In 1513 Leonardo was called to Rome by the new Pope Leo X, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s son, Giovanni. It was the moment for artistic ambition to flame in one who felt himself a great painter. Michelangelo had recently unveiled the Sistine ceiling, and Raphael had completed the Camera della Segnatura. Leonardo was sixty-one, when a painter should be at his best. Yet he plunged himself into scientific experiments, perpetrated strange practical jokes on his patrons, produced nothing but disorderly notes, and after two wasted years left the repute of one rather an amateur magician than an artist.
Having lived a wanderer, it was appropriate that Leonardo should die an exile. Francis I, an enthusiastic patron of Italian art, called him to France and settled him honorably in the Château of Cloux, near Amboise. We hear of him as immensely learned and venerable, but palsied, and dependent on the affectionate care of his pupil Melzi. He died on the morrow of Mayday 1519 at peace with the church, leaving money to sixty poor persons who should follow his body with candles to the tomb. Doubtless you could have marked in that pitiful procession many of those gnarled, toothless and haggard faces which Leonardo formerly loved to sketch in the intervals of his endless quest of beauty. As we study the marvelous drawing of himself in old age, Figure [158], we may surmise that he was glad to go. It is hard to see in it the courtier who bore the fantastic silver lute to Lodovico, the artist who charmed a smile from the weary and cautious face of Mona Lisa. One sees a man immensely old, though at an age generally robust and cheery—one who has tried to crowd many lives into one and has paid the inevitable penalty.
Fig. 158. Leonardo da Vinci. His own portrait.—Turin.
Broken and intermittent as it had been, Leonardo’s painting had sufficed to show the way. He had substituted mystery of light and shade for allurement of frank color, study of the subtler and finer shades of emotion for obvious characterization, had founded modern portraiture. He had shown how to express power and passion with delicacy, had combined the richest animation and variety with monumental severity of design. After him the art of painting was never to be the same again. Its standards became ampler and more classic. Stolid men like Fra Bartolommeo immediately accepted his principles of composition and so did miraculously alert intelligences like Raphael’s. His mere passing contact and tradition inspired that admirable language of light and dark that became poetry in Giorgione and Correggio. The good and the harm he did is active today in thousands of academies and art schools. His is assuredly the finest intelligence that ever applied itself to the painter’s art, and if he failed in will and in fecundity, he has impressed himself upon posterity as no other Italian painter save Titian. His art had its limitations, but its capacity for influence, to which he added the thoughtful eloquence of his written word, seems limitless; and his glory is imperishable.
Nowhere does the superiority of Florence show more clearly than in the attitude of her artists to Leonardo. Where his Milanese followers aped his superficial mannerisms, his Florentine admirers studied and assimilated his construction in light and shade and his principles of geometrical composition. Unhappily the early years of the sixteenth century were a slack time in Florence. Such transitional painters as Piero di Cosimo, Granacci, Franciabigio, Il Bacchiacca, and Ridolfo Ghirlandaio were not men to carry forward Leonardo’s discoveries, but they and others, at least paid him an intelligent homage and sensibly clarified their practice under his influence. Greater intelligences like Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto not merely adopted Leonardo’s canons, but even at certain points criticized them. Both saw the drawback of Leonardo’s passionate concern with chiaroscuro—that it flooded the canvas with colorless shadow, tending to reduce the palette to black and white. Both men then therefore kept their rich shadows colorful. Both worked for a more compact and intricate composition as well as for graceful, abstract poses. In these latter endeavors they simplified and sharpened principles which Leonardo himself only rarely carried to their logical extreme.
Leonardo retained certain primitive qualities. He seldom reduced his compositions to dense arrangements of the figures, loving to allow elbow room and delighting to open up landscape backgrounds. And while in the “Treatise on Painting” he advocated elaborately balanced and counterpoised poses, in practice he usually sought an excuse for them in action. A consummate stylist, he achieved style on a basis of function. The pose, in his own words, must express “the emotions of the soul.” Right here his ablest followers took issue with him. Posture with them no longer expressed specific or individual emotion, but abstract beauties of grace, dignity or grandeur. The figures no longer do or feel anything, they are arranged as the general composition and mood of the picture require. Such gradual advance towards pure style heralds the advent of the High Renaissance.
Fig. 159. Fra Bartolommeo. God appearing to two Saints.—Lucca.
Of the somewhat stolid and occasionally sentimental sublimity of Fra Bartolommeo[[57]] nothing much need be said except that it was a formative influence on young Raphael. The Dominican monk is an impressive and amiable figure personally. Working solely for the glory of God and the profit of the Convent of San Marco, perturbed by the tragic fate of his cloister mate, Savonarola, he strove incessantly for a fuller color and a greater dignity. In his numerous Holy Families he is stately in a conventional way, nowhere more so than in the unfinished design for a Madonna with St. Ann, in the Uffizi. Occasionally, in such pictures as the Deposition of the Uffizi, and the Madonna of Pity at Lucca he achieves poignant, one is tempted to say operatic effects, forecasting the mood of the Baroque. Lucca also affords in the great picture God Adored by Two Saints, Figure [159], a fine example of this painter’s simple and massive compositions. In the fresco of The Last Judgment, which, being ruined, is better represented by Copies, Figure [160], we find an elaboration, in Leonardo’s sense, of the simple symmetries of Perugino. It is the precedent for Raphael’s monumental frescoes at Rome. His short career, from about 1495 to 1517, fell on evil times for Florence. In happier days he might have harmonized more perfectly the stylist and the lyrical dramatist that, as it was, never quite came to terms in his grave and noble personality. Yet to have mediated between Leonardo and Raphael would seem glory enough for any painter, and it was also no slight service to borrow for Florentine painting, rapidly becoming starved of color, something of the colorful richness of Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione.