Leonardo da Vinci Read online

  CHAPTER EIGHT—1508-1513

  IN the summer of 1508 Leonardo returned to Milan, which was to be his headquarters for the next five years. His chief patron was still Charles d’Amboise, Lord of Chaumont, who remained governor of Milan till his death in 1511. Early in his life d’Amboise had been touched by the spirit of the Renaissance, and in Milan he tried to revive or maintain the civilization of the Sforzas. Of this civilization Leonardo had been the greatest glory, and we know that d’Amboise treated him with the utmost consideration. As with the Sforzas he was not simply court painter, but architect, engineer, and general artistic adviser. A few designs for architecture, dating from about this period, are in the Codice Atlantico and at Windsor. Among them are plans and elevations of a town house with classical orders and various suggestions for wells and fountains. The British Museum MS. of 1508 also contains his longest writings on architecture, a study of fissures in walls and vaults, which suggest that he was employed in restoring and conserving as well as building. One day he would be deciding on the form of the choir stalls in the Duomo; another, acting as military engineer in the war against Venice; another, arranging pageants for the entry of Louise XII into Milan. It was a variety of employment which Leonardo enjoyed, but which has left posterity the poorer. In these years he also travelled extensively, and although we have many clues as to the course of these journeys we have no hint as to their purpose. They do not seem to be connected with any recorded commission, and it is possible that they were undertaken solely in order to make those observations of nature which were one of the chief interests of his later years. MS. F, dated 22 September 1508 and entitled Di mondo ed acque, is the first of a series containing notes on geology, botany, atmosphere, and kindred subjects. Although Leonardo’s approach has become more scientific, he still sees with the eye of a painter. His notes on botany describe the ramifications of a tree and the disposition of its leaves, in much the same spirit as Ruskin in the fifth book of Modern Painters. Many pages of MS. G are concerned with light striking on trees, the various greens of transparent leaves, and the blue sheen which they reflect from the sky. The same book contains valuable notes of what Leonardo called la prospettiva di colore, the modification of colour by atmosphere; in fact, such observations seem to have been one of the chief motives of his mountaineering expeditions. A drawing of the Alps at Windsor (P. 285b), one of a beautiful series in red chalk on red paper, contains an elaborate note of the colour of mountain flowers when seen through a great gulf of intervening air at a considerable height. There are also notes on the colour of smoke and mist which remind us of Goethe, and only his dislike of formulas prevented him from anticipating Goethe’s principle of translucency. In these writings Leonardo anticipated the impressionist doctrine that everything is more or less reflected in everything else and that there are no such things as black shadows. Meanwhile, his paintings were growing more and more shadowy, so that his last work, the equivocal St. John in the Louvre, only just emerges from the darkness.

  During these expeditions into the mountains he became interested in problems of geology, and in particular the question of why shells and fossilized marine life can be found high up in mountains many miles inland. The thoroughness, tenacity, and candour with which, in several pages of the Leicester MS., he deals with this problem is an admirable example of his mind at work. He never for a moment admits the idea of a special creation, and he advances decisive arguments against the idea that the shells were carried there by the Flood. Ultimately he assumes that the country has been covered by the sea and sets to work to discover how this can have taken place. Thus his geological observations, taken in conjunction with his studies of embryology and comparative anatomy, show him ready to entertain the whole idea of evolution with a scientific open-mindedness in advance of many distinguished scientists of the nineteenth century.

  This study of geology is sometimes quoted as evidence of Leonardo’s drift away from art to science; but at every stage Leonardo’s researches, however austere, become fused with the texture of his imagination. His study of the earth’s bones is no exception. He had always been interested in rock formations, and to about the years 1508-10 belong a series of drawings at Windsor which show him studying outcrops and disturbed stratification, where the rock has broken through the comfortable humus, and reveals the ancient, grim foundations on which living things have their precarious existence (Pl. 48).

  This sense of the world as a planet, seen from a point of distance at which human life is no longer visible, is given final expression in the background of the Virgin and St. Anne, now in the Louvre (Pl. 49). There are no documents for this work, but the studies for it which have come down to us, no less than the whole character of the composition, suggests a date after Leonardo’s return to Milan and perhaps as late as 1510. Only the vast and delicate landscape was coloured by Leonardo’s own hand. The painting of the heads is insensitive and without the fine texture of the Mona Lisa. Parts of it are unfinished—the drapery covering the Virgin’s legs, for example, which is no more than an outline. Yet we know how subtle, musical, and close-knit this passage could have been from drawings in the Louvre and at Windsor, showing the elaborate preparations he made for all his work, although when the time came to use these studies in a picture his inborn distaste for finality forced him to leave it unfinished. Even more interesting than these drapery studies is Leonardo’s own drawing for the St. Anne’s head (Pl. 52). The differences between it and the head in the painting (Pl. 51) are no doubt partly due to Leonardo himself. It was he, for instance, who changed the headdress in order to give a sharper accent to the pyramidal group, and he may have done something to make her type more regular. But the difference must also be due to the head being painted by a pupil and is an example of a well-known truth, that a great man’s pupils are plus royaliste que le roi. The conventionally Leonardesque expression of the painted St. Anne has a certain charm and an artificial air of mystery, but the human mystery of the drawing is deeper and more subtle.{69}

  Despite these alterations the Louvre picture has a force and beauty which no copy could achieve. Critics have objected to the extreme artificiality of the poses, and we are, indeed, very far from the frontal simplicity of early quattrocento treatment of this subject. But nothing else in his work shows more clearly his intentions as an artist. The subject had interested Leonardo for many years, as offering the possibility of contrasted interlocking rhythms enclosed within a single shape. Looking at his earlier treatment of this theme we can see how he gradually made his rhythmical sequences more and more complex. In the Burlington House cartoon he has given a maximum of contraposto to the individual figures of the Virgin and St. Anne, but he has kept the whole of the Virgin’s figure on one side of the composition and the two heads, although they are looking in opposite directions, are on the same level and give the design a certain formality. Moreover, the two sides of the group are not perfectly thought out. The left-hand side is too characterless and on the right-hand side the intervals between the heads are too regular. In the cartoon of 1501, if we can judge by Brescianino’s replica, Leonardo has already succeeded in placing the Virgin’s head on a different level and the ascending scale of the heads is more interesting. But he clearly felt that the vertical line of the composition was over-emphatic and in a sketch in the Louvre for his last version of the subject we see how he emphasizes the diagonal line by bringing the Virgin’s figure right across the composition (Pl. 50). Finally, he arrives at the solution which we know in the Paris picture. By considerable distortion he has achieved a perfect balance throughout. The design has the exhilarating quality of an elaborate fugue; like a masterpiece of Bach it is inexhaustible. We are always discovering new felicities of movement and harmony, growling more and more intricate, yet subordinate to the whole; and, as with Bach, this is not only an intellectual performance; it is charged with human feeling.

  Without the style of Pater this strange blend of mystery and tenderness, human and inhuman, is best left u
ndescribed. But I cannot resist quoting the beautiful, and I believe profound, interpretation which Freud has put on this picture. He imagines that Leonardo must have spent the first years of his life with his mother, the peasant Caterina; but a year after his birth his father married, and when Ser Piero found that his wife was unlikely to have children, he brought his love child to be looked after by her. In a sense, therefore, Leonardo had two mothers. And it is the unconscious memory of these two beloved beings, intertwined as if in a dream, which led him to dwell with such tenderness on the subject of the Virgin and St. Anne. Whether or not this is true in fact, it seems to express the mood of the Louvre picture; and explains the apparent nearness in age of mother and daughter, the strange intermingling of their forms, and their remote, mysterious smiles.

  On 10 March 1511, Charles d’Amboise died and the government passed into the hands of two Generals, Gaston de Foix and Gian Giacomo Trivulzio. We know that Leonardo undertook to execute an equestrian monument for the latter and it is reasonable to place in this period the numerous drawings of horses at Windsor, which on grounds of style and other internal evidence belong to his second residence in Milan. Superficially these drawings resemble the studies for the Sforza memorial, and there is a certain irony in the fact that students have been unable to decide which designs Leonardo made for his first patron and which for the Sforza’s bitterest enemy and conqueror. However, I believe it is possible to distinguish between the two series, and as a result the later project can be studied in detail. It gives us a good opportunity of watching Leonardo at work, inventing and rejecting pose after pose in his effort to achieve something compact and full. The general scheme of the monument is known to us from an elaborate estimate in Leonardo’s own handwriting, giving precise measurements and descriptions of every part.{70}

  To begin with there was to be ‘a horse as large as life’—that is to say, smaller than the horse for the Sforza memorial—which was to be placed on a high base with a heavy cornice, frieze, and architrave. This base was evidently in an elaborate classical style, since we have estimates for eight columns and eight capitals made of metal. Between them were to be festoons in stone and other ornaments. Set in the base was to be the figure of the deceased, carved in stone, and this figure was to rest on a sarcophagus supported by six harpies with candelabra. Round the base there were to be eight figures which from their price in the specification were evidently to be almost life-size. The relative elaboration of the base is shown by the fact that it accounts for about half the cost of the whole monument, although stonework was very much cheaper than bronze. Three drawings at Windsor correspond closely with this description (Pl. 53). They show the heavy cornice and architrave, the classical columns and the tomb with its recumbent effigy; even the figures at the corners are roughly indicated and we see that they were thought of as captives tied to columns. Perhaps as a result of his recent work in Milan Leonardo has laid an emphasis on the architectural side of the monument which was completely absent from the Sforza memorial. He has transferred the motive of a recumbent effigy in the base from the wall monuments common in Northern Italy to a free standing group. In so doing he has changed a quattrocento motive into a typically high Renaissance motive. The slaves at the corners recall Michelangelo’s projects for the monument to Pope Julius: and some of the studies on a sheet at Windsor (P. 90) are remarkably like that last great monument of high Renaissance sculpture, Alfred Stevens’ memorial to the Duke of Wellington in St. Paul’s. The two main studies show that Leonardo was considering both a prancing horse (P. 93) and a walking horse (P. 94). Neither satisfied him completely. In the prancing horse the design of the space under the horse’s belly still presented difficulties; and the walking horse had to be redesigned with more severely plastic intention. With this end in view Leonardo made a further series of drawings from nature. This is another example of the immense pains—so often lost to us—which Leonardo took about all his compositions. He had been drawing horses all his life with a matchless power of observation. He had studied their anatomy and worked out a theory of their proportions; and at the age of fifty-five he begins again to make detailed and conscientious studies from nature. Superficially these drawings (e.g. P. 95, P. 96) are less attractive than those made for the Sforza monument. The crisp silverpoint, with its sensitive surface quality, is replaced by a slow pen-line, defining a sketch in black chalk. But this deliberation has an extraordinary weight; and it was weight—volume—at which Leonardo was aiming. These are not simply exquisite drawings from nature; they are studies for a piece of sculpture.

  It is worth digressing to notice the differences in pen technique between these drawings, and the earlier studies of horses. The whole system of shading has changed. Instead of diagonals the lines of shading are directed to indicate depth. Thus, a shadow on a cylinder, instead of being made up of graded diagonals, will consist of lines, drawn at right angles to the side of the cylinder, following its curves. This is what is known as shading following the form. It is essentially a sculptural style, rejecting the data of sight in favour of a convention based on knowledge. That Leonardo, who was so great a master of impressionistic draughtsmanship, ever adopted this intellectual, classical style is a proof of how much he valued continuity of modelling. This change in the method of shading is one of our best means of dating Leonardo’s drawings. There are very few instances of it earlier than 1500, and as time goes on it is used far more openly, with the lines of shading further apart. Ultimately it is accompanied by crosshatching, an unlikely system as long as silverpoint was the dominant technique. On the whole, this linear convention was little used by Italian painters.{71} It is a northern, in particular a German style, and we cannot reject the possibility that Leonardo was influenced by the prints and drawings of Dürer, which much impressed Italian artists of that date.

  In the final series of drawings for the Trivulzio monument two problems were absorbing Leonardo’s attention: the filling of the space below the belly of the prancing horse and the position of the rider. In both he owed much—more than ever before in his life—to the study of classical art. Müller-Walde claims that this was due to the study of an antique equestrian statue at Pavia since destroyed, known as the Regisole, which, to judge from our crude representations of it, was very like the Marcus Aurelius now on the Capitol. Leonardo mentions this statue in a note in the Codice Atlantico (f. 147 recto). ‘The one at Pavia is more praised for its movement than anything else—the imitation of antique things is more praiseworthy than that of modern—one cannot have beauty and utility together, as may be seen in men and fortresses—the trot has almost the quality of a free horse—where natural liveliness is lacking, it is necessary to make accidental liveliness.’ I have quoted the entry in full because beside referring to the Regisole, it is a good example of Leonardo’s way of jotting down his thoughts, and shows how his aesthetic ideas had moved away from the naturalism of the quattrocento. It also shows that this increased interest in the antique was not limited to the statue at Pavia. In fact, most of his later drawings for the Trivulzio monument seem to derive from classical reliefs or gems, and even show the rider transformed into a nude and laurel-crowned hero. The relation of the rider to the horse was a problem of design which, in his work on the Sforza monument, Leonardo had disregarded (Pl. 54). It was always referred to simply as il cavallo: the rider was to be cast separately and added later. Such a haphazard procedure was foreign to Leonardo’s later ideal of perfection, and in sketches for the Trivulzio monument the rider is always indicated, his position varying with minute variations in the pose of the horse. These variations—a barely perceptible raising or lowering of the head or fore-leg which gives a slightly different movement to the whole—cannot be described in detail, but may be understood from one example. Was the rider’s arm to be pointing forwards or backwards? At first, following the precedents of Gattamelata and the antique, he is pointing forwards (P. 92, P. 93). But Leonardo found this rather stiff, and in P. 97 he experiments with what I
may call an open pose, the rider pointing rhetorically backwards. The idea is worked out with a walking horse in a small sketch on P. 99; but not to his satisfaction, as he continues to experiment with the closed form, trying to give it movement by making the rider point forwards though looking backwards (P. 100, lower drawing), or lean forwards energetically (Pl. 54). An interesting example of the relation of horse and rider is the pen and ink drawing also on Pl. 54. Here we feel at once that the open pose is too open, and we wonder how Leonardo came to make such a mistake until we notice that in the original chalk drawing the rider is leaning forwards, and it was only when he came to ink the drawing in that Leonardo makes him point backwards, without altering the pose of the horse’s neck. We do not know which pose Leonardo would have selected finally, but it may be some indication that on a sheet at Windsor, 12,347, with instructions for casting the statue written at this time, an illustrative sketch shows the rider in the open pose. Similarly, in the project for the prancing horse, he tries several variations on the motive, familiar in classical reliefs, of the conquered foe crouching beneath its hooves, and in one drawing actually turns the trampled man on his back so that his legs, pressed against the horse’s belly, form a counter-rhythm to the rider’s upraised arm. Although more closely knit than the first Sforza designs, this, too, has an intricacy unsuitable to large-scale sculpture, and probably Leonardo never intended to carry out the design of the prancing horse; at least, one of his drawings of it (P. 102) seems to belong to a later date than the rest of the series, and can never have been intended for use. It is Leonardo’s last word on a subject which had interested him all his life, and is worth comparing with Michelangelo’s last word on one of his problems, the composition of two nudes, as we see it in a drawing in the Ashmolean of Samson slaying a Philistine. The similarity of the two drawings is obvious and rather touching since it would have been equally distasteful to either artist. Both have learnt in old age to avoid outlines and to present their subject through interior modelling, suggested by mysterious blots and blurs. This is what Cézanne meant when he praised a picture by saying that it was dessiné dans la forme.