Leonardo Da Vinci - Thinker and Man of Science E-Book

Eugène Müntz

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 394

Beschreibung

Not only was Leonardo da Vinci (1453-1519) an astonishing painter, but also a scientist, anatomist, sculptor, architect, musician, engineer, inventor, and more. The question is rather, what was he not? During the Italian Renaissance, he mastered the most beautiful works of art for the Medicis’ in Italy and for the King of France. He aroused admiration from his contemporaries, who depicted a universal genius, curious and virtuous. Even today, interest in da Vinci and his work does not fade; his works and writings are still studied by foremost experts hoping to decipher one of the numerous secrets of this visionary artist. Studying nature with passion, and all the independence proper to his character, he could not fail to combine precision with liberty, and truth with beauty. It is in this final emancipation, this perfect mastery of modelling, of illumination, and of expression, this breadth and freedom, that the master s raison d être and glory consist. Others may have struck out new paths also; but none travelled further or mounted higher than he.

Leseprobe

Author: Eugène Müntz

Title: Leonardo Da Vinci

Collection: Essential

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© 2023 Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

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ISBN: 978-1-64461-860-8

Publisher's Note

Out of respect for the author's original work, this text has not been updated, particularly regarding changes to the attribution and dates of the works, which have been, and are still at times, uncertain.

EUGÈNE MÜNTZ

LEONARDO DA VINCI

CONTENTS

LEONARDO’S DEALINGS WITH THE ANTIQUE

THE POET, THE THINKER, AND THE MAN OF SCIENCE

THE DOWNFALL OF LODOVICO IL MORO AND THE CONSEQUENCES

HIS RETURN TO MILAN

LEONARDO’S FINAL DAYS WORKING UNDER FRANCIS I AND HIS GREAT INFLUENCE

BIOGRAPHY

LIST OF ARTISTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

NOTES

1. Study for Hercules and the Lion Nemean, c. 1505-1508. Charcoal and metalpoint, 28 x 19 cm. Biblioteca Reale, Turin.

LEONARDO’S DEALINGS WITH THE ANTIQUE

“L’imitatione delle cose antiche e più laudabile che quella delle moderne.”

– LEONARDO DA VINCI

The initial stage of Leonardo’s career coincides with the last supreme encounter between the ancient tradition (the tradition of the Middle Ages), and the new spirit of the times. Down to about the third quarter of the fifteenth century, painting, if we exclude the painting of the school of Padua, had sought inspiration from Roman models for details of costume or ornament only. Now, taking example from the sister arts of architecture and sculpture, it strove to assimilate the actual principles, the very essence, of classic art. Botticelli, Ghirlandajo and, above all, Filippino Lippi exerted themselves unceasingly to build up their frescos or pictures on the teachings offered to them by that army of statues, some specimen of which came to light each day under the pickaxe of the excavator. These efforts, rudimentary enough at first, culminated some years later in the triumph of classicism under the banner of Raphael and his disciples.

How did Leonardo understand, and how did he turn to account for this factor, which became more and more difficult to neglect, this factor which spread itself over the intellectual life of the ‘quattrocentisti’ by so many ramifications?

At the first blush, one is rather inclined to deny that Leonardo ever felt the influence of classic models. “He alone,” says Eugène Piot, “was the true faultless painter. The study of nature, untrammelled by absorption in classic ideals, a constant and unremitting study, carried on always and everywhere, with a perseverance and tenacity peculiar to himself, had revealed to him all the secrets of power in art, all the mysteries of grandeur and physical beauty.”

Another critic, my lamented friend, Anton Springer, is no less positive: “Leonardo’s axiom, that nature is the artist’s true domain, that the study of nature should be inculcated, not only as the best, but as the only real discipline, determined his attitude towards the antique, and dominated his judgment of the historic development of art. It has often been remarked how extraordinarily slight was the influence exercised over him by the wonders of antiquity.

”In his pictures, indeed, it plays a very insignificant part, while in his writings it never manifests itself at all. In his youth, he drew inspiration once or twice from classic sources, as when he painted a Medusa’s head entwined with serpents, and drew a Neptune for his friend, Antonio Segni. The sea-god was represented on a vehicle drawn by sea horses on swelling waves, and surrounded by all sorts of marine beasts. As the drawing has not come down to us, it is impossible to form any opinion as to the measure in which Leonardo here utilised classic forms. The pictures of Bacchus and of Leda belong to an earlier period. Whether the Bacchus in Paris, and the various versions of the Leda, may lay claim to authenticity, is a question on which critics have not yet been able to agree. But be this as it may, the heads in all these pictures are of the individual type created by Leonardo, and show no trace of classic influences.”

2. Frontal Study of a Naked Man, c. 1503-1509. Pen and ink, 23.6 x 14.6 cm. Royal Library, Windsor Castle.

3. Andrea del Sarto, after Pollaiuolo, A Water Carrier, c. 1513. Red chalk, 17.9 x 11.3 cm. Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille.

Given Leonardo’s independent spirit and his critical tendencies, it is evident that he was never one of those who accept stereotyped formulae and ready-made principles, either in his maturity or in his youth. Nothing would have been more opposed to his aspirations, as either an artist or a man of science, than such acceptance. Did he not lay down the following rule in the Trattato della Pittura? – “A painter should never attach himself servilely to another master’s manner, for his aim should be, not to reproduce the works of man, but those of Nature, who, indeed, is so grand and prolific, that we should turn to her rather than to painters ”who are only her disciples, and who always show her under aspects less beautiful, less vivid, and less varied than she herself presents when she reveals herself to us.”

Although Leonardo left the question he once propounded to himself unanswered – is it better to study drawing from nature, or from the antique? – he was more categorical in another passage of the Trattato, a passage missing both in the original manuscripts and in the Vatican codex. It is only to be found in the Barberini MS, and runs thus: “It is a common fault with Italian painters to introduce into their pictures whole-length figures of emperors imitated from various antique statues, or at least to give to their heads an air which we find in the antique.”

Leonardo, in fact, had too fine a taste to allow himself to introduce into the art of painting effects proper to sculpture, as the great Andrea Mantegna was doing at this very time. For this reason, he did not believe that a painter would profit much by the imitation of antique statues. However, as a fact, these opinions are all more or less superficial.

A careful study of da Vinci’s work leads us to the inevitable conclusion that whatever he may have said of the antique, and however completely he may have avoided dependence upon it, he was well acquainted with it in practice, and had assimilated its spirit.

We may oppose, for instance, to the declarations of faith we have just been quoting, the following very definite assertion: “Suppose that an artist had to choose between copying antique models or those of modern times, he should choose the antique for imitation in preference to the modern.”[1]

Let us consider first the branch of art that is, as it were, the parent and frame of the rest, imposing upon them its own laws of arrangement, of symmetry, and even of illumination; I mean, of course, architecture. What was the attitude of Leonardo towards it? The answer is easy. He admitted the ancient orders only, except that he would allow their occasional combination with the Byzantine cupola. He accepted with no less eagerness the authority of Vitruvius, to which, indeed, he was constantly referring.

Many of his designs reproduce, or at least recall, Greek and Roman monuments, especially the mausoleum of Halicarnassus; one of his ideas for the base of the Sforza statue was taken from the castle of St Angelo at Rome.

From these premises flows a series of deductions of great importance, as the reader will readily understand.

The mere fact that Leonardo accepted Roman forms in architecture tends to prove that he admired classic methods in the provision of architectural settings and in the arrangement of figures in that setting. The principles of grouping that he followed in the Sforza statue, in his Last Supper, in his Saint Anne, are in no way inconsistent with those of antique models.

4. Doryphorus, Roman copy after a Greek original by Polykleitos created around 440 B.C, before 79 A.D. Marble, h: 200 cm. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.

5. Sandro Botticelli, Two Nude Studies. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

When Leonardo lamented that he was unable to equal the ancients in symmetry, he was, perhaps, thinking of their mastery of the science of composition. One of his own contemporaries, a certain Platino Piatta, places the following declaration in his mouth:

Mirator veterum discipulusque memor

Defuit una mihi symmetria prisca, peregi

Quod potui; veniam da mihi, posteritas.

As far as the canon of human proportion was concerned, Leonardo deferred, more perhaps than was reasonable, to the laws laid down by Vitruvius. The latter, he says, declares that the measurements of the human body are thus correlated: four fingers make one palm, four palms one foot, six palms one cubit, and four cubits or twenty-four palms the total stature of man. “If you separate your legs far enough to diminish your height by one-fourteenth, and stretch your arms outwards and upwards until your two middle fingers touch a line drawn horizontally across your poll, then your extremities will touch a circle of which your navel is the centre, and the space enclosed between your legs will be an equilateral triangle.”

The attention Leonardo gave to the nude should also be ascribed to his study of the antique.

Every now and again, especially in his sketches for the Adoration of the Magi, he drew figures quite undraped, so that he might the better observe their structure and the play of their movements.

In Leonardo’s method of rendering the human figure, we also find analogies with the antique. Excluding portraits and modern costumes from religious pictures, his efforts were given to make his people excel by their own beauty, instead of through the brilliancy of their ornaments and surroundings. What simplicity in his composition! What rigour in his selection! What thoroughness and completeness in his synthesis!

The young painter had little sympathy with realism in costume. Living in an ideal world, the modes and habits of his time did not trouble him, so that nothing is rarer in his work than to find memoranda of actual life, or reproduction of this or that landscape or building. No artist has shown less solicitude in those directions. He was interested in man himself, and not in man’s historical setting.

Leonardo’s proscription of the costume of his own time, a costume reproduced with so much care by the “quattrocentisti” was, like the retrospective nature of his investigations, proof of his abstract and idealistic mind. Putting aside a few portraits, the figures he painted are robed after the antique; they wear tunics, togas, cloaks; and wear them with an ease that justifies us in saying that no artist has at once modernised and preserved the noble simplicity of antique costume so successfully as the author of the Last Supper (see Vol. I "Leonardo Da Vinci - Artist, Painter of the Renaissance", p. 194-195) and the Mona Lisa.

6. Raffaello Sanzio called Raphael, Two Masculine Nudes. Red chalk, 41 x 28 cm. Albertina Museum, Vienna.

7. Farnese Hercules, copy after a Greek original of the 5th century B.C. Marble, h: 313 cm. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.

8. Discobolus, copy after a Greek original by Myron around 450 B.C. Marble, h: 148 cm. Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome.

9. Study of a Torso, c. 1511. Red chalk, 12 x 14.3 cm. Royal Library, Windsor Castle.

Leonardo declares in the Trattato that the representation of contemporary fashions should be avoided as much as possible (“fugire il più che si può gli abiti deila sua età”), except in the case of funerary statues. In this connection, he relates how, in his youth, “every one, young or old, wore clothes with edges cut into points, each point in turn being cut into smaller ones. Shoes and headdresses, pouches, offensive arms, collars, trains, the edges of petticoats, even the mouths of those who wished to be in the height of fashion, were adorned with deep indentations”. Next, he goes on to say, “came a time when sleeves grew so voluminous that they became larger than the garments to which they were attached. Then collars grew so high that they ended by covering the whole head. Afterwards they went to the opposite extreme, and were made so low that they were no longer supported by the shoulders, which they failed to reach. Later again, garments were made so extravagantly long, that they had to be carried over the arm to avoid being trodden upon. Then they were made so short and skimpy that they hardly reached the waist and elbows, and their wearers suffered martyrdom, and occasionally burst their sheath. Shoes were made so small that the toes mounted one upon the other and became covered with corns.”

Leonardo’s ideal dress was, for an old man, a long and ample garment, in fact a toga (“Che il vecchio sia togato”); for a youth a short, close-fitting one (“il giovane ornato d’abito”), open above the shoulders, except in the case of monks and priests.

So far as his conceptions go, no one approaches more closely to the pagan ideal than Leonardo. Who has professed a greater love for form than he has, or cultivated art for art’s sake with greater frankness? Who is more resolute in celebrating the glories of physical beauty, in sacrificing the literary significance of a work of art to some fascinating countenance, to some lovely exercise in the nude? In this connection, we may safely declare that if Leonardo did not copy the antique, he at least assimilated its spirit more completely than any contemporary. He approaches the Greeks themselves in the freedom and evident capacity for movement of his figures, as well as in an indescribable rhythm and inspiration. He was Greek, too, in his love for those androgynous forms, uniting masculine vigour with feminine grace, which play so large a part in his work, and of which the most complete type is the StJohn the Baptist of the Louvre.

From all this to the treatment of pagan subjects was but a step, and Leonardo took it more than once. He painted a Medusa, a Triumph of Neptune, a Leda, a Pomona, and a Bacchus. In such of these as have survived the conception is in every way satisfactory, being equally removed from the archæological pedantry dear to some artists of the time, and from the anachronisms of others.

Leonardo, however, was curiously forgetful of fitness and historical colour when he set out, in a sketch of the Deluge, to introduce Neptune with his trident and Æolus with his bag of winds! To represent the infernal regions he recommended that in the Paradise of Pluto should be placed twelve vessels, symbolising the mouths of Hell, from which devils should emerge, with Death, the Furies, a crowd of naked and weeping children, ashes, and fires of different colours. All this is essentially antique, nay, pagan. Although he took hints from his Greek and Roman predecessors, Leonardo had no idea of tying himself to their chariot wheels. This we may easily see from the way in which he treated iconography, allegory, and kindred subjects. No artist has ever pushed independence further than da Vinci; we may even say that he pushed it too far, for in matters like these it is absolutely necessary that a painter should be in sympathy with his public, a result only to be arrived at either by deferring to tradition, or by extraordinary proselytising efforts on his own part. However, Leonardo followed neither course, and many of his conceptions would be quite incomprehensible without the help of the explanations he has left us.

Rejecting all but a few of the traditional attributes (a column for Courage, three eyes for Prudence, and so on), he undertook to create a complete symbolism for himself. He proposed to represent Fame in the shape of a bird covered with tongues instead of feathers, to place in the hand of Ingratitude a burning brand, suggesting the wood that nourishes a fire but is itself consumed; or again, to symbolise Ingratitude by a pair of bellows consumed by flames.

One of the drawings at Christ Church, Oxford, shows a woman astride a skeleton on all fours; she has pendulous breasts, one hand raised in the air, the other supporting a vase. We should have found this an enigma very difficult to solve had the master not provided it with a long explanation. Here he meant to figure Envy. Envy, he explains, is represented making a contemptuous gesture towards heaven with one hand, because, if she could, she would direct her strength against the Deity; her face is a benevolent mask; her eyes are wounded by palm and olive branches, her ears by the myrtle and the laurel, which means that victory and truth offend her. Lightning flashes from her body, typifying her calumnies; she must be dry and thin, because she continually torments herself. A swelling serpent feeds on her heart. Her quiver is filled with tongues instead of arrows, because they are her favourite weapon. She must have a leopard skin, because that animal kills the lion with jealousy by giving him food for it.[2] Her hand must hold a vase filled with flowers, scorpions, toads, and other venomous animals; and she must ride upon Death, because Envy, being deathless, is never tired of commanding. The bridle she holds should be charged with various weapons, instruments of death. A second design on the same sheet represents the Combat between Envy and Virtue. The latter, figured as a fine, naked young man, thrusts a branch of palm into the eyes and one of olive into the ears of his enemy. Envy, who grasps him so closely that their two bodies seem to form but one, brandishes a torch behind her antagonist’s back and lays one hand upon his quiver. Leonardo provides the following comment: “As soon as Virtue is born, she begets Envy; and one may see a body without a shadow more easily than Virtue without Envy.”

10. Laocoon, Roman copy after a bronze original made in Pergame around 150 B.C. Marble, h: 184 cm. Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican.

11. Apollo Sauroktonos, Roman copy after a Greek original by Praxiteles created during the 4th century B.C. Marble. Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican.

After all this, I may discuss in detail the question of Leonardo’s imitations of the antique. They are vastly more numerous than is generally supposed, and in many definite points they corroborate the general view put forward here.

To take the question of sculpture, it is not proven that Leonardo made any use of the colossal horses of the Quirinal in Rome – the drawing of one of them, in the Resta collection at the Ambrosiana, is certainly not by him – on the other hand, I am certainly inclined to maintain that he studied the famous antique equestrian group in bronze, at Pavia: “Di quel di Pavia si lauda più il movimento che nessun altra cosa.” Richter believes in a slip of the pen here, and for Pavia would read Padua, the passage referring, in his opinion, to the Gattamelata of Donatello. In fact, no doubt is possible; the antique group in Pavia is meant and no other. Immediately after the phrase quoted above, Leonardo goes on to say that it is much more advisable to imitate ancient than modern productions. Where did Leonardo get the idea of his rearing horses? From the antique, undoubtedly. We may easily convince ourselves of this by examining gems representing such things as the fall of Phaeton, the death of Hector, and the death of Hippolytus.

Turning now to painting, we may point out, beside the more or less veiled reminiscences already alluded to, a certain number of textual imitations. In his studies for the Adoration of the Magi – the unfinished sketch in the Uffizi – attitudes continually recur which recall certain famous antiques, such as the Faun of Praxiteles, and the bronze Narcissus, at Naples. The same series of drawings contains a bearded individual obviously founded on the antique type of Silenus.

In his studies for the Last Supper, the apostle in profile recalls in the most striking manner the Roman medallions of the time of the Antonines, notably those of Lucius Verus.

Even for facial types, Leonardo deigned, now and then, though rarely, to consult the ancients. His StJohn the Baptist, in the Louvre, is clearly based on certain antique types, half masculine and half feminine, such as the Apollino, the Bacchus, and the Hermaphroditus, and yet the combination is thoroughly Leonardesque.

If there is one page in this work of Leonardo that betrays study from nature, and especially study of the horse’s anatomy, more than another, it is assuredly the Battle of Anghiari, of which one episode has been preserved in a drawing by Rubens, and in a few more or less partial copies. The episode is that known as the Fight for the Standard. It had never occurred to me to investigate in that direction, when accident, the great explorer, brought under my eyes a cameo presenting remarkable analogies, not to say more, with one of the motifs employed by Leonardo. This cameo represents the Fall of Phaeton.

In spite of its beauty of workmanship, my first impulse was to look upon it as an imitation dating from the period of the Renaissance, in which case it would be a copy from the Battle of Anghiari, and not its prototype. How was I to persevere in my doubt of its antiquity when I found it engraved in the Trésor de Numismatique et de Glyptique (mythological section), and unreservedly accepted by an archaeologist of Froehner’s perspicacity? The motif of this cameo was very popular with the ancients, although it can scarcely be traced beyond the Empire.

Examples mostly date from the third century of our era. The horse on the left, which stretches himself upwards, is textually repeated on four sarcophagi reproduced by Wieseler. That which offers the most striking analogies with the Battle of Anghiari came to the Uffizi in the seventeenth century, having previously been in the Colonna gardens in Rome. However, let us go back to the cameo. Leonardo must certainly have seen it in Florence, where it is still. We are confirmed in this belief by the presence, among the jewels deposited with Agostino Chigi by Piero de’ Medici in 1496, of a cameo representing Phaëton: “Una tavola d’argiento, con cinque ca. Mei, coiè uno con Fetonte in mezzo et le teste de imperatori da canto,” The cameo was certainly already popularised in Florence by means of casts.

12. Amazonomachy frieze, slab 1022, by Thimotheos, Mausoleum at Halikarnassos, c. 350 B.C. Marble, h: 90 cm. British Museum, London.

There is more in the Battle of Anghiari than this conveyance of a particular motif. Leonardo borrowed the types of his horses from the Phaeton of the ancient graver or sculptor. Compare the horses in his drawings for the Sforza monument with those in the Battle of Anghiari. The difference is striking. In the former, the silhouette is well-marked and full of nobility; in the latter, the forms are thick and fleshy, just as we see them in the Roman gem. Leonardo’s horse has this peculiarity, that if we examine him in the drawing of Rubens, which is clearly turned the same way as the original, he exactly reproduces the horse on the right in the cameo, while if we turn to Edelinck’s engraving, which is reversed, he agrees exactly with the horse on the left.

It was on this occasion that Leonardo was unluckily inspired to demand the secret of encaustic painting from Pliny. He could make nothing of it. He attempted to carry out the Battle of Anghiari in the method, but met with so many difficulties and disappointments, that he gave up the whole matter in disgust and abandoned Pliny, and encaustic painting, and, alas the Battle of Anghiari, which might otherwise have survived to our own times.

Compared to the grand total of Leonardo’s drawings, a total to be reckoned in thousands, the number of his copies from the antique does not, at first sight, seem very great. Richter, learned editor of his literary and scientific remains, goes as far as to say that among all these countless drawings he had only found one single study from the antique, an equestrian statue, taken apparently from that of Marcus Aurelius in Rome.

As a fact, his imitations are relatively numerous.

Among those of a more or less indefinite kind, we may quote the bust of an old man draped in the Roman fashion with his right hand thrust out through the folds of his toga. On the other hand, a drawing in red chalk, at Windsor, seems to me a reproduction of the torso of Pasquin, with an attempt to restore the lower part of the body. Again, we have the drawing of a cameo bearing the design of a genius standing by the side of another figure. If from figures we pass to motifs of decoration, we are again met by a certain number of these borrowings.

Accepting The Annunciation of the Uffizi as the work of Leonardo, we there find him introducing a marble tripod of extreme richness. A sketch more or less suggesting an antique tripod occurs in one of the Windsor drawings. A candelabrum in the Codex Atlanticus, of great purity and harmony of form, is derived, beyond a doubt, from the antique. We may also refer to the harpies and trophies that were to have decorated the mausoleum of Trivulzio.

To conclude, this great artist treated the antique as it should be treated by one who wishes to profit by its teaching, and desires to receive lessons rather than labour-saving formulæ. By dint of long and thoughtful though intermittent study, Leonardo mastered the antique spirit. Allowing it to germinate freely within him, he counted upon the wealth and independence of his own nature to enable him to turn it to his own use, to transform it, and to produce with its aid works of art which should be essentially vital and modern.

In this chapter, I have only discussed the relations between the antique and the art of Leonardo. I have now to do as much for his philosophy, his science, and his mechanics, and to show how, in those directions also, we continually encounter the Greeks and the Romans.

THE POET, THE THINKER, AND THE MAN OF SCIENCE

“Léonard, ce frère Italien de Faust.”

– MICHELET

The painter of Mona Lisa and the Last Supper enchanted and dazzled his contemporaries from the first hour, and four centuries have not diminished the prestige of his artistic creations. As a thinker and investigator, he has been less fortunate. It has required the efforts of several generations of learned men, from Venturi, Libri, and Govi, down to Uzielli, Richter, Ravaisson-Mollien, Beltrami, and Piumati to complete the work of rehabilitation.

I propose, in my turn, to inquire what place was occupied by letters in the activities of this universal genius. So far the problem has not even been attacked; and if I have to be content at last with a negative result, I shall not regret any trouble that may enable me to penetrate a little more profoundly into the mind of such a man.

To form a true judgment of Leonardo’s writings we must begin by recognising that here we have to deal, in literature and philosophy no less than in science, with the self-taught man par excellence. Education has little purchase on natures essentially original, and we may safely assert that the education received by this particular child of genius in the hamlet of Vinci and afterwards in Florence was about as careless as it could be. We can, moreover, point to evidence on Leonardo’s early studies which bears every sign of authenticity. A biographer tells us that he showed an unbounded, even an extravagant, thirst for acquiring knowledge, but that his curiosity was equalled by the instability of his tastes. He passed from arithmetic to music, from natural history to the arts of design, and from these to the occult sciences, without any sign of fatigue, but also without any steady devotion. His literary and historical studies always occupied a second place.

In spite of his great faculty of assimilation, Leonardo always betrays a certain embarrassment before a literary or historical question. We may take him at his word when he calls himself “illiterato” and “uomo senza lettere”. “I know well,” he says somewhere, “that as I am not lettered, some impertinent individual may think himself justified in finding fault and in calling me an illiterate person. Idiots! Do they not know that I might give the answer of Marius to the Roman patricians: ‘It is by those who bedeck themselves with the labours of others that I am not allowed to enjoy my own.’ They say that because I have not trained myself in letters, I cannot do justice to the subjects I wish to treat. They do not know that such matters as occupy me are better fitted for treatment by experiment than by words. Now, those who have written well have learnt from experience, to which I myself always look up as my master.”

13. Giorgione, The Three Philosophers, 1508-1509. Oil on canvas, 123.5 x 144.5 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

What suffering and humiliation may be divined behind such a confession!

With a reserve which does him credit, Leonardo abstains from all critical judgment, except when a scientific opinion has to be contested. In his writings upon art he only once allows himself to be seduced into a judgment on a colleague (Botticelli); and so, when he has to deal with poets, thinkers, historians, he is content with the statement of facts. Even while proclaiming the utility and pleasure-giving power of history, at the very moment of confessing that “the knowledge of past times and of geography adorns and nourishes the intellect”, he is continually guilty of the most extraordinary anachronisms. He talks somewhere of “the part played by Archimedes of Syracuse, who lived at the court of Ecliderides, King of the Cirodastri, in the wars between the Spaniards and the English(!)” He attributes to Cato the credit of having discovered the tomb of this same Archimedes, although the proverbial schoolboy could have told him that the honour was Cicero’s. If his reticence of judgment in matters of art sprang from tolerance or indifference, in matters of learning it is to be explained by an only too well founded distrust of his own knowledge. It is, in fact, hopeless to deny that, in spite of all his efforts, Leonardo never became a scholar. His glory rests on another foundation.

The embarrassments felt by a man of genius like this, whenever he had to invent a mise-en-scène or to find some telling formula, move us to deep pity as well as to boundless admiration. Though he was the clearest and most suggestive of analysts, he lacked the nicety and fluency of expression that education had made so easy for his Florentine fellow-citizens. This is how in default of schooling, in default of having mastered the secrets of versification like Poliziano, or the subtleties of Platonic philosophy like Marsilio Ficino, or the problems of the known and the unknown like Pico de la Mirandola, in default, indeed, of certain rudimentary branches of knowledge that his unimportant contemporaries had learnt as children, Leonardo failed to gain the appreciation of the immense majority of his countrymen, in spite of the unrivalled scope of his genius. Again, what a mistake he made in a rhetorical age in despising oratory, and spurning the friendship of those whom we now call log-rollers! Yet again, why did he not stay in Florence? Or settle in Rome? The most famous scholars would have hastened to exalt his genius. Castiglione would have given him a place of honour in his Cortegiano; Ariosto would have set him in the company of Charlemagne’s paladins; Bembo would have written his epitaph in an eloquent mingling of pleasure and pain! But the Milanese men of letters, the obtuse and heavy-handed Ligurians and Cisalpine Gauls who were the intimates of Lodovico, could do nothing for the glory of their new fellow-citizen. The very language they wrote was too barbaric to be understood by the rest of Italy.

In his mature years Leonardo attempted to fill the gaps in his education. He applied himself more particularly to the study of Latin. Here he had everything to learn. If we may judge from the glossary he prepared for his own use, he had not even acquired the rudiments when he was some thirty-five or forty years old. He found it necessary to write down the meaning of such elementary pronouns, adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions as “sed, aliquid, quid, instar, tunc, praeter”. I must hasten to say that his efforts were crowned with success. In the letter addressed to the Cardinal d’Este in 1507, he manages Latin epistolary forms with perfect ease. Elsewhere he quotes from the Latin, “Omne grave tendit deorsum – Decipimur votis et tempore fallimur et mors deridet curas – Anxia vita nihil!” He even made himself acquainted with macaronic Latin. After entering in his notebook the loan made to Salai to enable the latter to complete his sister’s dowry (1508), he gives himself up to these melancholy reflections:

(Si) non restavis (habe) bis

Si abebis, non tamen cito.

Si tamen cito, non tamen bonum,

Et si tamen bonum, perdes amicum.

One of the most incomprehensible of Leonardo’s compilations is the vocabulary in the Trivulzio Manuscript, which consists of at least seven or eight thousand words, ranged into four or five columns. Now and then it suggests the commencement of a dictionary of synonyms, but more often it seems meaningless. Reading the lines horizontally, we obtain results like this: “belicoso, glorifichato, rifrancare, unità, imaculata – ameno, piacevole, dilettevole – stupefacto, essmarrito”; reading them vertically, we arrive at such results as “sadisfatione, intento, origine, ondamento, cierchare, trovare, intendere”.

14. Paolo Uccello, St George and the Dragon, c. 1470. Oil on canvas, 55.6 x 74.2 cm. The National Gallery, London.

15. Study for the Fight Against the Dragon, c. 1480. Pen and ink, grey wash, 19 x 12.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

16. Study for the Fight Against the Dragon, c. 1480. Pen and ink, grey wash, 19 x 12.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

According to de Geymüller, these lists of Leonardo’s represent an attack on the philosophy of language. In the course of his reading he had noted the words that seemed to him the most telling; he had afterwards grouped them now as synonyms, now as terms opposed to each other in sense. Elsewhere he forms series of substantives and of adjectives, or of verbs derived from them or offering parallel meanings. He searches for words expressing ideas which flow naturally from some initial term, a proceeding that we should follow now if we had to compile a dictionary of analogies. Sometimes he takes as a base for his grouping the differences in meaning between words which resemble each other in sound. Orthographical likenesses and differences also attracted his attention; thus, he asks himself how it is that l comes to be substituted for r, and vice versa. Grammar, logic, philology, all these were subjected to his investigations, which, unsystematic as they are, proclaim once more his insatiable curiosity.

He collected a library in which historians elbowed poets, and philosophers, mathematicians or physicists. Numberless extracts and quotations bear witness to the wide extent of his reading.

The famous manuscript known as the Codex Atlanticus contains the catalogue of da Vinci’s little library. He had collected thirty-seven volumes, representing every branch of human knowledge, from theology to agriculture, and even to magic. He had besides borrowed a certain number of volumes from his friends: a Vitruvius, a Marliano, a De Calculatione, an Albertus Magnus, an Anatomia, and a Dante. We know from the research of the Marchese d’Adda that printed editions of all these existed in the fifteenth century. To form his collection Leonardo had only then to apply to the printers of Milan and its neighbourhood, as most of the books he owned were published in Lombardy.

It is a little surprising to find the literary element holding such an important place in the studies of Leonardo; Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, stand side by side with Poggio, Philelpho, Burchiello, and Pulci. Philosophy occupies as large a place as poetry. The titles of his books and the names of the authors he honoured – Albertus Magnus, Diogenes Laertius, Platina, Marsilio Ficino – prove the eclecticism and liberality of their possessor. Religion and morals are not forgotten; they are represented by the Bible, the Psalms, Æsop, the Flowers of Virtue; the champions of history are Livy, Justinian, and the chronicler Isidorus. Special treatises on arithmetic, cosmography, medicine, anatomy, agriculture, and the military arts complete Leonardo’s library. The section devoted to natural history is remarkable; it includes the works of Pliny, John de Mandeville, and a Lapidarium, that is to say, compilations in which romance fills as large a space as science.

Italian scholars declare that Leonardo’s grammar is that of the small Florentine shopkeeper, and that his orthography is of the strangest and most eccentric kind. He seems to have thought the letter c was pronounced like an s, unless accompanied by an h; so he writes “chasa” or “chosa”. He doubles an s before a consonant, for example, “quessto” or “asspirare”; he substitutes l for r in words like “sobblieta” or “iplocito”, and for u in “aldacia” or “laldevole”. He was also in the habit of combining, in the German fashion, words meant to stand apart.

In literature, as in art, it is difficult to imagine a less synthetic genius than Leonardo. What a contrast he affords to Michelangelo, whose various sallies and sarcasms have become so famous! Can we imagine Leonardo saying before a picture painted without brushes, that the artist would have done better had he condescended to use a brush, and painted rather less wretchedly; or telling Francia’s handsome son that his father made better figures in the flesh than on canvas? Before Leonardo could formulate an idea or express a sentiment, he had to go through a long process of observation and analysis. In this respect, he was more like a son of the north than one of those Florentines who were so famous in the great centuries for the clearness and vivacity of their ideas. On the other hand, how profound his laboriously built-up conceptions were! When he had, at the cost of infinite labour, succeeded in giving form and unity to a composition, what a sublimity it reached!

Leonardo more than made up for his lack of education by his natural gifts. His contemporaries agree in declaring that he was the best improvisatore of his time: “il migliore dicitore di rime all’ improviso del tempo.” The incessant comparisons he sets up in the Trattato between painters and poets show that he took a deep interest in poetry. What kind of attempts did he make in it himself? Did he write love songs, or did he pen those light verses of which Florentines were so fond? Did he follow the example of his great rival, Bramante, whose sonnets, composed at il Moro’s court, pay so generous a homage to the comic muse? We do not know. This is one more mystery in the life of the man characterised by Michelet as “the Italian brother of Faust”. We do not even know whether he ever felt love for a woman. The five thousand pages of manuscript he has left us do not contain the slightest allusion to a love affair. He seems to have lived for art and science, and brother of Faust though he was, no Marguerite ever hung upon his neck to distract or console him.

17. Vittore Carpaccio, Saint George Killing the Dragon, 1516. Oil on canvas, 180 x 226 cm. San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice.

18. Vittore Carpaccio, St. George Killing the Dragon, 1502. Tempera on canvas, 141 x 360 cm. Scuola di S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice.

To return to the poet, barely some half dozen of his verses have survived, among them an impromptu so enigmatic and strange that hitherto no one has attempted to explain it:

Se’l Petrarca amò si forte il laurc

Fu perch’ egli è bon fralla salsicia e tonno.

I non posso di lor ciancie far tesauro.[3]

This “jeu d’esprit”, incomprehensible at first sight, initiates us, as I think I can show, into Leonardo’s relations with a whole group of poets, professional and amateur, settled at the court of Lodovico Sforza. The author, as we see, begins abruptly with the question: “Why was Petrarch so fond of the laurel?” Meaningless if taken alone, the problem is readily solved if we consider it in the light of the other compositions thrown off at this time by the hangers-on of Sforza. We know, in fact, that Bramante, Gasparo Visconti, Bellincioni, and many others engaged in violent disputes over the respective merits of Dante and Petrarch. Bramante distinguished himself by a boundless admiration for the author of the Divina Commedia. Leonardo, it is safe to guess, was content to contribute this very unclassical triplet to the discussion.

Leonardo has long been credited with a sonnet that still enjoys a certain popularity. It expresses, in a rather clumsy and hackneyed form, an idea which any philosopher would be ready to endorse, an idea, moreover, as old as the world: “Let him who cannot do what he wishes, wish to do what he can.” One of the master’s biographers relies on this when he calls Leonardo a poet-moralist, “familiar with internal conflicts, and gifted with qualities of style analogous to those which marked him as a painter. …The sonnet,” he adds, “could not be excelled for precision and technical conciseness, and nothing could be more nobly pathetic than the frankness of its personal application.”

19. Raffaello Sanzio called Raphael, St George Fighting the Dragon (The Little St George), 1505. Oil on wood panel, 31 x 27 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Unhappily, modern criticism is ruthless, and Professor Uzielli, who has discussed the problems connected with Leonardo with such unequalled perspicacity, has mathematically demonstrated, if I may use the term, in an argument covering eighty-five pages, that this famous sonnet is really the work of one Antonio, a Florentine (Antonio di Meglio, according to Uzielli: according to others, Antonio di Matteo, who died in 1446).

Leonardo therefore had nothing to do with it, which is a pity, as its combination of good sense with a certain technical inexperience would have been thoroughly in keeping with his sincere and sagacious intellect.

After all these negative conclusions, the reader may well be impatient to learn in what, after all, Leonardo’s talent as a poet consisted, and how I justify his inclusion among the Parnassians.

Open the Trattato dell’Arte della Pittura and read his description of the zephyr and the hurricane. In movement, warmth, and audacity it rivals Virgil’s famous description of a storm in the Georgics. As descriptive poetry, in which landscape and effects of light and atmosphere are rendered, sixteenth-century Italian literature produced nothing finer. Here and there, we find a few subtle resemblances to the “concetti”, which prove that Leonardo was not above turning occasionally to Petrarch as a model. “The divine strain that exists in the art of the painter puts an echo of the divine intellect in his (work), and enables him to create with perfect freedom a world of birds, of plants, of fruits, of wide plains, of ruins perched upon mountain sides, of scenes calculated to excite awe and terror or of smiling sites enamelled with many coloured flowers. Over these fields the soft breath of the wind spreads gentle undulations, as if the bending grass had turned to watch the flight of the breeze. Or he shows us the swollen rivers flowing from the mountains, carrying down uprooted trees, mingled with rocks, roots, mud and foam, and driving before them everything that attempts to stem their progress. Or yet again the sea, its waves struggling with the tormenting winds, its superb undulations thrown up to the sky and then falling, to smother the gale which flogs it. The waves embrace and imprison the wind, which tears them apart and splits them, mixing with their foam, and venting its rage upon them. Sometimes, carried by the wind, the foam escapes from the sea, flies along the cliffs and promontories, and, leaping over the summits of the hills, falls in the valleys beyond; some of it mingles with the wind and becomes its prey, some escapes and falls again into the sea as rain, some rushes down as a waterspout from the mountains, and chases before it everything which opposes its rage. Sometimes this latter encounters a breaking wave, dashes against it, and with it leaps to the sky, filling the air with a mist of foam; and this mist, driven by the wind against the cliffs, begets dark clouds, which in turn become the prey of the wind their conqueror.”