What drew Leonardo from Florence to Milan we do not surely know. Probably he was called directly by the Duke Lodovico Sforza to undertake the colossal equestrian statue of his father Francesco. Moreover, Leonardo seems to have achieved notoriety at Florence without gaining much confidence or achieving much success. After all, he had rather little to show for his genius—just his sketch books and his good intentions in unfinished masterpieces. He seems, too, never to have mastered the practice which ever brought the best commissions, fresco painting. Thus he had every reason to seek new fortunes.
He heralded his coming to Milan with the most truthfully boastful of letters in which he arrogated to himself all ability as an inventor, civil and military engineer, painter, sculptor, and architect; and he entered the presence of Lodovico bearing a silver lute wrought in the form of a horse’s skull. This dramatic entrance was the forecast of arduous duties as an entertainer. He sang, told anecdotes and fables, arranged pageants and masques, conducted debates on his art—in short, accepted the thousand and one duties and distractions of a courtier.
He painted the portraits of the Duke’s mistresses, and it is possible that we have the girlish figure of Cecilia Gallierani in the lady with an Ermine[[54]] at Cracow. The forms and feeling are entirely like Leonardo’s work in the early eighties. He agreed to do an altar-piece for the Church of San Francesco, and delivered it only after a delay of twenty-three years. This most postponed of pictures is the version of the Madonna of the Rocks now at London. Meanwhile Leonardo’s constant concern was “the horse,” as he calls it. For seven years he worked at a rearing horse with a fallen foe trodden beneath. It is shown in many drawings. It was too sensational a theme to please him in the long run. So in 1490, spurred by the risk of losing the job, he restudied the horse, using the walking motive, which had come down from classical antiquity. Eventually the clay model was set up before the Sforza castle, just in time for the invading French archers to make a target of it. The rider was never even definitely planned. The whole project remained a chagrin to Leonardo even after the horse itself had disappeared. One day in Florence he civilly accosted Michelangelo who turned on him with the taunt—“Thou who did’st model a horse and could’st not cast it in bronze.”
Amidst the distractions of the court, the irksomeness of the rashly undertaken Sforza monument, and the increasing passion for scientific research, Leonardo managed to carry through his single monumental work, the Last Supper, in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
For three years Leonardo worked spasmodically on the Last Supper, and it was finished in 1498. The design had been most carefully elaborated. He started with the customary arrangement of the apostles in pairs, John in Jesus’ bosom—a refractory motive, and Judas in sinister isolation on the near side of the table. Almost by accident he fell upon the effective grouping of the apostles by threes. Then he set himself to giving in expression and gesture the maximum emotion that could be contained within a monumental design. He eliminated the old casual accessories and made all the lines of perspective converge on the face of Christ. He gave to all the figures a classical gravity, though admitting many varieties of age and character.
Thus even in its ruined estate The Last Supper, Figure [154], is perhaps the most impressive picture in the world. The moment is that when Christ says “One of you shall betray me.” The arrangement is in five great balancing waves. From the Christ there is an outgoing gesture of resignation and love, from the apostles converging, incoming waves of horror, amazement, curiosity and indignation. Each undulation is double. Extended arms or pointed hands check the motion where it is excessive or connect the separate groups. Only Judas is out of the converging rhythm. He swings back defiantly pondering his part. Highly agitated in details, the whole is held within a noble and pathetic decorum. It is the very ideal of a Renaissance composition—dense, rich, energetic, varied, yet unified by a severe and calculated pattern which subordinates to its purpose the most diverse components. Raphael can only imitate it in the lower part of the Disputa, and monumental design ever since has gone to school with it.
Fig. 154. Leonardo da Vinci. Last supper.—S. Maria delle Grazie, Milan.
It was unhappily painted in tempera, not in oils as older accounts say,[[55]] on the dry wall, and it soon began to deteriorate. What we see today is merely the wraith of it, yet a wraith that imposes itself and moves us as few better preserved masterpieces do.
In the year 1500 the French overran Lombardy, and, Leonardo, after wandering in Northern Italy and a martial episode as engineer for conquering Cæsar Borgia, returned, in 1503, to his native Florence. He is fifty and already in spirit an old man. His always limited will power has given out, he broods incessantly over mathematical and physical lore, wastes himself over fantastic inventions. His exhibit is only a cartoon, now lost, for a St. Ann. He makes portraits by proxy, but paints, himself, only under peculiar incentives. Such he found in the commission for a great battle-piece for the Priors’ Palace and in the personality of Mona Lisa.