Leonardo da Vinci Read online

  We have another advantage over earlier generations in our wider range of aesthetic comparison. We are no longer bound to assess Leonardo’s work by classical standards of correctness, nor to admire only those drawings which resemble the style taught in academies. A freer approach to the problems of creation, born of our acquaintance with primitive and oriental art, has revealed the expressive qualities of work which earlier critics regarded as merely eccentric; and we see that Leonardo’s personal, liberated drawings bring us closer to the sources of his genius than the wrecks of his great, formal achievements in painting. Finally, we may claim that our knowledge of psychology is fuller than it was. Whether or not we believe in the more elaborate doctrines of psychoanalysis, we are all aware that symbols come to the mind unsought, from some depths of unconscious memory and that even the greatest intellect draws part of its strength from a dark centre of animal vitality. We can no longer offer a simple explanation for every motive. In particular is this true of the character and work of Leonardo. The grand generalizations, the words of praise and blame, the categories of excellence in which older criticism abounds, cannot be applied to him without absurdity. He is a standing refutation of the comfortable belief that all great men are simple. No more complex and mysterious character ever existed, and any attempt at simplification would run contrary to the whole action of his mind.{1} He had such a strong sense of organic life, of growth and decay, of the infinitely small and the infinitely big, in short of the nature of the physical world, that he rarely attempted an abstract proposition which was not mathematical; and we must observe the same caution in our attempts to study him.

  But although we may try to avoid conjecture and theory in the greater part of Leonardo’s life, in the first thirty years they are inevitable. The available facts are so meagre that if we are too scientific, too closely bound by documents and stylistic criticism, we shall lose some of the truth. Almost from his youth Leonardo was a legendary figure, and some of the characteristics which we recognize as truest and most valuable in our picture of him are known only from legend and in particular from Vasari’s biography.

  Leonardo was born at Anchiano, a village near the little town of Vinci, in 1452. His father, Ser Piero, was to become a successful notary; his mother was a peasant named Caterina. As far as we know he was brought up in the countryside where he was born, and Pater, with his usual insight, has seen how life on a Tuscan farm, ‘watching the lizards and glow worms and other strange small creatures which haunt an Italian vineyard’, could colour the boy’s imagination and give him his enduring preoccupation with organic life. Vasari expresses this truth in the familiar story of how Leonardo as a boy painted a dragon on the shield of one of his father’s peasants, ‘and for this purpose carried into a room of his own lizards great and small, crickets, serpents, butterflies, grass-hoppers, bats and such like animals, out of which, variously put together, he formed a great ugly creature’. The shield has disappeared—may never have existed; but we do not need its material presence to know the truth of Vasari’s description, for in his enumeration of twisting creatures we recognize the forms which reappear in Leonardo’s latest drawings.

  One other legend of Leonardo’s youth must be remembered, his beauty. We have no contemporary description of him as a young man and no identifiable portrait, but in Vasari and all the early authors the accounts of his beauty are so emphatic that they must be based on a living tradition. He was beautiful, strong, graceful in all his actions, and so charming in conversation that he drew all men’s spirits to him: of this his later life gives full confirmation. Vasari’s account of his love and mastery of horses is also confirmed by numerous drawings; and the story of how he would buy birds in the marketplace, take them in his hand and let them go, giving them their lost liberty, is part of a love of nature, visible in all his work.{2} To these early biographers he was himself a masterpiece of nature and seemed to be initiated into her processes. Even the almost magical powers with which he was credited in old age, they interpreted as part of his physical perfection. Naïve and incomplete as this interpretation is, it contains one small part of the truth worth adding to a complex whole. Another fragment, of an almost contrary kind, is to be found in one of Leonardo’s own notebooks, and is practically the only record of his youth which they contain. It is a memory, or a symbolic dream, which still retains the disturbing quality of an emotional experience deeply secreted in the unconscious mind. ‘In the earliest memory of my childhood it seemed to me that as I lay in my cradle a kite came down to me and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail between my lips. This,’ he adds, ‘seems to be my fate.’{3} We are still too ignorant of psychology to interpret such a memory with any finality, but it is not surprising that Freud has taken this passage as the starting-point for a psychological study of Leonardo. His conclusions have been rejected with horror by the majority of Leonardo scholars, and no doubt the workings of a powerful and complex mind cannot be deduced from a single sentence nor explained by a rather one-sided system of psychology. Freud’s study, though it contains some passages of fine intuition, is perhaps as over-simplified as that of Vasari. Yet it helps our conception of Leonardo’s character by insisting that he was abnormal. We must remember this undercurrent when examining the surface of his early work. Later we shall not easily forget it.

  We know that by 1469 Leonardo had come, with his father, to live in Florence, and in 1472 he was inscribed on the roll of the guild of St. Luke as a painter—Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci dipintore. He was then twenty years old and if he followed the usual course of apprenticeship he must have been learning the art of painting for at least four years. Tradition and the evidence of style tell us that his first master was Verrocchio; and we learn from documents that he was still in Verrocchio’s workshop in 1476; so that it is important for us to know something about an artist with whom Leonardo spent six or seven years.

  Verrocchio has always been regarded as the typical craftsman of the Florentine renaissance, ready to undertake any work which demanded skill in the handling of materials, from the setting of a precious stone to the casting of the sphere of gilded copper which still surmounts the Duomo.{4} But no single formula can cover Verrocchio in both his painting and his sculpture. Verrocchio’s pictures, as they have come down to us, form a small coherent group. They are largely and firmly drawn, and in each one the figures dominate the landscape with a certain grandeur. But they do not stir the imagination. Their forms are metallic, their colours unsubtle and bright. The world they create for us is the prosaic world of a practical man; whereas in Verrocchio’s sculpture there is a suggestion of the incalculable forces and fantasies which we associate with Leonardo. For this reason the relation between Leonardo and Verrocchio the sculptor is close yet problematic, and to understand the formative influences on Leonardo, we must begin by looking at the principal pieces of sculpture executed by Verrocchio while Leonardo was in his workshop.{5} Of datable works we have first the group of the Incredulity of St. Thomas at Or San Michele. It was commissioned in 1463 and we know that Verrocchio was at work on the model between 1467 and 1470. The Lavabo in the Sacristy of San Lorenzo must date from before 1469, the sarcophagus tomb of Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici is dated 1472. Of undated pieces we can be sure that the bronze David in the Bargello and the terracotta relief of the Resurrection from Careggi belong to the years of Leonardo’s apprenticeship. To a later period, but one in which Leonardo was still in Verrocchio’s shop, belong the silver relief of 1477 hi the Opera del Duomo, and most probably the lost bronze reliefs, which Lorenzo de’ Medici sent to Mathias Corvinus. Now a characteristic which these works have most markedly in common is a love of twisting movement, either in the whole composition or in details. The St. Thomas group is the first instance in the Renaissance of that complicated flow of movement through a composition, achieved by contrasted axes of the figures, which Leonardo made the chief motive of all his constructions, and which, through him, became the foundation
of the mannerist style. Even the bronze David has an alert twist of the body, and in the Careggi relief the movements and attitudes of the figures are extraordinarily like Leonardo’s early drawings. As for twisting movement in the details, Vasari describes how Verrocchio loved to draw knots and elaborately-plaited hair and we have ample confirmation of this in the bronze flowers which writhe and flow with the exuberance of nature round the porphyry sarcophagus of the Medici; or in the drawings of actual hair in the British Museum, plaited in almost exactly the same style that Leonardo was to use, more than thirty years later, in his cartoon of Leda. We must suppose that Leonardo’s love of curves was instinctive, born of his earliest unconscious memories, but that his master showed him the forms in which his innate sense of rhythm could most easily find expression.

  Secondly, Verrocchio’s sculpture shows the same facial types which we find in Leonardo’s early drawings. Seen in profile, the David is very like one of Leonardo’s elegant young men with wavy hair. He even has the hardly perceptible smile which was to become a part of the Leonardesque ideal, and we may find this smile on other works of Verrocchio, the St. Thomas or the heads which decorate the basin in S. Lorenzo. It was Verrocchio, too, who first used this type of pretty boy in contrast with ferocious nutcracker old men. The motive survives in the silver relief of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist, where the old warrior is strikingly Leonardesque; but no doubt its classical expression was to be found in the famous pair of bronze reliefs of Scipio Africanus and Darius, whose original forms can be deduced from replicas in different mediums—marble, stucco, glazed terracotta. It is possible that Leonardo himself made free versions of these reliefs. A marble in the Louvre and a stucco in the Victoria and Albert Museum have enough Leonardesque character of modelling and design dimly to reflect his Scipio; and his Darius is known from the silver point in the British Museum, one of the most finished and elaborate of his early drawings (Pl. 7). A more enduring influence of these reliefs—the whole notion of contrasting youthful and aged, effeminate and virile heads—I shall treat more fully when I come to speak of Leonardo’s caricatures.

  At this point the question begins to form in our minds, do not these similarities suggest that Leonardo was responsible for much of Verrocchio’s sculpture? Leonardo refers to his practice as a sculptor in his letter to Ludovico Sforza (p. 45), and the list of his works on p. 47 includes a relief of the Passion. There is nothing inherently improbable in the suggestion; but unfortunately there is no conclusive evidence such as might be supplied by a document or a drawing. With painting the position is much clearer.

  Those pictures which seem to have been executed by Verrocchio himself must date from before 1472. After that date he seemed to abandon painting altogether. It is perhaps no coincidence that our earliest evidence of Leonardo as a painter dates from this year, and it is in the next six years that we must place the paintings which most critics are now agreed to call his earliest works: the Annunciation in the Uffizi, the Virgin with the Flowers in the Munich Gallery, the portrait in the Liechtenstein Collection, and the Benois Madonna in the Hermitage. These pictures all have qualities in common which connect them with the first indisputable painting of Leonardo, the Paris Virgin of the Rocks, and which are in contrast to the paintings of Verrocchio. Instead of Verrochio’s clear local colours, they are conceived in low tones of olive green and grey; instead of his bold, firm modelling, the heads and hands are drawn with a curious delicacy and an eye for minute gradations of surface. None of Leonardo’s contemporaries imagined this twilit world, so different from the bright enamelled daylight of the quattrocento. These pictures, then, owe little to Verrocchio. Yet we can be sure that they were executed in his shop, not only because Leonardo was working with him at the time, but because they contain certain of his studio properties. In fact, we can deduce from the documents for the Pistoja altar-piece that they were commissioned and sold as works of Verrocchio, or rather of ‘Verrocchio and Co.’ Leonardo in his master’s workshop held a position not unlike that of a head cutter in a small but distinguished firm of tailors, and it was natural that the proprietor though himself a capable homme du métier, should leave to his gifted assistant that part of the work in which he himself had least interest. Here again we can find a core of truth in Vasari’s story of how Leonardo painted the angel in Verrocchio’s Baptism, ‘which,’ he says, ‘was the reason why Andrea would never again touch colours, being most indignant that a boy should know more of the art than he did.’{6} Possibly Verrocchio, when he saw such striking evidence of his pupil’s skill, did give up painting, not so much from motives of jealousy or shame, as from expediency. It was enough to have one good painter in the firm: in future he could confine himself to his favourite arts of sculpture and goldsmithy.

  We must now examine Leonardo’s early painting in detail. Vasari’s statement that he painted an angel in Verrocchio’s Baptism (Pl. 1), although discredited in a recent period of scepticism, is confirmed by documentary and stylistic evidence. It appears in a meagre guide to Florence, Albertini’s Memoriale, which, since it was written in 1510, when Leonardo was still in Italy, must be looked on as a reliable source. Above all, we have, in the angel’s head, unmistakable evidence of Leonardo’s early style, all the more clearly seen in contrast to the angel of Verrocchio. With the prophetic power sometimes found in the earliest work of genius, Leonardo has foreshadowed a change which was to come over Italian art in his lifetime. Verrocchio’s angel is of the same family as all the angels of the quattrocento, since the time of Luca della Robbia’s singing boys. He has the same broad bony face, the same short nose, the same wavy hair. The treatment is perfectly naturalistic. He seems to look with astonishment at his companion, as at a visitant from another world; and, in fact, Leonardo’s angel belongs to a world of the imagination which Verrocchio’s never penetrated. In every line of the nose, cheek, and chin this head reveals an ideal of perfection. To some extent this ideal, like all our dreams of physical perfection, was inspired by the antique, fragments of which Leonardo must have seen in Florence at the time. But the cascade of hair, rippling over the angel’s shoulder, in his own invention, where, as in a miraculous bud, is one side of Leonardo’s art, the ‘beauty touched with strangeness’ of Pater. Yet this head, which foreshadows so much of his mature vision, is obviously the work of a young painter, more intent on the delicate outlining of detail than on mass and structure. It must date from between about 1470 and 1472. The angel’s draperies are also by Leonardo and show a curious system of folds, rather stiff and angular but most delicately rendered. Here, too, we have confirmation in Vasari, who says that when Leonardo was a student ‘he often made figures in clay which he covered with a soft worn linen dipped in clay, and then set himself to draw them with great patience on a particular kind of fine Rheims cloth or prepared linen; and he executed some of them in black and white with the point or a brush to a marvel, as some of those which we have in our book of drawings still bear witness.’ A number of these drawings still exist, and from their hard, stiff folds we can see that Vasari’s account of their origin is correct. The angel’s draperies were certainly painted from such drawings—two of them may even have been amongst the studies used—and the peculiar character of Leonardo’s early draperies can be understood.

  Far from accusing Vasari of invention, I believe that he did not go far enough. Leonardo’s part in the Baptism did not end with the angel; he was also responsible for the landscape, and here again has drawn from his imagination a foretaste of his future style. Verrocchio, unlike his rival, Antonio Pollajuolo, had no personal or original conception of landscape. He followed the current fashion, introduced through Flemish pictures and illuminated manuscripts, of round trees dotted about on a plain, with a horizon of rounded hills. Everything is tidily arranged and sharply defined. He could not have painted the background of the Baptism with its wide, romantic stretch of hills, lakes, shining mists and pools, anticipating the backgrounds of the Mona Lisa and the Louvre St. Anne. Some of the
distant hills have been damaged by overpainting, but the nearer part is intact and recalls Leonardo’s famous drawing of a landscape in the Uffizi inscribed didi Sta Maria della neve addi 5 d’aghossto 1473 (Pl. 2). As often in Renaissance art, the drawing is more naturalistic than the picture, but both have the same motive of shining rocks and trees framing a distant plane. We are aware of landscape as something full of movement, light moving over the hills, wind stirring the leaves of trees, water flowing and falling in cascades; all of which is rendered in brilliant broken touches, with scurries and flutters of the pen, or flicks of golden paint from the brush. The drawing is in fact one of the most important documents for our study of Leonardo’s early work. It shows him already master of an original and developed technique in which effects of light are achieved with a directness quite at variance with the formal style of the period. There is a kind of genial recklessness about the touch which does not suggest the painstaking goldsmith’s apprentice.

  Next in date to the Baptism comes the Annunciation now in the Uffizi (Pls 3 and 4). It is the sort of large composite picture which artists keep in their studios for many years, and work at intermittently; and it lacks the unity of a work carried out under a single impulse. Perhaps for this reason scholars were long unwilling to accept it as being from the hand of Leonardo, but it is perfectly in character with his other early works both in the general twilit tone, and in the drawing of the details. Moreover, there exists a drawing for the angel’s sleeve which is unquestionably his. The draperies in the Annunciation, with their thin straight folds, are so like those of the angel’s robe in the Baptism that the picture must have been begun at the same time,{7} and it is interesting to notice that the over-prominent lectern seems to belong to the period, c. 1472, in which Verrocchio’s workshop was occupied with the similar sarcophagus of the Medici in San Lorenzo. The composition is so awkward that scholars have accused the painter of errors in perspective, but the perspective of the architecture is correct—painstakingly and amateurishly correct. The vanishing point is exactly in the middle of the picture horizontally and two-thirds the way up vertically. But this insistence on the linear perspective of the architecture, irrespective of the position of the figures or the composition as a whole, is the sign of a very young painter. He has learnt the trick of perspective without understanding its true intention, that is to say, the placing of objects in the picture space in a clear and harmonious relation to one another; and Leonardo has, in fact, made what appears to be a mistake of spatial relationships in making the Virgin place her farther hand on the near side of her lectern which, as we can see from its base, is a few feet nearer the spectator than she is.