PIERO FIRST

OF

THE GENIUS OF LEONARDO-HIS CHILDHOOD -HIS FAMILY-SER
STUDIES AND EARLIEST ATTEMPTS-IN VERROCCHIO'S STUDIO-METHODS
FELLOW-STUDENTS: PERUGINO, LORENZO DI CREDI, ATALANTE

TEACHING-HIS

-MASTER AND PUPIL.

LIFE STUDY.

I

N Leonardo da Vinci we have the most perfect embodiment of the modern intellect, the highest expression of the marriage of art and science: the thinker, the poet, the wizard whose fascination is unrivalled. Studying his art, in its incomparable variety, we find in his very caprices, to use Edgar Quinet's happy phrase with a slight modification: "the laws of the Italian Renaissance, and the geometry of universal beauty."

It is true, unhappily, that setting aside his few completed works-the Virgin of the Rocks, the Last Supper, the Saint Anne, and the Mona Lisa-Leonardo's achievement as painter and sculptor is mainly present to us in marvellous fragments. It is to his drawings we must turn to understand all the tenderness of his heart, all the wealth of his imagination. To his drawings therefore, we must first call attention.

Two periods of human life seem to have specially fixed Leonardo's

B

attention adolescence, and old age; childhood and maturity had less interest for him. He has left us a whole series of adolescent types, some dreamy, some ardent.

In all modern art, I can think of no creations so free, superb, spontaneous, in a word, divine, to oppose to the marvels of antiquity. Thanks to the genius of Leonardo, these figures, winged, diaphanous, yet true in the highest sense, evoke a region of perfection to which it is their mission to transport us. Let us take two heads that make a pair in the Louvre; unless I am mistaken, they illustrate Classic Beauty, and the Beauty of the Renaissance period. The first (No. 384) represents a youth with a profile pure and correct as that of a Greek cameo, his neck bare, his long, artistically curled hair bound. with a wreath of laurel. The second (No. 382, Salle des Boites) has the same type, but it is treated in the Italian manner, with greater vigour and animation; the hair is covered by a small cap, set daintily on the head; about the shoulders there are indications of a doublet, buttoned to the throat; the curls fall in natural, untrained locks. Who cannot see in these two heads the contrast between classic art, an art essentially ideal and devoted to form, and modern art, freer, more spontaneous, more living.

When he depicts maturity, Leonardo displays vigour, energy, an implacable determination; his ideal is a man like an oak-tree. Such is the person in profile in the Royal Library at Windsor, whose massive features are so firmly modelled. This drawing should be compared with the other of the same head, at an earlier age.

Old age in its turn passes before us in all its diverse aspects of majesty or decrepitude. Some faces are reduced to the mere bony substructure; in others we note the deterioration of the features; the hooked nose, the chin drawn up to the mouth, the relaxed muscles, the bald head. Foremost among these types is the master's portrait of himself; a powerful head, with piercing eyes, under puckered eyelids, a mocking mouth, almost bitter in expression, a delicate, well-proportioned nose, long hair, and a long disordered beard; the whole suggestive of the magus, not to say the magician.

If we turn to his evocations of the feminine ideal, the same freshness, the same variety delight us here. His women are now candid,

now enigmatic, now proud, now tender, their eyes misty with languors, or brilliant with indefinable smiles. And yet, like Donatello, he was one of those exceptionally great artists in whose life the love of woman seems to have played no part. While Eros showered his arrows all around the master, in the epicurean world of the Renaissance; while Giorgione and Raphael died, the victims of passions too fervently reciprocated; while Andrea del Sarto sacrificed his honour to his love for his capricious wife, Lucrezia Fedi; while Michelangelo himself, the sombre misanthrope, cherished an affection no less ardent than respectful for Vittoria Colonna, Leonardo, consecrating himself without reserve to art and science, soared above all human weaknesses; the delights of the mind sufficed him. He himself proclaimed it in plain terms: "Fair humanity passes, but art endures. (Cosa bella mortal passa e non arte.)"

No artist was ever so absorbed as he, on the one hand by the search after truth, on the other, by the pursuit of an ideal which should satisfy the exquisite delicacy of his taste. No one ever made fewer sacrifices to perishable emotions. In the five thousand sheets of manuscript he left us, never once does he mention a woman's name, except to note, with the dryness of a professed naturalist, some trait that has struck him in her person: "Giovannina has a fantastic face; she is in the hospital, at Santa Catarina." This is typical of his tantalising brevity.

From the very first, we are struck by the care with which Leonardo chose his models. He was no advocate for the frank acceptance of nature as such, beautiful or ugly, interesting or insignificant. For months together he applied himself to the discovery of some remarkable specimen of humanity. When once he had laid hands on this Phoenix, we know from the portrait of the Gioconda with what tenacity he set to work to reproduce it. It is regrettable that he should not have shown the same ardour in the pursuit of feminine types, really beautiful and sympathetic, seductive or radiant, that he showed in that of types of youths and old men, or of types verging on caricature. It would have been so interesting to have had, even in a series of sketches, a whole iconography by his hand, in addition to the three or four masterpieces on which he concentrated his powers; the unknown Princess of the Ambrosiana, Isabella d'Este, the Belle Ferronière, and

the Gioconda. How was it that all the great ladies of the Italian Renaissance did not aspire to be immortalised by that magic brush? Leonardo's subtlety and penetration marked him out as the interpreter par excellence of woman; no other could have fixed her features and analysed her character with a like commingling of delicacy and distinction.

And yet, strange to say, by some curious. and violent revulsion, the artist who had celebrated woman in such exquisite transcriptions, took pleasure in noting the extremes of deformity in the sex whose most precious apanage is beauty. In a word, the man of science came into conflict with the artist; to types delicious in their youthful freshness, he opposes the heads of shrews and im

(Windsor Library)

beciles, every variety of repulsive distortion. It would almost seem--to borrow an idea from Champfleury as if he sought to indemnify himself for having idealised so much in his pictures.

The Italian master,"

adds Champfleury, "has treated womankind more harshly than the professed caricaturists, for most of these, while pursuing man with their sarcasms, seem to protest their love for the beautiful by respecting woman."

As a sculptor, Leonardo distinguished himself by the revival and

(Windsor Library)