III
The sinister side of Leonardo da Vinci's genius leads him to the execution of the most prodigious caricatures ever invented; that is to say, before the malevolent and diabolical and macabre and malignant creations in this genre of Goya. In his Caprichos one sees the man's immense arrogance, his destructive and constructive genius, his rebellion—perhaps even more so than Leonardo's—against old tradition; which he hated and violated. Dramatic, revolutionary, visionary in his somber Spanish fashion, it seems to me that this—one of the supreme forms of his art—is, in the same sense as Villon's Grand Testament, his Last Testament: for in both poet and painter the nervous magnificence seen equally in the verse and in the painting is created, almost literally, out of their life-blood.
Only, in Leonardo, visions shape themselves into strange perversities—not the pensive perversities of Perugino—and assume aspects of evasive horrors, of the utmost ugliness, and are transformed into aspects of beauty and of cruelty, as the artist wanders in the hot streets of Florence to catch glimpses of strange hair and strange faces, as he and they follow the sun's shadow. He seizes on them, furiously, curiously, then he refines upon them, molding them to the fashion of his own moods; but always with that unerring sense of beauty which he possesses supremely—beauty, often enough, in its remoteness from actual reality. With passion he tortures them into passionate shapes; with cruelty he makes them grimace; abnormally sensitive (as Rodin often enough was) he is pitiless on the people he comes in contact with, setting ironical flames that circle round them as in Dante's Inferno, where the two most famous lovers of all time, Francesca and Paolo, endure the painted images of the fires of hell, eternally unconsumed. When he seeks absolute beauty there are times when it is beyond the world that he finds it; when he seeks ignominy, it is a breath blowing from an invisible darkness which brings it to his nerves. In evoking singular landscapes, he invents the bizarre. When he is concerned with the tragic passions of difficult souls, he drags them suddenly out of some obscure covering, and seems, in some of his extravagances, to set them naked before us.
As it is Pater who says that inextricably mingled with those qualities there is an element of mockery, "so that, whether in sorrow or scorn, he caricatures Dante even," I am reminded of certain of Botticelli's designs for Dante's inferno, in which I find the element of caricature; as, for instance, when the second head grows on Dante's shoulders, looking backward; as, in the face of Beatrice, which is changed into a tragic mask, because in the poem she refrains from smiling, lest the radiance of the seventh heaven, drawn into her eyes, shall shrivel Dante into ashes.
Nearest to Leonardo in the sinister quality of his genius is El Greco. I have never forgotten his Dream of Philip II, in the Escurial, where there is a painted hell that suggests the fierce material hells of Hieronymus von Bosch: a huge fanged mouth wide open, the damned seen writhing in that red cavern, a lake of flame awaiting those beyond, where the king, dressed in black, kneels at the side. It is almost a vision of madness, and as if this tormented brain of the fanatic, who built these prison walls about himself, and shut himself living into a tomb-like cell, and dead into a more tomb-like crypt, had wrought itself into the painter's brain; who would have found something not uncongenial to himself in this mountainous place of dust and gray granite, in which every line is rigid, every color ashen, in a kind of stony immobility more terrible than any other of the images of death.
I am tempted to bring in here, by way of comparison with these two artists, Jacques Callot, a painter of extraordinary genius, born at Nancy, in Lorraine, in 1592; who, in many of his works, created over again ancient dragons and devils: created them with the fury of an invention that never rested. In his engraving of the hanged men there is that strangeness in beauty which takes away much of the horror of the actual thing; and in his monstrous and malignant Fantasie, where two inhuman creatures—in all the splendor of caricature—grind I know not what poison, in a wide-mouthed jar, plumed and demoniacal.
La Tentation de Saint Antoine, done in 1635, is stupendous. High in the sky is the enormous figure of a reptile-faced Satan, who vomits out of his mouth legions of evil spirits; he is winged with ferocious wings that extend on both sides hugely; one of his clawed hands is chained, the right hurls out lightning. There is Chaos in this composition; it is imaginative in the highest degree of that satanical quality that produces monstrosities. There are clawed creatures that swim in the air, unicorns with stealthy glances. And, with his wonderful sense of design, the saint is seen outside his cave, assailed by legions of naked women, winged and wanton, shameless and shameful. And what is the aim, what is the desire of these evil creatures? To seduce Saint Antony of the Temptations.
Another picture painted on the same subject is that of Gruneweld in the Cologne Museum, which represents a tortured creature who has floated sheer off the earth in his agony, his face drawn inward, as it were, with hideous pains; near him a crew of red and green devils, crab-like, dragon-like, who squirm and gnaw and bark and claw at him, in an obscene whirl and fierce orgy of onslaught. Below, a strange bar of sunset and at the side a row of dripping trees; behind, a black sky almost crackling with color. In some of the other monstrous pictures I saw suggestions of Beardsley; as in the child who kisses the Virgin with thrust-out lips; in those of Meister van S. Severin, in which I found a conception of nature as unnatural and as rigid as that of the Japanese, but turned hideous with hard German reality, as in the terrifying dolls who are meant to be gracious in the Italian manner. And in this room I was obliged to sit in the midst of a great heat, where blood drips from all the walls, where tormented figures writhe among bright-colored tormentors; where there is a riot of rich cloths, gold and jewels, of unnatural beasts, of castles and meadows, in which there is nothing exquisite; only an unending cruelty in things. The very colors cry out at one; they grimace at you; a crucified thief bends back over the top of the cross in his struggles; all around monsters spawn out of every rock and cavern and there is hell fire.
To turn from these to the Cranachs in Vienna is to be in another world of art: an art more purposely perverse, more curiously unnatural; but, where his genius is shown at its greatest, is in an exquisite Judith holding the head of Holofernes, which lies, open-eyed, all its red arteries visible, painted delicately. She wears orange and red clothes, with collars and laces, and slashed sleeves through which many rings are seen on her fingers; she has a large red hat placed jauntily on her head. She is all peach-blossom and soft, half-cruel sweetness with all the wicked indifference of her long narrow eyes, the pink mouth and dimpled chin. She is a somnambulist, and the sword she holds is scarcely stained. There are two drops of blood on the table on which she rests the great curled head with its open eyes; her fingers rest on the forehead almost caressingly. She is Monna Lisa, become German and bourgeoise, having certainly forgotten the mysterious secret of which she still keeps the sign on her face.
Writing in Florence on Leonardo da Vinci I used by way of comparison two Greek marbles I had seen in London; one, the head of an old man, which is all energy and truth—comparable only in Greek work, with the drunken woman in Munich, and, in modern art, with La Vieille Heaulmière of Rodin; the other, a woman's head, which ravishes the mind. The lips and eyes have no expression by which one can remember them; but some infinitely mysterious expression seems to flow through them as through the eyes and lips of a woman's head by Leonardo. And all this reminds me of certain unforgettable impressions; and, most of all, when in Bologna I saw, in the Museo Civico, the spoils of Etruscan sepulchres, that weighed on me heavily; and, at the same time, I felt an odor of death, such as I had not even felt in Pompeii; where in so frightful a step backward of twenty centuries, the mind reels, clutching at that somewhat pacifying thought, for at least its momentary relief. Here were the bodies of men and women, molded for ever in the gesture of their last moment, and these rigid corpses are as vivid in their interrupted life as the damp corpses in the morgue. In Bologna, as I was pursued by the sight of the hairpins of dead women, there flashed on me this wonderful sentence of Leonardo: "Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away."