more of the meaning of nature and purpose of humanity. Nature was "the
true mistress of higher intelligences." So he plunged into the study of
nature. And in doing this he followed the manner of the older students;
he brooded over the hidden virtues of plants and crystals, the lines
traced by stars as they moved in the sky, over the correspondences which
exist between the different orders of living things, through which, to
eyes opened, they interpret each other; and for years he seemed to those
about him as one listening to a voice silent for other men.
He learned here the art of going deep, of tracking the sources of
expression to their subtlest retreats, the power of an intimate presence
in the things he handled. He did not at once or entirely desert his art;
only he was no longer the cheerful objective painter, through whose
soul, as through clear glass, the bright figures of Florentine life,
only made a little mellower and more pensive by the transit, passed on
to the white wall. He wasted many days in curious tricks of design,
seeming to lose himself in the spinning of intricate devices of lines
and colours. He was smitten with a love of the impossible--the
perforation of mountains, changing the course of rivers, raising great
buildings, such as the church of San Giovanni, in the air; all those
feats for the performance of which natural magic professes 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
over-wrought and labouring brain. Two ideas were especially fixed in
him, as reflexes of things that had touched his brain in childhood
beyond the measure of other impressions--the smiling of women and the
motion of great waters....
The science of that age was all divination, clairvoyance, unsubjected to
our exact modern formulas, seeking in an instant of vision to
concentrate a thousand experiences. Later writers, thinking only of the
well-ordered treatise on painting which a Frenchman, Raffaelle du
Fresne, a hundred years afterwards, compiled from Leonardo's bewildered
manuscripts, written strangely as his manner was, from right to left,
have imagined a rigid order in his inquiries. But this rigid order was
little in accordance with the restlessness of his character; and if we
think of him as the mere reasoner who subjects design to anatomy, and
composition to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have of him that
impression which those about him received from him. Poring over his
crucibles, making experiments with colour, trying by a strange variation
of the alchemist's dream to discover the secret, not of an elixir to
make man's natural life immortal, but rather 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 head perplexed, we but dimly
see; the mystery which at no point quite lifts from Leonardo's life is
deepest here. But it is certain that at one period of his life he had
almost ceased to be an artist.
The year 1483--the year of the birth of Raffaelle and the thirty-first
of Leonardo's life--is fixed as the date of his visit to Milan by the
letter in which he recommends himself to Ludovico Sforza, and offers to
tell him for a price strange secrets in the art of war. It was that
Sforza who murdered his young nephew by slow poison, yet was so
susceptible to religious impressions that he turned his worst passions
into a kind of religious cultus, 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 economizes 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. 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 to the
charm of music, and Leonardo's nature had a kind of spell in it.
Fascination is always the word descriptive of him. No portrait of his
youth remains; but all tends to make us believe that up to this time
some charm of voice and aspect, strong enough to balance the
disadvantage of his birth, had played about him. His physical strength
was great; it was said that he could bend a horseshoe like a coil of
lead.
The Duomo, the work of artists from beyond the Alps, so fantastic to 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 exquisite amusements,
(Leonardo became a celebrated designer of pageants,) and brilliant sins;
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 two-fold: partly the
Renaissance, partly also the coming of what is called the "modern
spirit," with its realism, its appeal to experience; it comprehended a
return to antiquity, and a return to nature. Raffaelle represents the
return to antiquity, and Leonardo the return to nature. In this return
to nature he was seeking to satisfy a boundless curiosity by her
perpetual surprises, a microscopic sense of finish by her finesse, or
delicacy of operation, that _subtilitas naturæ_ 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 the gatherings
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 fidelity that different writers have attributed to him a
fondness for particular flowers, as Clement the cyclamen, and Rio the
jasmine; 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 solemn effects of moving
water; you may follow it springing from its distant source among the
rocks on the heath of the _Madonna of the Balances_, passing as a little
fall into the treacherous calm of the _Madonna of the Lake_, next, as a
goodly river below the cliffs of the _Madonna of the Rocks_, washing the
white walls of its distant villages, stealing out in a network of
divided streams in _La Gioconda_, to the sea-shore 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 lie 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 fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a
thousand with a miracle of finesse. Through his strange veil of sight
things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light
of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or
through deep water.
And not into nature only; but he plunged also into human personality,
and became above all a painter of portraits; faces of a modelling more
skilful than has been seen before or since, embodied with a reality
which almost amounts to illusion on dark air. To take a character as it
was, and delicately sound its stops, suited one so curious in
observation, curious in invention. So he painted the portraits of
Ludovico's mistresses, Lucretia Crivelli and Cecilia Galerani the
poetess, of Ludovico himself, and the Duchess Beatrice. The portrait of
Cecilia Galerani is lost, but that of Lucretia Crivelli has been
identified with _La Belle Ferronnière_ of the Louvre, and Ludovico's
pale, anxious face still remains in the Ambrosian. 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....
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.
Ludovico became a prisoner, and the remaining years of Leonardo's life
are more or less years of wandering. From his brilliant life at court he
had saved nothing, and he returned to Florence a poor man. Perhaps
necessity kept his spirit excited: the next four years are one prolonged
rapture or ecstasy of invention. He painted the pictures of the Louvre,
his most authentic works, which came there straight from the cabinet of
Francis the First, at Fontainebleau. One picture of his, the _Saint
Anne_--not the _Saint Anne_ of the Louvre, but a mere cartoon now in
London--revived for a moment a sort of appreciation more common in an
earlier time, when good pictures had still seemed miraculous; and for
two days a crowd of people of all qualities passed in naïve excitement
through the chamber where it hung, and gave Leonardo a taste of
Cimabue's triumph. But his work was less with the saints than with the
living women of Florence; for he lived still in the polished society
that he loved, and in the houses of Florence, left perhaps a little
subject to light thoughts by the death of Savonarola (the latest gossip
is of an undraped Monna Lisa, found in some out-of-the-way corner of the
late Orleans collection), he saw Ginevra di Benci, and Lisa, the young
third wife of Francesco del Giocondo. As we have seen him using
incidents of the sacred legend, not for their own sake, or as mere
subjects for pictorial realisation, but as a symbolical language for
fancies all his own, so now he found a vent for his thoughts in taking
one of those languid women, and raising her, as Leda or Pomona, Modesty
or Vanity, to the seventh heaven of symbolical expression.
_La Gioconda_ is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the
revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness,
only the _Melancholia_ of 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 the marble chair, in
that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea.
Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least.[10] 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 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 she and the
dream grown thus apart, yet so closely together? Present from the first,
incorporeal in Leonardo's thought, dimly traced in the designs of
Verrocchio, she is found present at last in Il Giocondo's house. That
there is much of mere portraiture in the picture is attested by the
legend that by artificial means, the presence of mimes and flute
players, that subtle expression was protracted on the face. Again, was
it in four years and by renewed labour never really completed, or in
four months and as by stroke of magic, that the image was projected?
The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive
of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire. Hers is
the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the
eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon
the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and
fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside
one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and
how would they be troubled by this beauty into which the soul with all
its maladies has passed? All the thoughts and experience of the world
have etched and moulded there in that which they have of power to refine
and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust
of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and
imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the
vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the
grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day
about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and,
as Leda, was mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne, the mother of
Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes,
and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing
lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a
perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old
one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought
upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life.
Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the
symbol of the modern idea.
During these years at Florence Leonardo's history is the history of his
art; he himself is lost in the bright cloud of it. The outward history
begins again in 1502, with a wild journey through central Italy, which
he makes as the chief engineer of Cæsar Borgia. The biographer, putting
together the stray jottings of his manuscripts, may follow him through
every day of it, up the strange tower of Sienna, which looks towards
Rome, elastic like a bent bow, down to the sea-shore at Piombino, each
place appearing as fitfully as in a fevered dream.... We catch a glimpse
of him again at Rome in 1514, surrounded by his mirrors and vials and
furnaces, making strange toys that seemed alive of wax and quicksilver.
The hesitation which had haunted him all through life, and made 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 he was suspected by
the anti-Gallian society at Rome of French tendencies. It paralyzed 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 soft valley of the Masse, and not too far
from the great outer sea. M. Arsène Houssaye has succeeded in giving a
pensive local colour to this part of his subject, with which, as a
Frenchman, he could best deal. "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 attractive in the history of art, where, under
a strange mixture of lights, Italian art dies away as a French exotic.
_Studies in the History of the Renaissance_ (London, 1873).
FOOTNOTES:
[9] The spelling commonly used is "Mona Lisa." The editor has thought
best, however, to keep the form of spelling used by Walter Pater.
[10] Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson in the lips
and cheeks, lost for us.
THE ADORATION OF THE LAMB
(_VAN EYCK_)
KUGLER
Hubert van Eyck was born, according to the common acceptation, in 1366.
John van Eyck was his junior by some unknown number of years.
Chroniclers of the Sixteenth Century vaguely suggest that the two
brothers settled at Ghent in 1410. There is every reason to believe that
all these dates are incorrect; that Hubert was born after 1366, and that
the date of his migration to Ghent must be placed later in the century.
It is credible that both the brothers were court painters to Philip of
Charolois, heir apparent to the throne of Burgundy, who lived with his
wife Michelle de France at Ghent between 1418 and 1421. In the service
of the prince, painters were free from the constraint of their guild,
but on the withdrawal of the court the privilege would cease; and this
explains how the names of the Van Eycks were not recorded in the
register of the corporation of St. Luke till 1421, when, on the death of
the Countess Michelle, and as a tribute to her memory, they were
registered as masters without a fee. John van Eyck soon found employment
in the court atmosphere, which seemed congenial to him, whilst Hubert
remained at Ghent, received commissions from the municipality (1424),
and became acquainted with Jodocus Vydts, for whom he composed the
vast altar-piece known as the _Adoration of the Lamb_. It was not fated
that he should finish the great work which he was then induced to begin.
He probably sketched the subjects that were to adorn the panels, and
completed some of the more important of them. At his death in 1426 he
was buried in the chapel, the decoration of which had been the last
occupation of his life. We may sum up the qualities which distinguished
him, and the services which he rendered to the art of his country, in
the following sentences:--
[Illustration: THE ADORATION OF THE LAMB.
_Van Eyck_.]