Leonardo da Vinci Read online

  Leonardo’s imagery arouses admiration rather than delight. The intellectual treatment of a theme usually reserved for the emotions, is disquieting, even though, as in this case, it displays an intellect of extraordinary subtlety and power. In few of his creations do we feel more clearly the distance which separates Leonardo from common humanity.

  CHAPTER SEVEN—1503-1508

  TO realize the amazing productivity of Leonardo during the four years of his residence in Florence, 1503-7, we must remember that a great part of the work done during that period is lost to us. We know it only from literary records and pupils’ copies, some of which can be connected with original drawings. Two such lost works, the Leda and the Madonna of the Yarn Winder, have already been referred to. These were finished pictures; but for the most part, Leonardo, who hated the labour of painting, was content to expend his unflagging pictorial invention on drawings which were seized upon by the pupils and parasites who surrounded him and turned into saleable pictures. Some of these pupils’ copies can be connected with sketches so slight that they can hardly have served as the basis for a finished picture, and since none of them has any indication of squaring, I think that Leonardo himself must have turned them into large drawings or cartoons. This would account for the fact that painters such as Raphael, Piero di Cosimo, and Quentin Matsys borrowed from Leonardo motives which are only known to us in his smallest scribbles. Of all works of art, cartoons are the most destructible, especially when they have become the common property of a studio; and we are fortunate in having one of these, the Burlington House St. Anne, more or less intact. Had it not survived we could hardly have guessed at its existence, as it is not recorded in any documents, and only one drawing for it by Leonardo survives. We know that it served as a model for a painting by Luini now in the Ambrosiana, and on the analogy of this connexion we may reconstruct several other lost cartoons of a similar type. We may take for example another Luini, the Christ among the Doctors in the National Gallery. This composition, which used to be attributed to Leonardo himself, had a prestige which Luini’s unaided work never achieved. Its origins may be found in a letter from Isabella d’Este of 14 May 1504, in which she asks Leonardo to paint her a youthful Christ ‘Of about twelve years old, the age he would have been when he disputed in the Temple’. Isabella’s letter refers to a single figure of the youthful Christ, but either her description suggested to Leonardo a composition of Christ in the Temple or he was already at work on such a subject, and Isabella wished him to paint her the central figure alone. In any case, he seems to have carried out the single figure of a Christ bearing the globe, known through numerous copies and two original drawings at Windsor (P. 207), studies of drapery which the copies follow very closely. And, later or earlier, this figure was made the centre of a group of Doctors whose general disposition we know from Luini’s free version, and whose physiognomies can be traced in several of Leonardo’s drawings. As in the Uffizi Adoration and the Last Supper, Leonardo has based his composition on the motive of a central type of innocence and beauty surrounded by embodiments of worldly passions, in this case aged cunning and obstinacy. This was evidently the aspect of the cartoon which most impressed Dürer, for he reproduces it in his own gothic version of the subject painted in Italy in 1505.

  Other projects of these years could be traced with equal fullness, both in their origins and their influence. I will mention one which has an interesting bearing on Leonardo’s attitude towards the antique: the design of Neptune which Leonardo did for his friend Antonio Segni. This was evidently a highly-finished drawing of the kind which, some thirty years later, Michelangelo was to make for his friend Cavalieri. Vasari says it was drawn with such diligence that it seemed wholly alive, and adds: ‘In it one saw the ocean troubled, and Neptune’s chariot drawn by sea-horses, with fantastic creatures, dolphins and winds; and several most beautiful heads of sea gods. This final drawing is lost, but two preparatory studies at Windsor show that Leonardo had set himself an unusual problem. Out of compliment to the learned taste of his friend (it was for Segni that Botticelli painted his Calumny of Apelles) Leonardo has aimed at a composition in the antique style. The more finished drawing at Windsor recalls an antique gem in the decorative arabesque of sea-horses’ heads and tails, which bend round the central figure as if to fill the oval of a cameo (Pl. 42). Leonardo’s love of exuberant motion has given this classical idea the character of the Pergamene school; in fact, some by-products of the school, probably sarcophagi, must have been in his mind, and should be remembered when considering the almost contemporary cartoon for the Battle of Anghiari. But in this sketch the violent movement of the Neptune did not seem sufficiently august, and Leonardo has written a note on the drawing, ‘lower the horses’, so that the god might attain greater dignity. One, certainly not the final, result of this attempt is to be seen on the other sheet at Windsor (P. 206), where he has drawn sea-horses round the feet of a figure freely copied from Michelangelo’s David, as if aware that his great rival had a mastery of the antique cannon which he could never achieve. It is interesting to remember that in January 1504 Leonardo was one of a committee of artists appointed to consider the placing of the David; and this gives us the date of the Neptune drawing, since it cannot have been much earlier, and in the same year Segni left Florence for Rome. What the final appearance of the drawing may have been we cannot tell. Neither study gives us any indication of how the heads of marine gods, so highly praised by Vasari, were included in the composition. We know that the design was much admired and made the subject of a Latin epigram.{64} It was the first of a kind which long occupied the minds of high Renaissance artists. Raphael’s Galatea, Ammanati’s Neptune fountain in the Piazza della Signoria, even Bernini’s Trevi fountain are expansions of the same theme; and a bronze group by Gian Francesco Rustici (see p. 131){65} may actually be taken from Leonardo’s drawing and give some idea of its final form.

  In addition to Leonardo’s immense output as an artist, these years saw him engaged on some of his most arduous scientific and practical labours. To 1505 belongs his MS. on the flight of birds, a subject which he continued to study till his last years. Leonardo was certainly not the first man since antiquity to try to construct machines by which human beings could fly. Roger Bacon says that ‘an instrument may be made to fly withal if one sit in the midst of the instrument, and do turn an engine, by which the wings, being artificially composed, may beat the air after the manner of a flying bird.’ Some such inventions are embodied in Leonardo’s earliest studies of flight, dating from about 1485, which, like the early machines, show that he had not yet arrived at his experimental approach to every problem. It is characteristic of the growth of his mind that by 1505 he should have gone back to study from nature the principles of flight. He assumed, as all early students of flying assumed, that man would fly in the same way as the birds, and the manuscript consists almost entirely of small studies of birds in flight. Fifteen years ago we should have said that this assumption had been completely falsified by the invention of the propeller-driven aeroplane. But the growth of gliding has shown that Leonardo’s approach to the problem may yet prove to be the right one, and recent students of aeronautics have given more and more attention to the flight of birds. This book is not concerned with Leonardo as an inventor, but his studies of flight have a bearing on his art because they prove the extraordinary quickness of his eye. There is no doubt that the nerves of his eyes and brain, like those of certain famous athletes, were really supernormal, and in consequence he was able to draw and describe movements of a bird which were not seen again until the invention of the slow-motion cinema.

  A branch of science more directly related to his painting at this date was anatomy. During his residence at Florence he stayed in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova and the Anonimo tells us that he was given opportunities of dissection there. Nearly all the drawings in the Anatomical MS. B date from this period. Many of these are concerned with muscles, especially of the legs and thighs; and in thi
s way they are connected with the drawings for the Battle of Anghiari. They give some justification to the old belief that Leonardo studied anatomy in order to make his representation of the figure more scientific. But in general Leonardo’s scientific researches were undertaken for their own sakes, and anatomy was only one manifestation of his curiosity into the workings of nature. It never became to him, as it did to Michelangelo, a means of pictorial expression. In fact, he warns the painter against the abuse of anatomical knowledge: ‘O anatomical painter’ runs a note in MS. E, probably written in Rome about the year 1514, ‘beware, lest in the attempt to make your nudes display all their emotions by a too strong indication of bones, sinews, and muscles, you become a wooden painter.’ The reference to Michelangelo, who at that moment was painting the Sistine Ceiling, is unmistakable. Leonardo has understood that the true purpose of Michelangelo’s anatomical display is the expression of emotion, but has seen in it the seeds of mannerism. He goes on to write of anatomical knowledge used from a purely naturalistic point of view. Michelangelo might have replied with an exactly analogous criticism of Leonardo’s chiaroscuro.

  One more of these practical occupations remains to be mentioned, because it led accidentally to Leonardo’s greatest commission. I have mentioned that while employed by Cesare Borgia, Leonardo met Machiavelli at Urbino. The two men met again at Imola, and on Leonardo’s return to Florence they seem to have become intimate. Each in his own sphere felt the necessity of reconstructing principles on the basis of facts, and brought to the task a great and free intelligence. Machiavelli, moreover, was capable of romantic enthusiasm for unusual abilities; and it was this which made him give all the weight of his position—he was secretary to the republic and friend of the gonfaloniere Soderini—to one of Leonardo’s most extravagant schemes. At intervals during his life Leonardo had been concerned with schemes involving the management of water. He had drawn plans of canalization for the Sforza at Vigevano, Lomellini, Ivrea, and in Milan itself. He had attempted to drain the marsh at Piombino, and was later to draw plans for draining the Pontine marshes (P. 287). Any student of his drawings will remember that the idea of canalization was always active in his mind. He therefore conceived a plan to end the miserable war between Florence and Pisa which had been dragging on for some years by depriving Pisa of the Arno. Instead the Arno should enter the sea near Stagna and should be navigable as far as Florence. The scheme was first put forward in the summer of 1503 and in August 1504, after a year’s discussion, the council decided to adopt it. It is a proof of Leonardo’s power of persuasion—fu nel parlare, says the Anonimo, eloquentissimo—that the hard-headed Florentine Signoria was ever won round to a scheme which would extend the resources of modern engineering and must then have been wholly impracticable. Some of Leonardo’s maps still remain (P. 265), and some drawings of men digging (P. 229); but no trace of the canals. The water refused to flow into the new channels, and in October 1504 the work was abandoned.

  Leonardo’s friendship with Machiavelli was to have a more important result: the commission from the Signoria to paint a great fresco in the Sala del Gran Consiglio of the Palazzo Vecchio. The subject chosen was the victory of the Florentines over the Pisans at the Battle of Anghiari: and Solmi believed, on insufficient evidence, I fear, that the description of the Battle drawn up for Leonardo’s use and still preserved in the Codice Atlantico was in Machiavelli’s own hand.

  Leonardo began the cartoon in October 1503. By May 1504 the work was so little advanced that the Signoria made an agreement by which it was to be finished in February 1505: and by the end of that year the cartoon actually was finished and Leonardo had begun to paint on the wall. We are told by the Anonimo that he attempted a technical method learnt from Pliny—a sort of encaustic—and that the result was unsuccessful.{66} The upper half dried too dark, the lower half melted. The general effect is given fairly well in an early copy in the Uffizi and as we can see, the painting was not entirely ruined. In 1513 a special frame was made to enclose it, and Anton Francesco Doni, in a letter to a friend, dated 17 August 1549, mentions it as one of the things most worthy to be seen in Florence. ‘Having ascended the stairs of the Sala Grande’, he writes, ‘take a diligent view of a group of horses (a portion of the battle of Leonardo da Vinci) which will appear a miraculous thing to you.’ Even Vasari does not describe it as being in the dilapidated condition of the Last Supper, and he had good reason to make it out as bad as possible for it was he who finally obliterated Leonardo’s work by painting one of his own feeble and turgid decorations over the top during the general reconstruction of the room in 1565.

  The Battle of Anghiari was, in some ways, Leonardo’s most important commission. At the height of his powers he was given a subject ideally suited to his genius. His work was to occupy a room of state in his native town; and in the same room the one man who could possibly be considered his equal was engaged on a similar commission, Michelangelo, who started work on his cartoon of bathing soldiers surprised at the Battle of Cascina a little later than Leonardo. Even Leonardo, so little moved by worldly considerations, must have felt that his honour as a Florentine was at stake. The idea of painting a battle had long been in his mind, and is described in the Ashburnham MS. I (4 verso), in a dramatic passage too long to quote in full.{67} As so often happens when painters describe their subjects—Delacroix is another example—the result is far more ‘literary’ than modern critics would suppose. Leonardo’s description contains incidents and details which might seem outside the true scope of painting.

  You must make the conquered and beaten pale, their brows raised and knit, and the skin above their brows furrowed with pain, the sides of the nose with wrinkles going in an arch from the nostrils to the eyes, and make the nostrils drawn up and the lips arched upwards discovering the upper teeth; and the teeth apart as with crying out and lamentation. And make one man shielding his terrified eyes with one hand, the palm towards the enemy, while the other rests on the ground to support his half-raised body....Others must be represented in the agonies of death grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with their fists clenched against their bodies and their legs contorted. Someone might be shown disarmed and beaten down by the enemy, turning upon the foe, with teeth and nails, to take an inhuman and bitter revenge....You would see some of the victors leaving the fight and issuing from the crowd, rubbing their eyes and cheeks with both hands to clean them of the dirt made by their watering eyes smarting from the dust and smoke.

  We may be sure that Leonardo’s cartoon included as many of these details as possible, and we know from copies that the man half-raised from the ground, shielding his eyes, was part of the central group. Another feature of this description is his impressionism—his interest in effects of atmosphere.

  The higher the smoke, mixed with the dust-laden air, rises towards a certain level, the more it will look like a dark cloud; and it will be seen that at the top, where the smoke is more separate from the dust, the smoke will assume a bluish tinge and the dust will tend to its colour. This mixture of air, smoke, and dust will look much lighter on the side whence the light comes than on the opposite side.

  Of this, alas, we have no trace in the copies which have come down to us, and knowing his tendency to make his finished work more and more plastic, it may not have been carried out in the painting. But it is perceptible in the small preparatory sketches for the whole scene, which have survived. These fiery little scribbles show how Leonardo felt his way towards an elaborate composition by first setting down the general sense of the movement, and then condensing the motives which satisfied him. It is the method he himself suggests in one of the first of his notes on painting. ‘These rules’, he says, ‘are of use only in the second stage (per ripruova) of the figure. If you try to apply them to [the first] composition you will never make an end and will produce confusion in your works.’ Two of the drawings in the Venice Academy show the main features of what was afterwards to become the standard group, though in more diffuse form. The h
orseman on the left who looks back over his horse’s haunches, is already a dominant motive. Others contain figures which reappear in several drawings, but not in copies of the Standard group, and from them we can attempt to reconstruct the parts of the cartoon which are lost.

  In the choice of poses and in the final composition, Leonardo was much influenced by Bertoldo’s bronze relief of a battle now in the Bargello. Bertoldo had been keeper of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s collection of antiques and the greatest authority on classical art of his time; and for almost a generation he had watched over the youth of Florence drawing antiques in Lorenzo’s garden. Now to our notions nothing could seem further from classical art than the Battle of Anghiari: but that is because we still see the antique through the eyes of Winckelmann and nineteenth-century classicism as something cold, restrained, and static. To the Renaissance it was the exact reverse. They admired in the antique the power of conveying passion and violence, as opposed to the dry and timid movements of their own early painters. Bertoldo’s bronze, which is largely taken from a famous antique sarcophagus at Pisa, was considered a model of the classical style, and in his cartoon Leonardo no doubt believed that he was approaching the famous battle pieces of Philoxenos.

  Our reconstruction of Leonardo’s cartoon is conjectural. We have several copies of the central motive, the struggle for the Standard, taken from the wreck of the original painting on the walls of the Palazzo Vecchio; and a number of drawings which show that though the struggle for the Standard was the chief, it was not the only motive of his cartoon. We can guess at the existence of one other group, which included the motive of a wild, galloping horse, known in several studies and in a drawing by Michelangelo, which seems to be a copy of Leonardo’s cartoon, and there are hints of a second group, a cavalcade of horsemen in a drawing at Windsor (P. 201). Perhaps the struggle for the Standard was to have been the central panel, and the two others were to have been separated from it by windows.