Leonardo da Vinci Read online

  On his return to Florence in 1503, however, Leonardo did execute one portrait entirely with his own hand. This portrait still exists, though hardly as Leonardo would wish us to see it. Before looking at the original we should read Vasari’s description. ‘The eyes had that lustre and watery sheen which is always seen in real life, and around them were those touches of red and the lashes which cannot be represented without the greatest subtlety....The nose, with its beautiful nostrils, rosy and tender, seemed to be alive. The opening of the mouth, united by the red of the lips to the flesh tones of the face, seemed not to be coloured but to be living flesh.’ Red, rosy, tender, it might be the description of a Fragonard. Who would recognize the submarine goddess of the Louvre? (Pl. 35).

  How exquisitely lovely the Mona Lisa must have been when Vasari saw her; for of course his description of her fresh rosy colouring must be perfectly accurate. She is beautiful enough even now, heaven knows, if we could see her properly. Anyone who has had the privilege of seeing the Mona Lisa taken down, out of the deep well in which she hangs, and carried to the light will remember the wonderful transformation that takes place. The presence that rises before one, so much larger and more majestical than one had imagined, is no longer a diver in deep seas. In the sunshine something of the warm life which Vasari admired comes back to her, and tinges her cheeks and lips, and we can understand how he saw her as being primarily a masterpiece of naturalism. He was thinking of that miraculous subtlety of modelling, that imperceptible melting of tone into tone, plane into plane, which hardly any other painter has achieved without littleness or loss of texture. The surface has the delicacy of a new-laid egg and yet it is alive: for this is Pater’s ‘beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh little cell by cell’—a phrase which more than any other in that famous cadenza expresses Leonardo’s real intention.

  Familiarity has blinded us to the beauty of the Mona Lisa’s pose. It is so easy, so final, that we do not think of it as a great formal discovery until we rediscover it in Raphael’s Maddalena Doni or Corot’s Dame à la Perle. Where the romantic overtones are less insistent we are freer to contemplate formal relationships, and we see, in the Raphael for example, how carefully the axes of head and bust and hands are calculated to lead us round the figure with an even, continuous movement. A proof that Leonardo’s contemporaries felt the value of this invention is the number of pupils’ copies in which the figure is shown undraped. It is possible that Leonardo did a large drawing of this subject in order to realize more fully the implications of the pose, and from this there derives the many pupils’ versions, including an accomplished cartoon at Chantilly. At all events, a nude figure in the attitude of the Mona Lisa was well-known in France in the early sixteenth century, and formed part of the stock in trade of the Fontainebleau painters on the frequent occasions when they had to portray royal favourites in their baths.

  Once we leave these purely historical considerations, we are surrounded by mist and mirage. The English critic, above all, is embarrassed by Pater’s immortal passage ringing in his ears, and reminding him that anything he may write will be poor and shallow by comparison. Yet the Mona Lisa is one of those works of art which each generation must reinterpret. To follow M. Valery and dismiss her smile as un pli de visage, is to admit defeat. It is also to misunderstand Leonardo, for the Mona Lisa’s smile is the supreme example of that complex inner life, caught and fixed in durable material, which Leonardo in all his notes on the subject claims as one of the chief aims of art. A quarry so shy must be approached with every artifice. We can well believe Vasari’s story that Leonardo ‘retained musicians who played and sang and continually jested in order to take away that melancholy that painters are used to give to their portraits’; and we must remember the passage in the Trattato (§ 135) which describes how the face yields its subtlest expression when seen by evening light in stormy weather. In this shunning of strong sunlight we feel once more the anti-classical, we might say the un-Mediterranean, nature of Leonardo. ‘Set her for a moment’, says Pater, ‘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.’ In its essence Mona Lisa’s smile is a gothic smile, the smile of the Queens and Saints at Rheims or Naumburg, but since Leonardo’s ideal of beauty was touched by pagan antiquity, she is smoother and more fleshly than the Gothic saints. They are transparent, she is opaque. Their smiles are the pure illumination of the spirit; in hers there is something wordly, watchful, and self-satisfied.

  The picture is so full of Leonardo’s demon that we forget to think of it as a portrait, and no doubt an excellent likeness, of a young Florentine lady of twenty-four. She is often described as Leonardo’s ideal of beauty, but this is false, since the angel in the Virgin of the Rocks and the two St. Annes show that his ideal was more tranquil and more regular. None the less, she must have embodied something inherent in his vision. How else can one account for the fact that while he was refusing commissions from Popes, Kings, and Princesses he spent his utmost skill and, as we are told, three years in painting the second wife of an obscure Florentine citizen? We may speculate with Pater on the relationship of the living Florentine to this creature of his thought—‘by what strange affinities had the dream and the person grown up thus apart and yet so closely together’. At least we can be sure that his feeling for her was not the ordinary man’s feeling for a beautiful woman. He sees her physical beauty as something mysterious, even a shade repulsive, as a child might feel the physical attraction of his mother. And as often with Leonardo, this absence of normal sensuality makes us pause and shiver, like a sudden wave of cold air in a beautiful building.

  Behind the Mona Lisa stretches a circle of rocky spires and pinnacles which sustain the mood of her smile. This is Leonardo’s most characteristic landscape, as quintessential as the figure it surrounds, and we may suitably digress to consider his backgrounds in general. From his earliest work he had felt that the only possible background to a picture was a range of fantastic mountain peaks. He had rebelled instinctively against the landscapes taught in Verrocchio’s shop, the tranquil undulations of Perugino, or the neat man-made landscapes which his Florentine contemporaries had imitated from Flemish art. To him landscape seems to have represented the wildness of nature, the vast, untamed background of human life; so the resemblance of his mountains to the craggy precipices of Chinese painting is no accident, for the Chinese artist also wished to symbolize the contrast between wild nature and busy, organized society. Yet between Leonardo and the Chinese there is also a profound difference. To the Chinese a mountain landscape was chiefly a symbol, an ideograph of solitude and communion with nature, expressed in the most correct and elegant forms which the artist could command. To Leonardo a landscape, like a human being, was part of a vast machine, to be understood part by part and, if possible, in the whole. Rocks were not simply decorative silhouettes. They were part of the earth’s bones, with an anatomy of their own, caused by some remote seismic upheaval. Clouds were not random curls of the brush, drawn by some celestial artist, but were the congregation of tiny drops formed from the evaporation of the sea, and soon would pour back their rain into the rivers. Thus, Leonardo’s landscapes, however wildly romantic his choice of subject matter, never take on the slightly artificial appearance of the Chinese. To realize the deep knowledge of natural appearance behind them, we have only to compare the background of the Mona Lisa, in some ways the most romantic of all, with the caricature of Leonardo’s landscape in such a schoolpiece as the Resurrection, in Berlin, where the mountains are arranged like the scenery in a toy theatre.

  The period of the Mona Lisa is no arbitrary point at which to examine Leonardo’s landscapes, because to about this period belong a number of the landscape drawings at Windsor. One of these, a red chalk drawing of a storm breaking over a valley in the Alps (Pl. 36), must date from a few years earlier, and is one of the studies from nature which precede the background of t
he Mona Lisa. The way in which a complex panorama is compressed into a few square inches recalls Turner, though even in such a romantic subject we feel the Italian grasp of formal design beside which a Turner looks unsteady.

  The landscape drawings of about 1503 are less romantic. They show the influence of Leonardo’s practical pursuits during the preceding years, his map-making for Cesare Borgia, and his studies of watersheds and canalization. Many of them are done from a high point of view—some are almost maps—and contain rivers or canals. The most exquisite are those drawn with short delicate strokes of the pen in a pale ink impossible to reproduce (P. 270 to P. 278). They have a Japanese fantasy and precision in the placing of the chief accents, as if Leonardo’s vision, in admitting some flavour of actual life into his ideal landscapes, has undergone the same process by which Chinese painting was transformed into the print of Hokusai and Hiroshige.

  The range of Leonardo’s interest in nature is further shown by a group of plant studies, done at about the same period as these panoramic landscapes. He drew flowers throughout his life. The grasses in the Uffizi Annunciation and the flowers in the Munich Madonna are already the work of someone who understands the inner nature of plant life. Vasari and the Anonimo tell us of a cartoon of Adam and Eve ‘in a meadow with an infinite number of flowers’ of which not a trace remains; and the second entry on the list quoted on p. 47 is ‘many flowers, drawn from nature’—all now lost. The only drawings of plants of this early period are in the pages of MS. B, and can be connected with the Virgin of the Rocks; to a later period, about the years 1503-6, belong ten studies of flowers at Windsor (P. 270 to P. 278). Technically, they are amongst Leonardo’s most miraculous drawings (Pls 37 and 38). The majority are in red chalk, on prepared paper, a medium more colouristic than precise; yet Leonardo has given the greatest possible fullness of definition. No one but Watteau seems to have been able to sharpen his chalk to such a fine, firm point, let alone use it. In others, he has added touches with a pen to increase definition. In the finest of all, pen and chalk are equally combined, giving a wide range of tone which might have tempted a less learned draughtsman into facile effectiveness. A masterpiece of this kind is the study of a St. of Bethlehem among swirling grasses (Pl. 39) which combines the rhythmic movement of his hand with the microscopic steadiness of his eye, so that it becomes an essential token of his art when freed from all conscious intentions, dramatic or professional.

  As usual it is hard to say how far these studies were made for their own sakes and how far they were preparatory to a picture. That they and others like them were used in a picture is certain. This was the lost picture of Leda and the Swan which, as all the copies show, contained a profusion of flowers and grasses extraordinary even for Leonardo. Both the Anonimo and Lomazzo record that Leonardo painted a Leda which was taken to France in the sixteenth century. Cassiano del Pozzo who saw it in Fontainebleau in 1625 describes it in detail—‘a standing figure of Leda almost entirely naked, with the swan at her feet and two eggs, from whose broken shells come forth four babies. This piece, though somewhat dry in style, is exquisitely finished, especially in the woman’s breast; and for the rest the landscape and the plant life are rendered with the greatest diligence. Unfortunately, the picture is in a bad way because it is done on three long panels which have split apart and broken off a certain amount of paint.’ The picture is in inventories of Fontainebleau of 1692 and 1694, but does not appear in them again, and Carlo Goldoni, visiting Versailles in 1775, can find no trace or memory of it. He adds that it is not in the list of pictures destroyed, as he says, from misplaced feelings of devotion, so the tradition that it was burnt by order of Madame de Maintenon because of its indecency is probably without foundation.

  Cassiano del Pozzo’s description shows that the Leda was one of Leonardo’s largest and most important panels and it is worth making some effort to reconstruct it correctly. Our materials for doing so are relatively abundant. In the first place, we have Leonardo’s own drawings of the head and bust;{61} then a pen drawing by Raphael evidently copying Leonardo’s cartoon which shows the whole figure and the babies; a red chalk drawing in the Louvre by a close pupil of Leonardo and numerous painted versions by pupils and contemporaries.

  We can divide these copies into two distinct groups. The first, which is represented by Raphael’s drawing, the Louvre drawing, a picture by Bugiardini in the Borghese, and a copy formerly in the Collection of M. Richeton, shows Leda with her body so far twisted round that her left breast is in profile and the line of her right arm comes almost down to her hip. She seems to be straining away from the swan’s bill. The children are not disposed regularly as in the other group of copies, though the Raphael drawing and the Richeton version contain a baby in roughly the same attitude. Since Raphael’s drawing belongs to his Florentine period, this version of the Leda must have been completed before 1504. We may infer that it was no more than a cartoon or large drawing in which the position of the children was only suggested. The other group of copies must derive from Leonardo’s picture. All of these are by Milanese and not Florentine artists, and suggest that the original was painted after Leonardo’s return to Milan. He evidently felt that the twist of Leda’s body in the cartoon had been too violent for a finished painting and modified it considerably. As a result, the dramatic intention of her shrinking movement is lost, and the pose becomes artificial. He also decided on the position of the children, which is the same in all the copies of the painting. Of these the closest to Leonardo is that at Wilton (Pl. 40) which is almost certainly the work of Cesare da Sesto, and so may have been painted in Leonardo’s workshop between 1507 and 1510. Cesare has made alterations in the landscape, which is characteristic of his style, but Leda’s elaborate coiffure is line for line the same as one of Leonardo’s drawings at Windsor, P. 210.{62} Less close, but still deriving directly from Leonardo’s painting, is the ex-Spiridon version which was once claimed as the original. Other versions drift further and further from the original, only the pose of the figure remaining the same.

  Even in her final modified form the Leda remains an extreme example of Leonardo’s love of twisting forms. As in Indian sculpture, the high full breasts are made the centre of a sequence of curves moving freely in space, and contrasted with the open, frontal axis of the hips. This contrast has its own meaning, but it is interesting to note that Leonardo at an early stage attempted a design even more expressive of his love of contraposto. This experiment is best seen in a beautiful sketch at Windsor, which is on the same sheet as a study for Anghiari (P. 212). Leda is kneeling on her right knee, her left cutting across her body in a counter rhythm to the movement of her shoulders. Two pen and ink drawings at Rotterdam (P. 208) and Chats-worth{63} show how swan and grasses charged the whole composition with a more than Indian complexity. Nowhere else does Leonardo give such free rein to his strangely unclassical rhythmic sense.

  One more question connected with the Leda remains to be answered. Why did Leonardo choose the subject? It is no answer to say that he wanted to paint a female nude in an attitude of contraposto. We can be sure that the myth of Leda had some special meaning for him, although at first sight at the furthest remove from his nature. No classical myth is more unblushingly pagan, and Leonardo was the least pagan artist of the Renaissance, never content to enjoy the sensuous surface of life, but searching for the bone beneath the skin. To him, then, the Leda myth could not be what it was to Correggio, an allegory of sensual ecstasy. He saw in it not the joy and beauty of sexual intercourse, but its mystery, and its analogy with the creative processes of nature. His Leda symbolizes the female aspect of creation. She is a fertility goddess, a Diana of Ephesus, her female attributes emphasized not by monstrous exaggeration, but by ingenuity of pose. The downcast eyes, taken by Lomazzo as a sign of modesty, are dark, secret, remote. Even those elaborate coils of hair seem appropriate to the intricacy of conception. All round this passive figure, nature is bursting with new life, thick grasses writhe out of the earth, thi
ck leaves weigh down the branches; and at her feet, four human babies tumble out of the broken eggs.

  That such an interpretation is not fanciful is proved by a study of Leonardo’s drawings. The very first sketch for the Leda is on a sheet at Windsor (12,642) on which there is also an anatomical study. Now this study can be related directly to a number of drawings in the Anatomical MS. B, which deal with the problem of generation. One of these in particular bears a study of female anatomy very similar to the Leda and evidently of the same date. And in the drawing the creative process symbolized in the Leda is examined with scientific detachment.