BOOK XIV
MONNA LISA GIOCONDA—1503-1506
'The darkness of that subterranean place was too deep, and when I had passed some time therein, two feelings awoke within me and contended—fear and curiosity; fear of exploring that dark depth; curiosity as to its secret.'
Leonardo da Vinci.
I
Leonardo used to say:—
'For portraits, have a special studio; a court, oblong and rectangular, ten braccia in width, twenty in length, the walls painted black, with a projecting roof and canvas curtains for the sun. Or, if you haven't the canvas curtains, paint only in the twilight, or when it is clouded and dull. That is the perfect light.'
Just such a court for the painting of portraits he had made for himself in the house of the Florentine citizen who lodged him; a notable personage, commissary of the Signoria, a mathematician, a man of intellect and of amiability, his name Ser Piero di Braccio Martelli. His house was the second in the Via Martelli, on the left as one goes from San Giovanni to the Palazzo Medici.
It was a warm misty afternoon, towards the close of spring, in the year 1505. The sun shone through clouds; there was a dull light, which seemed as if shining under water, throwing delicate liquid shadows—Leonardo's favourite condition of the atmosphere; which, he thought, gave special charm to the face of a woman.
'Will she come?' he asked himself, thinking of her whose portrait he had been painting for nearly three years, with a tenacity and a zeal unwonted.
He arranged the studio for her reception. Boltraffio, watching him, marvelled at his unusual solicitude.
He prepared palette, brushes, and skins of paint, each one coated with a transparent film of gum arabic. He removed the cover from the portrait, which was disposed on a movable three-legged stand called a leggio. He set the fountain playing in the middle of the court. It had been constructed for her delight—falling streams striking against glass spheres put them in motion and produced a strange low music. Her favourite flowers had been planted round the fountain—pale irises—the lilies of Florence. Then he crumbled bread in a basket for the tame doe which lived in the court, and which she used to feed with her own hands; lastly, he arranged her chair, of smooth dark oak with carved back and arms; before it placed a soft rug, upon which was already curled and purring a white cat of a rare breed, procured for her pleasure, a dainty foreign beast with varicoloured eyes, the right yellow as a topaz, the left sapphire blue.