Leonardo da Vinci Read online

  In studying the architecture and even the painting of the Renaissance, we must always remember that one whole branch of each is almost completely lost to us—the architecture and decoration which was designed for pageants and masquerades. We know from Vasari how many of the greatest artists whose lives he records seem to have given a considerable part of their time to such ephemeral work. It was in these lath and plaster designs that a man could show his invention, his fantasy, unimpeded by cost and the painful process of construction; and we know that Leonardo did such work with pleasure. Our only series of drawings for masquerade costumes belongs to a later period, but we have written record of several pageants which he ordered with great ingenuity—in particular the Masque of the Paradiso of 1490 and the performance of Jupiter and Danae of 1496. Leonardo’s notes and sketches of stage machinery include a revolving stage and a lift; but, once more, we do not know how far these were his inventions or current theatrical usage.

  These masquerades were performed as a means of glorifying the ruling powers—in this instance, Ludovico, his wife and mistresses-and like all Renaissance ideas of fame, they involved participation in elaborate allegories by which, for a few hours, the individual assumed the immortality of a work of art. Much of Leonardo’s time was spent on the invention of allegories and emblems expressive of Ludovico’s greatness. This work seems to have appealed to him, for the manuscripts contain many fabulous or allegorical writings. In MS. H Leonardo has compiled a bestiary, one of his longest pieces of coherent prose, which is partly taken from a popular medieval compilation called the Fiore di Virtù, partly from a similar work, the Acerba, by the so-called Cecco d’ Ascoli. Leonardo also quotes from Pliny, but it is significant that although he had before him this relatively scientific source for the life and habits of animals, the greater part of his bestiary is taken from those fanciful medieval writers to whom natural history was only a pretext for moral allegory.

  Closely allied to this bestiary, and inspired by similar sources, are the fables which are scattered throughout the Codice Atlantico. Although many of these must be derivative, they have, when read as a whole, a certain unity expressive of Leonardo’s point of view. Almost all are pessimistic. The animals, plants, or inanimate objects, who are the heroes of the fables, are no sooner confident of success and security than they are utterly destroyed by some superior and usually unconscious agency. If they avoid one misfortune, they immediately fall victim to a far greater as a result of their previous cunning. We see reflected Leonardo’s view of contemporary politics, and indeed of life in general, where nature only allows man to reach some pinnacle of self-esteem in order to deal him a more shattering blow. The most personal of all these emblematic writings is a series in the Codice Atlantico which Leonardo has entitled Prophecies. These are in a form which seems to have been popular among the wits of Milan, and we read that Leonardo’s prophecies were written in competition with those of Bramante. They consist of descriptions of ordinary everyday happenings, so worded as to sound like appalling catastrophes. Thus ‘many people by puffing out a breath with too much haste will thereby lose their sight and soon after all consciousness’; to which Leonardo supplies the explanation ‘of putting out the light when going to bed’. Here the intention is solely humorous, and the ‘prophecy’ is really a sort of riddle. But in some instances I believe that Leonardo has taken advantage of this form to express his own convictions. Many describe acts of cruelty and injustice which sound unbelievable, until the ‘key’ tells us that they refer to animals. ‘Endless multitudes will have their little children taken from them, ripped open and flayed and most cruelly cut in pieces (of sheep, cows, goats, and the like).’ ‘The severest labour will be repaid with hunger and thirst, blows and goadings, curses and great abuse (of asses).’ Knowing from contemporary sources Leonardo’s love of animals, we can be sure that such ‘prophecies’ as these are not mere jokes, but represent his refusal to take as a matter of course the suffering which man’s technical skill has allowed him to inflict on the other animals.

  The love of allegory revealed in the notebooks is also expressed in some very beautiful drawings. They date from about the period of the bestiary in MS. H 1494, and several of them illustrate fabulous events of natural history, the ermine, the lizard, and others which I cannot interpret (P. 109). These differ from most of Leonardo’s drawings in that they are complete compositions: that of the lizard, in particular, has a suggestion of atmosphere and the vibration of light which was one of Leonardo’s most precious gifts when he chose to use it (P. 111). In contrast to these charming fables is a series of macabre allegorical drawings at Christ Church, Oxford. They seem to have some political meaning which is lost to us, and may have attracted Leonardo chiefly as an outlet for his bizarre fancies. We see two witches seated on a gigantic toad, while a third rides a skeleton with a load of arrows: there are two-headed monsters, wild pursuits, unexpected checks and repulses, all the inhabitants of a nightmare drawn with the flashing, flickering touch which Leonardo only used when the subject really interested him (P. 104-8).

  Closely connected with such fantasies are those once popular specimens of Leonardo’s art—the grotesques or caricatures (Pl. 27). For three centuries these were the most typical of his works, familiar in numerous engravings. Today we find them disgusting, or at best wearisome. But Leonardo’s immediate successors were right in recognizing the caricatures as essential to his genius, concentrating many elements of his spirit. In the first place, they express his love of phenomena—of eccentric nature. They are part of the same curiosity which led Dürer to make an engraving of a pig with eight legs. Vasari describes how Leonardo would follow extraordinary types for a whole day in order to memorize their features. We know that he even took the address of those which had interested him, ‘Giovanina, fantastic face, is at Saint Catherine’s hospital’.{26} It is one of the very few references to a woman in all Leonardo’s notebooks. Given this interest in freaks, we can see that many of the so-called caricatures are much more realistic than at first sight we believe. In a humanitarian age we instinctively shut our eyes to such horrors, and lunatic asylums, good doctoring, and false teeth have greatly reduced their number. ‘Monsieur Degas, pourquoi faîtes-vous toujours les femmes si laides?’ ‘Madame, parce que la femme en générale est laide.’ Mixed with his motive of curiosity lay others, more profound: the motives which led men to carve gargoyles on the Gothic cathedrals. Gargoyles were the complement to saints; Leonardo’s caricatures were complementary to his untiring search for ideal beauty. And gargoyles were the expression of all the passions, the animal forces, the Caliban gruntings and groanings which are left in human nature when the divine has been poured away. Leonardo was less concerned than his Gothic predecessors with the ethereal parts of our nature, and so his caricatures, in their expression of passionate energy, merge imperceptibly into the heroic. Most typical of such creations is the bald, clean-shaven man, with formidable frown, nut-cracker nose and chin, who appears sometimes in the form of a caricature, more often as an ideal. His strongly accentuated features seem to have typified for Leonardo vigour and resolution, and so he becomes the counterpart of that other profile which came with equal facility from Leonardo’s pen—the epicene youth. These are, in fact, the two hieroglyphs of Leonardo’s unconscious mind, the two images his hand created when his attention was wandering, and as such they have an importance for us which the frequent poverty of their execution should not disguise. Virile and effeminate, they symbolize the two sides of Leonardo’s nature, a dualism I have already suggested in the contrast between his life in Florence and in Milan. It is no accident that the heroic type appears with almost caricatural emphasis in the masterpiece of his Florentine period, the Battle of Anghiari; and that the epicene type is drawn with the greatest affection in those Milanese years, soon after 1490, when Salai entered Leonardo’s studio. But as usual both types go back to his earliest Florentine years, were indeed taken from Verrocchio, the elegant youth from such a head as the
David, the warrior from the lost Darius relief. Both types appear, contrasted for the first time, on the famous sheet at Windsor of about 1478) but there they have a Florentine quattrocento character, which they lose as they become more expressive. The warrior is still classical, the boy still young. Later the warrior’s profile is distorted by the violence of his resolution, the boy becomes blowsy and self-satisfied. Yet the change is slight and subtle, more one of expression than of morphology, and shows that these two images reflect deep and fixed necessities in Leonardo’s nature. Even in his most conscious creations, even in the Last Supper, they remain, as it were, the armature round which his types are created.

  The two most important of Leonardo’s studies at this period remain to be mentioned. They are anatomy and the action of light. His treatment of these subjects springs from his belief in painting as a science. They are two of the means by which the uncertainty of mere appearances may be given some of the certainty of measured facts. They are therefore best considered in relation to his theory of art, which, from its importance and complexity, I shall treat in a separate chapter.

  CHAPTER FOUR—THE ‘TRATTATO DELLA PITTURA’

  LEONARDO is one of the few great painters to leave us a quantity of writing about his art. I put it in this way, rather than saying a treatise on art, because his numerous notes on painting are hardly more systematic than his other observations. We have, however, more reason to believe that he intended a definite treatise on the subject, and he may even have given some shape to the part dealing with the human figure, since in his introduction to the Divina Proportione, written in 1498, Pacioli says that Leonardo had ‘finished with great diligence an admirable book on the depiction and movements of men’ (de pictura et movimenti humani). This book is lost, but amongst Leonardo’s anatomical drawings at Windsor are several studies of the human body in movement which date from this period and must be connected with the treatise; and it was probably known to the author of a treatise on the art of drawing known as the Codex Huygens, much of which is clearly derived from Leonardo.{27} A great many of his original notes on the science of painting have also survived. Some of the manuscripts deal with the subject almost exclusively: the MS. C is concerned with light and shade, and MS. E with the understanding of plants and trees. The Ashburnham MS. No. 2 (now Bibliothèque Nationale, 2038 Italien) contains so many and varied instructions on painting that when it was discovered it was at first taken for the lost treatise. But the majority of such notes are scattered throughout the manuscripts in the pages of the Codice Atlantico and on individual drawings. These notes on painting, with a certain amount of writing on other subjects loosely related to it, were collected by J. P. Richter and published in 1883 under the somewhat misleading title, The Literary Works of Leonardo. A number of Leonardo’s writings on art have not survived in their original form. Vasari tells us that beside the main body of the manuscripts which in his day were in the possession of Francesco Melzi, there were ‘in the hands of N. N., a painter of Milan, some writings of Leonardo likewise in characters written with the left hand, backwards, which treat of painting and of the methods of drawing and colouring. This person, not long since, came to Florence to see me, wishing to print this work; and he took it to Rome in order to give it effect, but I do not know what may afterwards have become of it.’ It seems reasonable to suppose that these papers in the possession of N. N. formed the first part of a selection from Leonardo’s notes on art which was made about the middle of the sixteenth century and has come down to us in several manuscripts. The best of these comes from the Urbino library and is now in the Vatican library. This is the transcript of Leonardo’s notes, known as the Trattato della Pittura—and as such I shall refer to it. Some of the matter it contains can also be found in Leonardo’s original autograph, and we can see that the copyist was, for the date, remarkably faithful in following Leonardo’s actual word. It is important to be sure of this, since a great part of his transcript reproduces notes by Leonardo which are lost to us in the original, and which greatly enlarge our knowledge of his aims and character. The Trattato was copied and recopied with diminishing accuracy throughout the sixteenth century. One copy belonged to Benvenuto Cellini,{28} another to Annibale Carracci, who said that if he had known it earlier it would have spared him twenty years of labour; yet another, in the Barberini library, was edited by Cassiano del Pozzo, who induced Poussin to draw illustrations to it. In 1651 it served as a basis for the first printed edition published by Raphael du Fresne. Other editions followed; but under the influence of contemporary art theorists they drifted farther and farther from Leonardo’s original text, became, in fact, little more than-case-books of academic classicism. This the Trattato remained until the rediscovery of the earlier manuscripts, with their relation to Leonardo’s original notes, which showed how far were the real workings of his mind from the formulas of Du Fresne, Roland Freart, and Francesco Fontani.

  The Trattato della Pittura is not an easy book to read. In the Vatican MS.{29} it consists of eight books and 935 ‘chapters’, some no more than a few lines, some covering several pages. Although the compiler has tried to arrange the entries under their subjects, very few have any sequence, and many repeat each other in slightly varying form. In a short summary we may say that the contents are valuable in four different ways. First, they give Leonardo’s general views on the nature of art; secondly, there are notes on the science of painting; thirdly, there are notes on studio practice; and fourthly, there are entries, scattered through the Trattato, in which Leonardo expresses, sometimes half-unconsciously, his personal tastes and feelings as a painter.

  Leonardo’s general views on the art of painting are found for the most part in the first book of the Trattato, where he compares it to the arts of poetry, music, and sculpture.{30} These comparisons, or paragoni as they were called, were a standard form of critical literature at the time, and something of what they contain is derivative; but the presentation of the argument and, above all, the illustrative examples quoted are characteristic of Leonardo and of immense interest, since nowhere else does he allow himself to write in such generalized or such personal terms of the things which concerned him most deeply.

  Since classical times painting had been classed among the mechanical arts,{31} and Leonardo, like Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses, is concerned to establish its respectability by proving that it is a mental activity and a science. The destruction of such an artificial premise naturally involves him in some artificiality himself, but above these sophistries, which are harmless enough if judged by the standards of contemporary literature, there towers a noble and thrilling conception of what painting should be. In the first place, it is a recreation of the visible world. Leonardo always insists on this godlike quality of the painter’s imagination. From the divine element in the science of painting it follows that the mind of the painter is transformed into the likeness of the mind of God. It is this view of art as creation which makes him insist that the painter must be universal, must neglect no aspect of nature; and for the same reason he must be a scientist, that is to say, must understand the inner nature of what he paints almost as if he had created it himself. ‘If you despise painting,’ he says,{32} ‘which is the sole means of reproducing all the known works of nature, you despise an invention which with subtle and philosophic speculation considers all the qualities of forms: seas, plants, animals, grasses, flowers, all of which are encircled in light and shadow.’ But the painter must not only recreate the semblance of things seen: he must select and dispose them with harmonious intention. Painting, he says, depends on ‘l’armonica proporzionalita delle parti che compongono il tutto, che contenta il senso’.{33} Here Leonardo shows himself touched by the predominant Platonism of his time, for the idea that the visual arts were a sort of frozen music was familiar to many theorists of the Renaissance, and had been given superb expression by Leon Battista Alberti, to whose treatise on painting, written in 1435, Leonardo was greatly indebted. But in his enthusiasm for p
ainting, Leonardo goes farther and claims that painting is superior to music in so far as it is frozen, since its sequences are not fleeting sounds or images, si volece nel nascere come nel morire, but can be apprehended immediately and contemplated indefinitely.{34} This exposition of the relative immediacy and permanence of the sensations aroused by the arts, anticipating to some extent the theories of Lessing, is, from a critical point of view, the most valuable part of the Trattato. But strict logic was no part of Leonardo’s equipment, and when he comes to compare painting with sculpture his personal prejudices rush in, to the confusion of his aesthetic theories, but to the vast enrichment of our knowledge of his character.

  For that side of painting which consists in the harmonious composition of proportionate parts Leonardo gives no rules, though in one abstruse passage he hints at a means of establishing an equivalent to certain musical intervals.{35} The academic advice and instruction which fill a great part of the Trattato are concerned with painting as the science by which visible objects are recreated in permanent shape. And since the exact sciences must be stated in mathematical terms, Leonardo insists that the student of painting must be grounded in mathematics. This union of art and mathematics is far from our own way of thinking, but it was fundamental to the Renaissance. It was the basis of perspective, that article of faith of the fifteenth-century painters, through which they hoped to surpass even the painters of antiquity. By perspective they sometimes meant the whole science of vision, the means by which a visual impression is received in the retina; more frequently they limited the word to the scientific representation of receding figures in space. But even in this narrower interpretation, the study of perspective involved a real mastery of mathematics: and this the great artists of the quattrocento—Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Uccello, Mantegna, Bramante, above all Piero della Francesca—had evidently possessed. All this must be borne in mind when studying the diagrams and calculations which fill the pages of Leonardo’s writings on art. His chief treatise on perspective seems to be lost; such notes on the subject as have come down to us derive from Alberti and perhaps from Piero della Francesca. His notes on the perspective of colour, however, and what he calls the perspective of disappearance contain many of those acute observations in which he anticipated the doctrines of impressionism; but he was so far from carrying out these delicate observations of colour and atmosphere in his painting that they were entirely without influence. The reverse is true of his observations on light and shade. Like all good Florentines he felt the importance of relief, but he was not content to achieve it by the subtle combination of drawing and surface modelling which the painters of the quattrocento had brought to perfection. He wished to achieve relief through the scientific use of light and shade. In the Trattato he says—under the heading ‘which is the more difficult, light and shade or good drawing’—‘Shadows have their boundaries at certain determinable points. He who is ignorant of these will produce work without relief; and relief is the summit and the soul of painting.’{36}