moon was
rising behind the dark hill of San Miniato. On the bank near the Ponte
Vecchio a cluster of very ancient houses, with uneven balconies and
wooden supports, were reflected in the dull green water. Behind Monte
Albano glittered a single star. The outline of Florence was cut against
the clear sky like a golden capital letter in some ancient manuscript;
an outline unique in the world, familiar to Leonardo as the outline of a
human face. To the north rose the ancient belfry of Santa Croce, near it
the straight slender stem of the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; then
Giotto's marble campanile, and the red cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore,
like the gigantic expanding blossom of the purple lily, the flower of
Florence on her standards and escutcheons. All Florence, bathed in
moonlight seemed a huge silver flower.
Leonardo noted that every city has its own especial perfume; that of
Florence was a mingling of the scent of iris flowers, and the faint
odour of dust and damp and old varnish which belongs to ancient
pictures.
His thoughts veered to her who was becoming their constant
preoccupation--Monna Lisa Gioconda. He knew scarce more of her life than
did Giovanni his pupil; it was less an annoyance than a perpetual
astonishment to him to reflect that she had a husband--Messer Francesco,
so tall and lean, with a wart on his cheek, thick eyebrows; a positive
soul; whose talk was of Sicilian cattle and the tax upon sheepskins.
There were moments in which Leonardo rejoiced in her ethereal charm,
which seemed above common humanity, yet was more real to him than aught
belonging to everyday life. There were other moments in which he
acutely felt the beauty of the living woman.
Lisa was not one of those celebrated by the poetasters as _dotte eroine_
(learned heroines). She never displayed her knowledge of books; only by
chance he found out that she read both Latin and Greek. She spoke so
simply that many imagined her stupid. But Leonardo found in her what is
most rare, especially among women, instinctive wisdom. Sometimes by a
chance sentence she would reveal herself so near, so akin to him in
spirit, that he felt her his one and eternal friend, the sister of his
soul. At these moments he would fain have overpassed the magic circle
which divides contemplation from life; but such desires he quenched at
once. Was this love which united them? Platonic ravings, languid sighs
of ideal lovers, syrupy sonnets in the Petrarchan style, had never
excited in him anything but amusement or boredom. Equally alien to his
nature was the passion which most men call love. Just as he ate no meat,
because it seemed to him repulsive, so he refrained from women, because
all material possession--in marriage or outside it--seemed to him
coarse. He avoided it as he avoided the shambles, neither blaming nor
approving, acknowledging the law of natural struggle for hunger or for
love, but refusing to take any part in it himself, and obeying a purer
law of chastity and love.
Yet even if he had loved her, what more perfect union with the beloved
could he have wished than in this secret and mystic intercourse, in the
creation of this immortal image, this new being, born of them both, as a
child of its parents, in which he and she were one? Nevertheless he felt
that even in this mystic union, stainless as it was, there was
danger--it might be greater danger than in the bond of ordinary fleshly
love. They walked on the verge of a precipice where none had walked
before, resisting the vertigo and the fatal attraction of the abyss.
Between them were simple words, vague and uncompleted phrases, through
which their secret showed as the sun shines through the morning mist. At
times he thought, What if the mist should scatter, and the blinding sun
shine out which kills mystery, dissolves all phantoms? What if he or she
should prove unequal to the strain, should overstep the magic circle,
materialise imagination into fact, contemplation into life? Had he the
right to test a human soul, the soul of his life-long friend, his
spiritual sister, as he tested the laws of mechanics, the structure of
plants, the action of poisons? Would she not revolt, cast him from her
with contempt and hatred?
Again at times he fancied he was subjecting her to a slow and a terrible
death. Her submissiveness alarmed him; it seemed limitless, like his own
eternal search for knowledge, the delicate yet penetrating scrutiny to
which he subjected her. Sooner or later he would have to decide what she
was to him, a woman or a spirit. He had been hoping that temporary
absence would postpone this inevitable decision, and for this reason was
glad to be leaving Florence.
But now that the moment had come, that separation was imminent, he
realised that he had been mistaken, and that instead of deferring, his
departure must hasten the decision.
Absorbed in these thoughts, he did not notice that he had wandered into
a lonely blind alley, and on looking about him did not at once recognise
where he was. Giotto's campanile appearing above the houses showed he
was in the vicinity of the cathedral. One side of the narrow street was
lost in blackest shadow, the other was white under the rays of the moon.
A distant light glowed red. It came from one of the _loggie_
characteristic of Florence, with a balcony and semi-circular arches on
slender pillars; a company in masks and cloaks were singing a serenade,
to the gentle tinkling of a lute.
It was the old love-song, composed by Lorenzo Il Magnifico, which had
once sounded in the carnival procession; a melancholy yet joyous melody,
pleasant to Leonardo's ears because he had know it in his youth.
Quanto è bella giovinezza!
Ma sen fugge tuttavia
Chi vuol esser lieto sia
Di doman non v'è certezza.
(Fair-fleeting Youth must snatch at happiness:
He knows not if to-morrow curse or bless.)
The last line lingered sadly in his ears with mournful foreboding.
Already on the threshold of old age, and approaching darkness and
solitude, had not Fate sent him at last a living soul, a kindred soul?
Must he repulse it? must he deny it? sacrifice life for contemplation,
as he had so often done before? renounce the near for the faraway, the
real for the ideal? Which was he to choose, the true and living and
mortal Gioconda or the immortal, which had no material existence? They
were equally dear to him, yet he must choose between them; choose at
once, for her sake. But his will was weak. He could arrive at no
decision, and wandered on aimlessly through the streets, debating,
debating with himself.
Presently he reached the house of Piero Martelli, where he lodged. The
doors were shut, the lights extinguished. He raised the hammer hung on a
chain, and knocked. The porter did not come. Repeated blows were only
answered by echoes from the sounding arches of the stone staircase.
Echoes died away and silence succeeded, seeming the more profound for
the brightness of the moonlight.
A clock boomed from a neighbouring tower. The heavy measured clanging
told of the silent and dreadful flight of time, of the darkness and
loneliness of age, of the past which could never return. And long did
the last clang vibrate in the moonlit stillness, quivering on the air,
now weakening, now strengthening again in ever widening waves of sound,
as if repeating--
Di doman non v'è certezza.
V
The next day, at her habitual hour, Monna Lisa came to the studio for
the first time unaccompanied. She knew it was their last interview. It
was a brilliant morning, and Leonardo lowered the canvas curtain to
produce that dim and tender light, transparent as submarine shadows,
which gave her face its greatest charm.
They were alone.
He kept working on in silence, calm and absorbed, forgetting his
thoughts of the previous night, forgetting the parting, the inevitable
choice. Past and Future had alike vanished from his memory; time had
come to a standstill; it seemed as if she had always sat, and would ever
thus sit before him, with that calm strange smile. What he could not do
in life he did by imagination; he blended the two images in one--mingled
the reality and its reflection--the living woman and the immortal.
He had now the sense of a great deliverance. He no longer either pitied
her or feared her. He knew her submissiveness, that she would accept
all, endure all; die, perhaps, but never revolt. And momently he looked
at her with that curiosity which had taken him to the execution of the
condemned, that he might watch the last shudders of fear on the dying
faces.
Suddenly he fancied that a strange shadow, as of an unbidden thought,
which he had not evoked, which he wished away, appeared upon her
countenance, like the cloud of human breath upon the surface of a
mirror. To preserve her, to recall her anew to the Type, within the
fatidic circle, to banish from her this human shadow, he related
gravely, like a magician pronouncing an incantation, one of his mystic
tales.
'Unable to resist the desire of beholding new forms, the secret
creations of nature, I at length reached the cavern, and there at the
entrance stood still in terror. I stooped, the left hand on the right
knee, and shading my eyes with my hand to accustom myself to the
darkness, I presently took heart and entered, and moved forward for
several steps. Then, frowning, straining my sight to the utmost, I
unwittingly changed my course and wandered hither and thither in the
darkness, feeling my way and groping after the definite. But the
obscurity was overpowering, and when I had passed some time in it, Fear
and Curiosity contended most mightily within me: fear of searching that
dark cavern, and curiosity after its secret.'
He was silent. The unwonted shadow lay still upon her face.
'Which of the two feelings gained the day?' La Gioconda murmured.
'Curiosity.'
'And you learned the stupendous secret?'
'I learned ... what could be learned.'
'And will reveal it to men?'
'I would not, nor could not, reveal all. But I would inspire them also
with curiosity strong enough to vanquish fear.'
'_And if curiosity be not enough_, Messer Leonardo?' she said slowly, an
unwonted fire in her eyes; 'if something further, a profounder feeling,
were needed to lay bare the cavern's last and greatest treasure?'
And she turned toward him a smile he had never seen before.
'What more is needed?' he asked.
She was silent. Just then a slender blinding ray shone through a rent in
the curtain; the dimness vanished; the mystery, the clear shadows,
tender as distant music, fled.
'You leave to-morrow?' she said suddenly.
'No. To-night.'
'I, too, am soon departing.'
The artist looked at her steadily, attempted speech, and said nothing.
He devined her meaning; that she would not stay in Florence without him.
'Messer Francesco,' she continued, 'goes presently for three months to
Calabria. I have asked him to take me with him.'
He frowned. This sunshine was not to his mind; the fountain had been
ghostly white; now it had taken the rainbow hues of life. Leonardo felt
that he was returning to life, timid, weak, pitiable.
'No matter,' said Monna Lisa, 'draw closer the curtain. It is early yet.
I am not tired.'
'I have painted enough,' he said, throwing down his brush.
'You will not finish my portrait?'
'Why not?' he cried hastily, as if alarmed. 'Will you not come to me
when you return?'
'I will come. But shall I be the same? You have told me that faces,
especially the faces of women, quickly change.'
'I long to finish it. But sometimes to me it seems impossible?'
'Impossible?' wondered La Gioconda. 'Ay, they tell me you finish nothing
because you are always seeking the impossible.'
In these words he fancied a tender reproach.
'The moment has come!' he thought.
She rose and said with her usual calm:--
'Farewell, Messer Leonardo. I wish you a good journey.' He also had
risen, and looking at her he saw again helpless entreaty and reproach on
her face. He knew that this moment was irrevocable for both--final and
solemn as death. He felt he must break this pregnant silence, yet no
words came to him. The more he forced his will to find a solution, the
more he was conscious of his own powerlessness and the profundity of the
abyss which must divide them. Monna Lisa still smiled her quiet smile;
that calmness, that brightness, seemed to him now the smile of the dead.
Intolerable pity filled his heart and weakened him still more.
She stretched out her hand; he took it and kissed it for the first time
since he had known her. As he did so she bent quickly, and he felt that
La Gioconda touched his hair with her lips.
'May God have you in his keeping,' she said simply.
When he recovered from his wonder--she was gone. Around him was the dead
silence of a summer afternoon, more menacing than midnight. Again he
heard the heavy measured clanging of the clock, telling of the
irremediable flight of time, of the darkness and loneliness of age, of
the past, which can return no more. And as the last vibrations died away
the words of the plaintive love song echoed in his ears:--
'Di doman non v'è certezza.'
'_And count not on the day to come._'
VI
Learning that Messer Giocondo was not returning from Calabria till
October, Leonardo deferred his return to Florence for ten days that he
might not reach the city till Madonna Lisa was there. He counted the
hours till that moment should arrive; superstitious dread oppressed his
heart when he remembered that accident might easily prolong the
separation. He strove not to think; he asked no one for news lest he
should hear something disappointing.
At last the day came, and he reached Florence early in the morning.
Autumnal, damp and dull, the city yet seemed especially fair. It spoke
to him of La Gioconda. It was one of _her_ days; misty, transparent,
with subdued light, as of sunlight seen through water.
He no longer asked himself how they would meet, what he should say, nor
how he must act that they might part no more, that he might keep her for
ever as his only friend, the sister of his soul.
'Things turn out best when one does not think too much. The great thing
is, not to think,' he said to himself, quoting the lad Raphael. 'I will
question her; and she will tell me all which that day we left unsaid;
she will explain what more than curiosity is necessary if one is to
discover the marvel of the cavern.'
Gladness filled his soul as if he were a boy of sixteen with his life
before him; yet deep down under this gladness there lingered a half
unconscious presentiment of mishap.
In the evening he visited Machiavelli, intending to go to Messer
Giocondo's house next day. Impatience, however, overcame him, and he
decided to call at once and ask for news from the porter of Madonna
Lisa's safe arrival. He went down the Via Tornabuoni towards the Ponte
Santa Trinità, the same route, though in the opposite direction, which
he had followed the night before his departure. The weather had suddenly
changed, as often happens in Florence on autumn evenings. The north
wind, piercing as a knife, blew down the valley of the Mugnone, and the
crest of the Mugello was whitened with snow. In the town it was raining;
but just above the horizon there remained a narrow strip of clear sky,
and from it the sun suddenly burst forth, flooding the wet streets and
shining roofs and the faces of the passers-by with a harsh yellow light.
The rain seemed like copper dust, and the glass of distant windows
glowed like live coals.
Near the bridge and opposite the church of Santa Trinità, in the angle
formed by the river bank and the Via Tornabuoni, rose the imposing
Palazzo degli Spini, built of large warm-grey stones, with barred lancet
windows and castellated roof like a fortress. Down below was the
customary row of stone benches, where the citizens congregated to tell
the news, to sun or to shade themselves, to play at dice or draughts.
There was a loggia at the other side of the palace, looking out upon the
Arno.
As he passed, Leonardo saw in this loggia a group of persons, strangers
to him for the most part, disputing so vehemently that they did not
notice the storm.
'Messer Leonardo! come hither and resolve our question!' they called to
him. He stopped. The dispute was about certain lines in the
thirty-fourth canto of Dante's _Inferno_, where Lucifer is described
buried breast-high in the ice at the very bottom of the accursed Pit.
The matter was expounded to Leonardo by one of the disputants, a rich
old wool merchant. The artist, however, was but half attending, for his
eyes were fixed on a man coming along the Lungarno Acciaioli. This
person walked heavily, shambling like a bear: he was bent and bony,
with a large head, black hair, and ill-shaped beard; his clothes were
poor and carelessly thrown on. He had a broad-browed heavy face, with
projecting ears and a broken nose. His small eyes dilated and glowed
strangely under excitement, and much night-work had reddened his
eyelids. Indeed he was said to work preferably in underground darkness,
with a small round lamp attached to his forehead, like a new Cyclops. It
was Michelangelo.
'Give us your opinion,' urged the disputants of Leonardo.
'I have heard,' replied the painter, 'that Messer Buonarroti is a
student of the great Alighieri. Ask him; he will answer your question
better than I.'
For Leonardo had always hoped that his difference with Michelangelo
would die a natural death; and he was anxious for an occasion which
would bring them to speech together.
The younger man, hearing his name pronounced, stopped and raised his
eyes. He was reserved and shy, even to wildness, dreading the stare of
strangers, and fancying that they scorned his ugliness, which he himself
was never able to forget. Now he looked suspiciously at the company in
the loggia; but when he saw Leonardo's smile, and his piercing glance
bent down upon him, for the older man was much the taller of the two,
shyness changed into rage. He grew pale and red by turns; words choked
him; but at last he blurted out:--
'Explain it yourself, most intelligent of sages, sold to the Lombards!
Books are your proper pastime; you who spent sixteen years trying to
hatch a clay horse, and when you tried to cast it in bronze threw up the
task in despair.' He knew he was speaking outrageously; but such was his
fury that no words seemed to him sufficiently insulting to hurl at his
rival.
Leonardo made no reply; he looked the other full in the face, and the
bystanders also were silent, watching the two men.
Before the violence of Buonarroti, Leonardo's calm almost feminine
smile, tinged with sadness, suggested weakness. But he himself
remembered Monna Lisa's words, that Michelangelo would never pardon him
for his gift of that quietness which is mightier than storm.
Michelangelo finding no more words waved his hand, turned quickly, and
went on his way, with his shambling gait, his dull unconscious habit of
growling, his bent head and bowed shoulders, upon which seemed to rest
some superhuman burden. Soon he disappeared as if dissolved into the
turbid copper-coloured rain and the wild and threatening sunlight.
Leonardo walked on. On the bridge one of the company in the loggia of
the Palazzo Spini overtook him--a little man with the aspect of a Jew,
though a pure-blooded Florentine, known to Leonardo as a scandal-monger.
The painter crossed the bridge, the other running by his side, talking
of Michelangelo, and trying to force Leonardo into some adverse
criticism of his rival, which no doubt he intended to repeat at the
earliest opportunity. Leonardo, however, refused to be drawn into this
trap, and remained silent.
The intruder was not to be shaken off.
'Tell me, Messere,' he said, 'have you yet finished your portrait of La
Gioconda?'
'I have not,' answered the painter. 'Why are you interested?'
'Nay, I was only considering the matter. For three years you have
laboured at one picture, and you say it is still incomplete. But to us
ignorant amateurs it seems already perfection, and we can conceive of
nothing further to be done.'
And he smiled obsequiously. Leonardo would have liked to take the little
man by the collar and fling him into the river.
'And what will you do now?' continued the irrepressible one. 'But
perhaps you have not heard, Messer Leonardo?'
Through his aversion the artist felt a spasm of dread. The other had
evidently something on his tongue; his eyes danced, his hands shook. He
seemed like some noxious insect.
'Oh, _Santo Iddio benedetto_!' he exclaimed; 'forsooth you only returned
to Florence this morning, so the news may not have reached you. Poor
Messer Giocondo! to be thrice widowed! Conceive what bad luck! 'Tis now
a month since Madonna Lisa, by the will of Heaven, expired!'
Darkness fell upon Leonardo's eyes; for a moment it seemed to him he
must swoon. But the keen inquisitive gaze of his tormentor helped him to
a superhuman effort of self-control; he turned pale, but his face
remained inscrutable. The other, disappointed, presently took his leave.
Left alone, Leonardo gradually recovered his composure. His first
thought was that the busybody had lied; inventing the evil tidings on
purpose to see what effect they would produce on the artist whose name
had long been whispered as a lover of La Gioconda's. It was incredible
that she could really be dead.
Before nightfall, however, he had learned all. Madonna Lisa, victim,
said some, of a contagious malady of the throat, had died at the obscure
town of Lagonero, on the return journey from Calabria to Florence.
VII
The attempt to divert the Arno from Pisa ended in disaster. Floods
destroyed the works, and turned the blooming lowland into a pestilential
swamp, where the workmen died of malaria. The labour, the money, the
lives had been expended for naught: the Ferrarese engineers threw the
blame upon Soderini, Machiavelli, and Leonardo. They were placed under a
ban, and their acquaintances turned from them in the streets. Niccolò
fell ill of vexation.
Two years before this, Leonardo's father, Ser Piero da Vinci, notary of
the palace of the Podestà, had died at the age of eighty.
In the matter of inheritance Ser Piero had frequently expressed an
intention of placing Leonardo on an equal footing with his legitimate
sons. They refused to execute his will. Leonardo's affairs were at this
time much involved, and he was induced to assent to the proposal of one
of the Hebrew usurers, from whom he had borrowed on the security of his
expectations, that he should sell him his claim on the paternal
inheritance. A lawsuit followed which lasted for six years. Taking
advantage of Leonardo's unpopularity, his brothers poured oil on the
flames, accusing him of sorcery, atheism, high treason during his
service with Cæsar Borgia, and violation of tombs by digging up corpses
for dissection; they even insulted the memory of his dead mother,
Caterina, and revived the twenty-year-old slander, accusing him of vice.
In addition to all these trials was added the failure of the picture in
the Council Chamber. Notwithstanding his experience with regard to the
_Cenacolo_, he had used oil paints also for the 'Battle of Anghiari,'
though with what he believed an improved method. When the work was half
finished he attempted to hasten the fixing of the paint in the plaster
by means of a great fire in a brazier before the picture. But the heat
acted only on the lower part of the surface; the varnish and paint
higher up would not dry.
After many fruitless experiments he realised that the second attempt at
wall-painting in oil was unsuccessful as the first, and that the
'Battle' would fade away as surely as the 'Last Supper.'
Once more, in Michelangelo's words, he was obliged to throw up his task
in despair.
The picture troubled him more than the Pisan canal or the fraternal
lawsuit. Soderini had harassed him with demands for mercantile exactness
in the carrying out of the order for the fresco, pressed for completion
within a given time, threatened him with penalties, finally accused him
openly of having misappropriated public money. Yet when Leonardo, having
borrowed from his friends, proposed to restore all he had received from
the treasury, Messer Piero refused to accept his offer, and meanwhile
was not ashamed to write to the Seigneur Charles d'Amboise, governor of
Lombardy, who was negotiating for the transfer of the painter from
Florence to Milan:--
'The conduct of Leonardo da Vinci has not been honourable: for having
received a large sum for the execution of a great work, he abandoned it
when he had completed but a very little, and in this matter had acted as
a traitor to the republic.'
One winter night Leonardo sat alone in his working room. The wind howled
in the chimney, the walls shook, the candle flickered, the stuffed bird,
suspended from a wooden bar, swayed as if attempting to fly; above the
bookshelf the familiar spider ran in alarm about his web. Drops of rain
battered the window like the knocks of one wishing to enter.
After a day spent in working for his livelihood, Leonardo felt
exhausted, as by a night of fever. He tried to employ himself by
scientific study, by drawing a caricature, by reading; but everything
fell from his hands. He had no inclination to sleep, and the whole night
was before him.
He looked at the piles of books, at the crucibles, the retorts, the
bottles containing monstrosities preserved in spirit; at the brass
quadrants, the globes, the apparatus for the study of mechanics,
astronomy, physics, hydraulics, optics, and anatomy. An unwonted
repugnance to them all filled his soul. Was not he the fellow of yonder
old spider in the dark corner above the mouldy books, the human bones,
the limbs of lifeless machines? What was left to him, what lay between
him and death, between him and utter oblivion except certain sheets of
paper, which he was covering with writing that no one could read? And he
remembered his happiness when as a child he had climbed the heights of
Monte Albano, had seen the flocks of cranes, had smelt the freshness of
spring, had gazed at the fair city of Florence, lying in the sunlight
haze like an amethyst, so small that it could be framed between two
branches of juniper. Yes, he had been happy; thinking of nothing,
knowing nothing.
Was the whole labour of his life a mockery? Was Love, after all, _not_
the daughter of Knowledge?
He listened to the howling, the shrieking, the roaring of the storm, and
he remembered Machiavelli's words: 'The most fearful thing in life is
not poverty nor care, sickness nor sorrow, nor death itself. It is
weariness of spirit.'
And still the inhuman voice of the night wind spoke of things
unavoidable yet unintelligible to the mind of man; of the loneliness,
the blackness of utter darkness on the bosom of old Chaos, mother of all
that is; of the boundless weariness of the spirit of the world. Leonardo
rose, took a candle, went into the next room, uncovered a picture
standing on an easel and veiled with a heavy drapery like a shroud. It
was the portrait of Monna Lisa Gioconda.
He had not looked at it since their parting. Now it seemed that he saw
it for the first time; such vigour of life was in it that he trembled
before his own creation. He remembered old-world traditions of magic
portraits which, if pierced by a needle, caused the death of the living
originals. In this case had he not done the contrary, taken life from
the living woman to give it to the dead?
It was all vivid and exact, to the last fold of her dress, to the little
stars of the delicate embroidery garnishing the opening round her neck.
It seemed as if the white bosom heaved, the blood beat warm in the
arteries, the expression of the face changed. Yet was she spectral, far
off, alien; more antique, in her deathless youth, than the cliffs in the
picture background--strange, sky-blue rocks, like stalactites, that
seemed visions of a world long extinct Ah! and the waves of her hair
fell from under the dark transparent veil, by the same laws of divine
mechanics as fell the waves of water in the cataract! It was only now,
when he had lost her, that he knew the charm of Monna Lisa. Hers was the
charm which he had sought in nature; the secret of the universe was the
secret of this woman, whom he had loved.
And it was no longer he who was putting her to the test, but she who was
trying him. What meant the gaze of those eyes, reflecting his own soul?
Was she repeating what she had said at their last meeting--telling him
that more than curiosity is needed, if the most wondrous secret of the
cavern is to be discovered? Or was this the alien smile of perfect
knowledge with which the dead look at the living? For the first time he
realised that she was truly dead. Could he or could he not have saved
her? Never before had he looked into the face of Death so directly, so
near. Terror turned his soul to ice. He drew back from the horror: for
the first time in his life he did not wish to _know_.
With a hasty and furtive movement he dropped the shroud again over the
canvas, and turned away.
* * * * *
In the succeeding spring, by the good offices of Charles d'Amboise,
Leonardo was freed from his engagements to the Florentine Republic, and
able to return to Milan. Now, as twenty-five years before, he was glad
to leave his home, and to see the snowy crests of the Alps rising above
the great plain of Lombardy. Now, as then, he was an exile, cast out
from his country and his home.