Notes on Leonardo da Vinci.
by Walter Pater.
Source: Modern English Essays. Edited by Ernest Rhys. Vol. 1. 1922. J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Printed in Great Britain. (p. 159-189)
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From Britannica.com: “Walter Pater … (born August 4, 1839, Shadwell, London, England—died July 30, 1894, Oxford, Oxfordshire), English critic, essayist,
and humanist whose advocacy of ‘art for art’s sake’ became a cardinal doctrine of the movement known as Aestheticism.”
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(Part 3)
… About the Last Supper, its decay and restorations, a whole literature has risen up, Goethe’s pensive sketch of its sad fortunes being far the best. The death in child-birth of the Duchess Beatrice, was followed in Ludovico by one of those paroxysms of religious feeling which in him were constitutional. The low gloomy, Dominican church of Saint Mary of the Graces had been the favourite shrine of Beatrice. She had spent her last days there, full of sinister presentiments; at last it had been almost necessary to remove her from it by force. And now it was here that mass was said a hundred times a day for her repose; and a mania for restoring churches took possession of the duke. So on the damp wall of the refectory, oozing with mineral salts, Leonardo painted the Last Supper. A hundred anecdotes were told about it, his retouchings and delays. They show him refusing to work except at the moment of invention, scornful of whoever thought that art was a work of mere industry and rule, often coming the whole length of Milan to give a single touch. He painted it, not in fresco, where all must be impromptu but in oils, the new method which he had been one of the first to welcome, because it allowed of so many after-thoughts, such a refined working out of perfection. It turned out that on a plastered wall no process could have been less durable. Within fifty years it had fallen into decay. Protestants, who always found themselves much edified by a certain biblical turn in it, have multiplied all sorts of bad copies and engravings of it. And now we have to turn back to Leonardo’s own studies, — above all, to one drawing of the central head atthe Brera, which in a union of tenderness and severity in the face-lines, reminds one of the monumental work of Mino da Fiesole, — to trace it as it was.
It was another effort to set a thing out of the range of its conventional associations. Strange,after all the misrepresentations of the Middle Age, was the effort to see it, not as the pale host of the altar, but as one taking leave of his friends. Five years after, the young Raphael, at Florence, painted it with sweet and solemn effect in the refectory of Saint Onofrio; but still with all the mystical unreality of the school of Perugino. Vasari pretends that the central head was never finished. Well; finished or unfinished, or owing part of its effect to a mellowing decay, this central head does but consummate the sentiment of the whole company — ghosts through which you see the wall, faint as the shadows of the leaves upon the wall on autumn afternoons; this figure is but the faintest, most spectral of them all. It is the image of what the history it symbolises has been more and more ever since, paler and paler as it recedes from us. Criticism came with its appeal from mystical unrealities to originals, and restored no life-like reality but these transparent shadows — spirits which have not flesh and bones.
The Last Supper was finished in 1497; 1498 the French entered Milan, and whether or not the Gascon bowmen used it as a mark for their arrows, the model of the Sforza certainly did not survive. Ludovico became a prisoner, and the remaining years of Leonardo’s life are more or less years of wandering. From his brilliant life at court he had saved nothing, and he returned to Florence a poor man. Perhaps necessity kept his spirit excited: the next four years are one prolonged rapture or ecstasy of invention. He painted the pictures of the Louvre, his most authentic works, which came there straight from the cabinet of Francis I. at Fontainebleau. One picture of his, the Saint Anne — not the Saint Anne of the Louvre, but a mere cartoon now in London — revived for a moment a sort of appreciation more common in an earlier time, when good pictures had still seemed miraculous; and for two days a crowd of people of all qualities passed in naive excitement through the chamber where it hung, and gave him a taste of Cimabue’s triumph. But his work was less with the saints than with the living women of Florence; for he moved still in the polished society that he loved, and in the salons of Florence, left perhaps a little subject to light thoughts by the death of Savonarola (the latest gossip is of an undraped Monna Lisa, found in some out-of-the-way corner of the late Orleans collection), he met Ginevra di Benci, and Lisa, the young third wife of Francesco del Giocondo. As we have seen him using incidents of the sacred legend, not for their own sake, or as mere subjects for pictorial realisation, but as a symbolical language for fancies all his own, so now he found a vent for his thoughts in taking one of these languid women, and raising her, as Leda or Pomona, Modesty or Vanity, to the seventh heaven of symbolical expression.
La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo’s masterpiece — the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness, only the Melancholia of Dürer is comparable to it; and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least. As often happens with works in which invention seems to reach its limit, there is an element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In that inestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession of Vasari, were certain designs by Verrocchio— faces of such impressive beauty that Leonardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to connect with these designs of the elder by-past master, as with its germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo’s work. Besides the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last. What was the relationship of a living Florentine to this creature of his thought? By what strange affinities had she and the dream grown thus apart, yet so closely together? Present from the first incorporeal in Leonardo’s thought, dimly traced in the designs of Verrochio, she is found present at last in II Giocondo’s house. That there is much of mere portraiture in the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, the presence of mimes and flute-players, that subtle expression was protracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and by renewed labour never really completed, or in four months, and as by stroke of magic, that the image was projected?
The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all “the ends of the world are come,” and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh — the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed? All the thoughts and experiences of the world have etched and moulded there in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form — the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, andsumming up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly, Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.
During these years at Florence Leonardo’s history is the history of his art; he himself is lost in the bright cloud of it. The outward history begins again in 1502, with a wild journey through central Italy, which he makes as the chief engineer of Caesar Borgia. The biographer, putting together the stray jottings of his MSS., may follow him through every day of it, up the strange tower of Sienna, which looks towards Rome, elastic like a bent bow, down to the seashore at Piombino, each place appearing as fitfully as in a fever dream.
One other great work was left for him to do— a work all trace of which soon vanished — the Battle of the Standard, in which he had for his rival Michael Angelo. The citizens of Florence, desiring to decorate the walls of the great council chambers, had offered the work for competition, and any subject might be chosen from the Florentine wars of the fifteenth century. Michael Angelo chose for his cartoon an incident of the war with Pisa, in which the Florentine soldiers, bathing in the Arno, are surprised by the sound of trumpets, and run to arms. His design has reached us only in an old engraving, which perhaps would help us less than what we remember of the background of his Holy Family in the Uffizi to imagine in what superhuman form, such as might have beguiled the heart of an earlier world, those figures may have risen from the water. Leonardo chose an incident from the battle of Anghiari, in which two parties of soldiers fight for a standard. Like Michael Angelo’s, his cartoon is lost, and has come to us only in sketches and a fragment of Rubens. Through the accounts given we may discern some lust of terrible things in it, so that even the horses tore each other with their teeth; and yet one fragment of it, in a drawing of his at Florence, is far different — a waving field of lovely armour, the chased edgings running like lines of sunlight from side to side. Michael Angelo was twenty-seven years old; Leonardo more than fifty; and Raphael, then nineteen years old, visiting Florence for the first time, came and watched them as they worked. We catch a glimpse of him again at Rome in 1514, surrounded by his mirrors and vials and furnaces, making strange toys that seemed alive of wax and quicksilver. The hesitation which had haunted him all through life, and made him like one under a spell, was on him now with double force. No one had ever carried political indifferentism farther; it had always been his philosophy to “fly before the storm”; he is out with the Sforzas and in with the Sforzas as the tide of fortune turns. Yet now he was suspected by the anti-Gallican, Medicean society at Rome, of French leanings. It paralysed him to find himself among enemies; and he turned wholly to France, which had long courted him.
France was going to be an Italy more Italian than Italy itself. Francis I., like Louis XII. before him, was attracted by the finesse of Leonardo’s work. La Gioconda was already in his cabinet, and he offered Leonardo the little Chateau de Clou, with its vineyards and meadows, in the soft valley of the Masse — not too far from the great outer sea. M. Arsene Houssaye has succeeded in giving a pensive local colour to this part of his subject, with which, as a Frenchman, he could best deal. A Monsieur Lyonard, ”peinteur du Roy pour Amboyse,” so the letter of Francis I. is headed. It opens a prospect— one of the most attractive in the history of art — where, under a strange mixture of lights, Italian art dies away as a French exotic. M. Houssaye does but touch it lightly, and it would carry us beyond the present essay if we allowed ourselves to be seduced by its interest.
Two questions remain, after all busy antiquarianism, concerning Leonardo’s death — the question of his religion, and the question whether Francis I. was present at the time. They are of about equally little importance in the estimate of Leonardo’s genius. The directions in his will about the thirty masses and the great candles for the church of St. Florentin are things of course — their real purpose being immediate and practical; and on no theory of religion could such hurried candle-burning be of much consequence. We forget them in speculating how one who had been always so desirous of beauty, but desired it always in such precise and definite forms, as hands or flowers or hair, looked forward now into the vague land, and experienced the last curiosity.
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