forward, the young man in profile beside him, and the man with his back to the spectator in the foreground, are almost exactly reproduced; as is also the person standing on the extreme left, wrapped in a cloak, his chin resting on his hand. The breadth and majesty of this last figure, indeed, inspired yet another artist, more powerful and original than Raphael, an artist who was always ready to cry out against plagiarism, though he himself did not fail to lay the works of his predecessors under contribution. I refer to Michelangelo. Compare the figure of God the Father in his Creation of Eve in the Sistine Chapel with this old man of Leonardo's. The analogy is striking.

In this Adoration of the Magi, which biographers have passed over almost in silence, we have, in fact, the germs of two masterpieces by Michelangelo and by Raphael.

It is only men of genius like Leonardo who can thus lavish, to some extent unconsciously, treasures which make the fortunes of others, great and small.

The background of the cartoon consists of classic ruins, with crumbling arches, beneath which are animated groups of men on foot and on horseback; the double staircase is retained, and several figures are seated on the steps on one side.

Of all the episodes of the sacred story, the Adoration of the Magi is that which lends itself best to the introduction of the hippic element.1 It must therefore have been specially attractive to Leonardo, at all times such an ardent lover of horses.

Without transgressing the rules of sacred imagery, he was able to indulge a taste on which, indeed, he had every reason to congratulate himself. He accordingly gives us some dozen horses in every variety of attitude lying down, standing, resting, walking, rearing, galloping. In the background to the right we have a regular cavalry skirmish, a forecast of that in the Battle of Anghiari; naked combatants struggling among the feet of the horses on the ground, a woman, also naked, flying in terror, etc.2 The central action suffers a little from their

1 We need only recall the superb cavalcade of Gentile da Fabriano's Adoration of the Magi, in the Accademia at Florence; the chargers, fiery or placid, which abound in Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes in the Riccardi Palace, and in Fra Filippo's and Filippino Lippi's pictures in the Uffizi.

2 A horse's head in the Windsor collection seems to bear some relation to the horse

vicinity; but great men alone are privileged to digress in this fashion. The vegetation, always so carefully observed by Leonardo, has not been sacrificed. A magnificent palm rises in the middle distance, near the centre.

One other peculiarity should be noted. Leonardo, a painter exclusively, with a certain contempt for the decorative arts, has not given the costumes of his heroes the richness by which these are generally marked in the art of the Middle Ages and of the early Renaissance.

He has dressed his personages in tunics, togas, or mantles, recalling those of the ancients-one of his rare gleanings from the art of Greece and Rome-but draped with greater freedom. Again, the vessels containing the offerings of the monarchs have none of the magnificence invariably bestowed on them by the primitive painters, and so well adapted to relieve the lines of a composition. They are chalices of simple shape and small size, with covers terminating in knobs.

One of the most learned of our modern art-historians has given an excellent analysis of the technique of the cartoon : "Leonardo," he says, :1 "first made a very careful drawing with pen or brush on the prepared panel; he put the whole into perspective, as the drawing in the Uffizi shows; he then shaded with brown colour; but as he made use of a kind of bitumen, it has lowered very much in tone, and, in his finished works, this bituminous colour has absorbed all the others, and blackened the shadows extravagantly." Vasari, too, described Leonardo's innovations in much the same tone: " He introduced a certain darkness into oil-painting, which the moderns have adopted to give greater vigour and relief to their figures. . . . . Anxious to relieve the objects he represented as much as possible, he strove to produce the most intense blacks by means of dark shadows, and thus to make the luminous parts of his pictures more brilliant; the result being that he gradually suppressed the high lights, and that his pictures have the effect of night-pieces."

Unconsciously or deliberately, Leonardo shows predilections no less standing to the left in the Adoration of the Magi, as does another horse's head, with indications of measurements, in MS. A of the Bibliothèque de l'Institut.

1 Passavant apud Rigollot, Catalogue de l'Euvre de Leonard de Vinci, p. 314.

2 For the progress brought about by Leonardo in the art of modelling, see Brücke and Helmholtz's Principes Scientifiques des Beaux Arts, p. 110-III. Paris, 1878 (tr.

from the German).

For the more or

pronounced with regard to colour harmonies.

less crude harmonies of his predecessors, he substituted a subtle scale, made up of subdued tints, such as bistre and bitumen; in these matters he was more ingenious than Rembrandt himself. Here the theorist confirmed the tendencies of the practitioner. We must read chap. Ixxiv. of the Trattato della Pittura to see with what irony he rallies the mediocre painters who hide

their incompetence under a blaze of gold and of ultramarine.

In another innovation, he meets Masaccio on common ground, if, indeed, his practice was not a reminiscence of the earlier master. Suppressing all idle accessories, he gives the place of honour to the human figure, stripped of vain ornament, and 'reduced to the simplicity of antique costume. This was, indeed, the principle of classic art itself, but his was a classicism invariably warmed and animated by the study of nature. examine his concep

Let us

now

tion of a picture. Leonardo's predecessors had all sacrificed more or less to

literary painting-I mean painting in which ideas, motives, and composition come before a preoccupation with the problems of technique. They were born narrators; narrators now emotional, now amusing, apt in the illustration of some abstract idea by means of a figure or a gesture, skilful commentators, adding expression to the episodes of the Scriptures or the legends of the Saints by a thousand ingenious touches. How far removed were such achievements from Leonardo's ambitions! No artist was ever less disposed to submit to the bondage of literature. He wished his pictures to command admiration for themselves, not for the subjects with which they dealt; his triumphs lay in the solution of some problem of perspective, of illumination, of grouping, above all of modelling. For the rest, he trusted to his own poetical and emotional instincts.

If we consider the invention shown in his figures, we shall find that here, too, Leonardo proclaims the rights of the great historical painter. After Fra Angelico, concurrently with Perugino, and before Michelangelo, he banished portraits of friends or patrons from his sacred pictures. Not that he did not often seek inspiration in real persons, but he subjected them to an elaborate process of modification and assimilation before giving them a place in the sanctuary of art. See, for instance, his Last Supper. In short, he never introduced a portrait in any of his compositions; his characters either purely imaginary, or highly

are

idealised.

These various analyses will make it easy for us to characterise the progress realised, or I should perhaps rather say, the revolution accomplished, by Leonardo in painting. Studying nature with passion, and all the sciences that tend to its more perfect reproduction-anatomy, perspective, physiognomy -and consulting classic models while preserving all the independence proper to his character, he could not fail to combine precision with liberty, and truth with beauty. It is in this final emancipation, this perfect mastery of modelling, of illumination, and of expression, this breadth and freedom, that the master's raison d'être and glory consist. Others may have struck out new paths also; but none travelled further or mounted higher than he.

The best informed and the most enthusiastic of his biographers, the excellent Vasari, has well defined what was in some sort a providential mission. After enumerating all the artistic leaders of the fifteenth century, he adds: "The works of Leonardo da Vinci demonstrated the errors of these artists most completely. He inaugurated the third, or modern manner. Besides the boldness and brilliance of his drawing, the perfection with which he reproduced the most subtle minutiae of nature, he seemed to give actual breath and movement to

his figures, thanks to the excellency of his theory, the superiority of his composition, the precision of his proportions, the beauty of his design, and his exquisite grace; the wealth of his resources was only equalled by the depth of his art ("abbondantissimo di copie, profondissimo di arte"). It would be difficult to say more happily that the supreme evolution of painting is due to Leonardo.

We shall perhaps better appreciate the immeasurable superiority of the Adoration of the Magi if we compare it with certain Florentine works of the same century.

We may take, for instance, Domenico Ghirlandajo's Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi, painted in 1487. Note the timidity of the action, and the stiffness of the horses in the background. As compared with Leonardo's manner, Ghirlandajo's is dry and crude, especially in his frescoes of the History of Santa Fina. Leonardo, thanks to the laws of chiaroscuro, which he strove to bring to perfection all his life long, was able to give his modelling a relief unknown to his predecessors, and to blend his colours with a suavity and morbidezza undreamt of heretofore, especially by Ghirlandajo.

If we turn to Filippino Lippi, we find the living antithesis of Leonardo. The one is brilliant indeed, but superficial; more inclined to literary painting than to the subtleties of design or colour; the other full of earnestness and conviction, gifted in the highest degree with the sense of form and of beauty.

Chance brought Leonardo and Filippino into contact on three several occasions. On the first, as we have seen, Filippino was charged (1483) with the execution of the altar-piece which had been ordered from Leonardo for the Chapel of S. Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. He had to fulfil the same mission again in 1496, and supply the Adoration of the Magi for the monastery of San Donato. On the third occasion, it was Leonardo, on the other hand, who begged Filippino to transfer to him a commission for an altar-piece for the Servites. Filippino, courteous and obliging, readily acceded to his request. But Leonardo, as usual, left the work unfinished, and in 1503 Filippino resumed his former contract, which death alone prevented him from carrying out.