[Page heading: LEONARDO]
All that Giotto and Masaccio had attained in the rendering of tactile
values, all that Fra Angelico or Filippo had achieved in expression, all
that Pollaiuolo had accomplished in movement, or Verrocchio in light and
shade, Leonardo, without the faintest trace of that tentativeness, that
painfulness of effort which characterised his immediate precursors,
equalled or surpassed. Outside Velasquez, and perhaps, when at their
best, Rembrandt and Degas, we shall seek in vain for tactile values so
stimulating and so convincing as those of his "Mona Lisa"; outside
Degas, we shall not find such supreme mastery over the art of movement
as in the unfinished "Epiphany" in the Uffizi; and if Leonardo has been
left far behind as a painter of light, no one has succeeded in conveying
by means of light and shade a more penetrating feeling of mystery and
awe than he in his "Virgin of the Rocks." Add to all this, a feeling for
beauty and significance that have scarcely ever been approached. Where
again youth so poignantly attractive, manhood so potently virile, old
age so dignified and possessed of the world's secrets! Who like Leonardo
has depicted the mother's happiness in her child and the child's joy in
being alive; who like Leonardo has portrayed the timidity, the newness
to experience, the delicacy and refinement of maidenhood; or the
enchantress intuitions, the inexhaustible fascination of the woman in
her years of mastery? Look at his many sketches for Madonnas, look at
his profile drawing of Isabella d'Este, or at the _Belle Joconde_, and
see whether elsewhere you find their equals. Leonardo is the one artist
of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched
but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the
cross-section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of
muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever
transmuted it into life-communicating values; and all without intention,
for most of these magical sketches were dashed off to illustrate purely
scientific matter, which alone absorbed his mind at the moment.
And just as his art is life-communicating as is that of scarcely
another, so the contemplation of his personality is life-enhancing as
that of scarcely any other man. Think that great though he was as a
painter, he was no less renowned as a sculptor and architect, musician
and improviser, and that all artistic occupations whatsoever were in his
career but moments snatched from the pursuit of theoretical and
practical knowledge. It would seem as if there were scarcely a field of
modern science but he either foresaw it in vision, or clearly
anticipated it, scarcely a realm of fruitful speculation of which he
was not a freeman; and as if there were hardly a form of human energy
which he did not manifest. And all that he demanded of life was the
chance to be useful! Surely, such a man brings us the gladdest of all
tidings--the wonderful possibilities of the human family, of whose
chances we all partake.
Painting, then, was to Leonardo so little of a preoccupation that we
must regard it as merely a mode of expression used at moments by a man
of universal genius, who recurred to it only when he had no more
absorbing occupation, and only when it could express what nothing else
could, the highest spiritual through the highest material significance.
And great though his mastery over his craft, his feeling for
significance was so much greater that it caused him to linger long over
his pictures, labouring to render the significance he felt but which his
hand could not reproduce, so that he rarely finished them. We thus have
lost in quantity, but have we lost in quality? Could a mere painter, or
even a mere artist, have seen and felt as Leonardo? We may well doubt.
We are too apt to regard a universal genius as a number of ordinary
brains somehow conjoined in one skull, and not always on the most
neighbourly terms. We forget that genius means mental energy, and that a
Leonardo, for the self-same reason that prevents his being merely a
painter--the fact that it does not exhaust a hundredth part of his
energy--will, when he does turn to painting, bring to bear a power of
seeing, feeling, and rendering, as utterly above that of the ordinary
painter as the "Mona Lisa" is above, let us say, Andrea del Sarto's
"Portrait of his Wife." No, let us not join in the reproaches made to
Leonardo for having painted so little; because he had much more to do
than to paint, he has left all of us heirs to one or two of the
supremest works of art ever created.