Historical vignettes, 2nd series

by Bernard Capes

Leonardo da Vinci

“I cannot read the truth into these eyes. Their riddle still eludes me.” When the passion of two natures meets in perfect reciprocity the resulting fruit is genius. It is procreation in the divine sense—divine creation by deputy, that is to say—whereby the love that is in the souls of both, each for the other, blossoms in the flawless understanding. Leonardo, the glorious bastard, was the earnest of such a meeting—a moment rarely possible, but still possible to any union—and the seal of its creative ecstasy was on his hand and on his brow. He was beautiful as he was inspired; yet, even as the Fates keep secrets from the gods themselves, from him was withheld the full interpretation of his own transcendent visions.

The young man to whom he spoke, and into whose eyes he had turned to look, lowered his lids as if abashed or aggrieved, and just perceptibly shrugged his shoulders.

“Master,” he said, presuming on the Master’s tolerance, “is it not the mystery of original sin in them which baffles you? And where on this earth are eyes to lack that riddle? You are too old, Master, by near fifteen hundred years to find the model you seek. There was never but one in all the world.”

He looked up suddenly, an odd shadow of challenge or defiance in those same vilified orbs, and again veiled them under drooped lashes.

Messer Leonardo stood musing, half abstracted. He was wont to hunt for the faces for his pictures about the city, and when he marked a quarry, to pursue it in and out of the human warren like a weasel, tasting its life in anticipation, until the moment came to seize and drain it. So had he captured the model for his Christ—among the people, as was meet—Lucio, the widow’s son, who had a face like an angel’s, and the gift, it seemed, of immortal youth. Lucio’s mother was the poorest of the poor, and bedridden at that; yet the fond pride in her kept her grown child in idleness. She embroidered rich cloths for tailors, and made a sufficient pittance; but him she would never let soil his lovely hands in menial service. It had been a different thing, however, when Messer Leonardo, the Duke’s own petted protégé, had proposed to introduce Lucio into the great picture of the Last Supper he was about to paint for the monks of Santa Maria delle Grazie. And as its divine protagonist! Here was service deliriously sanctified. Lucio must be enraptured to consecrate his young glowing beauty to an end so sublime. And he went, indeed, to the great Master’s atelier in the Palace, and was made the subject of innumerable studies, pending his appearance in the fresco.

The fresco itself was to be painted on an end wall of the monastery refectory, continuing in perspective the actual rafters of the room, and so far consisted in no more than a charcoal drawing, masterly outlining the group assembled at the consecration. Only the Christ Himself bloomed in flowery suggestion from the midmost throng, a figure iridescent, half revealed, as if it were verily a dream materialising.

Before this figure da Vinci, tall, comely, a rapt look on his beardless, keen-cut features, the solemnity of the riddle in his eyes, stood one morning, his forefinger to his lip, and pondered—pondered. His model for the Christ stood at his shoulder.

“Ho, Lucio!” he said suddenly, like a man awakening; “you suggest it is thus; and perhaps it is thus. How, then, to elude the riddle which eludes me?”

“Why not paint me so, Master, with my lids down?”

Leonardo glanced quickly at the speaker; then, raising his left hand with the brushes and the pallet in it, selected here and there and began to work. Presently, as he modelled with deft fingers, half-murmured fragments of speech came from him.

“What is thine age, Lucio? I forget.”

“Yet under twenty-five, Master.”

“Why, a miracle, Lucio! The bloom of thee; the round chin of thee; the golden dusky wings of thy hair! What ensures such youth in manhood? Innocence? A mother’s love? Art thou very innocent, Lucio?”

“Who can be wholly innocent, Master, with the stain of that original sin in him?”

“True. Yet, for all that, a good son, a pious son. Show me thine eyes again. Ah, the shy revealing! Art afraid it will out—the answer to the riddle?”

“No, Master.”

“Once more, then. There! Now keep them so.”

Presently he spoke again:

“Your poor mother, Lucio—she mends?”

“She mends a little, Messer.”

“All due to the reliquary, is it not? Tell me the true story.”

“The story, Messer!”

“Saints, what a gasp! Yes, the story, Lucio. I had heard a whisper of it—how a dream came to the bedridden woman, down by the Volta gate, promising her she should recover if she would make gift to the Sanctuary of the Holy Virgin at Saronno of that possession which, next to her son, she held in all the world most dear. You know what thing that was—a little gold and crystal reliquary, empty of all save her child’s and her husband’s hair; you know—or doth the story lie? It relates at least of how the woman called her son to her, and yielded to him that treasure from its hiding-place, and bade him by his love of her do with it what he would. He did not hesitate, the good son who owed his mother all in all, but straightway he went his pilgrimage, fifteen miles thither and fifteen back, through perils and much hunger, and left his reliquary at the shrine, and won his guerdon. Well won, I say. He owed her all, and what he could pay he paid. There ends the story—and she mends, you say?”

“Faith is the great physician, Messer.”

“Well, God be thanked for it. I think it is.”

He looked round again quickly, then wrought on, while a long silence ensued. Presently, with an exclamation, he threw down his brushes.

“The stain!” he said. “What folly! It confounds the issue. I shall not find my Christ!”

He dismissed his model, and returned to the ducal Palace. On his way he encountered a birdseller; a number of wee songsters imprisoned in a yoke of netted sieves hung over his shoulders. He paid the man for all, cut the strings, and released the pretty flock. A wide-eyed child, his moist lips parted in an eager smile, watched the quivering escape heavenwards.

“There stands my Christ,” thought the artist. “For the moment his small soul is free, free from the world, free from the shadow of the Fall, mounting with the happy little birds all mirrored in his eyes.”

From that day he set aside the divine problem, and confined his labours to the grosser figures of his group. He worked, forgetting his former model, and Lucio, the ideal of guileless manhood, passed into the mist of half-remembered things.

Messer Leonardo was a very great man. His genius was as multifarious as it was gigantic; but of its very nature it confessed a flaw. One vast conception in him pushed out another, so that the last was for ever claiming precedence over all before. His mind was a great hall thronged with uncompleted Titans. A scheme once realised, the way pointed out, he was impatient of its mere achievement. No supreme creator ever left so many immortal works unfinished—the varnishing and the sand-papering, so to speak, were matters for lesser souls.

Of these, perhaps, was the Prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the aged Padre Bandelli. He “kicked” over the intolerable tardiness of the artist; years rolled by—five years, ten years, and more—and still the fresco was not done. At length all was finished saving only two heads, those of the betrayer and the Betrayed, the opposite poles of darkness and glory; and there once more, and finally it seemed, the composition halted. Bandelli protested, grew wroth, complained at last to the Duke himself. Leonardo responded with a demand for models—the one wholly guiltless of original sin, the other—Judas. Of the latter he lived in hopes; if he could find him, he might help him to the former, as the deepest darkness of a well betrays the stars above; if he could not, he might use the Prior himself at a pinch. The Duke laughed, sided with his favourite, and the Prior withdrew discomfited. More years went by.

At length one day, as he was strolling in the streets with Duke Ludovico, his Magnificence hanging familiarly on his arm, Leonardo looked up and saw his Judas. He was one of two criminals, being carted for their gibbeting, who went by at the moment. The rogues jogged in a tumbril, their arms spliced back, their teeth grinning without merriment. A monk, holding up a small crucifix and gabbling mechanically as he ogled the passing petticoats, faced them; the executioner, brawny and impassive, sat before, chewing a fig; a ragged contadino with straw in his shoes, leading a horse as dusty and threadbare as an old overbeaten carpet, shambled at the head. Leonardo exclaimed “At last!” and adding excitedly “Release unto me Barabbas!” halted the procession with a gesture. “Give me this man,” he appealed to the Duke, “for my Judas. Eternal infamy shall be his in lieu of death.”

It was a trifling gift; Ludovico graciously, of his omnipotence, bestowed it. Leonardo begged permission to return to the Palace, and thence ascended to his atelier, that unclean hostage slinking at his heels. In the room he stood the creature up against a wall and studied him. Low cupidity, bestial self-indulgence, sin at its meanest and rankest were struggling there, out of the abject terror of death, to reassert themselves. Squalid, fulsome, with battered evil face and wild eyes shadowed under hair, the tint and almost the texture of ruined thatch, the thing fawned on its preserver, and was repelled, and fawned again, but at a distance, and stood whimpering. And thenceforward Leonardo set himself to unravel the riddle of this monstrous life.

He wrought for many days; and then gradually a strange awe began to assail him. There was something emerging from the darkness, a light, a vibration, which shook and confused his purpose. What was it? A Judas—with the glimmer of some lost angel reappearing, faint and indefinite, in the backward abysm of his eyes! That would never do—or would it—perhaps the best of all? He stayed his hand in amazement. The wonder grew, and with it some emotion, some reluctant sympathy with the debased thing—reciprocal, he somehow felt it to be.

And then one morning suddenly the creature spoke. It was in the refectory, whither he had been conveyed, that the Master might consider him in his actual relation to the composition—whence, still flowered, faint and mystic, the unsolved riddle of the Christ—and his voice came in a moment like a breaking water:

“He lied to Heaven and his mother, Messer; he had never hung the little gold and crystal reliquary at the shrine of the Beata Virgine in Saronno!”

Leonardo started violently and faced round. He stood gazing rigid at the speaker, like one stricken by some mortal memory.

“He was a hypocrite and a libertine,” cried the apparition, wildly striking its breast. “He had never left Milan. He had hung the reliquary about the neck of a little evil courtesan of the Ghetto, and with it had bought of her the hour’s bliss he had long and greedily coveted. But his mother, believing him, was cured through her faith; and, when she was restored, she herself made a pilgrimage of gratitude to the shrine, and she discovered what alone was to be found there—the killing truth. And thence she returned, the false life ebbing from her drop by drop, and, coming home, she read the confirmation in his eyes and she died of it. And you could not read it, Messer, as a mother came to; but the riddle spoiled your Christ—as it need not spoil your Judas. I am well portrayed at last—I am well.”

He ceased, dropping his head; and Leonardo found his voice in a cry:

“Thou art Lucio!”

And the other muttered:

“Yes, I am Lucio, who came to thee for Christ and remain’st as Judas.”

Then Leonardo said:

“He forgave them on the cross. As thou look’st towards Him whom in thine own image thou hast betrayed, so shalt thou find mercy, even thou. In Judas’ eyes I find my Christ at last.”

Wu Taotsz, the Celestial
Painter

In his fortress-palace at Nankin sat the Emperor Shun-yuen. It was a torrid day of the year 750, and the Emperor was fretful. Surfeit of power, he was reflecting, did not spell content. On the contrary, like lesser surfeits, it discomposed. It was a natural paradox, perhaps, that his seeming so full should make life appear so empty. He could not, for all his omnipotence, both eat his cake and have it.

The Emperor drew his imperial yellow silk surtout querulously about him, and “wah’d” snappishly. What was wrong with everything? As the third or fourth of his dynasty—the Tang, now long matured in a peaceful despotism—he possessed the lordship of all the good that existed. And yet the good was not good enough—it was failing somehow to satisfy. And why? He wished, by the celestial dragon, that he could tell!

Shun-yuen, as the product and successor of warriors, of their kin but not of their kind, was really, had he known it, in the throes of a new birth. There was represented in him at the moment the line of demarcation between the forces of the blood and of the intellect. He stood far enough away from the spirit which had enthroned his dynasty to have developed wholly in the ameliorating atmosphere of the peace which that spirit had won for itself; and yet there survived in him a virility which vaguely aspired to new fields of conquest. Surely there was something yet to be gained from the world beside territory and power; surely to be constituted Emperor of the Sun was not to be condemned to eternal stagnation in its glare? The germ of unrecognised thoughts and aspirations moved in him like a wriggling indigestion.

Suddenly in some near corridor of the Palace there rose a sound of repressed but excited voices, awaking a sympathetic response in his own restlessness. He attributed the disturbance to the general agitation evoked by his condition, since any imperial distress was automatically reflected in the imperial household, which was constituted very much on the lines of a hive; and it was with a thrill of interest, therefore, that he observed the entrance and reverential approach of his Chamberlain Chung-chi, an official of the second rank of the opaque red button and the three peacock feathers in an agate tube.

“Speak,” said the Emperor, ready to chastise for a disappointment, but longing for something novel.

Chung-chi, prostrating himself at the imperial feet, and bowing his forehead nine times to the floor, raised his fat face and obeyed:

“Light of the day, and supreme effulgence, under One, of the entire universe, on whom once to gaze in thy quintessential splendour is to be condemned to perpetual blindness, know that there has been seized in the town a stranger capable of the impossible heresy of asserting that there is on the earth a power greater than the Emperor himself.”

Shun-yuen sat erect, a sudden excitement tingling in his veins.

“Bring this slave before us,” he said, “that we may face and wither him in his blasphemy.”

Chung-chi rose, backed from the presence, disappeared, and returned in a moment, ushering in a man under guard. The stranger, offering no obeisance, stood up calm and fearless before the Emperor.

He was a small man, and old; yet the age in him, certified by a thousand minute wrinkles, seemed somehow discounted by the glow of a couple of brown eyes, as glossy and visionary as a child’s. His feet and ankles were bare; his short trousers and waistless blouse were of the ignoble butchers’ blue; his hair was clipped close to his scalp—for in those days the Tartar imposition of the pigtail was not, nor had women yet adopted the decadent fashion of hoofs. Over the stranger’s shoulder hung an open wallet, stuffed with brushes and pigments.

“Thy name?” demanded the Emperor.

“I am called Wu Taotsz, the celestial painter,” answered the stranger in a voice like a clear echo.

The Emperor’s lip curled slightly. This was one of the despised crafts, as yet held in contempt. Even at that date, to shine in letters or learning was the surest road to distinction, which is worth recording of a people warlike enough in the eighth century, however their reputation for arms may have suffered since. A uniform did not with them excuse and glorify a multitude of inanities; the fighting man got his due and no more. But still, however the intellectual arts were respected, the art of painting had not come into its own.

“Thou bearest thy head high,” said the Emperor. “Wilt thou remain celestial if we dock thee of it?”

He alluded to the common belief that to be deprived of one’s head, the seat of understanding, was to be disgraced beyond acceptance in paradise.

“Aye, even then,” answered the stranger.

The Emperor stared.

“By what authority?” he cried.

“By the power of Imagination,” said Wu Taotsz, “which is greater under God than all.”

“Greater than I am?”

“Greater than thou, O Emperor!”

Shun-yuen gave a little gasp.

“Thou hast said it,” he spake. “Who or what, then, is this Imagination?”

“It is that which penetrates and possesses even me, Wu Taotsz.”

“Thee? Then it is thou who art greater than I?”

“It is I, by virtue of that power.”

“What, then, can this Imagination do that I cannot do?”

“There is nothing which it cannot do, Shun-yuen. At its summons the world crawls prostrate at its feet; the Emperors bow their necks; wealth, beauty, power throng to worship it; nay, it can reach down the starry bodies from the skies and weld them into a single sphere, as potters knead clay, incomparably stupendous. Ask me what it can do!”

The Emperor glanced about him. His eyes had suddenly assumed a perplexed and troubled look; he shook his head slightly. The vague emotions and aspirations which had lately dejected him returned with redoubled force, and he thought, What is to seek here that this Imagination could perchance supply?

Suddenly his face brightened, and when all thought he was about to condemn the presumptuous madman to most exquisite tortures, he smiled upon Wu Taotsz, and spoke:

“Is it conceivable that in all these years we have not learned to honour lovely Peace with other than a fortress for her habitation? Mine eyes are dim with dreams of things I cannot shape—gold walls, and tumbling waters, and shining birds, and the misty loom of turrets clouding a vast space. Can Imagination build me such a shrine for Peace?”

“Aye, and more than thou dreamest,” answered the painter.

Shun-yuen rose. He bade the attendants honour Wu Taotsz, and minister to him, and give him all that he needed.

“Only the bare wall of a quiet room, and much rice-water, and my paints and brushes,” said the stranger, his eyes gleaming.

And he was allotted such a room as he desired; and, by his wish, none, not even the Emperor, came near him while he wrought. But every day Shun-yuen looked from his Palace windows upon the surrounding emptiness, and wondered when he was to see arise there the first evidences of the glorious fabric which Wu Taotsz was to build for him of his Imagination. And still every morning his soul was unsatisfied and the waste glared desolate.

Now in the meantime speculation was rife as to the stranger and his genesis. Some believed him to be a wizard embryo hatched from the sands of the great river; others that he was the spirit of the kilns where they baked the earth Kaolin into the porcelain which, in its hues and forms of increasing beauty, was coming to express more and more day by day the creative genius of the age. But of all these surmises Wu Taotsz was unconscious, as he worked on alone in his empty room.

And at last one morning he sent for the Emperor.

Eagerly Shun-yuen, dispensing, for the first time in his life, with forms and punctilio, hurried to obey the summons, and entered the room alone. And instantly he uttered a cry of rapture, and stood like one half stupefied. For there before him stood realised the pleasance of his dreams, only a thousand times transfigured.

He was gazing upon the clustered minarets of a palace such as his soul had never conceived, a fabric all builded of cloud and amber and foam, and yet as solid as the sward from which it sprang. There, in the midst of heavenly gardens which receded down terrace on terrace of loveliness to low hills and a blue horizon, the pearly structure sprang into a sky of lazulite; and to the golden gates of the main pavilion a flight of marble steps ascended.

Rousing himself as if from a trance of ecstasy, the Emperor spake:

“Who builded this, Wu Taotsz?”

“Imagination,” was the answer.

“Bid, then, Imagination to make the winds blow, the river sing, the birds warble.”

“They are vocal to my ears, Shun-yuen, and beautiful are the forms within the house.”

At that moment a droning fly settled with a flop upon the golden gate. The emperor started violently, and cried out, “A fly, and so far yet so plain!”

He hurried forward, peered closely, put out his hand and turned, with a scream of fury.

“Wretch! This is no more than a painted picture.”

“To Imagination it is real,” said Wu Taotsz.

The Emperor, his face orange with rage, leapt and drew his sword.

“Impostor,” he shrieked, “let Imagination, so it can, preserve thee from my wrath.”

He flew at the artist, who sped before him, across and round the room, until, reaching the foot of the painted steps, up the flight sprang Wu Taotsz, and, with a laugh, disappeared within the golden gates.

Following blindly in his anger, the Emperor rushed at the steps, staggered, recovered himself, gave a mortal gasp, and fell back. Before his eyes was just the blank wall of the room. The Palace and Wu Taotsz had vanished together.