Leonardo da Vinci

by Sir Kenneth M. Clark

  You might see on many of the hill-tops terrified animals of different kinds collected together and subdued to tameness, in company with men and women who had fled there with their children. The waters which covered the fields were strewn with tables, bedsteads, boats, and various other contrivances made from necessity and the fear of death, and on these were men and women with their children, weeping, terrified by the fury of the winds which, with tempestuous violence, rolled the waters under and over and about the bodies of the drowned. Nor was there any object lighter than the water which was not covered with a variety of animals, among them wolves, foxes, snakes, and others which, having come to a truce, stood together in a frightened crowd seeking to escape death.

  You might have seen assemblages of men who, with weapons in their hands, defended the small spots that remained to them against lions, wolves and beasts of prey who sought safety there. Ah! what dreadful noises were heard in the air rent by the fury of the thunder and the lightnings it flashed forth, which darted from the clouds dealing ruin and striking all that opposed its course. Ah! how many you might have seen closing their ears with their hands to shut out the tremendous sounds made in the darkened air by the raging of the winds mingling with the rain, the thunders of heaven, and the fury of the thunder-bolts.

  Other parts of his description are more closely connected with his studies of moving water, and dwell on that aspect of the Deluge which appealed to his sense of form.

  Let there be first represented the summit of a rugged mountain with valleys surrounding its base, and on its sides, let the surface of the soil be seen to slide, together with the small roots of the bushes, denuding great portions of the surrounding rocks. And descending ruinous from these precipices in its boisterous course, let it dash along and lay bare the twisted and gnarled roots of large trees turning up their roots; and let the mountains, as they are scoured bare, discover the profound fissures made in them by ancient earthquakes. The base of the mountains may be partly covered with ruins of shrubs, and these will be mixed with mud, roots, boughs of trees, and with all sorts of leaves thrust in with the mud and earth and stones. Into the depth of some valley may have fallen the fragments of a mountain, damming up the swollen waters of its river; which, having already burst its banks, will rush on in monstrous waves; and the greatest will strike upon and destroy the walls of the cities and farmhouses in the valley. Then the ruins of the high buildings in these cities will throw up a great dust, rising up in shape like smoke or wreathed clouds against the falling rain. But the swollen waters will sweep round the pool which contains them, striking in eddying whirlpools against the different obstacles, and leaping into the air in muddy foam; then, falling back, the beaten water will again be dashed into the air....

  The drawings at Windsor in which Leonardo illustrates these visions are the most personal in the whole range of his work (Pls 61 to 64). They express, with a freedom which is almost disturbing, his passion for twisting movement, and for sequences of form fuller and more complex than anything in European art. They are so far from the classical tradition that our first term of comparison might be one of the great Chinese paintings of cloud and storm, for example, the Dragon Scroll in the Boston Museum. Only in Oriental art do we find a similar mastery of the convention, by which forces and directions are reduced to visible linear curves. Yet, as with his landscape, closer study shows that Leonardo’s scientific attitude has given his drawings a character fundamentally different from Chinese painting. By profound research into the movement of water he has learnt to give his lines of force a logical as well as an expressive significance. In these drawings Leonardo has filled the atmosphere with the cascades and currents which he had studied in moving water. He explains how such atmospheric currents can be made visible. ‘Let the air be darkened’, he says, ‘by heavy rain whose oblique descent driven aslant by the rush of the winds will fly in drifts through the air like dust.’ In another passage he writes: ‘A mountain falling on a town will fling up dust in the form of clouds; but the colour of the dust will differ from that of the clouds’, and beside it the note, ‘A stone falling through the air leaves on the eye which sees it the impression of its motion, and the same effect is produced by the drops of water which fall from clouds.’ The scientific care with which these appalling catastrophes are studied has an almost comic effect. ‘If heavy masses of great mountains fall into vast lakes, a great quantity of water will be flung into the air, and its movement will be in a contrary direction to that of the object which struck the surface, that is to say, the angle of refraction will be equal to the angle of incidence.’ This fusion between science and fantasy is even more surprising when, as in Pl. 61 some dryly scientific observations on the nature of rain are barely legible through the turmoil of universal destruction. Through what strange inhibition did Leonardo attempt to hide from himself the true motive of these drawings? Was it pride in a science which might still look with detachment at the annihilation of humanity; or was it a kind of reserve which prevented him from betraying his innermost feelings in words, even though they were expressed in line?{74} For these drawings come from the depths of Leonardo’s soul. In them he has used his scientific knowledge as Michelangelo came to use his understanding of the human body, distorting it to express his sense of tragedy. If in the lovely drawing of a pointing woman he is Prosperity in these Deluges he is Lear:

  Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

  You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

  Till you have drencht our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

  You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

  Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

  Singe my white head!

  The drawings probably belong to a single period, but some sort of chronological sequence can be established in which the treatment becomes gradually more personal. The earliest is a large study of horsemen assailed by a tornado (P. 290), which is like an illustration to the Trattato, and even includes a wind god in the clouds, a conceit fall from the spirit of the later drawings.{75} An apocalyptic intention first appears in the pen and ink drawing (P. 288), in which terrified little figures cower beneath a rain of fire. Then come drawings like Pl. 61 where the fury of the elements is released, but the scene is comparatively restricted and within the bounds of possibility. In Pl. 62 the Deluge is at its height, and we see the motive, often alluded to in Leonardo’s description, of a mountain undermined by the gigantic spouts of rain falling on a town and annihilating it. But even more appalling is Pl. 63, where the Deluge has carried all before it, so that no sign remains of human life or vegetation. This is the climax of the series. There follow several drawings in which Leonardo has grown so absorbed in the elaboration of curvilinear patterns that the scenes lose some of their dramatic force. In Pl. 64, for example, the linear convention is used so openly that the deluge has become merely decorative; the water-spouts are as powerless as the petals of a chrysanthemum, and the collapsing mountain is made of a child’s bricks. Yet compared with the waves of a Japanese screen Leonardo’s composition is infinitely richer and more complex. It has a quality of inexhaustible suggestion only possible in the work of a man to whom the subtlety of natural appearances was perfectly familiar.

  On grounds of style and spirit, these drawings must belong to the uneasy years of residence at Rome. During that period the Pope seems to have consulted him on a scheme for draining the Pontine marshes, and in a drawing at Windsor (P. 287), representing a bird’s-eye view of the land in question, the treatment of hills and trees is very similar to the foreground of the deluges. It is suggestive that in the margin of that description of a tempest which most closely conforms to the drawings is the note, ‘The wave of the sea at Piombino is all foaming water’; for it was at Piombino that Leonardo had been employed in another great effort to drain marshy land.

  In the same years—1514-15—I would place Leonardo’s last surviving picture, the Louvre St. John (Pl. 65). It is usually said, on no evidence, to hav
e been painted in France, but if this were the case we could hardly account for the numerous contemporary Italian copies. No doubt Leonardo had been working on the subject for years and the actual date of its execution as a picture can never be established. The St. John is the least popular of Leonardo’s works. Critics have found it so little to their taste that they have called it the work of assistants. This is certainly false. The St. John is a baffling work, but every inch of it smells of Leonardo. Even if we dislike it we must admit its power to trouble the memory, both as image and design. The initial cause of our uneasiness is iconographic. We are aware, from the little reed cross which he holds, that this extraordinary creature is intended to represent St. John, and our whole sense of propriety is outraged. Every critic has laboriously pointed out that this is not a satisfactory presentation of the Baptist, and we must try to answer the question why Leonardo, who attached so much importance to the interpretation of a subject, has created an image almost blasphemously unlike the fiery ascetic of the Gospels. To a certain extent, the answer is to be found in the origin of the design. At the end of his second Florentine period, Leonardo became interested in the subject of an angel. There is a rough sketch of it on a drawing in Windsor dateable c. 1505 (P. 203), and we know that he finished the picture, for Vasari describes it as being in the cabinet of the Grand Duke Cosimo—‘a head of an angel raising its arm in the air so that it is foreshortened from the shoulder to the elbow, the other arm being laid on the breast, showing the hand.’ A figure corresponding to this description has come down to us in several paintings which are clearly replicas of a Leonardesque original. We can see that this angel was very like the St. John in general conception, but with the one important difference, that the St. John’s right arm is bent across his breast so that his hand points upwards over his left shoulder. The angel’s arm is seen in foreshortening, the hand and index finger pointing upwards; and from this gesture we see that he is an Angel of the Annunciation. Leonardo, with an audacity which is almost disturbing, has shown us the Announcing Angel from the point of vision of Our Lady. We can imagine what complex ideas Leonardo might have wished to express in this strange conception; for the Annunciation can be made to imply that union of flesh and spirit, human and divine, which he wished above all to express. Just as the forces of nature, subject to material analysis up to a point, became suddenly incomprehensible, so the Angel of the Annunciation, though taking human shape, was the agent of a mystery; and mystery to Leonardo was a shadow, a smile and a finger pointing into darkness.

  As an Angel, then, this figure is understandable; and if it shocks us, that is largely because we have taken for granted the pagan notion that an angel must be a type of fair-haired physical beauty, fragile or lusty as the taste of the period shall demand. It is less easy to understand how this image could be converted, with a single change of gesture, into a St. John, and I must confess that some years ago, when art was supposed to consist in the arrangement of forms, I believed that Leonardo made this alteration for purely formal motives: that he bent the arm across the figure in order to achieve a denser and more continuous volume. It is true that the St. John looks much more solid than the Angel, but we can be sure that Leonardo would not have varied the pose solely for that reason. Between the two figures there is more than a formal connexion. They are, in fact, the two messengers announcing the birth of Christ. The Angel points upwards to God; St. John points over his shoulder—‘there is one that cometh after me.’{76} Even this difference does not quite dispose of our difficulties, because the type and expression which can be understood in an Angel may seem to us inconsistent in a St. John. And here we must assume that Leonardo had formed of St. John a curiously personal conception which we must interpret as best we can. Of several possible interpretations I offer the following which is at least in keeping with Leonardo’s spirit. St. John the Baptist was the forerunner of the Truth and the Light. And what is the inevitable precursor of truth? A question. Leonardo’s St. John is the eternal question mark, the enigma of creation. He thus becomes Leonardo’s familiar—the spirit which stands at his shoulder and propounds unanswerable riddles. He has the smile of a sphinx, and the power of an obsessive shape. I have pointed out how this gesture—which itself has the rising rhythm of an interrogative—appears throughout Leonardo’s work. Here it is quintessential. The design has the finality of a hard-won form rendered in an intractable material. Leonardo who could give life to every pose and glance, has subdued his gifts as if he were working in obsidian.

  The Louvre St. John, being the most idiosyncratic of Leonardo’s works, was also the most influential; and part of our distaste for it is due to the large number of pupils’ copies which it recalls: for to most people the Milanese school is like the Cheshire cat—only the smile remains. Of these monotonously smiling figures I will mention only one, because it occurs in all early literature as an original Leonardo. This is the so-called Bacchus in the Louvre which, reversing the rôle of Heine’s pagan gods, is really a converted St. John the Baptist. As such he is described by Cassiano del Pozzo, who saw him at Fontainebleau in 1625; he adds, ‘it is a most delicate work but does not please because, it does not arouse feelings of devotion’. Presumably for this reason some painter was told to add a crown of vine leaves an change the cross into a thyrsis: and in the 1695 inventory St. Jean dans le désert is crossed out and Baccus dans un paysage written instead. Despite the exalted company which it keeps and its impressive pedigree, the Bacchus is a poor work. Personally, I believe that it is no more than the copy of a Cesare de Sesto, and I even doubt if it goes back to an original design by Leonardo. The frontality of all the planes—legs, chest, and head all parallel—is contrary to his principles of design, and none of his drawings has any connexion with it.

  ‘The magnificent Giuliano de’ Medici’, Leonardo notes, ‘left at dawn on the 9th day of January 1515, to marry a wife in Savoy; and in the same day the King of France died.’ For a year after this his movements are obscure, though we know that he was still attached to the household of Giuliano. Then on 17 March 1516, Giuliano died, and soon afterwards Leonardo must have accepted an invitation from Francis I to settle in France. The King seems to have treated him with the greatest liberality. He gave him the manor of Cloux, near Amboise, and asked nothing in return but the pleasure of his conversation, which he enjoyed almost every day. Of this we have firsthand evidence from Cellini, who twenty years later heard Francis say, ‘that he did believe no other man had been born who knew as much as Leonardo, both in sculpture, painting, and architecture, so that he was a very great philosopher’. Free to talk, experiment, and dream at will, it is not surprising that Leonardo seems to have produced practically nothing during his stay in France. We have a number of notes and drawings which show him interested in canalizing the Loire to Romorantin, and in town planning,{77} and from these we can date certain architectural drawings, in particular a fine study of a turreted fortress.{78} It is arguable that the style of French châteaux architecture as we see it, for example, at Chambord, derives from these drawings, and an ingenious attempt has been made to show that he designed the staircase of the Castle of Blois on the plan of a nautilus shell. Such a procedure would be characteristic of Leonardo, but unfortunately there is no evidence for it, except the well-known evidence that Shakespeare was a Scot—that the ability of the design warrants the assumption.

  Apart from architecture, all attributions of drawings to the period of his residence in France must be pure speculation, because we have no certain evidence of Leonardo’s activity in France, no dated drawings and only one documented commission; and this commission has not come down to us, for it was the lion filled with lilies recorded by Vasari and Lomazzo as being one of Leonardo’s most ingenious works. The lion is also mentioned independently in contemporary records of a Masquerade at the Château of Blois. These court descriptions do not mention the name of Leonardo, but their account of the Hon exactly corresponds to that of Leonardo’s biographers. The Hon took severa
l steps forward and seemed about to attack the King, when its head opened disclosing a great bank of lilies against a blue background. Much of an earlier Leonardesque spirit seems to survive in this fancy of his old age, the spirit which made him the inventor of emblem and elegance to the Sforza court.

  On 10 October 1517 Leonardo was visited by the Cardinal Louis of Aragon whose secretary Antonio de’ Beatis has left us an interesting and puzzling account of him. He says that Leonardo showed the Cardinal

  three pictures; one of a certain Florentine lady, done from the life, at the instance of the late Magnificent, Giuliano de’ Medici; the other of St. John the Baptist, as a Young Man; and one of the Madonna and the Child, which are placed in the lap of St. Anne, and all of them most perfect: but indeed, on account of a certain paralysis having seized him in the right hand,{79} one cannot expect more fine things from him. He has instructed a Milanese disciple, who works well enough; and although the aforesaid Messer Leonardo is not able to colour with that sweetness which he was wont, nevertheless he works at making designs and giving instruction to others. This gentleman has compiled a particular treatise of anatomy, with the demonstration in draft not only of the members, but also of the muscles, nerves, veins, joints, intestines, and of whatever can be reasoned about in the bodies both of men and women, in a way that has never yet been done by any other person. All which we have seen with our eyes; and he said that he has already dissected more than thirty bodies, both men and women of all ages. He has, also, written concerning the nature of water, and of divers machines, and other things, which he has set down in an endless number of volumes, and all in the vulgar tongue.