Leonardo Da Vinci - Chapter III

"He filled entire pages with profiles..."

Chapter III

these artists who had everything to discover, and, who in less than a century did discover everything (the principle of perspec­tive, the science of anatomy, the rules of light...) — one under­stands how this era is different from the others, and what makes it unique. It is a heroic age of which each masterwork is a trophy, the mark of a conquest. This huge conquest comes from a re­turn to Nature, meaning to the real. Leonardo fulfilled this idea linking it to another one doubly significant: the desire not to re­peat what was done before. He wrote: "How the art of painting slowly declines and is slowly lost from age to age when painters only have their predecessors as models."

But beginning with his sketches we see a demonstration of convergence of divergent concerns served by such a variety of means, that we find it difficult to reconcile such opposites in a single man. Often on the same page of his diagrams there is a constant going from one subject to another, attested by the jux­taposition of diagrams and notes that do not seem to have any­thing in common. For example, he filled entire pages with pro­files and did so all his life. He drew a great number of them, all more or less the same: a repulsive, almost ferocious-looking old man, next to a handsome youth. In the domain of art, these dia­grams represent grace and imagination on the one hand, and the

One of the first signed works of Leonardo is the landscape of Santa Maria della Neve, dated 2 August 1473, a drawing which was later considered as "the first real landscape sketch in the oc­cidental art". In this work, what interested Leonardo more than description of the shapes of trees and rocks, was to capture the es­sence of the phenomena — winds, snow or rain moving through the sunlight. He expressed a new sensitivity to the values of light, which he vibrated with shadings, giving time density and transparency to the landscape. Volume and space, shadows and mist are animated by a powerful and dynamic stroke.

During his whole life, Leonardo had been obsessed by the move­ments of water. In his last years he started the series of strange, terrifying sketches, all under the name of Deluge. He predicted this Deluge would exterminate man and all his works, bringing an end to the world. Almost abstract and of a great audacity since he was breaking away from conventional art forms, these exer­cises of the imagination, of stupefying depth and vigour, show his passion for complex movements, for convolutions, as much as his dismay at the future of humanity. His scientific knowledge is used here, with an implacable logic, to demonstrate how poor the means at man's disposal when he struggles with Nature; one sees here a prodigious spirit dredging the secret depths of his anguished soul: "Ah! What frightening tumults resound in the sadness of the air," wrote Leonardo in the commentary which

The enormity of his drawing work shows us that his life was a long preparation for the art of painting, which to him was the su­preme art. But knowing that it was his duty to bring it to perfec­tion, moreover aware, to the highest degree, of the complexity of Nature which he proposed to equal, he forced himself to a preliminary labour of a gigantic scope, seemingly out of propor­tion, with the number of works that he actually accomplished. That an artist could dedicate years to the mental incubation of a painting which sometimes he would even not complete, is what his public could not fathom. This is why after the flashing debut that had left an unforgettable impression, Leonardo little by little tired his patrons and the public and became a legendary figure, admired for his past prowess. But all the while he had been devoting himself to the meticulous elaboration of future works that were constantly postponed.

What was his method of working?

Before deciding to sculpt or to paint, he travelled the road from the minutest detail to entire organized form. Before working on the human body, he completely mastered its secret springs and the internal structure. "Having learned the nature of nerves, muscles and tendons", he wrote, "the painter will know exactly which nerves determine the movement of each member and their number, and which muscle provokes the contraction of the nerve when it swells, and what nerves, once converted into delicate cartilages envelop and contain this muscle. And so will he be able, in different ways and universally, to indicate the varied muscles, from the different poses of the figures." Leonardo's great contribution to anatomy lay in the creation of a system of drawing, still in general use, which enabled physi­cians to transmit their findings to students. Prior to his time the medical profession took little interest in anatomical drawing; many physicians actually opposed its use in books. Leonardo's

This rigourousness, which seemed to grow with age, explains both the severity of the study of drapes and the exuberance of the grotesque heads; he extended it to everything he perceived of the reality of the world. He was aware, above his senses, of the infinite plays of shadow and light, of the geometric sequences of the refraction.

The quality of grace comes before strength; the hyper-con­tracted muscles of Michaelangelo's figures would always dis­please Leonardo. The smiles that radiate throughout his most famous paintings prove that gracefulness is not only "more beautiful than beauty", but that it is stronger than strength.

Since light is God's first creation; it is the painter's first re­source and should be his first care. The chiaroscuri, the sfumato make light spring from darkness, in a painting, as God made it spring in the world; a painting must express the splendour of light, which is the main characteristic of the Creation. In The Last Supper Leonardo tends to blend Christ with the light and Judas with the shadow; in The Virgin of the Rocks the Virgin is more brilliant than St Ann, on whose knees she is resting; the lower part of the body of the Mona Lisa is hardly seen on the back­ground, on the contrary, her face is set on a luminous landscape. To Leonardo light was something toward which one climbs.

The artist in him wanted to embrace the whole of Nature, as if to build in his own vision, the unity of the spirit. Science and technique are always only auxiliaries to the service of art: "The one who disdains painting does not like Nature's philosophy. Painting is the most beautiful language of the mind."

The place that philosophy occupies in the life of the mind, the profound exigency of which it is the witness, the generalized curiosity that comes with painting or philosophy, the need for the number of facts that it holds and assimilates, the ever present thirst for cause, here was the permanent concern of the work of painting which occupied Leonardo.

In Leonardo's Treatise on Painting he speaks a lot about re­lief, on its nature, its function, on the different ways to translate it, that is, to render the three dimensions of things on a sur­face essentially two-dimensional. However, he does not reveal the source of the intuition of its importance, its pre-eminence; the idea that painting must not be a linear representation of the world, but rather its representation in volumes. One of the key points of his Treatise on Painting is that: "The painter follows these two objectives, man and the intention of his soul. The first objective is easy to reach, the second harder, because he must represent it by the movements of the members."

The Adoration of the Magi

Leonardo ended his Florentine period with a veritable mani­festo of humanism. The unfinished Adoration of the Magi was the first painting he conceived in this radical — and even revo­lutionary — way.

The Renaissance already had a number of paintings on this subject, all of which had been painted in the narrative style. But Leonard chose to abandon narration, to represent instead the maelstrom of impression which had accompanied this major event of Christian history: the arrival on earth of the Son of God. Moreover, he deliberately ignored a logic that would impose on him only the presence of peasants or of Magi, or the union of both: he wanted to include the whole of humanity around the

The Adoration of the Magi, 1481/82

Study for the sleeve of the Virgin and Child with St Ann, See p.28

Study for the angel's head in the Louvre The Virgin of the Rocks (see p. 65)

Study of hands for Mona Lisa, seep .76

This painting has a profound meditative quality. In it the ra­tional meets the irrational. The background layers open on vast perspectives of far away horizons; the foreground figures reveal a complex repertoire of psychological attitudes of human rela­tions and symbols. The mechanisms, the screws and springs of this pictorial machine are the figures, the gestures, the poses and his geometry the frame of mind, the attitudes and emotions. At the summit of the pyramid formed by the Virgin and the kneeling Magi is the Infant, the centre of this cosmogony. All around this young child, princes, shepherds, angels and knights move wrapped in this vast Epiphany — more revelation than simple adoration — such is the main idea of this composition.

Why did he believe that he had to introduce all these figures and elements into his compositions? One of the explanations that we can propose has to do with the profound feeling that Leonardo had for the bonds that unite all living creatures with Nature: trees, flowers, animals, men mingled and driven inexo­rably toward their destiny. Absolutely revolutionary, this was the most dramatic and the best-balanced composition of the whole Quattrocento, and the one in front of which generations of art­ists would lose themselves in an amazing contemplation.

The Virgin of the Rocks

The Virgin of the Rocks sings the victory of light over darkness. Here, Leonardo reconciled his imaginary universe with that of scientific naturalism. The painting is a mysterious revelation on a background which is not of this world: a grotto under an open sky where the Virgin takes refuge with Baby Jesus, St John the Baptist as a child, and an angel. But the figures have a supreme grace linked to a marvellous relaxed attitude, and the details of the vegetation are as close to nature as if they were from the hand of the best botanical painter.

The Virgin of the Rocks (detail), Paris

The characters are arranged in the usual pyramid, the Virgin's head forming once more the summit. Leonardo finally could ex­press his ideal of beauty in the angel's face whose features do not any longer keep their shape according to a surface design, but seem to express its interiority. The grotto is immersed in a twilight atmosphere, veiled with a light mist of sfumato. The shaping of the subjects in sfumato is so delicate that the precise contours can hardly be perceived; faces and bodies materialise in the soft light which fall on them; and the shadows inside the grotto are so dense that they seem to possess their own sub­stance. But the painting is not sombre and in spite of layers of varnish that soften its colours, they are always radiant.

Whatever the deep meaning of this work, and wherever and at whatever date Leonardo painted it, one fact certainly remains: it was his farewell to the Quattrocento. Having mastered the art of the Renaissance, he now went much further. Years would pass before he undertook another major work and, when he would decide to begin again, it would be to create one of the world's marvels, the first classical example of the Renaissance ideals at their highest: The Last Supper.

But before we come to The Last Supper, let us take a look at The Battle of Anghiari.

The central design of the Battle of Anghiari is of hexagonal shape and represents a tangle of men and horses overlapping and so close to each other, that it seems as if it is the preparatory study for a group sculpture. The rearing horses are reminiscent of an early work of Leonardo, The Adoration of the Magi, but there is no longer an expression of joy and exuberance that is communicated, but a sensation of furious and cruel drunkenness: the warriors chop each other with their sabres while the beasts kick and bite. This painting can be considered the crystallisation of Leonardo's attitude toward war, which he called the pazzia bestialisima — the most bestial of madness — an opinion that his experience at the service of Caesar Borgia could only have reinforced. He wanted to transform The Battle of Anghiari into a terrible and timeless accusation and he succeeded by removing all background details. There is no decoration in the background and the fabulous costumes of the warriors do not belong to any precise period. To render the crystallisation more impressive, Leonardo directed all the lines of his composition — sabres, the men's faces, the horses curving bodies and outstretched hooves — toward the interior. Nothing distracts the eyes from this ac­cusation, which stands here as convincing as the evidence that a prosecutor would place on a table.

Leonardo had worked long on his idea on the way to repre­sent a battle; it is this very idea he is going to follow "You will first design the smoke of the artillery mixed in the air with the dust raised by the movement of the horses and the warriors", he wrote around 1490. "You will redden the faces, the people, the air, the gunmen, their neighbours, and this redness will go fading while it moves away from its cause... Arrows will go up in all directions, they will come down, will fly in straight lines, filling the air, and the bullets of the gunmen will leave behind a track of smoke... If you show a man falling to the ground, reproduce the marks of his sliding down on the dust transformed into a pool of blood; and all around, in the viscous earth you will show the

Copy after Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari, by Peter Paul Rubens

Copy after Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari, by Peter Paul Rubens

The Last Supper

In 1495, at the request of Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo set about painting the Last Supper on the wall of the dining room of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan. For about 15 years Leonardo had been reflecting on the ideas which he de­veloped in The Last Supper. And so, The Last Supper gave the artist the opportunity to test his idea that painting is something mental, and to achieve in a single piece of art, a synthesis of his vast experience in the optical domain, in musical harmony, in the fields of anatomy and architecture, in the realms of colour and perspective, as well as in the domains of matter and technique.

This painting is not only prodigious in itself but later had a great influence. There is an aspect so evident in this masterpiece that it is often overlooked. In art few compositions offer so many difficulties as the presentation of thirteen subjects seated at a long table. Under Leonardo's brush this difficulty has been so majestically overcome that it is not seen. One does not even think about it.

He cleverly placed familiar objects around the disciples so that he would not have recourse to imaginary outdated modes. The wall on which he was painting occupied one of the short sides of the long room of the refectory of the convent. In front of the opposite wall, the prior's table was placed on a platform; all along the room there were rows of tables for the monks. The painting reproduced the tablecloths, knives, forks and the monk's glasses. In Leonard's mind, Christ had to nourish himself, in this com­pany, with the same food as the mortals. When the painting was completed, in 1498, those who were invited to contemplate it must have thought they were the object of a hallucination: the monks' room had become the extension of The Last Supper.

Another difficulty was the necessity to isolate Judas, in such a way that he could be recognized at first glance. For a thou­sand years, in fact from the first expression of Christian art, this problem was solved by placing Christ and the eleven faithful

The Last Supper.
The traitor Judas, the fourth from left, with his right hand clutches the pouch containing the money he has been paid to betray Christ.

The Last Supper. The traitor Judas, the fourth from left, with his right hand clutches the pouch containing the money he has been paid to betray Christ.

In its complexity The Last Supper expresses perhaps better than any other work of Leonardo, the master's innovations: the naturalness of the poses and the harmony with the psychological content; the insertion of each individual in a dynamic web of correspondence and contrasts, in an emotion which is indicated by the position of the hands and the movement of the heads; the psychological and not any longer the geometrical perspective, which enliven the scene in space and in the real light of the room. Tradition asks one to interpret the work as if Christ had just ut­tered the sentence: "One of you must betray me", and says that Leonardo wished to fix forever this dramatic moment. The dis­ciples deeply reacted to these words: a superb show of attitudes and gestures which reveal "the intentions of their souls."

It is assumed that the faces, except for that of Christ were those of people who Leonardo found in Milan or in the vicinity. Leonardo spent so many hours wandering in the haunts of the ruffians of Milan searching for the right Judas that the prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie complained to the Duke of Sforza that

As soon as The Last Supper was revealed, Leonardo's contem­poraries were stunned by the brutal revelation of reality. In one stroke, the traditional methods became obsolete and painting entered a new phase of its history. All references from that time agree in saying what admiration this piece aroused.

The unfortunate destiny of this prodigious composition, in which Leonardo gave the best of himself and dared to use an ex­perimental technique, resulted in disaster. It was not long before The Last Supper began to deteriorate. If it is famous today, it is because of the number of copies that were made in the XVIth century, some by Leonardo's direct disciples, which permit us to guess more or less what the original was like; notably the details and the colours and at the same time, to appreciate its incredible radiance. A series of restorations and wars, ending in the bombing of 1943, have reduced this masterpiece to a ghost-like state.

Mona Lisa

One of the worlds best loved paintings carried two names: Mona Lisa, a short form of Madona Lisa, the third wife of a Florentine merchant, and La Joconde, taken from the merchant's name, Francesco de Giocondo.

The first time Madona Lisa posed for Leonardo, she was twenty-four years old. To the eyes of her contemporaries she was approaching maturity. As a portrait, this work was an admi­rable success, "an exact copy of the subject", thought Vasari. But Leonardo far transcended the realistic portrait to make of his subject not only a woman, but the Woman. Under his hands, the individual and the symbolic became one. The idea that the artist

Portrait of Lisa del Giocondo (Mona Lisa), 1503-1506 and later (1510?)

St John the Baptist, c. 1513-1516?

The painting is of modest dimensions, but it feels monumental to the viewer, due to the effect achieved by setting the model in relation to the background of the portrait. This monumental ef­fect further increases the impression of charm and coldness that Mona Lisa radiates. For centuries she has been contemplated with delight, astonishment, or with a feeling of awe. Technically, Leonardo brought to the peak of perfection the use of sfumato; it is not known how many layers of extreme thinness — per­haps as many as one hundred — play their role in the sfumato. The background is without any doubt the most beautiful of all Leonardo's paintings. The details are precise but the jagged rocks, the water, the bones and blood of the earth bring to mind a ro­mantic vision of earth the day after the Creation. This painting has had such an influence on art that it is quite difficult to look at it with fresh eyes.

The Mona Lisa was an immediate success. From the time of its creation, people started to imitate and copy it, in France, in Italy, in Flanders, and in Spain. There are dozens of copies of this work, painted between the XVIth and the XIXth centuries. Its glory has never faded.

St John the Baptist

No matter how troubling it is, this tender face with a pro­voking smile is that of St John, just as Leonardo had wanted to interpret it, contrary to the traditional character of the ascetic, emaciated and full of fire. It is certain that by giving him this smiling and graceful pose, Leonardo had wanted to express the quintessence of the eternal mystery of which we find the signs in such a great part of his work — the enigma of Creation and of life itself.

To Leonardo the question was always to know how the world is made and since this can never be ably resolved, he did not dare to ask others. Painting, a mental subject was, for him, a certain way to know and evidence of the knowledge acquired. He would never have said that it is a manual craft; he preferred it to sculp­ture, precisely because the latter seemed to him more manual and less mental. Even when he wrote about machines and tools, he more readily said: "I know the way to..." than: "I do...". Art aims to render the individuality of the model, and, for that, it searches behind the lines that can be seen, for the movement the eye does not see, behind the movement itself, to something still more secret, the original intention, the fundamental aspiration of the subject. "The artist", he says, "has first the universe in mind, then in the hands." To him, science was not the only way to gain the knowledge of the world, but again neither the richest nor the truest of it. "Painting embraces all forms of Nature... You have the effects of the manifestation, we have the manifestation of the effects. In art, we can be said to be God's grand children."

Leonardo was a painter: painting was his philosophy. In fact he said it himself, and he spoke of painting as one speaks of phi­losophy. That is, he related everything to it. He had excessive ideas about painting, even a peculiar turn of thought which is far from satisfying the whole intelligence.

He felt with an intense suffering the constraint of time, and, in one page of the Codex Atlantica, he let out this moan, the

The Virgin of the Rocks, London

Study of a hydraulic device.
Leonardo's applied mechanics, perhaps more than any other of his scientific or technical pursuits, strike sparks of recognition and admiration in the machine-conscious 21th Century mind.

Sheet of Studies with multi-barrelled guns, c. 1482

Study of a flying Machine with a Hand and Foot-Powered mechanism 1487-1490

Studies of water formations, c. 1507
Leonardo's superhuman quickness of vision is shown in these sketches of flowing water - at top as it swirls around impeding boards, then below as it rushes into as pool.