Fig. 155. Leonardo da Vinci. Sketches for the Battle of Anghiari.—Windsor Castle.
Early in the year 1504 he began to work on the cartoon for the Battle of Anghiari. He chose the incident of a cavalry fight for the standard. He composed a whirl of horses and infuriated riders, hacking and slashing about a flag—a literal picture of bloodlust at its height. The ability he expended on this atrocious theme may be sensed in a dozen preparatory sketches, Figure [155]. The portion which he actually painted on the wall is represented only by inferior copies. The original soon faded from deficient technical methods. The old copies tell us that this great piece, while the marvel of its day, was sensational and highly exhibitionistic. We need not too much mourn its loss. The admiration it evoked was that of an age eager for novelty and responsive to display.
Fig. 156. Leonardo. Mona Lisa.—Louvre.
While working on the battle-piece, Leonardo met the young Neapolitan wife of Francesco del Giocondo and began her portrait, Figure [156]. She had lost children and was habitually sad. He employed musicians to charm the inscrutable fascinating smile to her face. He set her demure and watchful before a romantic expanse of river plain rimmed by blue alps. Against this wild charm of nature, he made Mona Lisa a symbol for all that is cultured, self-contained, sophisticated, civilized. Simple people instinctively dislike her, and are right. Subtle people adore her, and are also right. Such as wish poetic commentary on her mysterious beauty may find it for themselves in Walter Pater’s admirable essay. They will do well to temper his eloquence with Kenyon Cox’s[[56]] just if prosaic observation that this portrait is simply the finest, most accurate, and subtle bit of modelling in the world. Its mystery is perhaps merely one of amazing vision and impeccable workmanship. The truth may well lie between two interpretations, each of which is valid in its own field. Had there not been some extraordinary spell in the woman herself, Leonardo, now well weary of painting, would hardly have studied either her soul or her modelling with such tenacity.
During his brief sojourn in Florence, Leonardo did cartoons for two designs of Leda and the Swan, his only mythological picture. One represents her standing, the other crouching. If we may trust the inferior imitations, in which alone we know these subjects, their calculated sensuousness was almost cloying. Their mood is that of his least agreeable imitator, Sodoma.
Fig. 157. Leonardo. Madonna with St. Ann.—Louvre.
In May 1506 Florence lent Leonardo to Charles d’Amboise, the French viceroy at Milan, and there he spent the most of the next five years. The Franciscans had been biding their time, and under legal duress made him finish the Madonna which he had promised twenty-three years earlier. Thus the second Madonna of the Rocks, at London, was painted somewhat against the grain. It has more simplicity and breadth than the earlier version and shows improvements in the position of the angel. It also lacks the minute and painstaking delicacy of its original, reveals a tired hand and mind. Otherwise Leonardo achieved in painting only the third version of the Madonna and St. Ann, Figure [157], now in the Louvre. The interweaving of the figures is compact and masterly, the solution of the difficult problems of the two heads consummately clever. It has passages of the utmost loveliness, like the foot of the Madonna, but there is some suspicion of oversophistication, and Leonardo never summoned the energy to finish it. Painting little himself,—for he was busy with canals, architecture, and the never finished equestrian monument of Trivulzio,—Leonardo gave his stamp to the entire Milanese school. Such pupils as Boltraffio, Cesare da Sesto, Andrea Solario, his old partner, Ambrogio de Predis, and his intimate, Francesco Melzi, readily grasped his mannerisms, and filled Italy with Leonardesque pictures of inferior inspiration. More robust and independent spirits, like Bernardino Luini, adapted his manner intelligently to the needs of mural painting. Lombardy under his influence for a moment seemed to vie with Florence and Rome.