coil of lead.
The Duomo, work of artists from beyond the
Alps, so fantastic to a Florentine used to the mellow,
unbroken surfaces of Giotto and Arnolfo, was then
in all its freshness; and below, in the streets of
Milan, moved a people as fantastic, changeful,
and dreamlike. To Leonardo least of all men
could there be anything poisonous in the exotic
flowers of sentiment which grew there. It was a
life of exquisite amusements ā Leonardo became a
celebrated designer of pageants ā and brilliant sins;
and it suited the quality of his genius, composed
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LEONARDO DA VINCI
in almost equal parts of curiosity and the desire
of beauty, to take things as they came.
Curiosity and the desire of beauty! They are
the two elementary forces in Leonardo's genius;
curiosity often in conflict with the desire of beauty,
but generating, in union with it, a type of subtle
and curious grace.
The movement of the thirteenth century was
twofold: partly the Renaissance, partly also the
coming of what is called the modern spirit, with
its realism, its appeal to experience; it compre-
hended a return to antiquity, and a return to nature.
Raffaelle represents the return to antiquity, and
Leonardo the return to nature. In this return to
nature he was seeking to satisfy a boundless curiosity
by her perpetual surprises, a microscopic sense of
finish by her finesse, or delicacy of operation, that
subtilitas natures which Bacon notices. So we
find him often in intimate relations with men of
science, with Fra Luca Paccioli the mathematician,
and the anatomist IVIarc Antonio della Torre.
His observations and experiments fill thirteen
volumes of manuscript; and those who can judge
describe him as anticipating long before, by rapid
intuition, the later ideas of science. He explained
the obscure light of the unilluminated part of the
moon, knew that the sea had once covered the
mountains which contain shells, and the gathering
of the equatorial waters above the polar.
He who thus penetrated into the most secret
parts of nature preferred always the more to the
171
WALTER PATER
less remote, what, seeming exceptional, was an
instance of law more refined, the construction
about things of a peculiar atmosphere and mixed
lights. He paints flowers with such curious felicity
that different writers have attributed to him a
fondness for particular flowers, as Clement the
cyclamen, and Rio the jasmine; while at Venice
there is a stray leaf from his portfolio dotted all
over with studies of violets and the wild rose. In
him first appears the taste for what is bi-zarre or
recherche in landscape ā hollow places full of the
green shadow of bituminous rocks, ridged reefs
of trap-rock which cut the water into quaint sheets
of light ā their exact antitype is in our own western
seas ā all solemn effects of moving water; you
may follow it springing from its distant source
among the rocks on the heath of the Madonna of
the Balances, passing as a little fall into the treacher-
ous calm of the Madonna of the Lake, next, as a
goodly river below the cliffs of the Madonna of
the Rocks, washing the white walls of its distant
villages, stealing out in a network of divided streams
in La Gioconda to the sea-shore of the Saint Anne,
ā that delicate place, where the wind passes like
the hand of some fine etcher over the surface, and
the untorn shells lie thick upon the sand, and the
tops of the rocks, to which the waves never rise,
are green with grass grown fine as hair. It is the
landscape, not of dreams or fancy, but of places far
withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand
with a miracle of finesse. Through his strange
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LEONARDO DA VINCI
veil of sight things reach him so; in no ordinary
night or day, but as in faint Hght of edipse, or in
some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or
through deep water.
And not into nature only; but he plunged also
into human personality, and became above all a
painter of portraits; faces of a modelling more
skilful than has been seen before or since, embodied
with a reality which almost amounts to illusion
on dark air. To take a character as it was, and
delicately sound its stops, suited one so curious
in observation, curious in invention. So he painted
the portraits of Ludovico's mistresses, Lucretia
Crivelli and Cecilia Galerani the poetess, of Ludo-
vico himself, and the Duchess Beatrice. The
portrait of Cecilia Galerani is lost, but that of
Lucretia Crivelli has been identified with La
Belle Ferronniere of the Louvre, and Ludovico's
pale, anxious face still remains in the Ambrosian.
Opposite is the portrait of Beatrice d'Este, in whom
Leonardo seems to have caught some presentiment
of early death, painting her precise and grave, full
of the refinement of the dead, in sad earth-coloured
raiment, set with pale stones.
Sometimes this curiosity came in conflict with
the desire of beauty; it tended to make him go
too far below that outside of things in which art
begins and ends. This struggle between the reason
and its ideas and the senses, the desire of beauty,
is the key to Leonardo's life at Milan ā his rest-
lessness, his endless retouchings, his odd experiments
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WALTER PATER
with colour. How much must he leave unfinished,
how much recommence! His problem was the
transmutation of ideas into images. What he had
attained so far had been the mastery of that earlier
Florentine style, with its naive and limited sen-
suousness. Now he was to entertain in this narrow
medium those divinations of a humanity too wide
for it ā that larger vision of the opening world
which is only not too much for the great irregular
art of Shakespeare; and everywhere the effort is
visible in the work of his hands. This agitation,
this perpetual delay, give him an air of weariness
and ennui. To others he seems to be aiming at
an impossible effect, to do something that art,
that painting, can never do. Often the expres-
sion of physical beauty at this or that point seems
strained and marred in the effort, as in those heavy
German foreheads ā too heavy and German for
perfect beauty.
There was a touch of Germany in that genius
which, as Goethe said, had " miide sich gedacht,"
thought itself weary. What an anticipation of
modern Germany, for instance, in that debate on
the question whether sculpture or painting is the
nobler art! ^ But there is this difference between
him and the German, that, with all that curious
science, the German would have thought nothing
more was needed; and the name of Goethe himself
' How princely, how characteristic of Leonardo, the
answer, "Quanto piu', un' arte porta seco fatica di corpo,
tanto piu e vile"!
LEONARDO DA VINCI
reminds one how great for the artist may be the
danger of over-much science; how Goethe, who,
in the Elective Affinities and the first part of Faust,
does transmute ideas into images, who wrought
many such transmutations, did not invariably find
the spell-word, and in the second part of Faust,
presents us with a mass of science which has no
artistic character at all. But Leonardo will never
work till the happy moment comes ā that moment
of bien-etre, which to imaginative men is a moment
of invention. On this moment he waits; other
moments are but a preparation or after-taste of it.
Few men distinguish between them as jealously
as he did. Hence so many flaws even in the choicest
work. But for Leonardo the distinction is absolute,
and in the moment of bien-etre the alchemy com-
plete; the idea is stricken into colour and imagery;
a cloudy mysticism is refined to a subdued and
graceful mystery, and painting pleases the eye while
it satisfies the soul.
This curious beauty is seen above all in his
drawings, and in these chiefly in the abstract grace
of the bounding lines. Let us take some of these
drawings, and pause over them awhile; and, first,
one of those at Florence ā the heads of a woman
and a little child, set side by side, but each in its
own separate frame. First of all, there is something
exquisitely tender in the re-appearance in the fuller
curves of the child, of the sharper, more chastened
lines of the worn and older face, which leaves no
doubt that the heads are those of a little child and
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WALTER PATER
its mother, indicative of a feeling for maternity
always characteristic of Leonardo; a feeling further
indicated here by the half-humorous pathos of the
diminutive rounded shoulders of the child. You
may note a like tenderness in drawings of a young
man, seated in a stooping posture, his face in his
hands, as in sorrow; of a slave sitting in an uneasy
sitting attitude in some brief interval of rest; of
a small Madonna and Child, peeping sideways in
half-reassured terror, as a mighty griffin with bat-
like wings ā one of Leonardo's finest inventions^
ā descends suddenly from the air to snatch up a
lion wandering near them. But note in these, as
that which especially belongs to art, the contour
of the young man's hair, the poise of the
slave's arm above his head, and the curves of
the head of the child, following the little skull
within, thin and fine as some sea-shell worn
by the wind.
Take again another head, still more full of senti-
ment, but of a different kind ā 2, little red chalk
drawing which every one remembers who has
seen the drawings at the Louvre. It is a face of
doubtful sex, set in the shadow of its own hair,
the cheek-line in high light against it, with some-
thing voluptuous and full in the eyelids and the
lips. Another drawing might pass for the same
face in childhood, with parched and feverish lips,
but with much sweetness in the loose, short-waisted,
childish dress, with necklace and bulla, and the
daintily bound hair. We might take the thread of
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LEONARDO DA VINCI
suggestion which these two drawings offer, thus
set side by side, and, following it through the
drawings at Florence, Venice, and Milan, con-
struct a sort of series, illustrating better than any-
thing else Leonardo's type of womanly beauty.
Daughters of Herodias, their fantastic head-dresses
knotted and folded so strangely, to leave the dainty
oval of the face disengaged, they are not of the
Christian family, or of Raffaelle's. They are the
clairvoyants, through whom, as through delicate
instruments, one becomes aware of the subtler
forces of nature, and the modes of their action, all
that is magnetic in it, all those finer conditions
wherein material things rise to that subtlety of
operation which constitutes them spiritual, where
only the finer nerve and the keener touch can
follow; it is as if in certain revealing instances
we actually saw them at their work on human
flesh. Nervous, electric, faint always with some
inexplicable faintness, they seem to be subject to
exceptional conditions, to feel powers at work in
the common air unfelt by others, to become, as
it were, receptacles of them, and pass them on to
us in a chain of secret influences.
But among the more youthful heads there is one
at Florence which Love chooses for its own ā the
head of a young man, which may well be the like-
ness of Salaino, beloved of Leonardo for his curled
and waving hair ā belli capelli ricci e inanellatt ā
and afterwards his favourite pupil and servant. Of
all the interests in living men and women which
I 177 N
WALTER PATER
may have filled his life at Milan, this attachment
alone is recorded; and in return, Salaino identified
himself so entirely with Leonardo, that the picture
of St. Anne, in the Louvre, has been attributed
to him. It illustrates Leonardo's usual choice of
pupils ā men of some natural charm of person or
intercourse, like Salaino; or men of birth and
princely habits of life, like Francesco Melzi ā men
with just enough genius to be capable of initiation
into his secret, for which they were ready to efface
their own individuality. Among them, retiring
often to the villa of the Melzi at Canonica al
Vaprio, he worked at his fugitive manuscripts
and sketches, working for the present hour, and
for a few only, perhaps chiefly for himself. Other
artists have been as careless of present or future
applause, in self-forgetfulness, or because they set
moral or political ends above the ends of art; but
in him this solitary culture of beauty seems to have
hung upon a kind of self-love, and a carelessness
in the work of art of all but art itself. Out of the
secret places of a unique temperament he brought
strange blossoms and fruits hitherto unknown;
and for him the novel impression conveyed, the
exquisite effect woven, counted as an end in itself
ā a. perfect end.
And these pupils of his acquired his manner so
thoroughly, that though the number of Leonardo's
authentic works is very small indeed, there is a
multitude of other men's pictures, through which
we undoubtedly see him and come very near to
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LEONARDO DA VINCI
his genius. Sometimes, as in the little picture of
the Madonna of the Balances, in which, from the
bosom of his mother, Christ weighs the pebbles of
the brook against the sins of men, we have a hand,
rough enough by contrast, working on some fine
hint or sketch of his. Sometimes, as in the subjects
of the daughter of Herodias and the head of John
the Baptist, the lost originals have been re-echoed
and varied upon again and again by Luini and
others. At other times the original remains, but
has been a mere theme or motive, a type of which
the accessories might be modified or changed;
and these variations have but brought out the
more the purpose or expression of the original.
It is so with the so-called St. John the Baptist of
the Louvre ā one of the few naked figures Leonardo
painted ā whose delicate brown flesh and woman's
hair no one would go out into the wilderness to
seek, and whose treacherous smile would have
us understand something far beyond the outward
gesture or circumstance. But the long reed-like
cross in the hand, which suggests John the Baptist,
becomes faint in a copy at the Ambrosian, and
disappears altogether in another in the Palazzo
Rosso at Genoa. Returning from the last to the
original, we are no longer surprised by St. John's
strange likeness to the Bacchus, which hangs near
it, which set Gautier thinking of Heine's notion
of decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves,
took employment in the new religion. We recognise
one of those symbolical inventions in which the
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WALTER PATER
ostensible subject is used, not as matter for definite
pictorial realisation, but as the starting-point of a
train of sentiment, subtle and vague as a piece of
music. No one ever ruled over his subject more
entirely than Leonardo, or bent it more dexterously
to purely artistic ends. And so it comes to pass
that though he handles sacred subjects continually,
he is the most profane of painters; the given person
or subject. Saint John in the Desert, or the
Virgin on the Knees of Saint Anne, is often
merely the pretext for a kind of work which carries
one quite out of the range of its conventional
associations.
About the Last Supper, its decav 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
necessarv 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 retouch-
ings and delays. They show him refusing to work
i8o
LEONARDO DA VINCI
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 imprcmptu^ 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, ā
above all, to one drawing of the central head at
the Brera, which in a union of tenderness and
severity in the face-lines, reminds one of the
monumental work of Mino da Fiesole, ā 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 Raffaelle, at Florence,
painted it with sweet and solemn effect in the
refectorv of Saint Onofrio; but still with all the
mvstical unrealitv of the school of Perugino. Vasari
pretends that the central head was never finished.
Well; finished or unfinished, or owing part of its
i8i
WALTER PATER
effect to a mellowing decay, this central head does
but consummate the sentiment of the whole com-
pany ā 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 trans-
parent shadows ā 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 L at Fontainebleau. One picture of
his, the Saint Anne ā not the Saint Anne of
the Louvre, but a mere cartoon now in London
1 M. Arsene Houssaye comes to save the credit of his
countrymen.
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LEONARDO DA VINCI
ā 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 bv the death of Savonarola (the latest
gossip is of an undraped Monna Lisa, found in
some out-of-the-wav 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 lan-
guage 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, Leo-
nardo's masterpiece ā the revealing instance of his
mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness,
only the Melancholia of Diirer 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
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WALTER PATER
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 ā 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,
1 Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson
in the hps and cheeks, lost for us.
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LEONARDO DA VINCI
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 ā 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 therein that which they
have of power to refine and make expressive the
outward form ā 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
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WALTER PATER
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, and
summing 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 ā
a work all trace of which soon vanished ā the