Leonardo da Vinci Read online

  These similarities of form are accentuated, as Vasari pointed out, by a similar use of light and shade. At first Leonardo’s chiaroscuro seems to differ radically from that of the Venetians in that he professed to use shadow the more scientifically to render relief, they to heighten the emotional effect; or, to speak of actual practice, his shadow was an adjunct of form, theirs of colour. But Leonardo’s chiaroscuro examined in the light of the Trattato seems less rigidly scientific; seems, in fact, to express an emotional approach to nature at least as intense as that of the Venetians. The subjects described in the Trattato—how to paint a night piece, how to paint a storm, how to paint a woman standing in the shadow of an open door—show that he delighted in effects of light and shade of a strangeness and violence which Giorgione and his school were the first to attempt. What could be more like an illustration to the Trattato than the huge painting of the miracle of St. Mark in the Scuola di San Marco, which was possibly designed and partly executed by Giogione? It is true that Leonardo’s paintings as they have come down to us show a much less colouristic use of shadow than his writings would lead us to expect: and no doubt he never used the full Venetian range of colour. But we must remember that of the original aspect of Leonardo’s pictures we can form practically no conception, and that the traditional technique of the Milanese school, through whose copies so much of his work is known, was an opaque monochrome, to which colour was only added in glazes, now frequently lost. Only the least important of his paintings, the Ambrosiana musician, is in anything like its original condition: and it is remarkable for the luminosity of the shadows. Under deep layers of repaint and varnish the shadows of the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks may be equally luminous, and in the Last Supper this quality is still perceptible in the still life on the table and the decorative swags of fruit. The pictures through which Leonardo was known in Venice, therefore, may have shown a treatment of light and shade far closer to Giorgione and the early Titian than we can guess from their present condition or from the replicas of Milanese pupils.

  By 24 April 1500, Leonardo was in Florence again. It was almost twenty years since he had left, and during these years the atmosphere had changed. The spirit of Lorenzo was dead; and had been succeeded by a wave of revivalism in religion and republicanism in politics. In art the heroic and the ecstatic were more in demand than the daintiness and spontaneity of the quattrocento. Of this heroic classical style Leonardo was, in some ways, the precursor and Florence was ready to appreciate his art.

  When he returned (Vasari tells us) he found that the Servite brothers had commissioned Filippino to paint the altar-piece of the high altar of the Annunziata; Leonardo said that he would gladly have undertaken such a work and when he heard this Filippino, like the good fellow he was, withdrew. The friars, in order that Leonardo might paint it, took him into their house and bore the expense of himself and all his household; and so things went on for some time, and he did not even make a beginning. But at last he made a cartoon wherein were Our Lady and St. Anne and a Christ, which not only filled all artists with wonder, but, when it was finished men and women, young and old, continued for two days to crowd into the room where it was exhibited, as if attending a solemn festival: and all were astonished at its excellence.

  Such popular enthusiasm would hardly have been possible in Milan, and helps us to understand why the five years Leonardo spent in Florence were more productive than the preceding eighteen years spent in the north of Italy.

  Two representations of the Virgin and St. Anne by Leonardo have come down to us: the cartoon at Burlington House (Pl. 34), and the unfinished painting in the Louvre. It used to be assumed that the cartoon which Vasari describes was either that now at Burlington House, or a cartoon for the Louvre picture. We can be quite sure that it was not the Burlington House cartoon. During March and April of 1501 Isabella d’Este made one of her attempts to procure a picture from Leonardo. She communicated through her agent Fra Pietro da Novellara. This unhappy man was forced to write a series of letters tactfully conveying Leonardo’s unwillingness to work for her, and, fortunately for us, he hid his failure under accounts of Leonardo’s occupations. In one of these he describes a cartoon which must, from the date, be that mentioned by Vasari, and says that the Child Christ is leaving the arm of his Mother and has seized a lamb which he seems to be pressing to him. Now, there is no lamb in the Burlington House cartoon, and critics have therefore argued that the cartoon made for the Annunziata was the cartoon for the Louvre picture. But in so doing they did not read Fra Pietro’s description carefully enough.

  The mother (he goes on to say), half rising from St. Anne’s lap, is taking the Child to draw it from the lamb, that sacrificial animal, which signifies the passion. While St. Anne, rising slightly from her seat, seems as if she would hold back her daughter, so that she would not separate the Child from the lamb, which perhaps signifies that the Church did not wish to prevent the Passion of Christ. These figures are life-size, but they are in a small cartoon because all are seated or bent, and each one is placed before the other, to the left.

  Here is a very important motive and a clear description, which do not fit the Louvre picture. St. Anne is not making any attempt to restrain the Virgin; and the figures are not placed before each other to the left, but to the right. Professor Suida has pointed out that a painting by Brescianino in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, which obviously derives from Leonardo, exactly fulfils all the conditions of Fra Pietro’s description. The figures are placed before each other to the left, and are noticeably large in relation to the size of the canvas; and the St. Anne is attempting to hold back her daughter. To this evidence I may add the fact, not mentioned by Suida, that a Leonardo drawing at Windsor (P. 183) strongly suggests the St. Anne’s head as we see it in the Brescianino. Further evidence is the small Raphael Holy Family with the Lamb which has always been recognized as having some connexion with the Leonardo cartoon of 1501. It has no resemblance to either the Burlington House cartoon or the Louvre picture, but is closely related to the design of the Brescianino. I believe therefore that Suida is right, and that the cartoon of 1501 is known to us only in this indirect manner. According to Vasari the original was sent to France and it is not surprising that it is lost: only curious that we should know so few reminiscences of what was apparently one of Leonardo’s most popular works, and unfortunate that our closest replica is by a painter so little able to interpret the spirit of Leonardo’s design as a Raphaelesque Sienese. From Brescianino’s copy we can hardly begin to criticize Leonardo’s lost original, but we can say, I think, that it showed a more evolved design than the Burlington House cartoon. Iconographically, too, the introduction of the Lamb would suggest a later date. If this is correct, it confirms the old tradition, quoted by Padre Resta, that the Burlington House cartoon was executed in Milan before 1500. A picture by Luini in the Ambrosiana, which is taken from the cartoon, also supports this tradition. It could be dated between the completion of the Last Supper in 1497 and Leonardo’s departure from Milan in 1499—two years, as we have seen, less fully occupied than usual.

  By common consent the Burlington House cartoon is one of Leonardo’s most beautiful works, and it is even excluded from Mr. Berenson’s anathema.{59} ‘There is something truly Greek,’ he says, ‘about the gracious humanity of the ideals here embodied, and it is no less Greek as decoration. One can scarcely find draped figures contrived in a more plastic way without going back centuries to those female figures which once were clustered together on the gable of the Parthenon.’ Leonardo, with his love of mystery and agitation, was essentially un-Greek, and the classical elements in his work, like the geometrical, are a result of study, not predisposition. But in the cartoon the draperies have a breadth and flow remarkably similar to the group of Fates, and prove how deeply Leonardo’s studies had enabled him to enter into the classical tradition. The cartoon is also the one of his works which justifies the popular notion of his art. The shadowy, smiling heads, the tender mysterious glances, the p
ointing hand, and those two high-sounding devices, chiaroscuro and contraposto, all are present in their most acceptable form. This is therefore a convenient point at which to return to a question touched upon in our survey of the Trattato: the question of how far Leonardo’s study of shadow and twisting movement led to a certain coldness and artificiality in his later work.

  If theory is a true reflection of sensibility in intellectual terms, as was perspective to Piero della Francesca, it can give a painter’s work an added tautness and coherency. If it is made the pretext for fantasy, as was perspective by Uccello or mannerism by El Greco, theory can actually liberate. But if, by imposing a self-created academism, it deadens the natural sensibility, as with how many painters from Raphael to Monet, it is disastrous. Leonardo, like Seurat, seems to tremble between the first and last possibility. His theories reflect his creative instincts, but by intellectual elaboration they are made dangerously stiff and pressing. For example, his love of twisting movement was an instinct, visible, as we have seen, in his earliest work; and becoming more pronounced as his sense of form becomes more liberated. His innumerable studies of waves, knots, and plaited hair were not done in pursuit of a theory, but in satisfaction of an appetite. But of this instinct he made a theory. ‘Always make the figure, he wrote, ‘so that the breast is not turned in the same direction as the head. Let the movement of the head and arms be easy and pleasing, with various turns and twists.’ So with chiaroscuro. He had never used the bright colours of the quattrocento. His early work is largely distinguishable by its mysterious twilit tones; and this instinct, too, found confirmation in the scientific investigations into the nature of light and shade, described on p. 76. As a result, I think that Leonardo’s theories of light and shade led him to push his chiaroscuro a little further than his sensibility alone would have warranted. We shall see an example of this when we come to examine the second version of the Virgin of the Rocks. The Paris picture shows Leonardo’s natural feeling for darkness in the general setting, but the figures themselves are lit by more or less diffused rays: in the London picture the light comes from a single source and is concentrated on the heads so that a large part of each is in shadow. The result is a loss of colour and transparency which reminds us disagreeably of Leonardo’s followers; for whatever the effect of chiaroscuro and contraposto on Leonardo himself, on his imitators it was disastrous. He had provided them with a style, the true meaning of which they could not understand, and one which was peculiarly dangerous to mediocrities. A bad picture in the quattrocento style still has the merit of bright decorative colour; even its crudities may be a source of charm. A bad picture in the style of Leonardo is a horror of black shadows and squirming shapes.

  These two devices had an influence far beyond Leonardo’s own circle; and Vasari was right when he made them the turning point in the history of painting. The desire to lead the eye into the background by arranging the main lines diagonally to the picture plane and the theory that this movement should be achieved by smooth and continuous curves: these were to become essential qualities of Baroque. There was of course an important distinction between Leonardo and the Baroque painters. With him the movement is confined to the main group, which is detached from the background, like a piece of sculpture seen through a window; with the Baroque the diagonal serpentine movement is extended to the whole surface of the picture. But Correggio, who first conceived the true Baroque composition, never disguised his debt to Leonardo.

  In his use of light and shade, Leonardo was the precursor of all subsequent European painting. Next to Giotto, it was he who put it on the road which led it away from the other painting styles of the world. After his time no one could go back to the clear tones of the old linear method—the maniera secca e cruda, as Vasari called it: no one, that is to say, until the youthful Ingres. This tendency in European art is usually called scientific; and we have seen that its inventor started from scientific premises. Yet, throughout, a strong contrast of light and shade has been employed, not as a branch of pictorial science but as a means of expressing an emotional attitude. Rembrandt is the least academic of great painters. And Leonardo, in all his work, most of all perhaps in the Burlington House cartoon, uses chiaroscuro with a romantic intensity unrelated to the scientific diagrams of the Trattato.

  On 14 April 1501, a few weeks after his description of the St. Anne cartoon, Fra Pietro da Novellara writes that he has been introduced to Leonardo and found him at work on a Madonna and Child for Florimond Robertet, secretary to the French King. He describes the picture with his usual accuracy—the Child has seized Our Lady’s yarn winder and, holding it as if it were the Cross, gazes at it lovingly. The original of this composition is lost, but the number of surviving copies show that it must have been one of his most popular pictures; and this is easy to understand. For contemporary judgement was almost as conservative in the Renaissance as it is today, and Leonardo must by this time have become what is called a difficult artist. Perugino was often spoken of as his equal, and sometimes preferred, and so we can imagine that Leonardo’s patrons were relieved when he gave them something which rivalled Perugino in sweetness and which his earlier work had taught them to understand. As far as we can judge from the best copies,{60} the Madonna of the Yarn Winder was close in style to the Paris Virgin of the Rocks. In spirit it is similar to the kneeling Madonna with the playing Children, and shows that Leonardo could still relax into the happy, tender mood of his first Florentine drawings. We must suppose that in execution it was similar to the Mona Lisa, subtler and solider than the early Madonnas, but of this our only evidence is a red chalk drawing at Windsor (12,514), a study from the model of the Virgin’s shoulders, which combines firmness of structure with the delicate pearly quality of a Watteau.

  This is the only other painting we hear of before 1502, for during these two years Leonardo was almost entirely given up to other pursuits. ‘He is working hard at Geometry and has no patience with his brush’ writes Fra Pietro in one letter; and in the next ‘his mathematical experiments have so distracted him from painting that the sight of a brush puts him out of temper’. Finally Leonardo took the same means of escape from painting as he had attempted twenty years earlier: he took service as a military engineer. This time his engagement was more serious. His new master was Cesare Borgia.

  Like Leonardo, Cesare combined extreme realism in calculation with aims so ambitious as to seem, at this safe distance of time, little more than waking dreams. But unlike Leonardo, he also had the will to push matters to conclusions. This new allegiance absorbed all Leonardo’s energies. At the end of May he was in Piombino, making plans for draining the marsh; in June he was summoned by one of Cesare’s captains, Vitellozzo Vitelli, to assist in the rebellion of Arezzo against his native Florence. To this end he made some of the beautiful maps now at Windsor. On 20 June he accompanied Cesare in his perfidious attack on Urbino; and there he remained for a month, on close terms, as it seems, with Vitellozzo and his mysterious leader. It was during this month that he first encountered another great personality of the Renaissance, with whom he was destined to become intimate, Niccolo Machiavelli, who visited Urbino as Florentine envoy in June. In August Leonardo was in Cesena, where he probably designed the canal to Porto Cesenatico and left numerous plans for fortifying the city, some of which have survived; and at this time he received a patent from Cesare which refers to him as nostro prestantissimo et dilectissimo familiare architetto et ingegnere generale, and gives him absolute power to command and requisition what he needs for his work. In October he and his leader were shut up in Imola for several weeks, and it may have been in this rare period of enforced idleness that Leonardo was able to make the red chalk drawing now at Turin of Cesare’s head from three different angles. It shows his exquisitely curled, blond beard, which must have delighted Leonardo, and the curiously northern—we might say Düreresque—look which distinguished all the Borgias. Leonardo had always aspired to the life of action, and never before had it lain open to him with s
uch liberality and such promise. But the life of action has its drawbacks. On 31 December 1502 Leonardo’s friend, Vitellozzo Vitelli, was strangled by Cesare’s orders, and two months later Leonardo was back in Florence. The three years which follow were perhaps the most productive of his whole career as a painter.

  Fra Pietro da Novellara, in one of his earlier letters, had described how ‘two of Leonardo’s pupils were doing some portraits and he from time to time put a touch on them’. This had evidently been his practice throughout the later part of his Milanese period and several portraits which puzzle connoisseurs, for example the man in the Brera inscribed Vita si scias uti longa est, must be the result of co-operation between pupil and master. In view of Fra Pietro’s clear description of Leonardo’s workshop method it is obviously difficult to say which pupil has been employed, especially since our evidence for their individual styles is extremely scanty. As I have said, Boltraffio is one of the few whose later work affords some clue as to what he may have painted when in Leonardo’s studio. Marco d’Oggiono, whose name is linked with his as one of Leonardo’s earliest recorded pupils, is known from two monstrous altar-pieces in the Brera, but we cannot trace his peculiarly revolting style in any product of Leonardo’s workshop except in his Ascension of the Virgin in the Brera, which may derive in part from a design by his master. Although Vasari tells us that ‘there are certain works in Milan that are said to be by Salai, but which were retouched by Leonardo’ nothing can be attributed to him on internal evidence, unless it be some childish scribbles on Leonardo’s drawings. In despair scholars have been forced to invent imaginary pupils—the master of the Archinto portrait, the pseudo-Boltraffio, the so-called Giampetrino. Meanwhile, Leonardo’s notebooks contain numerous records of pupils about whom we know absolutely nothing—Bartolommeo, Bonifazio, Lorenzo, Giulio, Galeazzo, Benedetto, Gherardo, Joatti, Arrigo, il Fanfoia. Leonardo’s workshop in Milan must have contained craftsmen of all sorts to carry out his multifarious designs for the Sforzas, and many of the pupils mentioned in his notes were apparently machine-makers, locksmiths, glass-cutters, etc. During his years in Florence a greater proportion of his pupils must have been painters, but with one or two exceptions, like the Spaniard Fernando de Llanos, we cannot trace their subsequent work: and we must suppose that in Leonardo’s studio, with the help and stimulus of the master, their work reached a level of attainment so high as to be unrecognizably different from their independent efforts.