combination of those qualities, the laws by which they moderate,
support, relieve each other, are not peculiar to them; but most
often typical standards, or revealing instances of the laws by
which certain aesthetic effects are produced. The old masters
indeed are simpler; their characteristics are written larger, and are
easier to read, than the analogues of them in all the mixed,
confused productions of the modern mind. But when once we
have succeeded in defining for ourselves those characteristics,
and the law of their combination, we have acquired a standard or
measure which helps us to put in its right place many a vagrant
genius, many an unclassified talent, many precious though
imperfect [97] products of art. It is so with the components of the
true character of Michelangelo. That strange interfusion of
sweetness and strength is not to be found in those who claimed to
be his followers; but it is found in many of those who worked
before him, and in many others down to our own time, in William
Blake, for instance, and Victor Hugo, who, though not of his
school, and unaware, are his true sons, and help us to understand
him, as he in turn interprets and justifies them. Perhaps this is the
chief use in studying old masters.
1871.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
HOMO MINISTER ET INTERPRES NATURAE
[98] 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 [99] revolts, with intervals in
which he works not at all, or apart from the main scope of his
work. By a strange fortune the pictures on which his more
popular fame rested disappeared early from the world, like the
Battle of the Standard; or are mixed obscurely with the product
of meaner hands, like 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
secret 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 remembers, is one of the most brilliant chapters of 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 [100] 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, as 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
Château 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 boyhood 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
[101] 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
lad into whose soul the level light and aërial 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 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 [102] 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 to expand 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 [103] 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." He plunged, then, 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.
[104] 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 line and colour. 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 confirmed in him, as reflexes of things that had
touched his brain in childhood beyond the depth 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. As if catching [105] 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 which may be 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 lights 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 anything 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 [106] 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, crown
foremost, like a great calm stone against which the wave of
serpents breaks.
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 would have been
little in [107] 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 that impression which those around Leonardo
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 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 [108] 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 Raphael 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 passion 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 to the
power 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 [109] played about him. His
physical strength was great; it was said that he could bend a
horseshoe like a coil of lead.
The Duomo, 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.
Raphael 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, [110] 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 Paccioli 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 of 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 recherché 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 [111] 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, as a goodly river next, 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 the
dark air. To take a character as it was, and delicately sound its
stops, suited one so curious in observation, curious in invention.
He painted thus the portraits of Ludovico's [112] 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 Feronière 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 really 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
naïve 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 Shakespeare; and everywhere
the effort is visible in the work of his hands. This agitation, this
[113] 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 heavy and German for perfect beauty.
For there was a touch of Germany in that genius which, as
Goethe said, had "thought itself weary"--müde 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. 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-être, which to imaginative men is a moment of
invention. On this he waits with [114] a perfect patience; other
moments are but a preparation, or after-taste of it. Few men
distinguish between them as jealously as he. Hence so many
flaws even in the choicest work. But for Leonardo the distinction
is absolute, and, in the moment of bien-être, 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.