For several years Leonardo had turned over the theme of an Adoration of the Child in his sketch books. These desultory inventions were brought abruptly to a focus in March 1481, when he agreed to do an altar-piece for the monks of S. Donato at Scopeto. We have the best circumstantial evidence for identifying this piece with the unfinished Adoration of the Kings, now in the Uffizi. When we live ourselves into this dusky and mysterious sketch we step out of the early Renaissance into a new, ardent, rich and ordered region of invention such as the world had not witnessed since the glory of Greece faded. The composition went through at least three main stages. At first, as we see from a pen study in the Bonnat Museum, at Bayonne, an Adoration of the Shepherds was considered, the Madonna kneeling over the Christ between flanking groups of worshippers. The scheme was rejected as too thin and obvious. A picture of Lorenzi di Credi’s shows us its limited possibilities. Then the picture became an Adoration of the Kings, with the thatched shed, much action in the foreground group and a ruined amphitheatre in the background. This sketch in the Louvre, Figure [151], contains all the elements of the picture, but an extraordinary work of clarification and refinement remained to be done. The figures were studied and restudied till they reached both highest expressiveness and individuality,[[53]] and an exact relation to the dense and intricate articulation of the foreground group. Often there are half a dozen separate studies for each motive. The central group was more closely massed till it became a rose of eager faces and flickering hands and kneeling forms pressing inward towards the Child. To increase this concentration, a mound is erected behind the group shutting it off from the wide background. To steady the group, the Madonna is no longer swung athwart the motion, but her nearly straight position becomes a sort of axis carried up by the trees above. In the richness, variety and animation of the compact group of adorers, Leonardo has met the Early Renaissance on its own ground and outdone it. In the wider setting he still observes the old precepts, but in a profounder and more significant sense. He has swept the traditional shed aside and opened up a world, a world furtive and active and combatant in its own wilfulness—playing, hiding, and fighting amid the crumbling ruins of old civilizations, and before distant towering crags which were there before civilization or man himself was; a world oblivious of the sublime mystery accomplishing itself in the kings who pay homage to a Babe. What an ironic substitute for the joyous pastoralism with which contemporary artists invested their pictures of the Epiphany!
Fig. 151. Leonardo. Sketch for Adoration.—Louvre.
Fig. 152. Leonardo da Vinci. Adoration of the Magi. Underpainting.—Uffizi.
The Adoration of the Kings, Figure [152], is the richest, most complicated, most beautifully ordered picture of its century; even Leonardo was not to surpass it simply as a composition. Like all rich things it will bear many analyses. You may consider it as a triangle, with the reciprocal forms enriched, or, with Dr. Thys, as the combination of two radiating motives, one centred on the Madonna’s face, the other on the soft alert body of the Child. Such analyses are only important as temporary aids to understanding of the main fact that in the making of such a masterpiece a clear and subtile geometry is involved. Later Leonardo was to declare that there is no science which cannot undergo mathematical demonstration, and he probably would have added—no art. Of his own art at least the saying is true. It may have been not so much his native indolence that arrested a work which had claimed months of passionate preparation at the moment when creation was at its height, as the conviction that it would lose something if fully realized. One can see how he loved the summary touches of dark and light, the swift, sufficient evocation of body and soul which he had learned from Masaccio. He may have hated to cover up such work, and a critic today may well be in doubt whether the gain in finishing it would have atoned for the loss. Or Leonardo da Vinci may already have been called to Milan and a new artistic life. However that be, the monks of Secopto, after a long wait, turned to Filippino Lippi, who had already undertaken one lapsed commission for Leonardo, and he promptly achieved an Adoration of the Kings which only shows how inimitable Leonardo was, and how little mere richness counts in any picture.
For two years between 1481 and 1483, there is silence. It seems to me that in this time we may set the crowning of his early work in the Madonna of the Rocks at the Louvre and the Cartoon of St. Ann at London. The Madonna of the Rocks, Figure [153], is the logical outcome of a half dozen Adorations which we may trace through the drawings of 1478. A sheet of sketches in the Metropolitan Museum shows him turning the theme over, rejecting the established profile arrangement of Fra Filippo, and hitting on the formal pyramidal pattern which appears in the picture itself. There the pyramid is felt not merely in plane, but also in depth. The forms and faces are superbly tense without either rigidity or the fluency of Leonardo’s later work. The setting is primitive, with minutely studied textures of rock and crisp shapes of wall-flowers. Everything derives from Fra Filippo and Botticelli, but with new meaning. The romantic strangeness of the setting, the glimpses of sky and opening in the rock, the sifting in of light from the heart of the picture itself, the broad contrast of the formality of the figure arrangement with the picturesque wildness of the setting—all this is purest Leonardo and represents the culmination of many experiments. One can trace this idea of irregularly broken light and an informal screen as foil for a geometrical pattern, from the little Annunciation of the Louvre, through the unfinished St. Jerome of the Vatican. The Early Renaissance steps into the background, where it belongs. Leonardo never rejects it; he fulfils it with an exquisite sense of proportion.
Fig. 153. Leonardo. Madonna of the Rocks.—Louvre.
If the first Madonna of the Rocks was painted before 1482, in Florence, so probably was the cartoon of the Madonna with St. Ann, Figure [127], perhaps the most precious single work that Leonardo has left us. The inwardness of the relation between the two women is in the mood of the Adoration of the Kings, single motives suggest the drawings for the Madonna of the Cat. Later Leonardo was to lend to the motive greater complication and formal elegance, somewhat at the cost of emotional insight. Pictures of intense and natural feeling Leonardo does not produce after his thirtieth year. Instead we have dramatic objectivity in one phase, and in another, exquisite subtilities, a calculated graciousness sweet to morbidity.