Chapter 2

The singularly beautiful "Head of Christ" (Plate VI.), now in the Brera Gallery at Milan, is the original study for the head of the principal figure in the fresco painting of the "Last Supper." In spite of decay and restoration it expresses "the most elevated seriousness together with Divine Gentleness, pain on account of the faithlessness of His disciples, a full presentiment of His own death, and resignation to the will of His Father."

THE COURT OF MILAN

Ludovico, to whom Leonardo was now court-painter, had married Beatrice d'Este, in 1491, when she was only fifteen years of age. The young Duchess, who at one time owned as many as eighty-four splendid gowns, refused to wear a certain dress of woven gold, which her husband had given her, if Cecilia Gallerani, the Sappho of her day, continued to wear a very similar one, which presumably had been given to her by Ludovico. Having discarded Cecilia, who, as her tastes did not lie in the direction of the Convent, was married in 1491 to Count Ludovico Bergamini, the Duke in 1496 became enamoured of Lucrezia Crivelli, a lady-in-waiting to the Duchess Beatrice.

Leonardo, as court painter, perhaps painted a portrait, now lost, of Lucrezia, whose features are more likely to be preserved to us in the portrait by Ambrogio da Predis, now in the Collection of the Earl of Roden, than in the quite unauthenticated portrait (Plate VII.), now in the Louvre (No. 1600).

On January 2, 1497, Beatrice spent three hours in prayer in the church of St. Maria delle Grazie, and the same night gave birth to a stillborn child. In a few hours she passed away, and from that moment Ludovico was a changed man. He went daily to see her tomb, and was quite overcome with grief.

In April 1498, Isabella d'Este, Beatrice's elder, more beautiful, and more graceful sister, "at the sound of whose name all the muses rise and do reverence" wrote to Cecilia Gallerani, or Bergamini, asking her to lend her the portrait which Leonardo had painted of her some fifteen years earlier, as she wished to compare it with a picture by Giovanni Bellini. Cecilia graciously lent the picture--now presumably lost--adding her regret that it no longer resembled her.

LEONARDO LEAVES MILAN

Among the last of Leonardo da Vinci's works in Milan towards the end of 1499 was, probably, the superb cartoon of "The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John," now at Burlington House. Though little known to the general public, this large drawing on _carton_, or stiff paper, is one of the greatest of London's treasures, as it reveals the sweeping line of Leonardo's powerful draughtsmanship. It was in the Pompeo Leoni, Arconati, Casnedi, and Udney Collections before passing to the Royal Academy.

In 1499 the stormy times in Milan foreboded the end of Ludovico's reign. In April of that year we read of his giving a vineyard to Leonardo; in September Ludovico had to leave Milan for the Tyrol to raise an army, and on the 14th of the same month the city was sold by Bernardino di Corte to the French, who occupied it from 1500 to 1512. Ludovico may well have had in mind the figure of the traitor in the "Last Supper" when he declared that "Since the days of Judas Iscariot there has never been so black a traitor as Bernardino di Corte." On October 6th Louis XII. entered the city. Before the end of the year Leonardo, realising the necessity for his speedy departure, sent six hundred gold florins by letter of exchange to Florence to be placed to his credit with the hospital of S. Maria Nuova.

In the following year, Ludovico having been defeated at Novara, Leonardo was a homeless wanderer. He left Milan for Mantua, where he drew a portrait in chalk of Isabella d'Este, which is now in the Louvre. Leonardo eventually arrived in Florence about Easter 1500. After apparently working there in 1501 on a second Cartoon, similar in most respects to the one he had executed in Milan two years earlier, he travelled in Umbria, visiting Orvieto, Pesaro, Rimini, and other towns, acting as engineer and architect to Cesare Borgia, for whom he planned a navigable canal between Cesena and Porto Cese-natico.

MONA LISA

Early in 1503 he was back again in Florence, and set to work in earnest on the "Portrait of Mona Lisa" (Plate I.), now in the Louvre (No. 1601). Lisa di Anton Maria di Noldo Gherardini was the daughter of Antonio Gherardini. In 1495 she married Francesco di Bartolommeo de Zenobi del Giocondo. It is from the surname of her husband that she derives the name of "La Joconde," by which her portrait is officially known in the Louvre. Vasari is probably inaccurate in saying that Leonardo "loitered over it for four years, and finally left it unfinished." He may have begun it in the spring of 1501 and, probably owing to having taken service under Cesare Borgia in the following year, put it on one side, ultimately completing it after working on the "Battle of Anghiari" in 1504. Vasari's eulogy of this portrait may with advantage be quoted: "Whoever shall desire to see how far art can imitate nature may do so to perfection in this head, wherein every peculiarity that could be depicted by the utmost subtlety of the pencil has been faithfully reproduced. The eyes have the lustrous brightness and moisture which is seen in life, and around them are those pale, red, and slightly livid circles, also proper to nature. The nose, with its beautiful and delicately roseate nostrils, might be easily believed to be alive; the mouth, admirable in its outline, has the lips uniting the rose-tints of their colour with those of the face, in the utmost perfection, and the carnation of the cheek does not appear to be painted, but truly flesh and blood. He who looks earnestly at the pit of the throat cannot but believe that he sees the beating of the pulses. Mona Lisa was exceedingly beautiful, and while Leonardo was painting her portrait, he took the precaution of keeping some one constantly near her to sing or play on instruments, or to jest and otherwise amuse her."

Leonardo painted this picture in the full maturity of his talent, and, although it is now little more than a monochrome owing to the free and merciless restoration to which it has been at times subjected, it must have created a wonderful impression on those who saw it in the early years of the sixteenth century. It is difficult for the unpractised eye to-day to form any idea of its original beauty. Leonardo has here painted this worldly-minded woman--her portrait is much more famous than she herself ever was--with a marvellous charm and suavity, a finesse of expression never reached before and hardly ever equalled since. Contrast the head of the Christ at Milan, Leonardo's conception of divinity expressed in perfect humanity, with the subtle and sphinx-like smile of this languorous creature.

The landscape background, against which Mona Lisa is posed, recalls the severe, rather than exuberant, landscape and the dim vistas of mountain ranges seen in the neighbourhood of his own birthplace. The portrait was bought during the reign of Francis I. for a sum which is to-day equal to about L1800. Leonardo, by the way, does not seem to have been really affected by any individual affection for any woman, and, like Michelangelo and Raphael, never married.

In January 4, 1504, Leonardo was one of the members of the Committee of Artists summoned to advise the Signoria as to the most suitable site for the erection of Michelangelo's statue of "David," which had recently been completed.

BATTLE OF ANGHIARI

In the following May he was commissioned by the Signoria to decorate one of the walls of the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. The subject he selected was the "Battle of Anghiari." Although he completed the cartoon, the only part of the composition which he eventually executed in colour was an incident in the foreground which dealt with the "Battle of the Standard." One of the many supposed copies of a study of this mural painting now hangs on the south-east staircase in the Victoria and Albert Museum. It depicts the Florentines under Cardinal Ludovico Mezzarota Scarampo fighting against the Milanese under Niccolo Piccinino, the General of Filippo Maria Visconti, on June 29, 1440.

AGAIN IN MILAN

Leonardo was back in Milan in May 1506 in the service of the French King, for whom he executed, apparently with the help of assistants, "the Madonna, the Infant Christ, and Saint Anne" (Plate VIII.). The composition of this oil-painting seems to have been built up on the second cartoon, which he had made some eight years earlier, and which was apparently taken to France in 1516 and ultimately lost.

IN ROME

From 1513-1515 he was in Rome, where Giovanni de' Medici had been elected Pope under the title of Leo X. He did not, however, work for the Pope, although he resided in the Vatican, his time being occupied in studying acoustics, anatomy, optics, geology, minerals, engineering, and geometry!

IN FRANCE

At last in 1516, three years before his death, Leonardo left his native land for France, where he received from Francis I. a princely income. His powers, however, had already begun to fail, and he produced very little in the country of his adoption. It is, nevertheless, only in the Louvre that his achievements as a painter can to-day be adequately studied.

On October 10, 1516, when he was resident at the Manor House of Cloux near Amboise in Touraine with Francesco Melzi, his friend and assistant, he showed three of his pictures to the Cardinal of Aragon, but his right hand was now paralysed, and he could "no longer colour with that sweetness with which he was wont, although still able to make drawings and to teach others."

It was no doubt in these closing years of his life that he drew the "Portrait of Himself" in red chalk, now at Turin, which is probably the only authentic portrait of him in existence.

HIS DEATH

On April 23, 1519--Easter Eve--exactly forty-five years before the birth of Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci made his will, and on May 2 of the same year he passed away.

Vasari informs us that Leonardo, "having become old, lay sick for many months, and finding himself near death and being sustained in the arms of his servants and friends, devoutly received the Holy Sacrament. He was then seized with a paroxysm, the forerunner of death, when King Francis I., who was accustomed frequently and affectionately to visit him, rose and supported his head to give him such assistance and to do him such favour as he could in the hope of alleviating his sufferings. The spirit of Leonardo, which was most divine, conscious that he could attain to no greater honour, departed in the arms of the monarch, being at that time in the seventy-fifth year of his age." The not over-veracious chronicler, however, is here drawing largely upon his imagination. Leonardo was only sixty-seven years of age, and the King was in all probability on that date at St. Germain-en Laye!

Thus died "Mr. Lionard de Vincy, the noble Milanese, painter, engineer, and architect to the King, State Mechanician" and "former Professor of Painting to the Duke of Milan."

"May God Almighty grant him His eternal peace," wrote his friend and assistant Francesco Melzi. "Every one laments the loss of a man whose like Nature cannot produce a second time."

HIS ART

Leonardo, whose birth antedates that of Michelangelo and Raphael by twenty three and thirty-one years respectively, was thus in the forefront of the Florentine Renaissance, his life coinciding almost exactly with the best period of Tuscan painting.

Leonardo was the first to investigate scientifically and to apply to art the laws of light and shade, though the preliminary investigations of Piero della Francesca deserve to be recorded.

He observed with strict accuracy the subtleties of chiaroscuro--light and shade apart from colour; but, as one critic has pointed out, his gift of chiaroscuro cost the colour-life of many a noble picture. Leonardo was "a tonist, not a colourist," before whom the whole book of nature lay open.

It was not instability of character but versatility of mind which caused him to undertake many things that having commenced he afterwards abandoned, and the probability is that as soon as he saw exactly how he could solve any difficulty which presented itself, he put on one side the merely perfunctory execution of such a task.

In the Forster collection in the Victoria and Albert museum three of Leonardo's note-books with sketches are preserved, and it is stated that it was his practice to carry about with him, attached to his girdle, a little book for making sketches. They prove that he was left-handed and wrote from right to left.

HIS MIND

We can readily believe the statements of Benvenuto Cellini, the sixteenth-century Goldsmith, that Francis I. "did not believe that any other man had come into the world who had attained so great a knowledge as Leonardo, and that not only as sculptor, painter, and architect, for beyond that he was a profound philosopher." It was Cellini also who contended that "Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael are the Book of the World."

Leonardo anticipated many eminent scientists and inventors in the methods of investigation which they adopted to solve the many problems with which their names are coupled. Among these may be cited Copernicus' theory of the earth's movement, Lamarck's classification of vertebrate and invertebrate animals, the laws of friction, the laws of combustion and respiration, the elevation of the continents, the laws of gravitation, the undulatory theory of light and heat, steam as a motive power in navigation, flying machines, the invention of the camera obscura, magnetic attraction, the use of the stone saw, the system of canalisation, breech loading cannon, the construction of fortifications, the circulation of the blood, the swimming belt, the wheelbarrow, the composition of explosives, the invention of paddle wheels, the smoke stack, the mincing machine! It is, therefore, easy to see why he called "Mechanics the Paradise of the Sciences."

Leonardo was a SUPERMAN.

HIS MAXIMS

The eye is the window of the soul.

Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.

Every difficulty can be overcome by effort.

Time abides long enough for those who make use of it.

Miserable men, how often do you enslave yourselves to gain money!

HIS SPELL

The influence of Leonardo was strongly felt in Milan, where he spent so many of the best years of his life and founded a School of painting. He was a close observer of the gradation and reflex of light, and was capable of giving to his discoveries a practical and aesthetic form. His strong personal character and the fascination of his genius enthralled his followers, who were satisfied to repeat his types, to perpetuate the "grey-hound eye," and to make use of his little devices. Among this group of painters may be mentioned Boltraffio, who perhaps painted the "Presumed Portrait of Lucrezia Crivelli" (Plate VII.), which is officially attributed in the Louvre to the great master himself.

HIS DESCENDANTS

Signor Uzielli has shown that one Tommaso da Vinci, a descendant of Domenico (one of Leonardo's brothers), was a few years ago a peasant at Bottinacio near Montespertoli, and had then in his possession the family papers, which now form part of the archives of the Accademia dei Lincei at Rome. It was proved also that Tommaso had given his eldest son "the glorious name of Leonardo."

End of Project Gutenberg's Leonardo da Vinci, by Maurice W. Brockwell