In Vasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci as we now read it there are some
variations from the first edition. There, the painter who has fixed the outward
type of Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator, holding lightly
by other men's beliefs, setting philosophy above Christianity. Words of his,
trenchant enough to justify this impression, are not recorded, and would have
been out of keeping with a genius of which one characteristic is the tendency to
lose itself in a refined and graceful mystery. The suspicion was but the
time-honoured form in which the world stamps its appreciation of one who has
thoughts for himself alone, his high indifferentism,
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common forms of things; and in the second edition the image was changed into
something fainter and more conventional. But it is still by a certain mystery in
his work, and something enigmatical beyond the usual measure of great men, that
he fascinates, or perhaps half repels. His life is one of sudden revolts, with
intervals in which he works not at all, or apart from the main scope of his
work. By a strange fortune the works on which his more popular fame rested
disappeared early from the world, as the
Battle of the Standard; or are
mixed obscurely with the work of meaner hands, as the
Last Supper.
His type of beauty is so exotic that it fascinates a larger number than it
delights, and seems more than that of any other artist to reflect ideas and
views and some scheme of the world within; so that he seemed to his
contemporaries to be the possessor of some unsanctified and secret wisdom; as to
Michelet and others to have anticipated modern ideas. He trifles with his
genius, and crowds all his chief work into a few tormented years of later life;
yet he is so possessed by his genius that he passes unmoved through the most
tragic events, overwhelming his country and friends, like one who comes across
them by chance on some secret errand....
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His art, if it was to be something in the world, must be weighted with more
of the meaning of nature and purpose of humanity. Nature was "the true mistress
of higher intelligences." 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.
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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....
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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,
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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....
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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
150the 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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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).] cheap oil paintings
