Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

Leonardo ‘the Florentine’, as he liked to call himself, was born in the fortified village of Vinci midway between Florence and Pisa. The illegitimate son of a notary, born as it would seem to no great heritage, he was yet early distinguished amongst his fellows.

‘The richest gifts of Heaven,’ says Vasari, ‘are sometimes showered upon the same person, and beauty, grace, and genius, are combined in so rare a manner in one man that, to whatever he may apply himself, every action is so divine that all others are left behind him.’ This reads like exaggeration until we turn to the facts that are known about Da Vinci’s life, and find he is all indeed Vasari described—a giant amongst his fellows in physique and intellect, and still more in practical imagination. So strong was he that with his fingers he could bend a horseshoe straight, so full of potent charm for all things living that his presence in a room would draw men and women out of sadness, while in the streets the wildest horses would willingly yield to his taming power. Of the cruelty that rests like a stain on the Middle Ages there was in him no trace—rather that hot compassion for suffering and weakness so often allied with strength. It is told of him as of St. Francis that he would buy the singing-birds sold in cages in the street that he might set them free.

His copy-books are full of the drawings of horses, and probably his greatest work of art, judged by the opinion of his day and the rough sketches still extant of his design, was the statue he modelled for Ludovico ‘Il Moro’ of Francesco Sforza, the famous condottiere poised on horseback. Unfortunately it perished almost at once, hacked in pieces by the French soldiery when they drove Ludovico from his capital some years later.

Leonardo has been called the ‘true founder of the Italian School of oil-painting’. His most celebrated picture, ‘The Last Supper’, painted in oils as an experiment, on the walls of a convent near Milan, began to flake away, owing to the damp, even before the artist’s death. It has been so constantly retouched since, that very little, save the consummate art in the arrangement of the figures, and the general dramatic simplicity of the scene depicted, is left to show the master-hand. Even this is enough to convey his genius. Amongst the most famous of his works that still remain are his ‘Mona Lisa’, sometimes called ‘La Gioconda’, the portrait of a Neapolitan lady, and the ‘Madonna of the Rocks’, both in the gallery of the Louvre.

Leonardo excelled his age in engineering, in his knowledge of anatomy and physics, in his inventive genius that led him to guess at the power of steam, and struggle over models of aeroplanes, at which his generation laughed and shrugged their shoulders. He himself took keen pleasure in such versatility, but his art, that held other men spellbound with admiration, would plunge him in depression. ‘When he sat down to paint he seemed overcome with fear’, says one account of him, and describes how he would alter and finally destroy, in despair of attaining his ideal, canvases that those about him considered already perfect. It is little wonder then that few finished works came from the brush of this indefatigable worker; but his influence on his age and after-centuries was none the less prodigious.

Leonardo stands for all that was best in the Renaissance—its zest for truth, its eager vitality and love of experiment, but most of all for its sympathy. He is the embodiment of that motto that seems more than any other to express the Renaissance outlook: Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto—‘I am a man, and nothing pertaining to mankind is foreign to my nature.’

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Italy, we have seen, was pre-eminently the home of the Renaissance—the teacher destined to give the world the ‘New Learning’ as she had preserved the old during the Dark Ages. In those sunny days, when Lorenzo ‘the Wise’, as well as ‘the Magnificent’, ruled in Florence, and by his statesmanship preserved so neat a balance of politics that the peninsula, divided by five ambitious Powers, yet remained at peace, a glorious future seemed assured; but in 1492, the year that Columbus discovered America, Lorenzo died. ‘The peace of Italy is dead also,’ exclaimed a statesman with prophetic insight, when he heard the news: and indeed the stability and moderation that Lorenzo and his house had symbolized was soon threatened.

In Florence, Wisdom was succeeded by Folly in the person of Piero, Lorenzo’s son, an Orsini on his mother’s side, and an inheritor to the full of the haughty, intractable temperament of the Roman baronage. Playing his football in the streets amongst the shopkeepers’ open booths, insolent to the merchants his father had courted, reckless of advice, Piero was soon to learn that a despotism, such as that of the Medici, founded not on armies but on public goodwill, falls at the first adverse wind. This wind, a whirlwind for Italy, blew from France; but it was Ludovico ‘Il Moro’, not the young Medici, who actually sowed the seed.

‘Nervous and cringing,’ as Philip de Commines had described him, Ludovico had found himself involved by his treatment of his nephew in a fog of suspicions and fears. Left to himself, uneducated and ailing in health, Gian Galeazzo Sforza would never have dared to thwart his ambitious uncle; but he had married a Neapolitan princess of stronger fibre, a granddaughter of Ferrante I, and when she complained to her relations, and they in turn remonstrated with ‘Il Moro’, trouble began.