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 attitude, in some brief interval of rest; of a small
Madonna and Child, [115] 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
great wild beast 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 sea-shell 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 will
remember 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 eye-lids and the lips.
Another drawing might pass for the same face in childhood, with
parched and feverish lips, but 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 [116] dainty oval of the face disengaged, they are not
of the Christian family, or of Raphael'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 final nerve and the
keener touch can follow. It is as if in certain significant examples
we actually saw those forces at their work on human flesh.
Nervous, electric, faint always with some inexplicable faintness,
these people seem to be subject to exceptional conditions, to feel
powers at work in the common air unfelt by others, to become, as
it were, the receptacle 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 [117] 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 brook against the sins of men, we have a hand,
rough enough by [118] 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 version, in the Palazzo
Rosso at Genoa. Returning from the latter to the original, we are
no longer surprised by Saint John's strange likeness to the
Bacchus which hangs near it, and which set Théophile 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 [119] train of
sentiment, subtle and vague as a piece of music. No one ever
ruled over the mere subject in hand 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 altogether beyond 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 perhaps 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 oratory 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. Effective anecdotes were told about it,
his retouchings and delays. They show him refusing to work
except at the moment of invention, scornful of any one who
supposed that art could be a work of mere industry and rule,
[120] 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 after-thoughts, 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.
Here was another effort to lift a given subject out of the range of
its traditional associations. Strange, after all the mystic
developments of the middle age, was the effort to see the
Eucharist, not as the pale Host of the altar, but as one taking
leave of his friends. Five years afterwards the young Raphael, 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, the head of Jesus does but
consummate the sentiment of the whole company--ghosts
through which you see the wall, faint as the shadows of the [121]
leaves upon the wall on autumn afternoons. This figure is but the
faintest, the most spectral of them all.
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 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 perhaps also, by a
singular circumstance, in a far-off town of France. For Ludovico
became a prisoner, and ended his days at Loches in Touraine.
After many years of captivity in the dungeons below, where all
seems sick with barbarous feudal memories, he was allowed at
last, it is said, to breathe fresher air for awhile in one of the rooms
of the great tower 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. In those vast
helmets and human faces and pieces of armour, among which, in
great letters, the [122] motto Infelix Sum is woven in and out, it is
perhaps not too fanciful to see the fruit of a wistful after-
dreaming over Leonardo's sundry experiments on the armed
figure of the great duke, which had occupied the two so much
during the days of their 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 now 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 simple
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. For two days a crowd of people of
all qualities passed in naïve excitement through the chamber
where it hung, and gave Leonardo a taste of the "triumph" of
Cimabue. 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 [123] 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 cryptic language for fancies all his
own, so now he found a vent for his thought in taking one of
these languid women, and raising her, as Leda or Pomona, as
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 Dürer 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 circle 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 limit, 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 [124] 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 what strange affinities had the dream and the person grown up
thus apart, and yet so closely together? Present from the first
incorporeally in Leonardo's brain, 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?
The presence that rose thus 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 [125] 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 mysticism 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
philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon
by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life.
Certainly [126] 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; for himself, he 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, 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 helps us less perhaps than our
remembrance of the background of his Holy Family in the Uffizii
to imagine in what superhuman form, [127] such as might have
beguiled the heart of an earlier world, those figures ascended out
of 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 Raphael, then
nineteen years of age, visiting Florence for the first time, came
and watched them as they worked.
We catch a glimpse of Leonardo 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 [128] to be suspected of secret
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 Château
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, in a
peculiarly blent atmosphere, Italian art dies away as a French
exotic.
Two questions remain, after much busy antiquarianism,
concerning Leonardo's death--the question of the exact 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
concerning 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 [129] how one who had been always so desirous of
beauty, but desired it always in such precise and definite forms,
as hands or flowers or hair, looked forward now into the vague
land, and experienced the last curiosity.
1869.
NOTES
113. *How princely, how characteristic of Leonardo, the answer,
Quanto più, un' arte porta seco fatica di corpo, tanto più è vile!
Return.
123. *Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson in
the lips and cheeks, lost for us.
125. +"[. . .] with Eastern merchants:" is the punctuation used in
the 1901 Macmillan edition. Macmillan's 1910 Library edition
erroneously uses a space followed only by a period. The Norton
Anthology editors emend the text to contain a comma after
"merchants" rather than a colon, but I have chosen to follow the
unusual, but seemingly correct, 1901 punctuation.
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
[130] IT is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard
poetry, music, and painting--all the various products of art--as but
translations into different languages of one and the same fixed
quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain
technical qualities of colour, in painting; of sound, in music; of
rhythmical words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in
art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic,
is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the
opposite principle--that the sensuous material of each art brings
with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the
forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind--is the
beginning of all true aesthetic criticism. For, as art addresses not
pure sense, still less the pure intellect, but the "imaginative
reason" through the senses, there are differences of kind in
aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differences in kind of the
gifts of sense themselves. Each art, therefore, having its own
peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm, has its own [131]
special mode of reaching the imagination, its own special
responsibilities to its material. One of the functions of aesthetic
criticism is to define these limitations; to estimate the degree in
which a given work of art fulfils its responsibilities to its special
material; to note in a picture that true pictorial charm, which is
neither a mere poetical thought or sentiment, on the one hand, nor
a mere result of communicable technical skill in colour or design,
on the other; to define in a poem that true poetical quality, which
is neither descriptive nor meditative merely, but comes of an
inventive handling of rhythmical language, the element of song in
the singing; to note in music the musical charm, that essential
music, which presents no words, no matter of sentiment or
thought, separable from the special form in which it is conveyed
to us.