Chapter V: Dawn of the Golden Age: Botticelli and Leonardo Da Vinci (2)

Amidst the distractions of the court, the irksomeness of the rashly undertaken Sforza monument, and the increasing passion for scientific research, Leonardo managed to carry through his single monumental work, the Last Supper, in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

For three years Leonardo worked spasmodically on the Last Supper, and it was finished in 1498. The design had been most carefully elaborated. He started with the customary arrangement of the apostles in pairs, John in Jesus’ bosom—a refractory motive, and Judas in sinister isolation on the near side of the table. Almost by accident he fell upon the effective grouping of the apostles by threes. Then he set himself to giving in expression and gesture the maximum emotion that could be contained within a monumental design. He eliminated the old casual accessories and made all the lines of perspective converge on the face of Christ. He gave to all the figures a classical gravity, though admitting many varieties of age and character.

Thus even in its ruined estate The Last Supper, Figure 154, is perhaps the most impressive picture in the world. The moment is that when Christ says “One of you shall betray me.” The arrangement is in five great balancing waves. From the Christ there is an outgoing gesture of resignation and love, from the apostles converging, incoming waves of horror, amazement, curiosity and indignation. Each undulation is double. Extended arms or pointed hands check the motion where it is excessive or connect the separate groups. Only Judas is out of the converging rhythm. He swings back defiantly pondering his part. Highly agitated in details, the whole is held within a noble and pathetic decorum. It is the very ideal of a Renaissance composition—dense, rich, energetic, varied, yet unified by a severe and calculated pattern which subordinates to its purpose the most diverse components. Raphael can only imitate it in the lower part of the Disputa, and monumental design ever since has gone to school with it.

FIG. 154. Leonardo da Vinci. Last supper.—_S. Maria delle Grazie,
Milan._
]

It was unhappily painted in tempera, not in oils as older accounts say,[55] on the dry wall, and it soon began to deteriorate. What we see today is merely the wraith of it, yet a wraith that imposes itself and moves us as few better preserved masterpieces do.

In the year 1500 the French overran Lombardy, and, Leonardo, after wandering in Northern Italy and a martial episode as engineer for conquering Cæsar Borgia, returned, in 1503, to his native Florence. He is fifty and already in spirit an old man. His always limited will power has given out, he broods incessantly over mathematical and physical lore, wastes himself over fantastic inventions. His exhibit is only a cartoon, now lost, for a St. Ann. He makes portraits by proxy, but paints, himself, only under peculiar incentives. Such he found in the commission for a great battle-piece for the Priors’ Palace and in the personality of Mona Lisa.

FIG. 155. Leonardo da Vinci. Sketches for the Battle of
Anghiari.—_Windsor Castle._
]

Early in the year 1504 he began to work on the cartoon for the Battle of Anghiari. He chose the incident of a cavalry fight for the standard. He composed a whirl of horses and infuriated riders, hacking and slashing about a flag—a literal picture of bloodlust at its height. The ability he expended on this atrocious theme may be sensed in a dozen preparatory sketches, Figure 155. The portion which he actually painted on the wall is represented only by inferior copies. The original soon faded from deficient technical methods. The old copies tell us that this great piece, while the marvel of its day, was sensational and highly exhibitionistic. We need not too much mourn its loss. The admiration it evoked was that of an age eager for novelty and responsive to display.

FIG. 156. Leonardo. Mona Lisa.—_Louvre._
]

While working on the battle-piece, Leonardo met the young Neapolitan wife of Francesco del Giocondo and began her portrait, Figure 156. She had lost children and was habitually sad. He employed musicians to charm the inscrutable fascinating smile to her face. He set her demure and watchful before a romantic expanse of river plain rimmed by blue alps. Against this wild charm of nature, he made Mona Lisa a symbol for all that is cultured, self-contained, sophisticated, civilized. Simple people instinctively dislike her, and are right. Subtle people adore her, and are also right. Such as wish poetic commentary on her mysterious beauty may find it for themselves in Walter Pater’s admirable essay. They will do well to temper his eloquence with Kenyon Cox’s[56] just if prosaic observation that this portrait is simply the finest, most accurate, and subtle bit of modelling in the world. Its mystery is perhaps merely one of amazing vision and impeccable workmanship. The truth may well lie between two interpretations, each of which is valid in its own field. Had there not been some extraordinary spell in the woman herself, Leonardo, now well weary of painting, would hardly have studied either her soul or her modelling with such tenacity.

During his brief sojourn in Florence, Leonardo did cartoons for two designs of Leda and the Swan, his only mythological picture. One represents her standing, the other crouching. If we may trust the inferior imitations, in which alone we know these subjects, their calculated sensuousness was almost cloying. Their mood is that of his least agreeable imitator, Sodoma.

FIG. 157. Leonardo. Madonna with St. Ann.—_Louvre._
]

In May 1506 Florence lent Leonardo to Charles d’Amboise, the French viceroy at Milan, and there he spent the most of the next five years. The Franciscans had been biding their time, and under legal duress made him finish the Madonna which he had promised twenty-three years earlier. Thus the second Madonna of the Rocks, at London, was painted somewhat against the grain. It has more simplicity and breadth than the earlier version and shows improvements in the position of the angel. It also lacks the minute and painstaking delicacy of its original, reveals a tired hand and mind. Otherwise Leonardo achieved in painting only the third version of the Madonna and St. Ann, Figure 157, now in the Louvre. The interweaving of the figures is compact and masterly, the solution of the difficult problems of the two heads consummately clever. It has passages of the utmost loveliness, like the foot of the Madonna, but there is some suspicion of oversophistication, and Leonardo never summoned the energy to finish it. Painting little himself,—for he was busy with canals, architecture, and the never finished equestrian monument of Trivulzio,—Leonardo gave his stamp to the entire Milanese school. Such pupils as Boltraffio, Cesare da Sesto, Andrea Solario, his old partner, Ambrogio de Predis, and his intimate, Francesco Melzi, readily grasped his mannerisms, and filled Italy with Leonardesque pictures of inferior inspiration. More robust and independent spirits, like Bernardino Luini, adapted his manner intelligently to the needs of mural painting. Lombardy under his influence for a moment seemed to vie with Florence and Rome.

In 1513 Leonardo was called to Rome by the new Pope Leo X, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s son, Giovanni. It was the moment for artistic ambition to flame in one who felt himself a great painter. Michelangelo had recently unveiled the Sistine ceiling, and Raphael had completed the Camera della Segnatura. Leonardo was sixty-one, when a painter should be at his best. Yet he plunged himself into scientific experiments, perpetrated strange practical jokes on his patrons, produced nothing but disorderly notes, and after two wasted years left the repute of one rather an amateur magician than an artist.

Having lived a wanderer, it was appropriate that Leonardo should die an exile. Francis I, an enthusiastic patron of Italian art, called him to France and settled him honorably in the Château of Cloux, near Amboise. We hear of him as immensely learned and venerable, but palsied, and dependent on the affectionate care of his pupil Melzi. He died on the morrow of Mayday 1519 at peace with the church, leaving money to sixty poor persons who should follow his body with candles to the tomb. Doubtless you could have marked in that pitiful procession many of those gnarled, toothless and haggard faces which Leonardo formerly loved to sketch in the intervals of his endless quest of beauty. As we study the marvelous drawing of himself in old age, Figure 158, we may surmise that he was glad to go. It is hard to see in it the courtier who bore the fantastic silver lute to Lodovico, the artist who charmed a smile from the weary and cautious face of Mona Lisa. One sees a man immensely old, though at an age generally robust and cheery—one who has tried to crowd many lives into one and has paid the inevitable penalty.

FIG. 158. Leonardo da Vinci. His own portrait.—_Turin._
]

Broken and intermittent as it had been, Leonardo’s painting had sufficed to show the way. He had substituted mystery of light and shade for allurement of frank color, study of the subtler and finer shades of emotion for obvious characterization, had founded modern portraiture. He had shown how to express power and passion with delicacy, had combined the richest animation and variety with monumental severity of design. After him the art of painting was never to be the same again. Its standards became ampler and more classic. Stolid men like Fra Bartolommeo immediately accepted his principles of composition and so did miraculously alert intelligences like Raphael’s. His mere passing contact and tradition inspired that admirable language of light and dark that became poetry in Giorgione and Correggio. The good and the harm he did is active today in thousands of academies and art schools. His is assuredly the finest intelligence that ever applied itself to the painter’s art, and if he failed in will and in fecundity, he has impressed himself upon posterity as no other Italian painter save Titian. His art had its limitations, but its capacity for influence, to which he added the thoughtful eloquence of his written word, seems limitless; and his glory is imperishable.

Nowhere does the superiority of Florence show more clearly than in the attitude of her artists to Leonardo. Where his Milanese followers aped his superficial mannerisms, his Florentine admirers studied and assimilated his construction in light and shade and his principles of geometrical composition. Unhappily the early years of the sixteenth century were a slack time in Florence. Such transitional painters as Piero di Cosimo, Granacci, Franciabigio, Il Bacchiacca, and Ridolfo Ghirlandaio were not men to carry forward Leonardo’s discoveries, but they and others, at least paid him an intelligent homage and sensibly clarified their practice under his influence. Greater intelligences like Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto not merely adopted Leonardo’s canons, but even at certain points criticized them. Both saw the drawback of Leonardo’s passionate concern with chiaroscuro—that it flooded the canvas with colorless shadow, tending to reduce the palette to black and white. Both men then therefore kept their rich shadows colorful. Both worked for a more compact and intricate composition as well as for graceful, abstract poses. In these latter endeavors they simplified and sharpened principles which Leonardo himself only rarely carried to their logical extreme.

Leonardo retained certain primitive qualities. He seldom reduced his compositions to dense arrangements of the figures, loving to allow elbow room and delighting to open up landscape backgrounds. And while in the “Treatise on Painting” he advocated elaborately balanced and counterpoised poses, in practice he usually sought an excuse for them in action. A consummate stylist, he achieved style on a basis of function. The pose, in his own words, must express “the emotions of the soul.” Right here his ablest followers took issue with him. Posture with them no longer expressed specific or individual emotion, but abstract beauties of grace, dignity or grandeur. The figures no longer do or feel anything, they are arranged as the general composition and mood of the picture require. Such gradual advance towards pure style heralds the advent of the High Renaissance.

FIG. 159. Fra Bartolommeo. God appearing to two Saints.—_Lucca._
]

Of the somewhat stolid and occasionally sentimental sublimity of Fra Bartolommeo[57] nothing much need be said except that it was a formative influence on young Raphael. The Dominican monk is an impressive and amiable figure personally. Working solely for the glory of God and the profit of the Convent of San Marco, perturbed by the tragic fate of his cloister mate, Savonarola, he strove incessantly for a fuller color and a greater dignity. In his numerous Holy Families he is stately in a conventional way, nowhere more so than in the unfinished design for a Madonna with St. Ann, in the Uffizi. Occasionally, in such pictures as the Deposition of the Uffizi, and the Madonna of Pity at Lucca he achieves poignant, one is tempted to say operatic effects, forecasting the mood of the Baroque. Lucca also affords in the great picture God Adored by Two Saints, Figure 159, a fine example of this painter’s simple and massive compositions. In the fresco of The Last Judgment, which, being ruined, is better represented by Copies, Figure 160, we find an elaboration, in Leonardo’s sense, of the simple symmetries of Perugino. It is the precedent for Raphael’s monumental frescoes at Rome. His short career, from about 1495 to 1517, fell on evil times for Florence. In happier days he might have harmonized more perfectly the stylist and the lyrical dramatist that, as it was, never quite came to terms in his grave and noble personality. Yet to have mediated between Leonardo and Raphael would seem glory enough for any painter, and it was also no slight service to borrow for Florentine painting, rapidly becoming starved of color, something of the colorful richness of Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione.

FIG. 160. Fra Bartolommeo. Copy of Lost Fresco of Last
Judgment.—_Uffizi._
]

“The Perfect Painter” was what the Florentines called Andrea del Sarto,[58] and he merited the title. He produced no masterpiece of the first order, but his Work is singularly uniform on a high level. Its chief qualities are dignity and grace with a great richness of color. The deep shadows are warm and full of dusky light, the stylistic poses of the figures always easy, and the weaving of the complicated groupings ever tasteful and harmonious. To the refractory art of fresco painting Andrea brought a richness, depth and variety of color that others hardly attained in oil painting. Only Luini in the north came near him in this regard. In short he is a consummate technician, carrying his art as far as skill and taste unillumined by sheer genius will reach.

FIG. 161. Andrea del Sarto. Birth.—_Annunziata._
]

Little of his excellence can be laid to his early training. Before 1500 he was working with Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea’s youthful frescoes of the miracles of S. Filippo Benizzi, in the fore-court of the Annunziata, show the loose and animated arrangements and the exaggeration of picturesque landscape features characteristic of his master. But Andrea learned rather of the time-spirit than of any other master. By 1514 his art is complete and one may see its flowering in the frescoes of the Birth of the Virgin, Figure 161, and the Madonna of the Sack, Figure 162, respectively in the fore-court and in the cloister of the Annunziata. It is a sumptuous and grave kind of design redeemed from heaviness by its exquisite balance of color masses, and from conventionality by the hint of portraiture in the artfully disposed figures.

FIG. 162. Andrea del Sarto. Madonna of the Sack.—_Annunziata._
]

Scores of times Andrea repeats these perfections in the great altar-backs required for the new Renaissance chapels. The Four Saints in the Pitti, the Madonna of the Harpies in the Uffizi, Figure 162a, the Enthroned Madonna at Berlin may serve among many to illustrate his accomplishment in this new vein. Somewhat reminiscent of the heavier monumentality of Fra Bartolommeo, these great pictures add a personal and disquieting note from the presence of the moody, handsome wife, Lucrezia whose caprices and infidelities are the tragic element in an otherwise even life.

FIG. 162_a._ Andrea del Sarto. Madonna of the Harpies.—_Uffizi._
]

Andrea in his later years won new glories but added no new note to his art. The monochrome frescoes in the Cloister of the Scalzo representing the Life of St. John Baptist merely show the old gravity somewhat exaggerated. The series which extended over many years (1515–1526) is uneven, and many of these perhaps overestimated compositions are plainly of student execution. Without his color, Andrea seems somewhat coldly academic. It was precisely this quality of stylistic grandeur, however, that appealed paradoxically to the romantic monarch, Francis I. He called Andrea to France in 1518 and kept him there in honor for a year. Had Andrea possessed any of the capacities of a teacher and theorist, he might have inaugurated the Renaissance in France. As it was he remained merely a harbinger of such inferior but more influential spirits as Il Rosso and Primaticcio who a few years later were to found the School of Fontainebleau.

Often the portfolios of a great technician are more thrilling than his major works. This is the case with Andrea del Sarto. His numerous sketches in red chalk, have an athletic charm which his painting lacks. Others have drawn differently in this medium, but no one has drawn better.

When Andrea died in 1531, “full of glory and domestic trials,” as Vasari recounts, the normal development of Florentine painting ended, and Florence had already seen her artistic star dimmed by the rising splendors of Venice and Rome. Artistically she became a city of wit and ingenuity, chronicling and criticizing art rather than producing it. Moreover the obsession of Michelangelo’s sublimity worked havoc with his dilettante imitators. Some of these have the grace of lucidity, like Agnolo Bronzino, who (1502–1572)[59] practiced a reactionary sort of portraiture based on the old tradition of tempera painting. In sheer beauty of surface, enamel one is tempted to call it, he is little inferior to his great German contemporary, Hans Holbein, and his sense of character is only less keen because less individual. In the haughty patricians surrounding the person of Cosimo, the first grandduke, he found congenial sitters, Figure 163. In the narrow field of portraiture he is nearly in the first rank, while in his rare mythologies and religious pictures his limitations appear painfully. He was a vicious person, a cold æsthete, with few of the generous virtues that nourish the soul. Yet in his flinty way he was quite perfect, and as one of the first professionally unmoral artists he cannot be neglected by the psychological critic.

FIG. 164. Pontormo. The Deposition.—_S. Felice._
]

A more appealing figure is his master, Jacopo Carrucci, called from his birthplace Il Pontormo.[60] His was a tender and deeply religious spirit with the poet’s capacity for elation and melancholy. In his altar-pieces, such as the Deposition, Figure 164, at San Felice he seeks and achieves a positive pathos. Influenced by Michelangelo’s sublimity, he converts it to more specific and psychological ends. Often he is restless and over-emphatic as in the frescoes of the Passion in the cloister of the Florentine Certosa, or in the strangely complicated and contorted little picture of the Martyrdom of St. Mauritius and his Legionaries, in the Uffizi. In such work he moves towards the absolute expressionism of an El Greco, preluding also the more conventional emotionalism of the Baroque. As a portraitist he had no equal at Florence except his pupil Bronzino. Often the sensitiveness and moodiness of his characterizations recall his Venetic contemporary, Lorenzo Lotto. Even when he is robust he is sensitively psychological, as in the superb portrait of a Halberdier, Figure 165. Above all he was a powerful and subtle draughtsman whether with pen or chalk. His line writhes in a fashion at times sinister, at times singularly blithe, and his figure sketches have something of the imaginative thrill of the figure studies of Blake. For the grandducal palace of Poggio a Cajano, Figure 166, he did in a huge lunette pierced by a great round window a most original decoration for the odd triangles at the base. The unconventional fields are filled each by a rather small figure energetically posed and surrounded by greenery. The thing is at once monumental and pastoral and its freedom and tonality almost as modern as a Besnard. I would willingly dwell longer on so sympathetic an artist, but can only refer the interested reader to Dr. F. M. Clapp’s two authoritative volumes.

FIG. 163. Bronzino. Eleonora of Toledo and her son.—_Uffizi._
]

FIG. 165. Pontormo. The Halberdier.—_C. C. Stillman, N. Y._
]

For a century and more after Pontormo’s death in 1556 there are still occasional artists of talent at Florence, but there is no longer a Florentine school. The masterpieces of Michelangelo were at Rome, those of Raphael widely scattered. Conscious of her decline, Florence begins to import artists—the Flemish portraitist, Sustermans; the Venetian decorator, Luca Giordano. One of her own abler painters, Francesco Salviati, attaches himself to the Venetian manner. Being an academic city, Florence eschews the rugged naturalism of Caravaggio, but has no longer vitality enough to find a substitute of her own. In the late sixteenth century her fresco painting sinks to the pompous emptiness represented by Giorgio Vasari, or by the hardly better mythologies of the brothers Federigo and Taddeo Zuccaro. In the seventeenth century she still can produce an idyllist of great romantic and sensuous charm in a Francesco Furini and a genial illustrator in a Giovanni di San Giovanni. But such names only suggest the incoherence of the times. Florence is no longer a main current but an eddy, and what small flood-tide still runs courses in the more resolute academism of Bologna, which is to be capable of inspiring a Poussin; and in the raw naturalism of Naples, which is about to give lessons to a Velasquez.

FIG. 166. Pontormo. Frescoed Lunette.—_Poggio a Cajano._
]

ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER V

POETRY AND PAINTING IN THE RENAISSANCE

Reversing the maxim _ut pictura poesis_, the Renaissance believed that
painting should be poetical. Indeed the term _poesia_ is commonly
applied to all painting of a mythological or idyllic sort. Angelo
Poliziano’s unfinished but very popular poem on the joust of 1468 is
lavish in descriptions, of which the painters made use. Botticelli
surely got more than a hint for the Birth of Venus from stanzas
xcix-ci of _La Giostra_, though the mood of the picture is wholly
Sandro’s own and unlike the pagan joyousness of Poliziano.

“One saw
Born in the sea, free and joyous in her acts,
A damsel with divine visage
Driven ashore by the ardent zephyrs
Balancing on a shell; and it seemed the heavens rejoiced thereat.”

“True the foam and true the sea you would have said
True the shell, and the blowing of the winds true.
You would have seen the gleam of the Goddess’ eye
And the heavens laugh about her, and the elements.
And the Hours in white garments on the strand,
And the winds toss their spreading soft locks.”

· · · · ·

“You could swear that you could see the goddess coming from the waves
Wringing out her hair with her right hand
And with the left covering the sweet mount of desire,
And the sand, once trodden by her feet,
Clothing itself with grass and flowers.
Then with joyous and expectant glance
You would have seen her clasped by the three nymphs
And wrapped in a starry robe.”

Botticelli’s charming and even slyly humorous picture of Venus with
sleeping Mars, at London, follows afar and discreetly _La Giostra_, I.
stanzas cxxii-iii, but Botticelli has taken the motive out of doors
and otherwise considerably subtilized it. Venus is

“Seated in bed outside the covers
Just released from the arms of Mars
Who, lies backward on her lap

· · · · ·

“Above them and around the tiny loves
Played naked, flying now here now there

· · · · ·

“One fills the quiver with fresh flowers
Then comes and empties it on the bed.”

Poliziano also supplied to Raphael the theme of the Galatea, in the
Farnesina, _Giostra_, I. cxviii (Fig. 192a)

“Two shapely dolphins draw a car;
On it is Galatea who holds the reins,
And they swimming breathe with equal breath.
Around circle the more amorous throng.
One spits out the salt wave, the others circle round;
One seems to play at love and dallies.
The fair nymph with her trusted sisters
Laughs charmingly at their hoarse singing.”

Titian, too, may have had in mind the _Giostra_, I. cxi, when he
composed his Bacchus and Ariadne. (Fig. 260)

“Comes upon a car covered with ivy and rushes
Drawn by two tigers—Bacchus
And with him it seems that fauns and mænads
Tread the deep sand and shout with raised voices.
One we see staggering; others seem to stumble,
One clashes the cymbal; others seem to laugh.
One drinks from a horn, one from his hand.
One has grabbed a nymph, and one turns handsprings.”

LEONARDO AND THE ACADEMIC IDEA OF PAINTING

The extraordinary mixture of liberality and dogmatism, of naturalism
and taste in Leonardo is best illustrated from his own _Trattato della
Pittura_. I quote from the standard edition of H. Ludwig, Vienna,
1882, using his paragraph numbers:

MODELLING IN CHIAROSCURO AS THE PAINTER’S FIRST OBJECT

¶ 412. “The first object of the painter is to make a flat plane appear
as a body in relief and projecting from that plane, and he who in such
art excels the others, deserves the greater praise, and such research,
or rather crown of such science, is born from light and shade, or I
mean chiaroscuro. Then he who flees from shadows, flees also from the
glory of our art among noble spirits and gains it with the ignorant
herd, which desires nothing in painting but beauty of colors,
forgetting entirely the beauty and wonder of showing a flat thing as
if it were in relief.”

ON JUDGING A PAINTER’S WORK

¶ 483. “The first thing is that you consider the figures, if they have
the relief which the place and light demand....

“The second is that the scattering, or rather distribution of the
figures be made according to the way in which you wish the story to
be.

“The third is that the figures be alert and intent on their particular
purpose.”

ON THE MOVEMENTS THAT MARK THE EMOTIONS

¶ 122. “The most important thing which can be found in the theory of
painting are the movements appropriate to the mental state of each
being,—as desire, scorn, wrath, pity and the like.”

THE STEPS IN A PAINTER’S EDUCATION

¶ 82. “Draw first designs of a good master made in the fashion of
nature and not mannered; then from a relief, in the presence of a
drawing made from that relief; then from a good natural object.”

JUDGMENT VERSUS DEXTERITY

¶ 62. “That painter who does not doubt learns little. When the work
surpasses the judgment of the worker, that worker acquires little, and
when the judgment surpasses the work, that work never ceases to grow
better, unless avarice prevents it.”

ON USE OF MEMORY IN THE NIGHT WATCHES

¶ 67. “Also I have proved it to be of no little use to me, when you
find yourself in bed in the dark, to repeat in the imagination the
things studied earlier, or other things of notable sort comprised in
subtle thought, and this is truly a laudable act and useful in fixing
things in memory.”

ON SELECTIVE IMITATION

¶ 58a. “The painter should be solitary and think over what he sees and
discuss with himself, selecting the most excellent parts of the
species of whatever he sees, acting after the fashion of a mirror
which transmutes into as many colors as there are things what is set
before it. And so doing he will seem to be himself a second nature.”

¶ 98. “Winter evenings should be used by young painters in the study
of things prepared in summer, that is bring together all the nudes
which you have made in the summer, and make a choice of the better
limbs and bodies and practice from them and fix them in mind.”

ON HIGH STANDARDS

¶ 59. “If you painter will seek to please the first painters, you will
make your pictures well, because they alone can guide you truthfully,
but if you wish to please those who are not masters, your pictures
will have few foreshortenings and little relief or alert movement, and
thereby you will fail in that part in which painting is held to be an
excellent art, that is in giving an effect of relief where there is
nothing in relief.”

ON AVOIDING HARSH SHADOWS AND SUNLIGHT EFFECTS

¶ 87. “The light cut off from the shade too clearly is greatly blamed
by painters. Hence to avoid such a fault, if you paint bodies in the
open country, you will not make the figures as lighted by the sun, but
imagine some sort of mist or transparent clouds to be interposed
between the object and the sun, whence, since the figure is not
emphasized by the sunlight, the demarcations of light and shade will
not be emphasized.”

ON THE MOST PLEASING LIGHT

¶ 138. “If you have a court yard that can be covered as you wish with
a linen awning, that will be a good light; or when you wish to draw
anyone, draw him in bad weather, towards nightfall, and make the
sitter stand with his back to one of the walls of this court. In the
streets set your mind towards nightfall on the faces of the men and
women, in bad weather, how much grace and sweetness appears in them.”

ON COUNTERPOISE OF THE FIGURE

¶ 88. “Do not have the head turned the way the breast is, nor the arm
the way the leg is; and if the head is turned over the right shoulder
make the parts lower on the left than on the right” [and vice versa].

At first blush this stylistic counsel flatly contradicts Leonardo’s
principle that poses and emotions should express state of mind, but as
a matter of fact many expressive movements obey this law of
counterpoise or active equilibrium. Leonardo himself generally finds
motives for such poses. Such successors as Raphael and Andrea del
Sarto habitually used such poses without other excuse than that of
their own inherent gracefulness.

ON FREEDOM IN MAKING A COMPOSITION

¶ 189. “Have you never considered the poets composing their verses?
They take no trouble to make fine letters, nor do they mind cancelling
some of the verses and making them better. Do you, then, painter, make
the limbs of your figures roughly and attend first to the movements
appropriate to the mental state of the beings composing your story,
rather than to the beauty and rightness of their members, because you
must understand that if such a composition in the rough will meet the
needs of the invention, it will please all the more after it has been
adorned with the perfection appropriate to all its parts. I have seen
in the clouds and spots on the wall what has aroused me to fine
inventions of various things, since these spots though entirely
without perfection in any part, did not lack perfection in their
movements and other actions.”

PAINTING THE GRANDCHILD OF NATURE

¶ 12. “If you shall despise painting, which is the only imitator of
all the apparent works of nature, assuredly you will despise also that
careful investigation which with philosophical and careful speculation
considers all the qualities of forms: the sea, place, plants, animals,
herbage, flowers, which are enveloped in light and shade. And truly
this speculation is science and the legitimate child of Nature, since
painting is born of this nature. But, to speak more correctly, we will
say grandchild of nature, since all apparent things are born of
Nature, of which things painting is born. Hence rightly we shall call
it the grandchild of this nature and the kinsman of God.”

THAT THE PAINTER SHOULD BE SOLITARY

¶ 50. “The painter, or rather designer, should be solitary, and
especially when he is intent on speculations and considerations which
continually appearing before the eyes give matter to be well kept in
memory. And if you are alone, you will be entirely yours. And if you
shall be accompanied by a single companion you will be half yours, and
so much the less as the indiscretion of your companionship shall be
the greater ... And if you would say ‘I will do in my fashion, I will
hold myself apart’ ... one cannot serve two masters. You will fulfil
badly the duty of a companion, and worse the aim of reasoning on the
art ... And if you say ‘I will withdraw myself entirely,’ ... I tell
you you will be held a madman, but, lo, thus doing you will at least
be alone.”

Here Leonardo takes sharpest issue with the easy-going sociable
methods which for generations had held in the painter’s bottega, and
shows himself an individualist of modern type.

RUBENS’ PRAISE OF LEONARDO

Peter Paul Rubens, who had copied Leonardo’s battle-piece, has left
the following perceptive tribute to the genius of his predecessor:

“Nothing escaped him that related to the expression of his subject:
and by the heat of his fancy, as well as by the solidity of his
judgment, he raised divine things by human, and understood how to give
men those different degrees, that elevate them to the character of
heroes.

“The best of the examples which he has left us is our Lord’s Supper,
which he painted at Milan, wherein he has represented the apostles in
places that suit with them, and our Saviour in the most honourable,
the midst of all, having nobody near enough to press or incommode him.
His attitude is grand, his arms are in a loose and free posture, to
show the greater grandeur, while the apostles appear agitated one side
to the other by the vehemence of their inquietude, and in which there
is, however, no meanness, nor any indecent action to be seen. In short
by his profound speculations he arrived to such a degree of
perfection, that it seems to me impossible to speak so well of him as
he deserves, and much more to imitate him.”

_The Art of Painting ... Translated from the French of Monsieur De
Piles_, London about 1725. p. 107 f.

FIG. 167. Raphael. Count Baldassare Castiglione, author of “the
Courtier.”—_Louvre._
]