Part 10 (1/2)
It is different with the little panel opposite, _The Rape of Helen_ (No 591), in which he has depicted with great liveliness and gusto a scene froarded painting only as a means of edification, its employment on such a subject e, not unlike the use of a chancel for the stabling of horses Such views can scarcely be said to be extinct now, and this is the ard to the other arts, such as sculpture or poetry
To a young man like Benozzo, and many others of his day, not monks, nor specially devout in disposition, it e which elcoin enthroned with Saints_ over and over again, must have been a little wearisoive no scope except by putting S
Jerooldfinches One likes to think of the pleasure hich Gozzoli received his co, perhaps fro a cell in the Convent of San Marco, recently rebuilt at the great end of Helen of Troy, or had he to seek the advice of soht tradition? He seems, indeed, to have been rather mixed in his ideas on the subject Did he consult Brunellesco in the construction of his Greek Temple, or Donatello or Ghiberti for the statue inside? Whence came that wonderful landscape with its e-shaped shi+ps? Froination, or from some old missal or choir-book illu of it, for his fancy had full scope His costu soear, elico's _Adoration_ (in which he possibly had a hand), to give an Eastern colour to the group of boyish heroes on the left; not knowing or considering that the robes in which he was accustoels were much nearer to, were indeed derived from, the costume of the Greeks For his ideal of female beauty he seems to have been satisfied with his own taste One can scarcely iure much less classical than that of the blonde with the _retrousse_ nose (presu so coed Italian in the centre The figures in the Te robe, with the long sleeves, who turns her back to us, has a sinity which reminds one less of Gozzoli's master than of Lippo Lippi or Masaccio, whose frescoes in the Carmine he, in common with all other artists, had doubtless studied There is nothing so classical or so natural in the picture as the beautiful little bare-legged boy that is running away in the foreground This little bright panel--so gay, so nave, so ignorant, and withal so char--is of importance in the history of art as illustrated in the National Gallery It is the first in which the artist has given full play to his iend, and, with one exception, the first which is purely secular in subject, and was designed for a ”secular” purpose It probably once fore-chest The important share which the landscape has in the composition, and its serious attempt at perspective, are also worthy of note As an exareat panoramic procession of the notables of his day, which under the title of the _Adoration of the Kings_, covers the walls of the chapel in the Medici Palace at Florence, of the designs of the history of S Agostino at San Genano, and of the frescoes in Campo Santo at Pisa, it is of course extremely inadequate, but it suffices to indicateartist was to strike out from the old track which sufficed for his saint-like master
_In the National Gallery_ (London, 1895)
MONNA LISA[9]
_(LEONARDO DA VINCI)_
WALTER PATER
In Vasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci asread it there are some variations from the first edition There, the painter who has fixed the outward type of Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator, holding lightly by otherphilosophy above Christianity Words of his, trenchant enough to justify this impression, are not recorded, and would have been out of keeping with a genius of which one characteristic is the tendency to lose itself in a refined and graceful mystery The suspicion was but the time-honoured form in which the world stahts for hih indifferentiss; and in the second edition the i fainter and more conventional But it is still by a certain reat men, that he fascinates, or perhaps half repels His life is one of sudden revolts, with intervals in which he works not at all, or apart froe fortune the works on which his more popular fame rested disappeared early from the world, as the _Battle of the Standard_; or are mixed obscurely with the work of meaner hands, as the _Last Supper_ His type of beauty is so exotic that it fascinates a larger nuhts, and seems more than that of any other artist to reflect ideas and views and some scheme of the world within; so that he seemed to his contemporaries to be the possessor of some unsanctified and secret wisdom; as to Michelet and others to have anticipated enius, and crowds all his chief work into a few torenius that he passes un his country and friends, like one who comes across them by chance on some secret errand
[Illustration: MONNA LISA
_L da Vinci_]
His art, if it was to be sohted withof nature and purpose of huences” So he plunged into the study of nature And in doing this he followed the manner of the older students; he brooded over the hidden virtues of plants and crystals, the lines traced by stars as they moved in the sky, over the correspondences which exist between the different orders of living things, through which, to eyes opened, they interpret each other; and for years he see to a voice silent for otherthe sources of expression to their subtlest retreats, the power of an intis he handled He did not at once or entirely desert his art; only he was no longer the cheerful objective painter, through whose soul, as through clear glass, the bright figures of Florentine life, only made a little mellower and more pensive by the transit, passed on to the white wall He wastedto lose hi of intricate devices of lines and colours He was smitten with a love of the i the course of rivers, raising great buildings, such as the church of San Giovanni, in the air; all those feats for the perforic professes to have the key Later writers, indeed, see in these efforts an anticipation of modern mechanics; in hiht and labouring brain Two ideas were especially fixed in his that had touched his brain in childhood beyond theof woreat waters
The science of that age was all divination, clairvoyance, unsubjected to our exactin an instant of vision to concentrate a thousand experiences Later writers, thinking only of the well-ordered treatise on painting which a Frenchman, Raffaelle du Fresne, a hundred years afterwards, compiled froely as his id order in his inquiries But this rigid order was little in accordance with the restlessness of his character; and if we think of hin to anatomy, and composition to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have of him that i over his crucibles, e variation of the alchemist's dream to discover the secret, not of an elixir toimmortality to the subtlest and , he seeician, possessed of curious secrets and a hidden knowledge, living in a world of which he alone possessed the key What his philosophy seems to have been most like is that of Paracelsus or Cardan; and s about it, with its confidence in short cuts and odd byways to knowledge To hie swiftness and double sight, divining the sources of springs beneath the earth or of expression beneath the huifts in cos, in the reed at the brook-side or the star which draws near to us but once in a century How in this way the clear purpose was overclouded, the fine chaser's head perplexed, we but dimly see; the mystery which at no point quite lifts from Leonardo's life is deepest here But it is certain that at one period of his life he had almost ceased to be an artist
The year 1483--the year of the birth of Raffaelle and the thirty-first of Leonardo's life--is fixed as the date of his visit to Milan by the letter in which he recommends himself to Ludovico Sforza, and offers to tell hie secrets in the art of war It was that Sforza whonephew by slow poison, yet was so susceptible to religious impressions that he turned his worst passions into a kind of religious cultus, and who took for his device theof flowers and fruit together, of a wisdom which economizes all forces for an opportunity of sudden and sure effect The faone before him, and he was to model a colossal statue of Francesco, the first duke As for Leonardo himself he came not as an artist at all, or careful of the fae harp of silver of his own construction, shaped in some curious likeness to a horse's skull The capricious spirit of Ludovico was susceptible to the charm of music, and Leonardo's nature had a kind of spell in it
Fascination is always the word descriptive of him No portrait of his youth remains; but all tends to make us believe that up to this tih to balance the disadvantage of his birth, had played about hireat; it was said that he could bend a horseshoe like a coil of lead
The Duomo, the 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, eful, and drea poisonous in the exotic flowers of sentirew there It was a life of exquisite aeants,) and brilliant sins; and it suited the quality of his genius, composed in almost equal parts of curiosity and the desire of beauty, to take things as they came
Curiosity and the desire of beauty--these are the two eleenius; 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 Fifteenth Century o-fold: partly the Renaissance, partly also the co of what is called the ”modern spirit,” with its realism, its appeal to experience; it comprehended 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 naturae_ which Bacon notices So we find him often in intimate relations with men of science, with Fra Luca Paccioli the mathematician, and the anatomist Marc Antonio della Torre His observations and experiments fill thirteen volue describe hi 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 s of the equatorial waters above the polar
He who thus penetrated into the most secret parts of nature preferred always theexceptional, was an instance of law s of a peculiar athts He paints floith such curious fidelity 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 _bizarre_ or _recherche_ in landscape: hollow places full of the green shadow of bitued reefs of trap-rock which cut the water into quaint sheets of light--their exact antitype is in our oestern seas; all sole fro the rocks on the heath of the _Madonna of the Balances_, passing as a little fall into the treacherous caloodly river below the cliffs of the _Madonna of the Rocks_, washi+ng 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_--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 froe veil of sight things reach hiht of eclipse, or in soh deep water
And not into nature only; but he plunged also into human personality, and beca 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 Ludovico 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 whoht sorave, full of the refinement of the dead, in sad earth-coloured raiment, set with pale stones
The _Last Supper_ was finished in 1497; in 1498 the French entered Milan, and whether or not the Gascon bowmen used it as a mark for their arrows, the model of Francesco Sforza certainly did not survive
Ludovico beca years of Leonardo's life areFro, 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 ht from the cabinet of Francis the First, 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 ood pictures had still seemed miraculous; and for two days a crowd of people of all qualities passed in nave exciteave Leonardo a taste of Cimabue's triumph But his as less with the saints than with the living women of Florence; for he lived still in the polished society that he loved, and in the houses 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 saw Ginevra di Benci, and Lisa, the young third wife of Francesco del Giocondo As we have seen hiend, not for their own sake, or as mere subjects for pictorial realisation, but as a sye for fancies all his own, so now he found a vent for his thoughts in taking one of those languid wo her, as Leda or Pomona, Modesty or Vanity, to the seventh heaven of symbolical expression
_La Gioconda_ is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's ht and work In suggestiveness, only the _Melancholia_ of Durer is comparable to it; and no crude syraceful ure, set in the marble chair, in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in soht under sea
Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least[10] As often happens orks in which invention seeiven to, not invented by, the s, once in the possession of Vasari, were certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty that Leonardo in his boyhood copied thens of the elder by-past erminal principle, the unfatho sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work Besides, the picture is a portrait Fro itself on the fabric of his dreaht fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last What was the relationshi+p of a living Florentine to this creature of his thought? By what strange affinities had she and the dreaether? Present froht, dins of Verrocchio, she is found present at last in Il Giocondo's house That there is end 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 coic, that the iely 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 coht 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 hoould they be troubled by this beauty into which the soul with all its hts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalise with its spiritual aan world, the sins of the Borgias She is older than the rocks a which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead rave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange ith Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was 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 hich it has ed the eyelids and the hands The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and ht upon by, and suht and life
Certainly Lady Lisa ht stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the sy these years at Florence Leonardo's history is the history of his art; he hiht cloud of it The outward history begins again in 1502, with a wild journey through central Italy, which he rapher, putting together the stray jottings of his h every day of it, up the strange tower of Sienna, which looks towards Rome, elastic like a bent bon to the sea-shore at Pio as fitfully as in a fevered dreaain at Rome in 1514, surrounded by his e toys that seemed alive of wax and quicksilver
The hesitation which had haunted hih life, and made like one under a spell, was upon him noith double force No one had ever carried political indifferentism farther; it had always been his philosophy to ”fly before the storainst them, as the tide of their fortune turns Yet noas suspected by the anti-Gallian society at Rome of French tendencies It paralyzed hi ene courted him