CHAPTER V

DAWN OF THE GOLDEN AGE: BOTTICELLI AND LEONARDO DA VINCI

Leonardo da Vinci as assimilator of the Realistic reforms—Botticelli

as reactionary—His beginnings under Fra Filippo and

Pollaiuolo—Height of his realistic achievement in Adoration of the

Magi—Assertion of his fantastic vein in the Primavera—The Dante

drawings and the distraught style of the later works, its æsthetic

value—Minor Eccentrics: Filippino Lippi—Piero di Cosimo—Leonardo

da Vinci, his gradual advance towards Chiaroscuro method, his

ideals—His work with Verrocchio—The Adoration of the Kings, its

disciplined richness—Cartoon of St. Ann—First Madonna of the

Rocks—Leonardo at Milan. The Last Supper—At Florence again. The

Battle Cartoon. Mona Lisa—Second Sojourn at Milan. The St. Ann,

his influence—At Rome, in France and the end—Leonardo’s successors

at Florence; Fra Bartolommeo— Andrea del Sarto—Agnolo

Bronzino—Pontormo—Decline of Florentine independence and of the

School.

The task before an ambitious young Florentine artist about 1475 was one

of assimilation. Pretty much all the knowledge essential for the new

painting existed, but in scattered shape. Masaccio had modernized

Giotto’s monumental patterns, and had found for himself the new

structural values of light and shade. Domenico Veneziano had introduced

the handier method of oil painting, and, with Piero della Francesca, had

attempted novel refinements in paler tonalities. He and Paolo Uccello

had worked out the mysteries of linear perspective. Andrea del Castagno

had achieved a systematic and learned anatomy. Antonio Pollaiuolo had

added to this an extraordinary knowledge of the human body in violent

action. Andrea Verrocchio had demonstrated that these realistic

strivings were compatible with grace. It had occurred to no one to

combine all these discoveries until Leonardo da Vinci reached his early

maturity. The synthesis worked out by him between 1480 and 1498, the

dates of his unfinished Adoration of the Kings and Last Supper

respectively, is the foundation on which Raphael built. Leonardo da

Vinci is the pioneer of the Golden Age.

It will help us to realize the greatness of his accomplishment to study

first the career of a contemporary and friend, the exquisite artist,

Sandro Botticelli. Botticelli, like Leonardo, came under the spell of

Verrocchio’s fastidiousness, and went some distance in the direction of

the new monumental beauty. Then abruptly he turned aside along solitary

lines quite unprecedented, but akin to the mystic past of Siena. His

great refusal of progress, his broken and eccentric career, give point

to the humanistic centrality and social authority of Leonardo’s

painting. The two men represent opposite escapes from the superficial

brilliance of the art dominated by Ghirlandaio. Leonardo moved out

towards the future, and has lived on as a fine inspiration of academic

painting ever since. Botticelli withdrew into himself, and has survived

flickeringly in the occasional admiration of kindred spirits. Both

express, if in very different fashion, the profound discontent that

preluded a new era of art. It will help us to perceive how great

Botticelli is in his solitary poetry, to consider two younger

contemporaries, Filippino Lippi, his pupil, and Piero di Cosimo, an

intelligent imitator of Leonardo, both of whom, sharing Botticelli’s

discontent, also sought escape in self-assertiveness of an eccentric

sort. As the modern age begins to dawn, the modern temperamental artist

appears. The _bottega_ begins to be a studio. Thus Sandro Botticelli[46]

has a double importance for us—as an exquisite artist, and even more as

the first individualist who strained sorely at the bounds imposed by the

collective taste, required a select public, and painted to please

himself.

There is nothing of this romantic isolation in his origins. He was born

a tanner’s son, in 1444, and brought up in the smiling country towards

Careggi. At thirteen he was still at school, hence was better educated

than the average painter. Soon he was put with a goldsmith, very likely

his brother Antonio, whose nickname—Il Botticello, the cask,

paradoxically attached itself to the creator of the Primavera. Before

his fifteenth year, 1459, young Botticelli was apprenticed to Fra

Filippo Lippi, the most sensitive eye of the time. Young Botticelli

presumably painted on the later frescoes at Prato, and I believe may

have been permitted to design certain of the figures in The Feast of

Herod. Two early pictures of the Adoration of the Kings, both in the

National Gallery, London, show us how whole-heartedly Botticelli adopted

his master’s discursive style, how sedulously he sought variety and

richness of gesture and facial expression. But these crowded

compositions lack Fra Filippo’s direct geniality. They are already

imagined before they are observed. Fra Filippo went to Spoleto some time

before 1468 and soon died there. So Botticelli was perhaps on his own

resources from his twenty-fourth year, though he was not inscribed in

the Company of St. Luke till 1472. What is certain is that he was

fortifying himself by imitation of far more strenuous artists than his

master. The delicate incisiveness of Verrocchio appears as an occasional

inspiration, the rugged power of Antonio Pollaiuolo dominates his

pictorial expression for many years.

A group of early pictures shows strikingly the interplay of realistic

influences with the assertion of his own originality. The delicately

expressive Madonna, Figure 128, in Mrs. John L. Gardner’s collection, is

based on Filippo Lippi’s Madonna in the Uffizi, Figure 103. The general

arrangement is the same. But what a change in feeling! All the overt

picturesque relations which Fra Filippo loved—the girlish Virgin praying

to her child, the chubby baby clutching at its mother, the impish angel

grinning out of the picture—all that is eliminated. The Virgin wistfully

reaches for the ear of wheat signifying her Son’s body that must be

broken. A well-grown, reverent angel, enigmatically smiling, offers the

grapes and wheat, symbols of the sacrament. The relation is between the

Madonna and this mysterious acolyte. Their consciousness of a prophetic

rite gains emphasis and pathos from the only unconscious thing in the

picture, the graceful babyish action of the Divine Child. The forms of

mother and Child are those of Filippo Lippi, but with elimination of

superfluous ornament and commonplace action. The reserved,

half-concealed smile of the angel and his strange beauty derive from

Andrea Verrocchio. You may trace it from his youthful David to his

disciple’s Mona Lisa. The date of the picture is merely a good guess,

but since it is free from the influence of Pollaiuolo, it may be before

1469.

[Illustration:

FIG. 128. Botticelli. Chigi Madonna.—_Mrs. John L. Gardner, Boston._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 130. Botticelli. Judith.—_Uffizi._

]

In that year the brothers Pollaiuolo undertook the painting of seven

figures of the Virtues to decorate the wainscot behind the magistrates’

bench in the Mercanzia, the mercantile court. Evidently they were

pressed for time, for they assigned one panel representing Fortitude,

Figure 129, to Botticelli. John Ruskin has celebrated in eloquent phrase

this frail embodiment of the courage of the mind. “Worn, somewhat, and

not a little weary; instead of standing ready for all comers, she is

sitting—apparently in revery; her fingers playing restlessly and

idly—nay, I think, even nervously about the hilt of her sword. For her

battle is not to begin today, nor did it begin yesterday. Many a morn

and even have passed since it began, and now—is this to be the ending of

it? And if this—by what manner of end?”

[Illustration:

FIG. 129. Botticelli. Fortitude.—_Uffizi._

]

The passage beautifully illustrates the odd blend of purest insight and

casual chatter in Ruskin’s criticism. Forget that the sword is a

mace—Ruskin is never right in such trifles. Fortitude sits merely

because her sister Virtues do so in the imposed decorative scheme. The

nervous action of the hands is chiefly an elegance. Yet the whole

characterization expresses with singular felicity the alert and

thoughtful charm of this Fortitude amid the stolid effigies of Antonio

and Piero Pollaiuolo. Ruskin, as often, is most wrong where it least

matters. We have more prosaic business with the Fortitude—to note the

pouting snub-nosed type, and the elaborate ornaments, which are Fra

Filippo’s, the solidly drawn but ill-shapen foot, which is Pollaiuolo’s,

and the sensitiveness, which is Botticelli’s own.

A still more complete assimilation of Pollaiuolo’s energetic mode is

revealed in the admirable little Judith, Figure 130, which must have

been painted towards 1475. The faces are still Fra Filippo’s, and he

could have invented the eager doglike obsequiousness of the maid. But

the springy action and the fine, lean ankles and feet, the bony,

expressive wrists and hands, the minutely featured landscape, are

completely in Pollaiuolo’s vein. Botticelli’s specific invention is the

sublimation of the theme—Judith’s sense of walking in a dream after the

unspeakable ordeal of the night. And the flutter of the robes in the

clean morning wind has a stylistic grace that amounts to Sandro’s

signature.

As he came into his thirty-fifth year, 1478, Botticelli painted two

pictures so different that without conclusive evidence we should hardly

believe them the work of a single mind and hand. The Adoration of the

Kings, Figure 131, with the sturdy Medici portraits, sums up all

Botticelli’s realistic achievement, shows him the greatest and most

typical Florentine master of the moment, and proves that his way was

easy to such triumphs of popularity as Ghirlandaio was soon to enjoy

uncontested. The other picture, The Allegory of Spring, evinces a

strange and to many repellant originality, indulges dreams not of this

earth, appeals to experiences inaccessible save to the æsthetically

elect. It was an earnest of neglect and unpopularity, the opening of a

solitary road that no artist would travel save under inner imperious

impulsion.

The Adoration of the Kings is composed after the fashion of Fra Filippo

and rendered with all the improvements of Pollaiuolo. The group of the

Mother, Child and Joseph is set high and well back, the minutely drawn

ruin, with its grace of wall-flowers, and the peacock on the ruined edge

of the masonry are again pure Fra Filippo, as are the juvenile charm of

Our Lady and the alertness of the Bambino. In Fra Filippo’s best style,

too, are the flanking groups of portraits which swing back towards the

central motive, leaving the centre free. Here are great personnages set

forth with dignity and force. Masaccio also has counted for much in

these portraits, and Antonio Pollaiuolo for more. The Mage kneeling by

the Child is Piero de’ Medici, the one in front with his back turned is

Cosimo. The beautiful young king addressing him is probably Giuliano,

lately slain by the Pazzi conspirators. Lorenzo is unmistakable at the

left with his proud military pose, his hands resting on a great sword.

At the right, robed in yellow, is the fine manly figure of Botticelli

himself. There are many other portraits of the most authoritative

accent, but we have no means of identifying them.

[Illustration:

FIG. 131. Botticelli. Adoration of the Magi.—_Uffizi._

]

Artistically this magnificent little picture suffers from two centres of

interest. It is an ambiguity, however, that would have troubled no

contemporary Florentine. He was willing to take the sacred group for

granted and to gaze delightedly at the figures of his rulers and

benefactors. In technical expression the picture is established through

light, shade, and color, its linear quality counting for rather little

in the effect. It is a logical and attractive combination of all the

realistic experiments of fifty years past, no single feature being

over-emphasized. It is prose of a most convincing and eloquent cadence.

[Illustration:

FIG. 132. Botticelli. Primavera—Allegory of Spring.—_Uffizi._

]

Before turning to a picture which is all poetry, the Primavera, we may

profitably consider Botticelli’s portrait, the robust body, the moody

sensual face. He was a celibate. One need not espouse the vagaries of a

Freud to know that such men, when gifted with imagination, dream strange

dreams. The Primavera, Figure 132, was painted for the Medici Villa of

Castello, where later Botticelli placed his Birth of Venus and

Signorelli his Pan as God of Music. All these pictures represent that

sudden homesickness for the idyllic scenes of classical antiquity which

fell upon the Italian world about this time. The _cassone_ painters,

working for work-a-day people, had represented the mythologies as so

many jolly stories. For the deeply cultured circle of the Medici, these

retrospections were fraught with sadness. The life where the gods moved

among alluring nymphs and amusing fauns seemed infinitely far off and

infinitely desirable. Through Horace and Virgil and Theocritus one could

glimpse it tantalizingly. Modern poets, like Angelo Poliziano, could

recover it faintly in Greek and Latin, or more rarely in Italian verse.

But the Italian loves to see, and here was the difficulty. The brown

soil had not yet yielded up the great store of old marbles. The actual

look of the bygone Golden Age, which within half a century was to become

matter of archæological certainty, was now matter of hesitant intuition.

One could brood over the old poets, arrange masques in which lightly

robed Tuscan girls played the nymph or goddess—whatever expedient was

used to live oneself back, the visual ingredients of the dream were

inevitably local and Tuscan. Such pictures as the Primavera represent

this transient and appealing mood. They tremble with unfulfilled

aspirations, breathe exquisite nostalgias, perpetuate as no other

records do the very soul of the humanists that surrounded Lorenzo the

Magnificent.

[Illustration:

FIG. 133. Botticelli. Primavera. Detail. Venus, Flora, Spring,

Zephyr.—_Uffizi._

]

For the fundamental decorative arrangement of the picture, white forms

swaying before a vertical paling, Botticelli skilfully borrowed the

motive of Pollaiuolo’s engraving, the Ten Nudes. Figure 109. From

Pollaiuolo, too, come the nervous contours, the wiry ankles, and slender

feet, and the curiously sprung knees. The old poets Lucretius and Horace

give just the hint for the persons of the idyl. Lucretius tells of the

coming of Spring blown in by the West wind, of Flora strewing flowers

before, Figure 133, with Venus and her son as witnesses. And Horace

tells how the three graces with ungirt robes dance before Mercury. But

Botticelli has contributed what gives the work its penetrating, sad

charm. His is the gloomy screen of orange trees and olives, the carpet

of spring flowers, the billowing lines that sweep across the panel. It

is conceived in two great rhythms of motion. The wave that is suave in

playful Spring becomes crisp and sharp in the robe of Flora, and is

nearly arrested in the heavy drapery of Venus, it passes with her raised

hand to the shimmering veil of the dancing Graces, and dies in the

firmly set form of Mercury, whose uplifted arm carries the movement into

the steady background, which stabilizes it all. Even to mention the

particular finesses and beauties of this fantastically lovely scene

would require an essay. I have made a fuller if very imperfect analysis

in my book, “Estimates in Art.” Now it is best to note merely that the

only joyous forms are Zephyrus, Spring and Cupid, the rest are sad or

enigmatically grave, as is Flora. Though they celebrate the renewal of

life through love in springtime, those whose immortality has witnessed

many springs carry in their faces and bearing the old knowledge that

life and love are constantly reborn under death sentence, and that what

is renewed spring after spring has but

“The frail duration of a flower.”

Again and again the poets have told this to unregarding man. Nobody has

made it visible save Botticelli.

I suppose only a score of people at the time knew how fine the Primavera

was, and a few hundred in the world today may know it. The thing was

hidden from the public, and Botticelli was painting himself into the

most obscure sort of glory. In his remaining thirty-two years, there are

a few reversions to his realistic vein, but his most characteristic

works merely carry on the recondite charm, the acute and personal

rhythms of the Primavera.

In 1480 was painted the Faust-like figure of St. Augustine. Figure 134.

One feels in the gnarled features and hand clutching the breast the

burden of lifelong meditation on the terrible mysteries of free will and

God’s eternal decrees. It is the effigy of one who has agonized in

thought, and is still seeking by that Calvary of the mind a tense and

hazardous peace.

The next year Botticelli went to Rome to take charge of the decoration

of the Sistine Chapel. We have already considered his best fresco there,

Moses in Midian. Figure 114. Of the two others—the Temptation of Christ,

and the Destruction of Korah—we need only add that they are immensely

rich in details, effective as narratives, and as decorative arrangements

surpassed on the Sistine walls only by Signorelli and Perugino.

[Illustration:

FIG. 134. Botticelli. St. Augustine. Fresco.—_Ognissanti._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 135. Botticelli. Madonna with six Angels.—_Uffizi._

]

There are rare moments of something like serenity in Botticelli’s

troubled career. One was when he painted the Pallas and the Centaur, and

another when he designed the loveliest of his round panels, the Madonna

with Six Angels, in the Uffizi, Figure 135. Unlike the more famous and

popular Magnificat, it is in immaculate preservation. The composition is

subtler and less obvious, the worn and burdened look of the Madonna

oppressed by her tragic fate, more specific and appealing. The late

Herbert P. Horne, Botticelli’s best biographer, sets the picture about

1487. About the same time were done those nuptial frescoes for Lorenzo

Tornabuoni and his bride, Giovanna degli Albizzi. Torn from the villa

walls at Careggi, they are now among the treasures of the Louvre.

Lorenzo is represented as received by the seven liberal arts, Giovanna

as presented to Venus by the Graces. We have seen in the last chapter

how these young people shared and illustrated the doom impending over

Medicean Florence. Botticelli captures, if not their look, at least a

fine symbol for their as yet unchallenged beauty and discretion.

[Illustration:

FIG. 136. Botticelli. Birth of Venus.—_Uffizi._

]

A little earlier perhaps he added to the Primavera at Castello the Birth

of Venus, Figure 136. It is conceived in the same bold rhythms, which

this time converge on the slight, smooth form of Venus and are steadied

by the horizon and the trees. Compared with the Primavera, the whole

thing is less rich, varied and naturalistic. Everything is more

schematic and conventional; gold is freely used without realistic

pretext. The wistful mood is still that of the Primavera. Venus comes to

earth with no joyous expectation. She glimpses unfulfilled desires, the

eternally deferred goal of earthly love. She obeys a destiny with

resignation and a pensive humility—almost asks pardon for the confusion

she is fated to produce among mortals. These involutions and refinements

have nothing to do with the whole-souled sensuousness of classical

antiquity, they have everything to do with that scrupulous balancing of

divine and earthly love which was the standing problem of the

Neo-Platonists surrounding Lorenzo the Magnificent.

[Illustration:

FIG. 137. Botticelli. Dante and Beatrice in Paradise.—_Print Room,

Berlin._

]

During the ’80s Botticelli was much occupied with the illustration of a

great manuscript of the “Divine Comedy.” Figure 137. These outlines in

silverpoint retouched with the pen find their equals only in the best

Far Eastern art. The line whips and dances and swirls across the

parchment, halting and turning to define a detail, then speeding anew on

its task of suggesting motion. Figures that float, groups that march or

dance as one, trailing smoke of incense—these volatile features are

rendered with the most energetic delicacy. And the most incredible

episodes of Dante’s poem gain credence with the eye through the deftest

use of the pure line. It hardens to suggest bone and sinew, tightens to

express joints that bear weight and preserve balance, loosens and

gallops to give the flutter of drapery over twinkling limbs. And all

this is done with a thin pen line that hardly changes thickness or

blackness—done with a touch as light as a feather and yet as firm as the

swing of a draughtsman’s compass. The study of such drawings is a

liberal education in the æsthetics of pure line.

These drawings freely distort the actual forms for the sake of greater

expressiveness. Such distortion is the characteristic mark of

Botticelli’s latest style. One may note it in the furniture panels which

tell the story of St. Zenobius and the tragic lot of the Roman heroines,

Lucretia and Virginia; in the Annunciation of the Uffizi and the Last

Communion of St. Jerome, in the Metropolitan Museum. The new manner is

characterized by habitually vehement expression. Intensity becomes

morbid, effective withal. We have to do with tortured but very fine

nerves. What personal history is involved we can merely surmise. We

know, however, that Botticelli followed eagerly the theocratic

revolution of Savonarola and suffered deep chagrin when the attempt to

make Florence a city of God collapsed amid sordid political jealousies.

His art becomes that of a _Piagnone_, a Savonarolist, a contemner of the

careless world. His method changes. The figures are unmodelled and flat,

they hurtle wildly and glisten metallically before airless landscapes.

Most of the hard-won Florentine realisms drop out, and the linear

rhythms recall the Gothic poignancy of Simone Martini.

Perhaps the finest picture of this sort is the Calumny of Apelles,

Figure 138, painted about 1490, and now in the Uffizi. It recreates

after an anecdote of Lucian, made current by Leonbattista Alberti, a

lost masterpiece by Apelles, which was painted to convince Alexander the

Great of the evil of calumny. An innocent prisoner is haled before an

ignorant judge. Calumny bearing a torch drags him by the hair. Treachery

and Deceit act as her tiring maids. The sordid figure of Envy is her

guide to a judge into whose asses’ ears Ignorance and Suspicion whisper

their counsels. Naked Truth pleads in vain for the victim as Remorse

turns to her with sullen helplessness. By a pictorial irony, the

sinister whirling group is set in a stately court adorned with statues

of magnanimous heroes of old, and one glimpses through the rich arches a

cloudless sky and an untroubled sea. Very rich in imaginative content,

ornate in its use of color and gold, sharp and definite in its rhythms,

discreet in its expressive distortions, this is perhaps the masterpiece

of Botticelli’s late style.

[Illustration:

FIG. 138. Botticelli. The Calumny of Apelles.—_Uffizi._

]

But one regards with surely almost pleasure and with more lively

sympathy the little Nativity in the National Gallery, Figure 139, a

celestial idyl in sentiment, and of greatest beauty of muted coloring.

Above the shed where the Virgin Mother worships her Divine Child, a

dancing ring of angels hovers. They hold olive branches from which

depend martyrs’ crowns. Wreathed shepherds, figures from some Theocritan

idyl, kneel outside the shed. Below, angels eagerly embrace three

youthful crowned figures, while impish baffled fiends lurk in crevices

of the rocks. The three figures may well typify Savonarola and his two

fellow-martyrs. A Greek inscription gives the date of 1500 and hints at

the fall of Savonarola and the shame of the French invasion. There is a

tenderness about the picture that recalls the Primavera, but it is more

elusive and unearthly, more implicit in every bit of the workmanship

itself than dependent on explicit symbolism.

What Botticelli could achieve in stark tragedy at this time is shown in

the Piet of the Munich gallery, a masterpiece which many critics have

quite unaccountably ascribed to an inferior imitator. It is of

tremendous effect. The compressing rocks seem to confine a grief too

great to be liberated in space. A shudder concentrates itself upon the

fair, youthful body of the dead Christ. One assists at a cosmic

mourning, the intolerable tension of which is mercifully relieved in the

swooning form of the Mother of Sorrows. The colors are sombre, the whole

effect fairly sculptural, though mass is attained more by linear accents

than by systematic light and shade. Balance and pose obey not a law of

physics but one of feeling.

[Illustration:

FIG. 139. Botticelli. Mystical Nativity.—_London._

]

The picture may be one of Botticelli’s latest. He lived on till 1510, a

lonely and indulged eccentric. He witnessed the youthful triumphs of

Raphael and Michelangelo at Florence, and saw the superb maturity of his

friend Leonardo da Vinci. He saw the artistic world move away from

himself towards ideals of gravity and decorum and disciplined

monumentality. He could have followed that high road himself. Instead he

had sought a romantic self-expression leading to an _impasse_. At least

he had made the _impasse_ singularly thrilling. Being a wag as well as a

poet, he had his compensations for neglect and doubtless he never

regretted his impolitic choice. Among artists of febrile and romantic

fibre he is one of the greatest. To know him thoroughly is an

incomparable exercise in exquisite feeling.

Taken in its social aspect, Botticelli’s later style is a protest

against the current, superficial, narrative and decorative modes.

Against prevailing successful commonplace, he opposes a highly refined

idiosyncracy. While the more stolid artists of the end of the century

were content to rework Ghirlandaio’s glittering vein, the more sensitive

spirits sought distinction in eccentricity. Eccentricity appears

whenever an old style has gone stale and a new one is imminent. It is

the natural expression of souls too independent to conform and too weak

to reconstruct. The grotesque was in the air. Luigi Pulci in the

“Morgante Maggiore” burlesques the ideal romances of chivalry, and mixes

the old clear categories of good and evil. Lorenzo de’ Medici at once

mimics and caricatures the simplicity of the peasant pastorals. Cynicism

runs riot in the short-story writers and in the new comedy. There is a

confusion of standards, a new complexity of appreciation, that at once

bewilders and allures delicate spirits. Thus they really express such a

moment of hesitation better than stronger or more ordinary artists. So a

Post-Impressionist of today may have a high symptomatic importance even

though his art be null, and a Filippino Lippi and Piero di Cosimo really

tell us more about the time-spirit than a Leonardo da Vinci.

Filippino[47] was born in 1457, at Prato, and presumably received his

first instruction from his father, Fra Filippo. At fifteen we find him

an orphan and studying with Botticelli, whom he probably assisted at

Rome in 1482. At twenty-seven, in 1484, he had the extraordinary honor

of completing Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. Doubtless he

had his great predecessor’s sketches to aid him. With a somewhat lighter

accent, he imitated as he might Masaccio’s simple and massive

construction in light and shade. Filippino’s Peter before the Proconsul,

Figure 140, and Crucifixion of St. Peter are of a gravity and weight to

have passed for Masaccio’s with good critics. But the fine portraits are

distinctive for the later date, as are the portraits and the graceful

kneeling boy painted opposite in the fresco left unfinished by Masaccio.

[Illustration:

FIG. 140. Filippino Lippi. St. Peter before Nero. Detail of

Fresco.—_Brancacci Chapel._

]

As a work of pious assimilation, Filippino’s frescoes are amazing; all

his more original work is so much falling-off from his beginnings. His

characteristic sensitive prettiness may be best observed in the

altar-piece in the Badia representing St. Bernard’s Vision of the

Virgin. Figure 141. As he writes her praises, she approaches his desk

escorted by eager angels. The scenic picturesqueness of the landscape,

the accentuated prettiness of the faces are characteristic.

Superficially like Botticelli, Filippino is less selective and always

more sentimental. He is rudely shaken out of a mode in which he is

attractive by the advent of the new giants of painting, Leonardo and

Signorelli. In his last work, painted about 1502 for the Strozzi Chapel

of Santa Maria Novella, he spends himself in superfluous and ineffective

inventions,—trophies, archæological ornaments. To lend impressiveness

and tragedy to the martyrdom of St. Philip and St. James, or to the

miracle of Drusiana, Figure 142, he has recourse to hideous contortions

of mouth and brows, to creaking joints and bursting muscles, to clamor

and sensationalism of all sorts. It is the bankruptcy of the gentle

spirit who only twenty years earlier had shown himself almost a great

artist in the Carmine, and only ten years earlier had proved himself an

accomplished decorator, at the Minerva, Rome. And the pity of this

plunge into competitive and hopeless exhibitionism is that Filippino was

a man of taste and character, a collector of classical antiques, an

obliging and generous spirit. He died in 1504 at the moment when

Leonardo da Vinci was planning a real and successful sensation for

Florence, in The Fight for the Standard.

[Illustration:

FIG. 141. Filippino Lippi. St. Bernard’s Vision.—_Badia._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 143. Piero di Cosimo. Primitive Man. Spalliera

panel.—_Metropolitan Museum, N. Y._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 142. Filippino Lippi. Raising of Drusiana by St. John.—_S. M.

Novella, Florence._

]

If Filippino became an eccentric through pressure of circumstances,

Piero di Cosimo[48] was one by nature. Born in 1462, he soon came under

the dullest of masters, Cosimo Rosselli. To Cosimo’s four hopeless

frescoes in the Sistine Chapel he added certain vivacious features, and

there he learned to know some of the ablest artists of his day. Always a

bachelor and recluse, he pursued serious studies in imitation of such

stern realists as Antonio Pollaiuolo and Luca Signorelli. He lived

sordidly in his _bottega_, literally from hand to mouth, on the eggs

which he boiled in his glue pot, in weekly batches. Alone he planned

strange mythologies, bestially pungent, and there he thought out odd

terrible pageants which shocked and enthralled his Florence. And as he

made these bizarre inventions, he mocked them and himself. His

admirations were shifting—now Signorelli, again the Flemish realists and

Leonardo: incompatible attractions.

[Illustration:

FIG. 144. Piero di Cosimo. Cleopatra.—_Chantilly._

]

You may sense his quality in two wall panels, now in the Metropolitan

Museum,[49] made for some palace. Piero had read over the legend of

primitive man as told by Ovid, and quickly his mind bred phantoms. First

he conceived a state where dominion trembled between man and the brute

creation. Savage men with the unfair advantage of fire are exterminating

the beasts, among whom fight those half-men, the centaurs, Figure 143.

In the companion panel the mood changes abruptly from strife and tumult

to the quaintly pastoral strains of a stone-age minuet. We assist at a

troglodyte water-party. Lovely woman dominates the new scene. The now

domesticated centaur proudly bears her. In courtly fashion skin-clad

warriors hand her into a rude pleasure raft which may perhaps waft the

picnickers to the joys of a cannibal feast. These inventions have

immense fantastic power, and their real originality by no means

precludes the suspicion that the artist is smiling at his own ingenuity

and at our complaisance.

[Illustration:

FIG. 145. Piero di Cosimo. Death of Procris.—_London._

]

Take again his Cleopatra, Figure 144, at Chantilly. The snub-nosed

Florentine beauty airs her abundant charms in a romantic landscape,

while the asp does his by no means disagreeable duty. What a travesty of

the dignity of Plutarch, and how fetching it is as distinguished

burlesque!

Cautiously and perhaps grudgingly, in the early years of the new

century, Piero follows the improvements of Leonardo. This influence is

palpable in the Rescue of Andromeda, in the Uffizi. The chained princess

carelessly displays her appetizing attractions, while the leering and

hungry dragon lurches on the beach and surveys his prey. High up in the

sky is hope, in the brisk, knightly figure of Perseus. A musical party

lolls deliciously on the strand, equally prepared to enjoy a heroic

rescue or a monster at feeding time. We are in the superbly

irresponsible world of the fairy tale, and the thrilling _raconteur_ has

his clever tongue in his cheek.

Exceptionally, as in that wistful poesy, The Death of Procris, Figure

145, at London, Piero is serious enough. The girlish body lies very

quiet amid meadow flowers. A puzzled faun and a more comprehending hound

are very touching mourners amid the unregarding beasts and birds of a

tranquil lake-side afternoon. Such refinements of sentiment are often

the compensation for an unstable spirit. The vein is rare in Piero, who,

aside from his mythological ironies and quite conventional religious

pieces, is also a vivacious portraitist as the galleries of New Haven,

Conn., the Hague, and London attest.

Piero lived on till 1521, surviving both Leonardo and Raphael. The

greatest artistic effort of modern times had spent itself before his

eyes, and he had mostly been content to be witty. He represents at least

a fine scorn of his flimsy training, and remains a consummate type of

the artist who lives, like a bear in winter, on his own fat.

After a long detour, we are once more on the high road. Perugino, with

his simple and gracious symmetries, had shown the painting of the end of

the century what ailed it. But his cure was too obvious to be acceptable

until a youngster of Raphael’s entirely modest intelligence should come

along. The reform, as often in other than artistic affairs, had to be

made from within, and was conducted by one who had much sympathy with

the random richness of the Early Renaissance style, Leonardo da

Vinci.[50]

Leonardo’s discoveries, pursued with the most patient and gradual care,

shocked no one and were quickly taken up. He was nearly thirty before he

reached consciousness of his mission, and having attained his artistic

end, he dropped painting, with a kind of scorn, for mathematical and

scientific investigation. In his admirable “Tractate on Painting” he has

left the fullest and most eloquent records of his ideals. The first is

that the painter must know clearly what he is about. “Without good

theory no good practice is possible.” Next the artist should be in a

filial relation to nature, admiring and imitating her directly, and not

through the eyes of other artists. As to the main object of painting,

Leonardo wavers between two definitions. Repeatedly he insists that that

painting is greatest which through the postures of the body shows the

emotions of the soul. As often, he uses a more technical definition—the

chief business of painting is to create a sense of relief or projection

where there is none. This relief is effected by delicate and accurate

distribution of light and shade. Light and dark are conceived in a

double fashion, as factors in relief and as offering intrinsic beauties

in their gradations. We have a refinement on the method of Masaccio,

which is merely structural and dramatic and without much intrinsic

charm. But the new beauty of chiaroscuro soon turns out to be

incompatible with the old beauty of frank color. Pictures become dusky

and mysterious, tending to black and white values. Ever since Leonardo,

academic painting has had the sore limitation of regarding shadow as

negation of color. It is the defect of his teaching and practice.

On broader matters, however, Leonardo is profoundly right. Seeing is a

mental process and should be selective. Represent all the muscles

emphatically, and your nude will look like a sack full of nuts. Accuracy

is necessary, but is of no value without accompanying dignity and grace.

Choose the most gracious aspects of reality, the pervasive moderate

light of evening rather than the sharp glare of the overhead sun.

Observe deaf-mutes so that you may learn the possibilities of expression

through gestures. Seek equilibrium and an active and vital balance

whether in the pose of the single figure or in the relations of the

figures to each other. Get the action right, and afterwards add the

details. These are some of the precepts which Leonardo scribbled off

about the year 1500 when he was nearing fifty and his work as a painter

was almost over. He is really describing the principles under which,

while accepting the richness and variety of the early Renaissance style,

he had once for all put it in order.

Of course this was a very gradual process. To the end Leonardo retained

something of a primitive quality, and he was by no means precocious. He

was born in 1452, the lovechild of a peasant girl of Vinci and a young

Florentine notary, Piero da Vinci. His earliest recollections must have

been of the hills and distant mountain prospects of his native hamlet of

Vinci, between Florence and Pisa. But he was soon taken into his

father’s home at Florence, and given an education which hardly exceeded

the proverbial “Three R’s”. Just when he was put with the painter and

sculptor, Andrea Verrocchio, is uncertain, but it can hardly have been

later than Leonardo’s thirteenth year, 1465. As a painter, Verrocchio

exists for us chiefly in the work of his pupils. As a sculptor, however,

he is a definite enough figure. His aim was plainly to infuse the new

realism with an aristocratic elegance. What a young patrician is his

David composing himself for the ordeal with a restrained well-bred

smile! There is a splendid dandyism in his valor. Or consider the

Madonna in terra-cotta, with her ornate head-dress, rich brooch, and

carefully arranged robe, her almost too sweet self-possession. She is a

clue to the fastidiousness of Verrocchio. Again consider the proud hard

face and the marvelously firm and delicate hands of the unknown lady

Verrocchio cut in marble. These things are dominant for the early

development of Leonardo, as the alert, powerful and aggressive Colleoni

monument is for his later heroic creations. Something of Verrocchio’s

scrupulous and eminently dilatory character also passed over to his

brilliant pupil. Verrocchio remained a bachelor and wholly devoted to

his art, yet he took eighteen years to give to his famous bronze group

of Christ and St. Thomas its dignity and sensitive feeling. Leonardo

remained some ten years or more with Verrocchio, painting many works

that are lost to us, and a few, I believe, that we may identify. In this

most contested matter I follow in the main the views of Dr. Sirén.

[Illustration:

FIG. 146. Leonardo da Vinci, Head at Left; Verrocchio, Head at Right.

Details from Verrocchio’s Baptism.—_Uffizi._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 146_a._> Verrocchio and Leonardo. Baptism of Christ.—_Uffizi._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 147. Leonardo da Vinci under Verrocchio’s Direction.

Annunciation.—_Uffizi._

]

For many years Leonardo ventured little on his own account, following

with docility the directions of his master. The single painting which we

may with certainty ascribe to Verrocchio, the Baptism of Christ, Figure

146a, in the Uffizi, already bears traces of Leonardo’s hand. The

general composition is borrowed from an insignificant panel of

Baldovinetti’s. The stalwart ugly forms derive from Pollaiuolo.

Delightful features added in oils by Leonardo are the exquisite angel at

the left, Figure 146, and the vaporous distance and mountain skyline. We

may surmise that these improvements were added about 1470 to a picture

started several years earlier. One other picture was designed by

Verrocchio and finished after his death in 1488 by his assistant,

Lorenzo di Credi. This Madonna, in the cathedral of Pistoia, affords an

excellent contrast between the puffy forms of Lorenzo and the firm and

living contours of Leonardo. The famous Annunciation in the Uffizi,

Figure 147, seems a kind of joint product, the actual painting being by

Leonardo, the badly balanced composition and intrusive heavy lectern, as

well as the rather cheap attitude of surprise of the Virgin,

representing a perfunctory mood of Verrocchio. The vista of remote

mountains hanging pale in the blue sky is such as only Leonardo could

have created. The delightful Gabriel also seems wholly his invention.

The composition again rests on one of Baldovinetti’s, at S. Miniato, and

the date of the picture may be about 1475. Of about the same date is a

Madonna with an Angel in the National Gallery, which may well be a

composition of Verrocchio interpreted by Leonardo. The note of sweetness

is a little forced, as in most work of this kind. We meet Leonardo in

his own right a little earlier, in a pen sketch of a broad landscape

dated in midsummer summer of 1473, Figure 148. Its spaciousness and

schematic handling of horizontals ally it to the landscape backgrounds

we have been considering. The last work of this Verrocchian character is

the Portrait of a Girl, in the Liechtenstein Gallery, Vienna. Here we

are in a field where Leonardo and his master are almost

indistinguishable, but the picturesquely broken background, the bit of

landscape, and the ease of the contours, speak for the younger man. As

late as 1476, his twenty-fifth year, Leonardo was still with Verrocchio.

He probably set up his own _bottega_ a year or so afterwards.

[Illustration:

FIG. 148. Leonardo da Vinci. Landscape. Pen Drawing.—_Uffizi._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 149. Leonardo da Vinci. Annunciation.—_Louvre._

]

There followed four or five years of eager experiment, much being

planned and rather little carried to completion. Relieved from the

pressure of a master, actual painting seems to have become irksome. He

loves to sketch, to turn his designs over until they reach perfection,

leaving them in the condition of the swiftest and most accurate

notations. Lack of system and paralysis of will are already apparent.

For about two years of this joyous and irresponsible creation he

remained a primitive. Such he is in the idyllic little Annunciation of

the Louvre,[51] Figure 149, which should be for its fluent technic no

earlier than 1476. He takes the motive which he had previously done

under restrictions, reduces it to a symmetrical order, rejects

distracting details, floods it with warm light breaking through ragged

apertures of the trees, and invests it with a penetrating humility and

grace. The little picture, which many critics set too early, is really

Leonardo’s declaration of independence. It shows features which

anticipate his mature style—a combination of a severe geometrical

symmetry in figure composition with a romantically strange setting and

lighting.

Of less import is the unpretentious little Madonna of the Flower,

recently discovered, and in the Hermitage, at Petrograd. It is

authenticated by numerous composition sketches. Its vivacity and

youthful lightness of effect are entirely in Verrocchio’s manner,

nothing is new but heavier shadows and more emphatic modelling.

[Illustration:

FIG. 150. Leonardo da Vinci. Pen Sketches for the Madonna of the

Cat.—_British Museum._

]

On a sheet of drawings in the Uffizi, which characteristically combines

with sketches of men’s heads studies of machinery, we read “This day I

began the two Virgin Marys.” The day is effaced, but it is a month in

1478, ending in _-bre_—September, October or November. One of these

Madonnas is, no doubt, the Madonna of the Flower.[52] As to the other we

have no certainty, but the sketches of this time show at least five

madonnas in process of invention. A Madonna holding a mischievous Child

who hugs a writhing cat, a Madonna with a Dish of Fruit, a Madonna

kneeling before the Child, a theme later developed into the Madonna of

the Rocks; a Madonna seated on the Ground, and a Madonna seated in the

open with the Christchild and St. John. Dr. Jens Thys thinks the last

composition may be the one actually begun as a picture, since such early

Raphaels as the Belle Jardinière seem to imply such a picture as their

model. We do well to turn from such speculations to the marvelous

sketches for these Madonnas, Figure 150. Nothing firmer, lighter or more

charming can be imagined. Of the line, thinned to a hair or widened to a

blot, there is the completest control. These little figures, a couple of

inches high at the most and often of thumb-nail minuteness, may be

enlarged to life size without losing in structure or character. Nothing

shows better the sheer fecund genius of Leonardo than these sheets,

crowded with figures, scribbled with his right-to-left handwriting, and

slantingly shaded from upper left downwards, after the fashion of a

lefthanded draughtsman. They show how Leonardo worked in spurts of

inspiration, creating a dozen lovely compositions and contented with

none. They represent so many tensely joyous half-hours, with doubtless

long intervals of other activities and withal of sheer brooding and

unrecorded observation. They help one grasp the spasmodic and

discontinuous quality of Leonardo’s genius—why the actual execution of

pictures was ever a matter of pain and drudgery to him. Up to his

twenty-ninth year he apparently made no prolonged effort of any sort,

but spent himself furiously in separate investigations. Then he pulled

himself together for a great picture, and though it too never got beyond

the underpainting, it broke the new path to the Golden Age.

For several years Leonardo had turned over the theme of an Adoration of

the Child in his sketch books. These desultory inventions were brought

abruptly to a focus in March 1481, when he agreed to do an altar-piece

for the monks of S. Donato at Scopeto. We have the best circumstantial

evidence for identifying this piece with the unfinished Adoration of the

Kings, now in the Uffizi. When we live ourselves into this dusky and

mysterious sketch we step out of the early Renaissance into a new,

ardent, rich and ordered region of invention such as the world had not

witnessed since the glory of Greece faded. The composition went through

at least three main stages. At first, as we see from a pen study in the

Bonnat Museum, at Bayonne, an Adoration of the Shepherds was considered,

the Madonna kneeling over the Christ between flanking groups of

worshippers. The scheme was rejected as too thin and obvious. A picture

of Lorenzi di Credi’s shows us its limited possibilities. Then the

picture became an Adoration of the Kings, with the thatched shed, much

action in the foreground group and a ruined amphitheatre in the

background. This sketch in the Louvre, Figure 151, contains all the

elements of the picture, but an extraordinary work of clarification and

refinement remained to be done. The figures were studied and restudied

till they reached both highest expressiveness and individuality,[53] and

an exact relation to the dense and intricate articulation of the

foreground group. Often there are half a dozen separate studies for each

motive. The central group was more closely massed till it became a rose

of eager faces and flickering hands and kneeling forms pressing inward

towards the Child. To increase this concentration, a mound is erected

behind the group shutting it off from the wide background. To steady the

group, the Madonna is no longer swung athwart the motion, but her nearly

straight position becomes a sort of axis carried up by the trees above.

In the richness, variety and animation of the compact group of adorers,

Leonardo has met the Early Renaissance on its own ground and outdone it.

In the wider setting he still observes the old precepts, but in a

profounder and more significant sense. He has swept the traditional shed

aside and opened up a world, a world furtive and active and combatant in

its own wilfulness—playing, hiding, and fighting amid the crumbling

ruins of old civilizations, and before distant towering crags which were

there before civilization or man himself was; a world oblivious of the

sublime mystery accomplishing itself in the kings who pay homage to a

Babe. What an ironic substitute for the joyous pastoralism with which

contemporary artists invested their pictures of the Epiphany!

[Illustration:

FIG. 151. Leonardo. Sketch for Adoration.—_Louvre._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 152. Leonardo da Vinci. Adoration of the Magi.

Underpainting.—_Uffizi._

]

The Adoration of the Kings, Figure 152, is the richest, most

complicated, most beautifully ordered picture of its century; even

Leonardo was not to surpass it simply as a composition. Like all rich

things it will bear many analyses. You may consider it as a triangle,

with the reciprocal forms enriched, or, with Dr. Thys, as the

combination of two radiating motives, one centred on the Madonna’s face,

the other on the soft alert body of the Child. Such analyses are only

important as temporary aids to understanding of the main fact that in

the making of such a masterpiece a clear and subtile geometry is

involved. Later Leonardo was to declare that there is no science which

cannot undergo mathematical demonstration, and he probably would have

added—no art. Of his own art at least the saying is true. It may have

been not so much his native indolence that arrested a work which had

claimed months of passionate preparation at the moment when creation was

at its height, as the conviction that it would lose something if fully

realized. One can see how he loved the summary touches of dark and

light, the swift, sufficient evocation of body and soul which he had

learned from Masaccio. He may have hated to cover up such work, and a

critic today may well be in doubt whether the gain in finishing it would

have atoned for the loss. Or Leonardo da Vinci may already have been

called to Milan and a new artistic life. However that be, the monks of

Secopto, after a long wait, turned to Filippino Lippi, who had already

undertaken one lapsed commission for Leonardo, and he promptly achieved

an Adoration of the Kings which only shows how inimitable Leonardo was,

and how little mere richness counts in any picture.

For two years between 1481 and 1483, there is silence. It seems to me

that in this time we may set the crowning of his early work in the

Madonna of the Rocks at the Louvre and the Cartoon of St. Ann at London.

The Madonna of the Rocks, Figure 153, is the logical outcome of a half

dozen Adorations which we may trace through the drawings of 1478. A

sheet of sketches in the Metropolitan Museum shows him turning the theme

over, rejecting the established profile arrangement of Fra Filippo, and

hitting on the formal pyramidal pattern which appears in the picture

itself. There the pyramid is felt not merely in plane, but also in

depth. The forms and faces are superbly tense without either rigidity or

the fluency of Leonardo’s later work. The setting is primitive, with

minutely studied textures of rock and crisp shapes of wall-flowers.

Everything derives from Fra Filippo and Botticelli, but with new

meaning. The romantic strangeness of the setting, the glimpses of sky

and opening in the rock, the sifting in of light from the heart of the

picture itself, the broad contrast of the formality of the figure

arrangement with the picturesque wildness of the setting—all this is

purest Leonardo and represents the culmination of many experiments. One

can trace this idea of irregularly broken light and an informal screen

as foil for a geometrical pattern, from the little Annunciation of the

Louvre, through the unfinished St. Jerome of the Vatican. The Early

Renaissance steps into the background, where it belongs. Leonardo never

rejects it; he fulfils it with an exquisite sense of proportion.

[Illustration:

FIG. 153. Leonardo. Madonna of the Rocks.—_Louvre._

]

If the first Madonna of the Rocks was painted before 1482, in Florence,

so probably was the cartoon of the Madonna with St. Ann, Figure 127,

perhaps the most precious single work that Leonardo has left us. The

inwardness of the relation between the two women is in the mood of the

Adoration of the Kings, single motives suggest the drawings for the

Madonna of the Cat. Later Leonardo was to lend to the motive greater

complication and formal elegance, somewhat at the cost of emotional

insight. Pictures of intense and natural feeling Leonardo does not

produce after his thirtieth year. Instead we have dramatic objectivity

in one phase, and in another, exquisite subtilities, a calculated

graciousness sweet to morbidity.

What drew Leonardo from Florence to Milan we do not surely know.

Probably he was called directly by the Duke Lodovico Sforza to undertake

the colossal equestrian statue of his father Francesco. Moreover,

Leonardo seems to have achieved notoriety at Florence without gaining

much confidence or achieving much success. After all, he had rather

little to show for his genius—just his sketch books and his good

intentions in unfinished masterpieces. He seems, too, never to have

mastered the practice which ever brought the best commissions, fresco

painting. Thus he had every reason to seek new fortunes.

He heralded his coming to Milan with the most truthfully boastful of

letters in which he arrogated to himself all ability as an inventor,

civil and military engineer, painter, sculptor, and architect; and he

entered the presence of Lodovico bearing a silver lute wrought in the

form of a horse’s skull. This dramatic entrance was the forecast of

arduous duties as an entertainer. He sang, told anecdotes and fables,

arranged pageants and masques, conducted debates on his art—in short,

accepted the thousand and one duties and distractions of a courtier.

He painted the portraits of the Duke’s mistresses, and it is possible

that we have the girlish figure of Cecilia Gallierani in the lady with

an Ermine[54] at Cracow. The forms and feeling are entirely like

Leonardo’s work in the early eighties. He agreed to do an altar-piece

for the Church of San Francesco, and delivered it only after a delay of

twenty-three years. This most postponed of pictures is the version of

the Madonna of the Rocks now at London. Meanwhile Leonardo’s constant

concern was “the horse,” as he calls it. For seven years he worked at a

rearing horse with a fallen foe trodden beneath. It is shown in many

drawings. It was too sensational a theme to please him in the long run.

So in 1490, spurred by the risk of losing the job, he restudied the

horse, using the walking motive, which had come down from classical

antiquity. Eventually the clay model was set up before the Sforza

castle, just in time for the invading French archers to make a target of

it. The rider was never even definitely planned. The whole project

remained a chagrin to Leonardo even after the horse itself had

disappeared. One day in Florence he civilly accosted Michelangelo who

turned on him with the taunt—“Thou who did’st model a horse and could’st

not cast it in bronze.”

Amidst the distractions of the court, the irksomeness of the rashly

undertaken Sforza monument, and the increasing passion for scientific

research, Leonardo managed to carry through his single monumental work,

the Last Supper, in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

For three years Leonardo worked spasmodically on the Last Supper, and it

was finished in 1498. The design had been most carefully elaborated. He

started with the customary arrangement of the apostles in pairs, John in

Jesus’ bosom—a refractory motive, and Judas in sinister isolation on the

near side of the table. Almost by accident he fell upon the effective

grouping of the apostles by threes. Then he set himself to giving in

expression and gesture the maximum emotion that could be contained

within a monumental design. He eliminated the old casual accessories and

made all the lines of perspective converge on the face of Christ. He

gave to all the figures a classical gravity, though admitting many

varieties of age and character.

Thus even in its ruined estate The Last Supper, Figure 154, is perhaps

the most impressive picture in the world. The moment is that when Christ

says “One of you shall betray me.” The arrangement is in five great

balancing waves. From the Christ there is an outgoing gesture of

resignation and love, from the apostles converging, incoming waves of

horror, amazement, curiosity and indignation. Each undulation is double.

Extended arms or pointed hands check the motion where it is excessive or

connect the separate groups. Only Judas is out of the converging rhythm.

He swings back defiantly pondering his part. Highly agitated in details,

the whole is held within a noble and pathetic decorum. It is the very

ideal of a Renaissance composition—dense, rich, energetic, varied, yet

unified by a severe and calculated pattern which subordinates to its

purpose the most diverse components. Raphael can only imitate it in the

lower part of the Disputa, and monumental design ever since has gone to

school with it.

[Illustration:

FIG. 154. Leonardo da Vinci. Last supper.—_S. Maria delle Grazie,

Milan._

]

It was unhappily painted in tempera, not in oils as older accounts

say,[55] on the dry wall, and it soon began to deteriorate. What we see

today is merely the wraith of it, yet a wraith that imposes itself and

moves us as few better preserved masterpieces do.

In the year 1500 the French overran Lombardy, and, Leonardo, after

wandering in Northern Italy and a martial episode as engineer for

conquering Cæsar Borgia, returned, in 1503, to his native Florence. He

is fifty and already in spirit an old man. His always limited will power

has given out, he broods incessantly over mathematical and physical

lore, wastes himself over fantastic inventions. His exhibit is only a

cartoon, now lost, for a St. Ann. He makes portraits by proxy, but

paints, himself, only under peculiar incentives. Such he found in the

commission for a great battle-piece for the Priors’ Palace and in the

personality of Mona Lisa.

[Illustration:

FIG. 155. Leonardo da Vinci. Sketches for the Battle of

Anghiari.—_Windsor Castle._

]

Early in the year 1504 he began to work on the cartoon for the Battle of

Anghiari. He chose the incident of a cavalry fight for the standard. He

composed a whirl of horses and infuriated riders, hacking and slashing

about a flag—a literal picture of bloodlust at its height. The ability

he expended on this atrocious theme may be sensed in a dozen preparatory

sketches, Figure 155. The portion which he actually painted on the wall

is represented only by inferior copies. The original soon faded from

deficient technical methods. The old copies tell us that this great

piece, while the marvel of its day, was sensational and highly

exhibitionistic. We need not too much mourn its loss. The admiration it

evoked was that of an age eager for novelty and responsive to display.

[Illustration:

FIG. 156. Leonardo. Mona Lisa.—_Louvre._

]

While working on the battle-piece, Leonardo met the young Neapolitan

wife of Francesco del Giocondo and began her portrait, Figure 156. She

had lost children and was habitually sad. He employed musicians to charm

the inscrutable fascinating smile to her face. He set her demure and

watchful before a romantic expanse of river plain rimmed by blue alps.

Against this wild charm of nature, he made Mona Lisa a symbol for all

that is cultured, self-contained, sophisticated, civilized. Simple

people instinctively dislike her, and are right. Subtle people adore

her, and are also right. Such as wish poetic commentary on her

mysterious beauty may find it for themselves in Walter Pater’s admirable

essay. They will do well to temper his eloquence with Kenyon Cox’s[56]

just if prosaic observation that this portrait is simply the finest,

most accurate, and subtle bit of modelling in the world. Its mystery is

perhaps merely one of amazing vision and impeccable workmanship. The

truth may well lie between two interpretations, each of which is valid

in its own field. Had there not been some extraordinary spell in the

woman herself, Leonardo, now well weary of painting, would hardly have

studied either her soul or her modelling with such tenacity.

During his brief sojourn in Florence, Leonardo did cartoons for two

designs of Leda and the Swan, his only mythological picture. One

represents her standing, the other crouching. If we may trust the

inferior imitations, in which alone we know these subjects, their

calculated sensuousness was almost cloying. Their mood is that of his

least agreeable imitator, Sodoma.

[Illustration:

FIG. 157. Leonardo. Madonna with St. Ann.—_Louvre._

]

In May 1506 Florence lent Leonardo to Charles d’Amboise, the French

viceroy at Milan, and there he spent the most of the next five years.

The Franciscans had been biding their time, and under legal duress made

him finish the Madonna which he had promised twenty-three years earlier.

Thus the second Madonna of the Rocks, at London, was painted somewhat

against the grain. It has more simplicity and breadth than the earlier

version and shows improvements in the position of the angel. It also

lacks the minute and painstaking delicacy of its original, reveals a

tired hand and mind. Otherwise Leonardo achieved in painting only the

third version of the Madonna and St. Ann, Figure 157, now in the Louvre.

The interweaving of the figures is compact and masterly, the solution of

the difficult problems of the two heads consummately clever. It has

passages of the utmost loveliness, like the foot of the Madonna, but

there is some suspicion of oversophistication, and Leonardo never

summoned the energy to finish it. Painting little himself,—for he was

busy with canals, architecture, and the never finished equestrian

monument of Trivulzio,—Leonardo gave his stamp to the entire Milanese

school. Such pupils as Boltraffio, Cesare da Sesto, Andrea Solario, his

old partner, Ambrogio de Predis, and his intimate, Francesco Melzi,

readily grasped his mannerisms, and filled Italy with Leonardesque

pictures of inferior inspiration. More robust and independent spirits,

like Bernardino Luini, adapted his manner intelligently to the needs of

mural painting. Lombardy under his influence for a moment seemed to vie

with Florence and Rome.

In 1513 Leonardo was called to Rome by the new Pope Leo X, Lorenzo de’

Medici’s son, Giovanni. It was the moment for artistic ambition to flame

in one who felt himself a great painter. Michelangelo had recently

unveiled the Sistine ceiling, and Raphael had completed the Camera della

Segnatura. Leonardo was sixty-one, when a painter should be at his best.

Yet he plunged himself into scientific experiments, perpetrated strange

practical jokes on his patrons, produced nothing but disorderly notes,

and after two wasted years left the repute of one rather an amateur

magician than an artist.

Having lived a wanderer, it was appropriate that Leonardo should die an

exile. Francis I, an enthusiastic patron of Italian art, called him to

France and settled him honorably in the Château of Cloux, near Amboise.

We hear of him as immensely learned and venerable, but palsied, and

dependent on the affectionate care of his pupil Melzi. He died on the

morrow of Mayday 1519 at peace with the church, leaving money to sixty

poor persons who should follow his body with candles to the tomb.

Doubtless you could have marked in that pitiful procession many of those

gnarled, toothless and haggard faces which Leonardo formerly loved to

sketch in the intervals of his endless quest of beauty. As we study the

marvelous drawing of himself in old age, Figure 158, we may surmise that

he was glad to go. It is hard to see in it the courtier who bore the

fantastic silver lute to Lodovico, the artist who charmed a smile from

the weary and cautious face of Mona Lisa. One sees a man immensely old,

though at an age generally robust and cheery—one who has tried to crowd

many lives into one and has paid the inevitable penalty.

[Illustration:

FIG. 158. Leonardo da Vinci. His own portrait.—_Turin._

]

Broken and intermittent as it had been, Leonardo’s painting had sufficed

to show the way. He had substituted mystery of light and shade for

allurement of frank color, study of the subtler and finer shades of

emotion for obvious characterization, had founded modern portraiture. He

had shown how to express power and passion with delicacy, had combined

the richest animation and variety with monumental severity of design.

After him the art of painting was never to be the same again. Its

standards became ampler and more classic. Stolid men like Fra

Bartolommeo immediately accepted his principles of composition and so

did miraculously alert intelligences like Raphael’s. His mere passing

contact and tradition inspired that admirable language of light and dark

that became poetry in Giorgione and Correggio. The good and the harm he

did is active today in thousands of academies and art schools. His is

assuredly the finest intelligence that ever applied itself to the

painter’s art, and if he failed in will and in fecundity, he has

impressed himself upon posterity as no other Italian painter save

Titian. His art had its limitations, but its capacity for influence, to

which he added the thoughtful eloquence of his written word, seems

limitless; and his glory is imperishable.

Nowhere does the superiority of Florence show more clearly than in the

attitude of her artists to Leonardo. Where his Milanese followers aped

his superficial mannerisms, his Florentine admirers studied and

assimilated his construction in light and shade and his principles of

geometrical composition. Unhappily the early years of the sixteenth

century were a slack time in Florence. Such transitional painters as

Piero di Cosimo, Granacci, Franciabigio, Il Bacchiacca, and Ridolfo

Ghirlandaio were not men to carry forward Leonardo’s discoveries, but

they and others, at least paid him an intelligent homage and sensibly

clarified their practice under his influence. Greater intelligences like

Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto not merely adopted Leonardo’s

canons, but even at certain points criticized them. Both saw the

drawback of Leonardo’s passionate concern with chiaroscuro—that it

flooded the canvas with colorless shadow, tending to reduce the palette

to black and white. Both men then therefore kept their rich shadows

colorful. Both worked for a more compact and intricate composition as

well as for graceful, abstract poses. In these latter endeavors they

simplified and sharpened principles which Leonardo himself only rarely

carried to their logical extreme.

Leonardo retained certain primitive qualities. He seldom reduced his

compositions to dense arrangements of the figures, loving to allow elbow

room and delighting to open up landscape backgrounds. And while in the

“Treatise on Painting” he advocated elaborately balanced and

counterpoised poses, in practice he usually sought an excuse for them in

action. A consummate stylist, he achieved style on a basis of function.

The pose, in his own words, must express “the emotions of the soul.”

Right here his ablest followers took issue with him. Posture with them

no longer expressed specific or individual emotion, but abstract

beauties of grace, dignity or grandeur. The figures no longer do or feel

anything, they are arranged as the general composition and mood of the

picture require. Such gradual advance towards pure style heralds the

advent of the High Renaissance.

[Illustration:

FIG. 159. Fra Bartolommeo. God appearing to two Saints.—_Lucca._

]

Of the somewhat stolid and occasionally sentimental sublimity of Fra

Bartolommeo[57] nothing much need be said except that it was a formative

influence on young Raphael. The Dominican monk is an impressive and

amiable figure personally. Working solely for the glory of God and the

profit of the Convent of San Marco, perturbed by the tragic fate of his

cloister mate, Savonarola, he strove incessantly for a fuller color and

a greater dignity. In his numerous Holy Families he is stately in a

conventional way, nowhere more so than in the unfinished design for a

Madonna with St. Ann, in the Uffizi. Occasionally, in such pictures as

the Deposition of the Uffizi, and the Madonna of Pity at Lucca he

achieves poignant, one is tempted to say operatic effects, forecasting

the mood of the Baroque. Lucca also affords in the great picture God

Adored by Two Saints, Figure 159, a fine example of this painter’s

simple and massive compositions. In the fresco of The Last Judgment,

which, being ruined, is better represented by Copies, Figure 160, we

find an elaboration, in Leonardo’s sense, of the simple symmetries of

Perugino. It is the precedent for Raphael’s monumental frescoes at Rome.

His short career, from about 1495 to 1517, fell on evil times for

Florence. In happier days he might have harmonized more perfectly the

stylist and the lyrical dramatist that, as it was, never quite came to

terms in his grave and noble personality. Yet to have mediated between

Leonardo and Raphael would seem glory enough for any painter, and it was

also no slight service to borrow for Florentine painting, rapidly

becoming starved of color, something of the colorful richness of

Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione.

[Illustration:

FIG. 160. Fra Bartolommeo. Copy of Lost Fresco of Last

Judgment.—_Uffizi._

]

“The Perfect Painter” was what the Florentines called Andrea del

Sarto,[58] and he merited the title. He produced no masterpiece of the

first order, but his Work is singularly uniform on a high level. Its

chief qualities are dignity and grace with a great richness of color.

The deep shadows are warm and full of dusky light, the stylistic poses

of the figures always easy, and the weaving of the complicated groupings

ever tasteful and harmonious. To the refractory art of fresco painting

Andrea brought a richness, depth and variety of color that others hardly

attained in oil painting. Only Luini in the north came near him in this

regard. In short he is a consummate technician, carrying his art as far

as skill and taste unillumined by sheer genius will reach.

[Illustration:

FIG. 161. Andrea del Sarto. Birth.—_Annunziata._

]

Little of his excellence can be laid to his early training. Before 1500

he was working with Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea’s youthful frescoes of

the miracles of S. Filippo Benizzi, in the fore-court of the Annunziata,

show the loose and animated arrangements and the exaggeration of

picturesque landscape features characteristic of his master. But Andrea

learned rather of the time-spirit than of any other master. By 1514 his

art is complete and one may see its flowering in the frescoes of the

Birth of the Virgin, Figure 161, and the Madonna of the Sack, Figure

162, respectively in the fore-court and in the cloister of the

Annunziata. It is a sumptuous and grave kind of design redeemed from

heaviness by its exquisite balance of color masses, and from

conventionality by the hint of portraiture in the artfully disposed

figures.

[Illustration:

FIG. 162. Andrea del Sarto. Madonna of the Sack.—_Annunziata._

]

Scores of times Andrea repeats these perfections in the great

altar-backs required for the new Renaissance chapels. The Four Saints in

the Pitti, the Madonna of the Harpies in the Uffizi, Figure 162a, the

Enthroned Madonna at Berlin may serve among many to illustrate his

accomplishment in this new vein. Somewhat reminiscent of the heavier

monumentality of Fra Bartolommeo, these great pictures add a personal

and disquieting note from the presence of the moody, handsome wife,

Lucrezia whose caprices and infidelities are the tragic element in an

otherwise even life.

[Illustration:

FIG. 162_a._ Andrea del Sarto. Madonna of the Harpies.—_Uffizi._

]

Andrea in his later years won new glories but added no new note to his

art. The monochrome frescoes in the Cloister of the Scalzo representing

the Life of St. John Baptist merely show the old gravity somewhat

exaggerated. The series which extended over many years (1515–1526) is

uneven, and many of these perhaps overestimated compositions are plainly

of student execution. Without his color, Andrea seems somewhat coldly

academic. It was precisely this quality of stylistic grandeur, however,

that appealed paradoxically to the romantic monarch, Francis I. He

called Andrea to France in 1518 and kept him there in honor for a year.

Had Andrea possessed any of the capacities of a teacher and theorist, he

might have inaugurated the Renaissance in France. As it was he remained

merely a harbinger of such inferior but more influential spirits as Il

Rosso and Primaticcio who a few years later were to found the School of

Fontainebleau.

Often the portfolios of a great technician are more thrilling than his

major works. This is the case with Andrea del Sarto. His numerous

sketches in red chalk, have an athletic charm which his painting lacks.

Others have drawn differently in this medium, but no one has drawn

better.

When Andrea died in 1531, “full of glory and domestic trials,” as Vasari

recounts, the normal development of Florentine painting ended, and

Florence had already seen her artistic star dimmed by the rising

splendors of Venice and Rome. Artistically she became a city of wit and

ingenuity, chronicling and criticizing art rather than producing it.

Moreover the obsession of Michelangelo’s sublimity worked havoc with his

dilettante imitators. Some of these have the grace of lucidity, like

Agnolo Bronzino, who (1502–1572)[59] practiced a reactionary sort of

portraiture based on the old tradition of tempera painting. In sheer

beauty of surface, enamel one is tempted to call it, he is little

inferior to his great German contemporary, Hans Holbein, and his sense

of character is only less keen because less individual. In the haughty

patricians surrounding the person of Cosimo, the first grandduke, he

found congenial sitters, Figure 163. In the narrow field of portraiture

he is nearly in the first rank, while in his rare mythologies and

religious pictures his limitations appear painfully. He was a vicious

person, a cold æsthete, with few of the generous virtues that nourish

the soul. Yet in his flinty way he was quite perfect, and as one of the

first professionally unmoral artists he cannot be neglected by the

psychological critic.

[Illustration:

FIG. 164. Pontormo. The Deposition.—_S. Felice._

]

A more appealing figure is his master, Jacopo Carrucci, called from his

birthplace Il Pontormo.[60] His was a tender and deeply religious spirit

with the poet’s capacity for elation and melancholy. In his

altar-pieces, such as the Deposition, Figure 164, at San Felice he seeks

and achieves a positive pathos. Influenced by Michelangelo’s sublimity,

he converts it to more specific and psychological ends. Often he is

restless and over-emphatic as in the frescoes of the Passion in the

cloister of the Florentine Certosa, or in the strangely complicated and

contorted little picture of the Martyrdom of St. Mauritius and his

Legionaries, in the Uffizi. In such work he moves towards the absolute

expressionism of an El Greco, preluding also the more conventional

emotionalism of the Baroque. As a portraitist he had no equal at

Florence except his pupil Bronzino. Often the sensitiveness and

moodiness of his characterizations recall his Venetic contemporary,

Lorenzo Lotto. Even when he is robust he is sensitively psychological,

as in the superb portrait of a Halberdier, Figure 165. Above all he was

a powerful and subtle draughtsman whether with pen or chalk. His line

writhes in a fashion at times sinister, at times singularly blithe, and

his figure sketches have something of the imaginative thrill of the

figure studies of Blake. For the grandducal palace of Poggio a Cajano,

Figure 166, he did in a huge lunette pierced by a great round window a

most original decoration for the odd triangles at the base. The

unconventional fields are filled each by a rather small figure

energetically posed and surrounded by greenery. The thing is at once

monumental and pastoral and its freedom and tonality almost as modern as

a Besnard. I would willingly dwell longer on so sympathetic an artist,

but can only refer the interested reader to Dr. F. M. Clapp’s two

authoritative volumes.

[Illustration:

FIG. 163. Bronzino. Eleonora of Toledo and her son.—_Uffizi._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 165. Pontormo. The Halberdier.—_C. C. Stillman, N. Y._

]

For a century and more after Pontormo’s death in 1556 there are still

occasional artists of talent at Florence, but there is no longer a

Florentine school. The masterpieces of Michelangelo were at Rome, those

of Raphael widely scattered. Conscious of her decline, Florence begins

to import artists—the Flemish portraitist, Sustermans; the Venetian

decorator, Luca Giordano. One of her own abler painters, Francesco

Salviati, attaches himself to the Venetian manner. Being an academic

city, Florence eschews the rugged naturalism of Caravaggio, but has no

longer vitality enough to find a substitute of her own. In the late

sixteenth century her fresco painting sinks to the pompous emptiness

represented by Giorgio Vasari, or by the hardly better mythologies of

the brothers Federigo and Taddeo Zuccaro. In the seventeenth century she

still can produce an idyllist of great romantic and sensuous charm in a

Francesco Furini and a genial illustrator in a Giovanni di San Giovanni.

But such names only suggest the incoherence of the times. Florence is no

longer a main current but an eddy, and what small flood-tide still runs

courses in the more resolute academism of Bologna, which is to be

capable of inspiring a Poussin; and in the raw naturalism of Naples,

which is about to give lessons to a Velasquez.

[Illustration:

FIG. 166. Pontormo. Frescoed Lunette.—_Poggio a Cajano._

]

ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER V

POETRY AND PAINTING IN THE RENAISSANCE

Reversing the maxim _ut pictura poesis_, the Renaissance believed that

painting should be poetical. Indeed the term _poesia_ is commonly

applied to all painting of a mythological or idyllic sort. Angelo

Poliziano’s unfinished but very popular poem on the joust of 1468 is

lavish in descriptions, of which the painters made use. Botticelli

surely got more than a hint for the Birth of Venus from stanzas

xcix-ci of _La Giostra_, though the mood of the picture is wholly

Sandro’s own and unlike the pagan joyousness of Poliziano.

“One saw

Born in the sea, free and joyous in her acts,

A damsel with divine visage

Driven ashore by the ardent zephyrs

Balancing on a shell; and it seemed the heavens rejoiced thereat.”

“True the foam and true the sea you would have said

True the shell, and the blowing of the winds true.

You would have seen the gleam of the Goddess’ eye

And the heavens laugh about her, and the elements.

And the Hours in white garments on the strand,

And the winds toss their spreading soft locks.”

· · · · ·

“You could swear that you could see the goddess coming from the waves

Wringing out her hair with her right hand

And with the left covering the sweet mount of desire,

And the sand, once trodden by her feet,

Clothing itself with grass and flowers.

Then with joyous and expectant glance

You would have seen her clasped by the three nymphs

And wrapped in a starry robe.”

Botticelli’s charming and even slyly humorous picture of Venus with

sleeping Mars, at London, follows afar and discreetly _La Giostra_, I.

stanzas cxxii-iii, but Botticelli has taken the motive out of doors

and otherwise considerably subtilized it. Venus is

“Seated in bed outside the covers

Just released from the arms of Mars

Who, lies backward on her lap

· · · · ·

“Above them and around the tiny loves

Played naked, flying now here now there

· · · · ·

“One fills the quiver with fresh flowers

Then comes and empties it on the bed.”

Poliziano also supplied to Raphael the theme of the Galatea, in the

Farnesina, _Giostra_, I. cxviii (Fig. 192a)

“Two shapely dolphins draw a car;

On it is Galatea who holds the reins,

And they swimming breathe with equal breath.

Around circle the more amorous throng.

One spits out the salt wave, the others circle round;

One seems to play at love and dallies.

The fair nymph with her trusted sisters

Laughs charmingly at their hoarse singing.”

Titian, too, may have had in mind the _Giostra_, I. cxi, when he

composed his Bacchus and Ariadne. (Fig. 260)

“Comes upon a car covered with ivy and rushes

Drawn by two tigers—Bacchus

And with him it seems that fauns and mænads

Tread the deep sand and shout with raised voices.

One we see staggering; others seem to stumble,

One clashes the cymbal; others seem to laugh.

One drinks from a horn, one from his hand.

One has grabbed a nymph, and one turns handsprings.”

LEONARDO AND THE ACADEMIC IDEA OF PAINTING

The extraordinary mixture of liberality and dogmatism, of naturalism

and taste in Leonardo is best illustrated from his own _Trattato della

Pittura_. I quote from the standard edition of H. Ludwig, Vienna,

1882, using his paragraph numbers:

MODELLING IN CHIAROSCURO AS THE PAINTER’S FIRST OBJECT

¶ 412. “The first object of the painter is to make a flat plane appear

as a body in relief and projecting from that plane, and he who in such

art excels the others, deserves the greater praise, and such research,

or rather crown of such science, is born from light and shade, or I

mean chiaroscuro. Then he who flees from shadows, flees also from the

glory of our art among noble spirits and gains it with the ignorant

herd, which desires nothing in painting but beauty of colors,

forgetting entirely the beauty and wonder of showing a flat thing as

if it were in relief.”

ON JUDGING A PAINTER’S WORK

¶ 483. “The first thing is that you consider the figures, if they have

the relief which the place and light demand....

“The second is that the scattering, or rather distribution of the

figures be made according to the way in which you wish the story to

be.

“The third is that the figures be alert and intent on their particular

purpose.”

ON THE MOVEMENTS THAT MARK THE EMOTIONS

¶ 122. “The most important thing which can be found in the theory of

painting are the movements appropriate to the mental state of each

being,—as desire, scorn, wrath, pity and the like.”

THE STEPS IN A PAINTER’S EDUCATION

¶ 82. “Draw first designs of a good master made in the fashion of

nature and not mannered; then from a relief, in the presence of a

drawing made from that relief; then from a good natural object.”

JUDGMENT VERSUS DEXTERITY

¶ 62. “That painter who does not doubt learns little. When the work

surpasses the judgment of the worker, that worker acquires little, and

when the judgment surpasses the work, that work never ceases to grow

better, unless avarice prevents it.”

ON USE OF MEMORY IN THE NIGHT WATCHES

¶ 67. “Also I have proved it to be of no little use to me, when you

find yourself in bed in the dark, to repeat in the imagination the

things studied earlier, or other things of notable sort comprised in

subtle thought, and this is truly a laudable act and useful in fixing

things in memory.”

ON SELECTIVE IMITATION

¶ 58a. “The painter should be solitary and think over what he sees and

discuss with himself, selecting the most excellent parts of the

species of whatever he sees, acting after the fashion of a mirror

which transmutes into as many colors as there are things what is set

before it. And so doing he will seem to be himself a second nature.”

¶ 98. “Winter evenings should be used by young painters in the study

of things prepared in summer, that is bring together all the nudes

which you have made in the summer, and make a choice of the better

limbs and bodies and practice from them and fix them in mind.”

ON HIGH STANDARDS

¶ 59. “If you painter will seek to please the first painters, you will

make your pictures well, because they alone can guide you truthfully,

but if you wish to please those who are not masters, your pictures

will have few foreshortenings and little relief or alert movement, and

thereby you will fail in that part in which painting is held to be an

excellent art, that is in giving an effect of relief where there is

nothing in relief.”

ON AVOIDING HARSH SHADOWS AND SUNLIGHT EFFECTS

¶ 87. “The light cut off from the shade too clearly is greatly blamed

by painters. Hence to avoid such a fault, if you paint bodies in the

open country, you will not make the figures as lighted by the sun, but

imagine some sort of mist or transparent clouds to be interposed

between the object and the sun, whence, since the figure is not

emphasized by the sunlight, the demarcations of light and shade will

not be emphasized.”

ON THE MOST PLEASING LIGHT

¶ 138. “If you have a court yard that can be covered as you wish with

a linen awning, that will be a good light; or when you wish to draw

anyone, draw him in bad weather, towards nightfall, and make the

sitter stand with his back to one of the walls of this court. In the

streets set your mind towards nightfall on the faces of the men and

women, in bad weather, how much grace and sweetness appears in them.”

ON COUNTERPOISE OF THE FIGURE

¶ 88. “Do not have the head turned the way the breast is, nor the arm

the way the leg is; and if the head is turned over the right shoulder

make the parts lower on the left than on the right” [and vice versa].

At first blush this stylistic counsel flatly contradicts Leonardo’s

principle that poses and emotions should express state of mind, but as

a matter of fact many expressive movements obey this law of

counterpoise or active equilibrium. Leonardo himself generally finds

motives for such poses. Such successors as Raphael and Andrea del

Sarto habitually used such poses without other excuse than that of

their own inherent gracefulness.

ON FREEDOM IN MAKING A COMPOSITION

¶ 189. “Have you never considered the poets composing their verses?

They take no trouble to make fine letters, nor do they mind cancelling

some of the verses and making them better. Do you, then, painter, make

the limbs of your figures roughly and attend first to the movements

appropriate to the mental state of the beings composing your story,

rather than to the beauty and rightness of their members, because you

must understand that if such a composition in the rough will meet the

needs of the invention, it will please all the more after it has been

adorned with the perfection appropriate to all its parts. I have seen

in the clouds and spots on the wall what has aroused me to fine

inventions of various things, since these spots though entirely

without perfection in any part, did not lack perfection in their

movements and other actions.”

PAINTING THE GRANDCHILD OF NATURE

¶ 12. “If you shall despise painting, which is the only imitator of

all the apparent works of nature, assuredly you will despise also that

careful investigation which with philosophical and careful speculation

considers all the qualities of forms: the sea, place, plants, animals,

herbage, flowers, which are enveloped in light and shade. And truly

this speculation is science and the legitimate child of Nature, since

painting is born of this nature. But, to speak more correctly, we will

say grandchild of nature, since all apparent things are born of

Nature, of which things painting is born. Hence rightly we shall call

it the grandchild of this nature and the kinsman of God.”

THAT THE PAINTER SHOULD BE SOLITARY

¶ 50. “The painter, or rather designer, should be solitary, and

especially when he is intent on speculations and considerations which

continually appearing before the eyes give matter to be well kept in

memory. And if you are alone, you will be entirely yours. And if you

shall be accompanied by a single companion you will be half yours, and

so much the less as the indiscretion of your companionship shall be

the greater ... And if you would say ‘I will do in my fashion, I will

hold myself apart’ ... one cannot serve two masters. You will fulfil

badly the duty of a companion, and worse the aim of reasoning on the

art ... And if you say ‘I will withdraw myself entirely,’ ... I tell

you you will be held a madman, but, lo, thus doing you will at least

be alone.”

Here Leonardo takes sharpest issue with the easy-going sociable

methods which for generations had held in the painter’s bottega, and

shows himself an individualist of modern type.

RUBENS’ PRAISE OF LEONARDO

Peter Paul Rubens, who had copied Leonardo’s battle-piece, has left

the following perceptive tribute to the genius of his predecessor:

“Nothing escaped him that related to the expression of his subject:

and by the heat of his fancy, as well as by the solidity of his

judgment, he raised divine things by human, and understood how to give

men those different degrees, that elevate them to the character of

heroes.

“The best of the examples which he has left us is our Lord’s Supper,

which he painted at Milan, wherein he has represented the apostles in

places that suit with them, and our Saviour in the most honourable,

the midst of all, having nobody near enough to press or incommode him.

His attitude is grand, his arms are in a loose and free posture, to

show the greater grandeur, while the apostles appear agitated one side

to the other by the vehemence of their inquietude, and in which there

is, however, no meanness, nor any indecent action to be seen. In short

by his profound speculations he arrived to such a degree of

perfection, that it seems to me impossible to speak so well of him as

he deserves, and much more to imitate him.”

_The Art of Painting ... Translated from the French of Monsieur De

Piles_, London about 1725. p. 107 f.

[Illustration:

FIG. 167. Raphael. Count Baldassare Castiglione, author of “the

Courtier.”—_Louvre._

]