Leonardo da Vinci

by Sir Kenneth M. Clark

  The studies for the Trivulzio monument, both by the way in which the black chalk is used and the watermark of the paper, help us to date a series of beautiful drawings for masquerade costumes (Pl. 55). These drawings are like one another in style and conception and were probably all for the same masquerade, but which we cannot say. It must have taken place in 1511-12. The use of pen and ink on two of them seems to make them too late for Louis XII’s residence in Milan in 1509: and the connexion with the Trivulzio drawings is proof that they were not done for the masquerades which we know him to have directed in France. Nevertheless, these drawings have a subtly French flavour. The elegant artifice of the costumes, no less than the sentiment, recalls that silvery, lunar reflection of the Italian Renaissance which we see in the Châteaux of the Loire; and two of the figures wear corselets of straps and ribbons, elaborately crossed and plaited in a style which suggests that typical product of the French Renaissance, St. Porchaire faïence. Perhaps they do so for the simple reason that Leonardo’s own inherent love of interlaced movement influenced the trend of French design. But we may also feel in these masqueraders something remote from the Italian spirit of the time, something dreamlike, as if seen through the eyes of a man to whom the golden life of the Renaissance was a distant, fanciful dream. For this reason they are remarkably like the drawings of the English Pre-Raphaelites, although the finest Burne-Jones would look thin and lifeless by comparison, and under the fluttering diaphanous skirts of Leonardo’s masqueraders we catch sight of muscular legs, anatomically perfect and very different from the wooden, dainty limbs of Rossetti. Most magical of all these costume pieces (if such it be) is the figure of a woman standing beside a little waterfall, pointing into the distance with a glance and a gesture of mysterious invitation (Pl. 56). This should be Leonardo’s last drawing, just as The Tempest should be Shakespeare’s last play. In it he returns to the inspiration of his youth, the tradition of Fra Filippo and Botticelli, and presents it with the depth and mastery of age. It is the figure which had haunted him all his life, his angel, his familiar, transfixed at last. Unlike the St. John in the Louvre, where a similar creature of his imagination is almost smothered in the labour of painting, this drawing is built of touches as broken and evasive as the latest Titian. We cannot imagine it being done part by part. A puff of wind had blown away the mist, and revealed this goddess, as stately as an elm, as subtle as a gothic Virgin.

  The studies for the Trivulzio memorial and the masquerade costumes must be the last works Leonardo executed for his French patrons in Milan. In June 1512 an unholy alliance of Spaniards, Papal mercenaries, and Venetians took over the government of the city, and Milan, which had been steadily declining as a centre of civilization, became completely disorganized. The poets, artists, and men of learning who at first hoped to find in the French occupation some afterglow of the Sforza patronage had already turned their hungry eyes elsewhere, and chiefly to Rome, whither Leonardo himself was soon to follow them. But for another year he remained in Milan, or nearby at Vaprio, in the house of his exquisite new friend and disciple, Francesco Melzi.

  One of his occupations during this year must be noticed, since it provides us with our last dated evidence of his style of drawing. This is his study of anatomy. In 1510-11 he met Marc Antonio dalla Torre, the greatest anatomist of his time, who, according to Vasari, helped Leonardo in his anatomical researches. But of this help Leonardo’s dated notebooks give no evidence. As we have seen, he was already studying anatomy in 1489 when Marc Antonio was only seven years old. By 1500 his researches had been carried far beyond anything necessary for the science of painting, and Leonardo had begun to cut deep into the central problems of biology by studying the processes of generation. A famous anatomical drawing representing the coition of a man and woman shows the strange detachment with which he regarded this central moment of an ordinary man’s life. It must date from about 1497. A few years later he was at work on the same subject, and symbolizing it, as we have seen, in the Leda. A large manuscript at Windsor, known as the Anatomical MS. A, bears the inscription ‘in the spring of this year, 1510, I hope to have completed all this branch of anatomy’. The greater part therefore dates from the year 1509, before the meeting with Marc Antonio, and proves that Leonardo cannot have learnt anatomy from the younger man. This manuscript contains a number of drawings of écorché figures, beautiful in themselves and useful as dating Leonardo’s pen technique. We see his system of shading following form carried almost to the point of mannerism. The line is dry and wiry, seldom betraying any feeling or vivacity, a sad, scientific style, compared to the beautiful anatomical drawings of 1489: yet the masquerade costumes of the same date show that Leonardo had not lost the magic of his touch when he chose to release it. This manuscript deals chiefly with musculature: but as a whole his later anatomical studies show him interested less in the mechanical than the organic side of his subject. A whole notebook dating from about 1512 is devoted to embryology, and he makes what must be one of the first drawings of a child in the womb (Pl. 57). When we remember the tenderness and delicacy of feeling which all early authorities attribute to Leonardo we can realize some of the noble and passionate curiosity which drove him to make such a terrible dissection, and to draw it with such a lucid and purposeful touch. His last anatomical manuscript, dated 9 January 1513, deals with the heart. It is characteristic that although he investigates the action of the heart and arteries with great thoroughness, he never brings himself to propose the circulation of the blood as a formulated theory. The manuscript is written with a blunt pen on coarse, blue-grey paper, and the illustrative drawings have a deliberate carelessness of touch as though Leonardo were denying himself the comeliness of his earlier style (Pl. 58). This is the technique of nearly all his latest drawings. It is not attributable to any physical decay, for we have neat writing of a later date: rather it seems to reflect the pessimism and the disillusion of old age, which rejects material beauty even if it consist in a dexterous line or a finely-turned cadence of verse.

  CHAPTER NINE—1513-1519

  ‘ON the 24th of September 1513’ says Leonardo, ‘I left Milan for Rome, with Giovanni Francesco de’ Melzi, Salai, Lorenzo, and il Fanfoia.’ Like many other artists he was attracted by the notorious liberality of Giovanni de’ Medici, who, in the preceding May, had become Pope Leo X. After stopping in Florence, Leonardo arrived in Rome towards the end of the year and was installed in rooms in the Belvedere of the Vatican, specially prepared for him by Giuliano de’ Medici, the Pope’s brother: so the favour which Lorenzo the Magnificent withheld from Leonardo was given to him by Lorenzo’s sons. Giuliano, weak and unstable though he was, combined interest in art and science in a manner which should have made him an ideal patron for Leonardo. But there seems to have been a fate against his relations with the Medici,{72} and contemporary documents give us a sad picture of Leonardo’s life in Rome. The solitary old exquisite, who had lived for so long according to his fancy remote from the world, found himself quartered among half the leading artists of Italy, crowding, criticizing, jockeying for positions. Raphael, with his troupe of ambitious youths, must have been frequently in the Belvedere to study the fragments of sculpture collected there, but we ask in vain if he visited the master from whom he had borrowed so freely. Worst of all, Michelangelo was in Rome, having gained by his work on the Sistine ceiling a position of unassailable authority. No wonder that Leonardo felt too weary to engage with such formidable rivals, and withdrew further into a melancholy and mysterious solitude. Vasari gives an account of his occupations worth quoting at length, since it shows how his scientific researches appeared to the eyes of his contemporaries.

  He formed a paste of a certain kind of wax, as he walked he shaped animals very thin and full of wind, and, by blowing into them, made them fly through the air, but when the wind ceased they fell to the ground. On the back of a most bizarre lizard, found by the vine-dresser of the Belvedere, he fixed, with a mixture of quicksilver, wings composed of scales stripped
from other lizards, which, as it walked, quivered with the motion; and having given it eyes, horns, and beard, taming it, and keeping it in a box, he made all his friends, to whom he showed it, fly for fear. He used often to have the guts of a wether completely freed of their fat and cleaned, and thus made so fine that they could have been held in the palm of the hand; and having placed a pair of blacksmith’s bellows in another room, he fixed to them one end of these, and, blowing into them, filled the room, which was very large, so that whoever was in it was obliged to retreat into a corner; showing how, transparent and full of wind, from taking up little space at the beginning they had come to occupy much, and likening them to virtue. He made an infinite number of such follies, and gave his attention to mirrors; and he tried the strangest methods in seeking out oils for painting, and varnish for preserving works when painted.

  It is interesting to notice that the story of Leonardo frightening his friends with a counterfeit dragon which occurs at the beginning of the Life, is repeated, in a different form, at the end. We cannot doubt that it is true and typical. But the only part of Vasari’s account which can be confirmed is the reference to mirrors. Leonardo was probably at work on optical toys, such as the camera obscura, which during his Roman visit had occupied the attention of his precursor, Leon Battista Alberti, over eighty years earlier. It seems that Leonardo had been given the services of a craftsman to carry out his designs, named Giorgio Tedesco. This man gave him infinite trouble and we have several drafts of long and angry letters on the subject which Leonardo addressed to his patron, Giuliano de’ Medici. Giorgio was dissatisfied with his pay, worked for others, would not follow Leonardo’s drawings, would not learn Italian, and went off shooting in the ruins with members of the Swiss Guard. Worst of all, he came under the influence of a fellow-countryman known as Giovanni degli Specchi, a manufacturer of mirrors who had his workshop in the Belvedere. This man was jealous of Leonardo’s influence with his patron and engineered a quarrel over their accommodation. Finally, he found a means of reporting Leonardo’s studies of anatomy to the Pope and having them stopped. It is ironical that the first instance of ecclesiastical interference with Leonardo should be due to Leo X. And I may here digress to contradict a belief, once commonly upheld, that Leonardo wrote backwards in order to conceal his thoughts, and did not publish his conclusions for fear of ecclesiastical persecution. This is completely unhistorical. In Leonardo’s time the Church allowed far more dangerous and directly subversive opinions than his to go unchecked. His scientific researches were carried out with full cognizance of religious institutions. His dissections were made in ecclesiastical hospitals such as Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. If his notebooks contain occasional gibes at the clergy these are less frequent and less severe than in most literature of the period. Leonardo wrote backwards because he was left-handed, and he did not publish his researches because he could not bring himself to try to put them in order. We have, in fact, no evidence that Leo X was concerned with Leonardo’s opinions except in this instance, but Vasari records that the Pope was distressed by his dilatoriness. ‘It is said that a work being given him to execute by the Pope, he immediately began to distil oils and herbs in order to make a varnish: whereupon Pope Leo exclaimed “Alas! this man will never do anything, for he begins by thinking about the end before the beginning of the work. Oimé! Costui non è per far nulla, da che comincia a pensare alia fine inanzi il principio dell’ opera.”

  Constitutional dilatoriness, an inability to carry anything through from beginning to end without the intervention of a thousand experiments and afterthoughts, had always been part of Leonardo’s character, and we must recognize it as a disease of the will similar to that which ruined the magnificent intellect of Coleridge. Di mi se mai fu fatta alcuna cosa—tell me if anything was ever done—this was the first sentence which flowed from Leonardo’s pen in any vacant moment. Di mi se mai, di mi se mai, again and again, dozens of times, we find it on sheets of drawings, among scribbles or mathematical jottings, or beside the most painstaking calculations, till it becomes a sort of refrain, and a clear symptom of his trouble. With Leonardo, of course, the shrinking of the will was only intermittent and was largely cancelled by the superhuman energy of his mind. But during those years in Rome it seems to have taken a hold on him, and almost the only record of his activity is a note in which he mentions his De Ludo Geometrico ‘finished on the 7th day of July, at the 23rd hour, in the study made for me by il Magnifico’ (Giuliano). Innumerable drawings in the Codice Atlantico—one sheet alone contains ninety-three—show us the nature of these geometrical games, and leave us lamenting the waste of Leonardo’s time and ingenuity. For these figures have as much to do with geometry as a crossword puzzle has to do with literature.

  A drawing at Windsor, which dates from these years, seems to symbolize his state of mind (Pl. 59). It shows an old bearded man seated in profile, his head on his hand gazing into the distance, with an air of profound melancholy. His nutcracker nose and sharply turned down mouth remind us of the old men in Leonardo’s unconscious scribbles, but his curling beard and large deep-set eye recall the likenesses of Leonardo himself. Even if this is not strictly a self-portrait we may call it a self-caricature, using the word to mean a simplified expression of essential character. Opposite him on the sheet are studies of swirling water and a note comparing its movement to that of plaited hair; and although these studies were not intended to have any connexion with the old man, for the sheet was originally folded over, they are like the projection of his thoughts. For of all Leonardo’s interests the most continuous and obsessive was the movement of water. At various times in his life he had been able to turn this obsession to semi-practical ends by applying himself to problems of canalization and irrigation. But the quantity of his notes on the subject—it forms one of the largest and most disheartening sections of his written work—and the quality of his drawings show a passion with no relation to practical life. Some of his studies of swirling water are amongst the most direct expressions of his sense of form, springing from the same mysterious source as his love of knots and tendrils. A sheet at Windsor shows water taking the form of both hair and flowers, racing along in twisted strands, and pouring from a sluice so that it makes dozens of little whirlpools, like a cluster of ferns with long curling tendrils (Pl. 60). His superhuman quickness of eye has allowed him to fasten on the decorative aspects of the subject, since confirmed by spark photography, and we must take these drawings of water as genuinely scientific. But as he gazed half hypnotized at the ruthless continuum of watery movement, Leonardo began to transpose his observations into the realm of the imagination, and to associate them with an idea of cataclysmic destruction which had always haunted him. Here for once he seems to have been touched by contemporary emotions, for the last years of the fifteenth century saw a series of prophetic writings, foretelling the destruction of the world by flood. These prophecies, which form a branch of the apocalyptic writings accompanying the Reformation, were condemned by the Church, but in spite of official opposition, they took an extraordinary hold on the popular mind and we are told that many made preparation for the catastrophe, sold their houses, and fled to the hills, so that in parts of Germany whole villages were deserted. It is revealing that Leonardo, who often expressed his contempt for vulgar superstition, should have allowed his mind to dwell on these prognostications of a deluge. They correspond with his own deepest belief: that the destructive forces of nature were like a reservoir, dammed up by a thin, unsteady wall, which at any moment might burst, and sweep away the pretentious homunculi who had dared to maintain that man was the measure of all things. By a curious chance, an artist who, in some ways, resembled him, Albert Dürer, was also influenced by the idea of a deluge.

  In the year 1525 (says Dürer), between Wednesday and Thursday after Whitsunday during the night, I saw this appearance in my sleep, how many great waters fell from heaven. The first struck the earth about four miles away from me with a terrific force, with tremendous c
lamour and clash, drowning the whole land....I was so frightened when I awoke that my whole body trembled and for a long while I could not come to myself. So when I arose in the morning, I painted above here as I had seen it. God turn all things to the best.

  Dürer’s watercolour drawing{73} shows a column of black water, without weight or movement, standing over a peaceful landscape, while the other waterspouts hang like dark aprons in the distant sky. It is a conception at the furthest remove from Leonardo. Compared to Dürer’s account of his dream, his very natural fear for his own safety, his pious prayer to God, Leonardo glories in the triumph of natural forces and dwells with gusto on every detail of destruction. His descriptions of the Deluge are found as early as the Ashburnham Codex of 1494 and as late as MS. G, but the most famous of them is on a sheet at Windsor, 12,665, where, on the pretext of instructing the painter how to represent a storm (the sheet is headed come si deve figurare una fortuna) Leonardo gives free rein to his imagination. Parts of this passage are literary and dramatic.