Leonardo da Vinci Read online

  Unity and drama, these are the essential qualities by which Leonardo’s Last Supper is distinguished from earlier representations of the subject. It is worth analysing the means by which these qualities have been achieved. To begin with the setting: we notice that there is nothing to distract the eye from the main theme. ‘In history painting,’ says Leonardo in the Trattato (§ 178), ‘do not ever make so many ornaments on your figures or their setting as will confuse the form and attitudes of the figures or the essential character of the setting.’ Instead of the fanciful, decorative architecture which earlier interpretations of the subject include, the scene of Leonardo’s Last Supper is so bare and severe that most copyists felt bound to invent a more attractive setting. There are no incidental motives—no flying birds, nor gossiping disciples. The vanishing point of the perspective is the principal figure. Every form and every gesture is concentrated. The problem of dramatic and formal concentration, always difficult, is almost insoluble when the subject is thirteen men sitting at a table. The earlier painters did not attempt to subordinate their figures to a single motive, but relied on a purely decorative arrangement. The painters of the Baroque, to whom unity of composition was essential, solved the problem by ingenious tricks of lighting and foreshortening, but in so doing they sacrificed the quietness and clarity of statement suitable to the subject, sometimes turning it, as Tintoretto in S. Paolo, into a scene of violence and confusion in which the Apostles reel and struggle among the servants and unknown onlookers. Leonardo’s solution is in some respects the same as that used in the Adoration, two dynamic masses united and kept in repose by a single point of balance. This seemingly simple arrangement involved the feat of composing the twelve Apostles into two groups of six: which groups should be perfectly coherent, and yet have sufficient movement to give them an interesting relation to the centre. The steps by which Leonardo arrived at his final solution are lost to us. We have very few drawings for the Last Supper, and for the composition only two studies. The more elaborate of these, a red chalk drawing in the Venice Academy, is one of the most puzzling of all Leonardesque relics. It is badly drawn—the Christ’s right arm and hand are childish; and in spite of the factitious animation of the figures they lack the inner life which redeems Leonardo’s most careless scribbles: they are stiff, almost archaic. For these reasons some of the best judges have doubted its authenticity, but the writing above the figures done in the same chalk as the drawing seems to be genuine and we may surmise that Leonardo was interested solely in noting down the order and characteristics of the Apostles. It tells us nothing about the composition, except that, although the drawing must date from about 1495, Leonardo has not yet begun to think of the two groups as wholes, and Judas is still placed on the near side of the table. This last motive also appears on the other surviving study, a pen and ink drawing at Windsor; but here Leonardo is already aiming at dramatic unity, and in a subsidiary sketch on the same sheet he considers the almost unbearably dramatic subject of Our Lord giving the sop to Judas.

  Between these sketches and the final composition an immense labour must have intervened; but unfortunately the drawings and studies in which the great construction gradually took its inevitable shape are almost entirely lost. It is perhaps a criticism of the Last Supper that in the groups of Apostles the evidence of this labour is still too apparent. We can see how Leonardo has varied each action, calculated each interval, balanced every change of direction. He has given us the ideal demonstration of his treatise on painting. What could be more in keeping with his theories than the two groups of Apostles on either side of Christ, turned inwards so that their axes form a kind of echelon of perspective around the central figure: or the way in which, having made the three Apostles on the extreme left look eagerly inward, he makes two on the right look outward, but point inward, so that their intention, meeting the formidable glare of St. Simon, seems to ricochet back along the line of their hands? The building up of such sequences is, no doubt, one of the greatest manifestations of intellectual power in art, but, seen through the medium of copies it remains an intellectual achievement, stupendous, but cold and academic. The centre of the composition upon which these two masses rest, the figure of Christ, springs from a deeper source. It is the unfathomable mystery of Leonardo that with all his apparent coldness, his aloofness from ordinary human feelings, his essential strangeness, he could yet create this figure so simple, so touching, and so universal in its appeal.

  Evidently one cannot look for long at the Last Supper without ceasing to study it as a composition, and beginning to speak of it as a drama. It is the most literary of all great pictures, one of the few of which the effect may be largely conveyed—can even be enhanced—by description. It is the opposite of a picture by one of the great decorative artists, by Paul Veronese, for example, where the actions, distractions, costumes, and expressions of the actors maybe quite unsuitable to the subject and simply chosen for their pictorial effectiveness.

  I need hardly describe, what has been described so often, the variety of gesture which Leonardo has given to the disciples, and the way in which the effect of these gestures is enhanced by contrast; how, for example, the rough impetuous Peter, pugnaciously eager to declare his innocence, contrasts with the resigned St. John, content to sit quietly, because he knows that no one will suspect him, and how St. Peter’s hand, forming a bridge between the heads of St. John and Judas, underlines the contrast between innocence and villainy—le bellezze con le bruttezze, says Leonardo, paiono più potenti l’una per l’altra.{54} All these penetrations, these dramatic inventions, have been analysed once and for all by one of the few men who, by the scale of his genius, was in a position to judge Leonardo-by Goethe. His essay on Bossi’s Cenacolo remains the best literary interpretation of the Last Supper. Very often in reading the description of a picture by a man of letters we feel that what the writer takes to be a stroke of dramatic genius is an accident of which the painter was quite unaware. With Leonardo this is not the case. We know from his notebooks and his theoretical writings on art how much thought he gave to the literary presentation of his subject. He is continually advising the painter to study expressive gestures and suitable actions, and to combine them with effects of variety and contrast. ‘That figure is most praiseworthy’, he says, ‘which, by its action, best expresses the passions of the soul.’ With unusual good fortune we have in one of his pocket-books{55} a note of the gestures suitable to the Last Supper.

  One who was drinking has left his glass in its position and turned his head towards the speaker. Another twists the fingers of his hands together and turns with a frown (con rigide ciglia) to his companion. Another with hands spread open showing the palm, shrugs his shoulders up to his ears and makes a grimace of astonishment (fa la bocca della maraviglia). Another speaks into his neighbour’s ear and the listener turns to him to lend an ear, while he holds a knife in one hand and in the other the loaf half cut through by the knife; and in turning round another, who holds a knife, upsets with his hand a glass on the table.

  In the note these gestures are, so to say, unallotted, and it is interesting to see which ones Leonardo has retained. There is no difficulty in recognizing in St. Andrew the man who shrugs his shoulders and makes the bocca della maraviglia; and St. Peter, who speaks into his neighbour’s ear, still holds the knife. The gesture of the man twisting his fingers together did not sufficiently add to the movement of the composition and has been dropped out; and so has the man with his glass half-way to his lips. Leonardo’s note was made from observation, and as the conception of the Last Supper grew more heroic, these everyday gestures became too trivial. But the man who turns round suddenly and upsets a glass has suffered a curious transformation. The motive has been given to Judas, only instead of a knife he holds the bag, and instead of a glass he upsets the salt, an accident still commemorated by the superstitious.

  This abundance and variety of gesture on which Leonardo expended so much thought is not the characteristic of the Last Suppe
r which appeals most strongly to modern sensibility. Nor do I believe that our lack of appreciation springs solely from a Northern embarrassment in face of the more expressive manners of the South. We feel no uneasiness before the Uffizi Adoration. In part this may be due to the fact that the Adoration is unfinished. The movement of the figures is communicated by the still perceptible movements of the painter’s brush. In the Last Supper the movement is frozen. There is something rather terrifying about all these ponderous figures in action; something of a contradiction in terms in the slow labour which has gone to the perfection of every gesture. And beyond this is a deeper cause. The whole force of gesture, as an expression of emotion, lies in its spontaneity: and the gestures in the Last Supper are not spontaneous. Leonardo, as we have just seen, consciously excluded those motions which approached the nature of genre. He intended the whole scene to be carried through in the highest mood of classical art, and this imposition of classicism on his innate feeling for life is slightly disturbing. The Apostles are too vital to be heroic, too large to be so animated.

  And here we come back to the disastrous change which the whole picture has suffered from the repainting of the heads; for had the original heads been there, with all their pathos and dramatic intensity, the gestures, in a subsidiary rôle, might have lost some of their flavour of artifice. The coarsely painted grimaces which are all that time and restoration have left us, would have horrified Leonardo, for many passages in the Trattato show us the importance he gave to facial expression and describe how the painter must use every artifice to observe it and note it down. To gain any idea of what we have lost we must turn to the few surviving drawings, in particular those two masterpieces, the St. James the greater and the St. Philip at Windsor (Pls 32 and 33); and we must remember that in the painting the dramatic intensity of both heads would certainly have been increased; they would have ceased to be studies from life and have become embodiments of emotional states, as concentrated and complete as the highest creations of classic drama.

  CHAPTER SIX—1497-1503

  BETWEEN the completion of the Last Supper and Leonardo’s departure from Milan, there remained rather less than two years, and we know that these were largely filled with official employments. In the summer of 1498 Leonardo was given a property outside the Porta Vercellina of Milan, and at the same time he was appointed ingegnere camerale. The Duke anticipated the coming French invasion, and much of Leonardo’s time was occupied in planning defences for Lombardy. Of his work as an artist, two undertakings date from these years. The first is his co-operation with Luca Pacioli in his celebrated work Divina Proportione. Pacioli, one of the leading mathematicians of his time, was a native of Borgo San Sepolcro, and had been the friend and pupil of Piero della Francesca, whose researches into perspective and the five regular bodies he incorporated, without acknowledgement, into his own publications. He arrived in Milan in 1496, and we know from Leonardo’s notebooks that the two men were soon on intimate terms. By 1497 they were collaborating on the Divina Proportions. We can trace Leonardo’s influence in some parts of the text, and there is no doubt that he drew the figures which illustrate the 1509 edition: Pacioli says so more than once. These figures consist of capital letters, constructed on a system of proportion, and a number of more elaborate figures of solid geometry. That Leonardo should have devoted so much time to these abstract designs is an instance of how much his creative gifts were dominated by his intellect. I said, when referring to his architecture, that for a Tuscan he was unusually devoid of the sense of abstract harmonies. Yet Pacioli, who had known Piero della Francesca, is never tired of praising Leonardo’s skill. With Piero proportion was a function of the spirit, with Leonardo of the intellect. Piero could not have drawn two lines without giving them some harmonious relationship, just as Leonardo was almost incapable of drawing a line which had not the quality of organic life. Yet by sheer intellectual power, Leonardo was able to conquer this branch of art which was naturally foreign to him.

  During these years the only commission of which we can be certain is the decoration of the Castle. This must have been done in the summer of 1498, for on 23 April the scaffolding was removed from the Sala delle Asse. There is evidence that Leonardo was engaged in decorating another room, the Saletta Negra, but the Sala delle Asse is the only one which has survived. I say survived—but that is not the right word, because when the vault was freed from plaster in 1901, the remains of Leonardo’s fresco was entirely and thickly repainted by an artist named Bassani. He seems to have followed closely the original traces of drawing, for it remains a complex and powerful design, worthy of Leonardo’s ingenuity, but he has completely lost the feeling of light and substance which is characteristic of Leonardo’s studies of plants, and is still perceptible in the damaged paintings of garlands in the decorative lunettes above the Last Supper. In covering his ceiling with branches of foliage, Leonardo was following an ancient motive. The invention goes back to classical times and is known in many mosaics, but it must have appealed equally to the Gothic mind, being in effect no more than an extension to the ceiling of the Verdure tapestry. Leonardo has given this conventional design his own character: indeed, it would be impossible to think of a decorative scheme more in keeping with his love of density—his horror vacui—and its accompanying hatred of abstraction. He has made the branches of his trees perform an elaborate system of interlacings similar to the well-known engravings of knots inscribed Academia Leonardo Vinci.{56} But in spite of their artificial twistings we may be sure that Leonardo’s deep knowledge of plant life gave to the original decoration a real character of growth and movement, and that feeling for the texture of fruit and leaves which we find in Correggio’s decorations in the Camera di San Paolo.

  During these years Ludovico was becoming a less satisfactory patron and we have several fragmentary letters of complaint from Leonardo. ‘I am aware that your Excellency is far too occupied for me to venture to remind you of my small matters, and that the arts have been put to silence.’ Ludovico was indeed occupied. In spite of his frenzied diplomacy the French entered Milan on 5 October 1499, and Ludovico, after regaining the city for a few months, was defeated and sent to France as a prisoner. In December 1499 Leonardo left Milan with Luca Pacioli to seek employment elsewhere. Like a true humanist he recognized no loyalties and knew no native country but his own genius. He had been intimately connected with the Sforzas for eighteen years, but when Ludovico achieved his short-lived return to Milan, Leonardo made no effort to rejoin him. In this he showed his political sense: Leonardo’s most intimate friend, Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara, the architect who had loyally returned to support Ludovico, was hung, drawn, and quartered by Trivulzio. Meanwhile Leonardo, who had contrived to make friends with the French, was intriguing with Trivulzio’s lieutenant, Ligny, for the return of his property in Milan, and in the following year would have been certain of employment by the French, had he not already been in the service of Cesare Borgia.

  On leaving Milan he seems to have gone straight to Mantua. He did not stay there long, but we know from a letter which he received in Venice on 13 March 1500 that he had had time to draw a portrait of Isabella d’Este. He seems to have impressed her all too favourably, for during the next four years she persecuted him with commissions, commanded or entreated, through her agent at Florence. She was particularly insistent that her portrait might be coloured, but as far as we know it remained no more than a cartoon, the general aspect of which has come down to us in a number of replicas. These show her wearing a wide-necked dress, seated with her head in profile, her arms folded before her, in a pose which must have influenced Venetian portraiture for the next ten years. One of these cartoons, now in the Louvre, is usually accepted as the original, but it has been so much reworked that no certain judgement is possible. It has been pricked for transfer so that we can be sure of the main outlines, and these show that the right arm was in a position anatomically false. The arm is shown correctly drawn in an otherwise feeble replica at Oxford,
and the natural inference is that the Louvre cartoon never was Leonardo’s original. All that is left for us to appreciate is the pose, which in its ease and breadth anticipates the Mona Lisa. It is curious that Leonardo, who always sought for movement into depth, should have chosen to represent her head in profile; but we know from his early drawings that he took a pleasure in giving this, the least plastic of poses, a remarkable feeling of relief, and in the portrait of Isabella we may suppose that the austere design of the head was intended as a check to the ample movement of the bust and arms.

  From Mantua Leonardo went to Venice. No doubt he had been there before, to study the horses of St. Mark or to see his old fellow-pupil, Lorenzo di Credi, finishing the Colleoni monument. But since this is the only visit of which we have documentary evidence, it is usually taken as the date of Leonardo’s influence on Venetian art. Vasari, in his life of Giorgione, says that ‘having seen some things from the hand of Leonardo delicately and deeply modelled with dark shadows, they pleased him so much that as long as he lived he made them his models, and in oil painting imitated them greatly.’{57} Modern writers have supposed that this statement was due only to Vasari’s Tuscan patriotism, but there is nothing improbable about it. Among Leonardo’s most personal and spontaneous images, both written and depicted, are many which recall, by their deeply-coloured romanticism, the art of early sixteenth-century Venice. Material evidence of his influence is Giorgione’s picture of Christ carrying the Cross in S. Rocco which certainly derives from a design by Leonardo. This design is known to us as a whole through the replicas of Milanese pupils, evidently taken from a lost cartoon;{58} from Leonardo’s own hand we have only a silverpoint drawing, now appropriately in the Venice Academy. But more important, if less easily demonstrable, is the influence on Giorgione of Leonardo’s whole way of looking at forms. This is most easily seen in a change of feminine type, whereby the wide shallow features of Bellini’s Madonnas was replaced by a more plastic and more regular oval. The head of the gipsy in the Tempesta magnified and seen in isolation is surprisingly Leonardesque; the Giorgione portrait of a lady with laurel leaves in Vienna reflects the same sense of form as the Belle Ferronnière. And as a complement to this ideal beauty, Giorgione like Leonardo portrayed an ideal of ugliness. The old woman with the inscription Col Tempo in the Venice Academy, which I believe to be an authentic Giorgione, derives from Leonardo both in general conception and in the actual type. Finally, the drapery of the Judith, so completely unlike that of Bellini, or, it must be confessed, of Giorgione’s other work, is directly inspired by Leonardo. The intricate folds which swirl out round the left side of the figure can be compared with the drawing of angels in the Venice Academy (P. 126).