We have now reached the great age of the Italian Renaissance, the age in which, not counting for the moment Venice, four arch-angelic natures gathered up all that had been hitherto achieved in art since the days of Pisano and Giotto, adding such celestial illumination from the sunlight of their inborn genius that in them the world for ever sees what art can do. Lionardo da Vinci was born in Valdarno in 1452, and died in France in 1519. Michael Angelo Buonarroti was born at Caprese, in the Casentino, in 1475, and died at Borne in 1564, having outlived the lives of his great peers by nearly half a century. Raphael Santi was born at Urbino in 1483, and died in Rome in 1520. Antonio Allegri was born at Correggio in 1494, and died there in 1534. To these four men, each in his own degree and according to his own peculiar quality of mind, the fulness of the Renaissance, in its power and freedom, was revealed. They entered the inner shrine, where dwelt the spirit of their age, and bore to the world without the message each of them had heard. In their work posterity still may read the meaning of that epoch, differently rendered according to the difference of gifts in each consummate artist, but comprehended in its unity by study of the four together. Lionardo is the wizard or diviner; to him the Renaissance offers her mystery and lends her magic. Raphael is the Phoebean singer; to him the Renaissance reveals her joy and dowers him with her gift of melody. Correggio is the Ariel or Faun; he has surprised laughter upon the face of the universe, and he paints this laughter in ever-varying movement. Michael Angelo is the prophet and Sibylline seer; to him the Renaissance discloses the travail of her spirit; him she endues with power; he wrests her secret, voyaging, like an ideal Columbus, the vast abyss of thought alone. In order that this revelation of the Renaissance in painting should be complete, it is necessary to add a fifth power to these four—that of the Venetian masters, who are the poets of carnal beauty, the rhetoricians of mundane pomp, the impassioned interpreters of all things great and splendid in the pageant of the outer world. As Venice herself, by type of constitution and historical development, remained sequestered from the rest of Italy, so her painters demand separate treatment.[[235]] It is enough, therefore, for the present to remember that without the note they utter the chord of the Renaissance lacks its harmony.
Lionardo, the natural son of Messer Pietro, notary of Florence and landed proprietor at Vinci, was so beautiful of person that no one, says Vasari, has sufficiently extolled his charm; so strong of limb that he could bend an iron ring or horse-shoe between his fingers; so eloquent of speech that those who listened to his words were fain to answer "Yes" or "No" as he thought fit. This child of grace and persuasion was a wonderful musician. The Duke of Milan sent for him to play upon his lute and improvise Italian canzoni. The lute he carried was of silver, fashioned like a horse's head, and tuned according to acoustic laws discovered by himself. Of the songs he sang to its accompaniment none have been preserved. Only one sonnet remains to show of what sort was the poetry of Lionardo, prized so highly by the men of his own generation. This, too, is less remarkable for poetic beauty than for sober philosophy expressed with singular brevity of phrase.[[236]]
This story of Da Vinci's lute might be chosen as a parable of his achievement. Art and science were never separated in his work; and both were not unfrequently subservient to some fanciful caprice, some bizarre freak of originality. Curiosity and love of the uncommon ruled his nature. By intuition and by persistent interrogation of nature he penetrated many secrets of science; but he was contented with the acquisition of knowledge. Once found, he had but little care to distribute the results of his investigations; at most he sought to use them for purposes of practical utility.[[237]] Even in childhood he is said to have perplexed his teachers by propounding arithmetical problems. In his maturity he carried anatomy further than Delia Torre; he invented machinery for water-mills and aqueducts; he devised engines of war, discovered the secret of conical rifle-bullets, adapted paddle-wheels to boats, projected new systems of siege artillery, investigated the principles of optics, designed buildings, made plans for piercing mountains, raising churches, connecting rivers, draining marshes, clearing harbours.[[238]] There was no branch of study whereby nature through the effort of the inquisitive intellect might be subordinated to the use of man, of which he was not master. Nor, richly gifted as was Lionardo, did he trust his natural facility. His patience was no less marvellous than the quickness of his insight. He lived to illustrate the definition of genius as the capacity for taking infinite pains.
While he was a boy, says Vasari, Lionardo modelled in terra-cotta certain heads of women smiling. This was in the workshop of Verocchio, who had already fixed a smile on David's face in bronze. When an old man, he left "Mona Lisa" on the easel not quite finished, the portrait of a subtle, shadowy, uncertain smile. This smile, this enigmatic revelation of a movement in the soul, this seductive ripple on the surface of the human personality, was to Lionardo a symbol of the secret of the world, an image of the universal mystery. It haunted him all through his life, and innumerable were the attempts he made to render by external form the magic of this fugitive and evanescent charm.
Through long days he would follow up and down the streets of Florence or of Milan beautiful unknown faces, learning them by heart, interpreting their changes of expression, reading the thoughts through the features. These he afterwards committed to paper. We possess many such sketches—a series of ideal portraits, containing each an unsolved riddle that the master read; a procession of shadows, cast by reality, that, entering the camera lucida of the artist's brain, gained new and spiritual quality.[[239]] In some of them his fancy seems to be imprisoned in the labyrinths of hair; in others the eyes deep with feeling or hard with gemlike brilliancy have caught it, or the lips that tell and hide so much, or the nostrils quivering with momentary emotion. Beauty, inexpressive of inner meaning, must, we conceive, have had but slight attraction for him. We do not find that he drew "a fair naked body" for the sake of its carnal charm; his hasty studies of the nude are often faulty, mere memoranda of attitude and gesture. The human form was interesting to him either scientifically or else as an index to the soul. Yet he felt the influence of personal loveliness His favourite pupil Salaino was a youth "of singular grace, with curled and waving hair, a feature of personal beauty by which Lionardo was always greatly pleased." Hair, the most mysterious of human things, the most manifold in form and hue, snakelike in its subtlety for the entanglement of souls, had naturally supreme attractiveness for the magician of the arts.
With like energy Lionardo bent himself to divine the import of ugliness. Whole pages of his sketch-book are filled with squalid heads of shrivelled crones and ghastly old men—with idiots, goîtred cretins, criminals, and clowns. It was not that he loved the horrible for its own sake; but he was determined to seize character, to command the gamut of human physiognomy from ideal beauty down to forms bestialised by vice and disease. The story related by Giraldi concerning the head of Judas in the "Cenacolo" at Milan, sufficiently illustrates the method of Lionardo in creating types and the utility of such caricatures as his notebooks contain.[[240]]
It is told that he brought into his room one day a collection of reptiles—lizards, newts, toads, vipers, efts—all creatures that are loathsome to the common eye. These, by the magic of imagination, he combined into a shape so terrible that those who saw it shuddered. Medusa's snake-enwoven head exhaling poisonous vapour from the livid lips; Leda, swanlike beside her swan lover; Chimæra, in whom many natures mingled and made one; the conflict of a dragon and a lion; S. John conceived not as a prophet but as a vine-crowned Faun, the harbinger of joy:—over pictorial motives of this kind, attractive by reason of their complexity or mystery, he loved to brood; and to this fascination of a sphinx-like charm we owe some of his most exquisite drawings. Lionardo more than any other artist who has ever lived (except perhaps his great predecessor Leo Battista Alberti) felt the primal sympathies that bind men to the earth, their mother, and to living things, their brethren.[[241]] Therefore the borderland between humanity and nature allured him with a spell half æsthetic and half scientific. In the dawn of Hellas this sympathetic apprehension of the world around him would have made him a supreme mythopoet. In the dawn of the modern world curiosity claimed the lion's share of his genius: nor can it be denied that his art suffered by this division of interests. The time was not yet come for accurate physiological investigation, or for the true birth of the scientific spirit; and in any age it would have been difficult for one man to establish on a sound basis discoveries made in so many realms as those explored by Lionardo. We cannot, therefore, but regret that he was not more exclusively a painter. If, however, he had confined his activity to the production of works equal to the "Cenacolo," we should have missed the most complete embodiment in one personality of the twofold impulses of the Renaissance and of its boundless passion for discovery.
Lionardo's turn for physical science led him to study the technicalities of art with fervent industry. Whatever his predecessors had acquired in the knowledge of materials, the chemistry of colours, the mathematics of composition, the laws of perspective, and the illusions of chiaroscuro, he developed to the utmost. To find a darker darkness and a brighter brightness than had yet been shown upon the painter's canvas; to solve problems of foreshortening; to deceive the eye by finely graduated tones and subtle touches; to submit the freest play of form to simple figures of geometry in grouping, were among the objects he most earnestly pursued. At the same time his deep feeling for all things that have life, gave him new power in the delineation of external nature. The branching of flower-stems, the outlines of fig-leaves, the attitudes of beasts and birds in motion, the arching of the fan-palm, were rendered by him with the same consummate skill as the dimple on a cheek or the fine curves of a young man's lips.[[242]] Wherever he perceived a difficulty, he approached and conquered it. Love, which is the soul of art—Love, the bondslave of Beauty and the son of Poverty by Craft—led him to these triumphs. He used to buy caged birds in the marketplace that he might let them loose. He was attached to horses, and kept a sumptuous stable; and these he would draw in eccentric attitudes, studying their anatomy in detail for his statue of Francesco Sforza.[[243]] In the "Battle of the Standard," known to us only by a sketch of Rubens,[[244]] he gave passions to the horse—not human passion, nor yet merely equine—but such as horses might feel when placed upon a par with men. In like manner the warriors are fiery with bestial impulses—leonine fury, wolfish ferocity, fox-like cunning. Their very armour takes the shape of monstrous reptiles. To such an extent did the interchange of human and animal properties haunt Lionardo's fancy.
From what has been already said we shall be better able to understand Lionardo's love of the bizarre and grotesque. One day a vine-dresser brought him a very curious lizard. The master fitted it with wings injected with quicksilver to give them motion as the creature crawled. Eyes, horns, and a beard, a marvellous dragon's mask, were placed upon its head. This strange beast lived in a cage, where Lionardo tamed it; but no one, says Vasari, dared so much as to look at it.[[245]] On quaint puzzles and perplexing schemes he mused a good part of his life away. At one time he was for making wings to fly with; at another he invented ropes that should uncoil, strand by strand; again, he devised a system of flat corks, by means of which to walk on water.[[246]] One day, after having scraped the intestines of a sheep so thin that he could hold them in the hollow of his hand, he filled them with wind from a bellows, and blew and blew until the room was choked, and his visitors had to run into corners. Lionardo told them that this was a proper symbol of genius.
Such stories form what may be called the legend of Lionardo's life; and some of them seem simple, others almost childish.[[247]] They illustrate what is meant when we call him the wizard of the Renaissance. Art, nature, life, the mysteries of existence, the infinite capacity of human thought, the riddle of the world, all that the Greeks called Pan, so swayed and allured him that, while he dreamed and wrought and never ceased from toil, he seemed to have achieved but little. The fancies of his brain were, perhaps, too subtle and too fragile to be made apparent to the eyes of men. He was wont, after years of labour, to leave his work still incomplete, feeling that he could not perfect it as he desired: yet even his most fragmentary sketches have a finish beyond the scope of lesser men. "Extraordinary power," says Vasari, "was in his case conjoined with remarkable facility, a mind of regal boldness and magnanimous daring." Yet he was constantly accused of indolence and inability to execute.[[248]] Often and often he made vast preparations and accomplished nothing. It is well known how the Prior of S. Maria delle Grazie complained that Lionardo stood for days looking at his fresco, and for weeks never came near it; how the monks of the Annunziata at Florence were cheated out of their painting, for which elaborate designs had yet been made; how Leo X., seeing him mix oils with varnish to make a new medium, exclaimed, "Alas! this man will do nothing; he thinks of the end before he makes a beginning." A good answer to account for the delay was always ready on the painter's lips, as that the man of genius works most when his hands are idlest; Judas, sought in vain through all the thieves' resorts in Milan, is not found; I cannot hope to see the face of Christ except in Paradise. Again, when an equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza had been modelled in all its parts, another model was begun because Da Vinci would fain show the warrior triumphing over a fallen foe.[[249]] The first motive seemed to him tame; the second was unrealisable in bronze. "I can do anything possible to man," he wrote to Lodovico Sforza, "and as well as any living artist either in sculpture or painting." But he would do nothing as taskwork, and his creative brain loved better to invent than to execute.[[250]] "Of a truth," continues his biographer, "there is good reason to believe that the very greatness of his most exalted mind, aiming at more than could be effected, was itself an impediment; perpetually seeking to add excellence to excellence and perfection to perfection. This was without doubt the true hindrance, so that, as our Petrarch has it, the work was retarded by desire." At the close of that cynical and positive century, the spirit whereof was so well expressed by Cosimo de' Medici,[[251]] Lionardo set before himself aims infinite instead of finite. His designs of wings to fly with symbolise his whole endeavour. He believed in solving the insoluble; and nature had so richly dowered him in the very dawntime of discovery, that he was almost justified in this delusion. Having caught the Proteus of the world, he tried to grasp him; but the god changed shape beneath his touch. Having surprised Silenus asleep, he begged from him a song; but the song Silenus sang was so marvellous in its variety, so subtle in its modulations, that Lionardo could do no more than recall scattered phrases. His Proteus was the spirit of the Renaissance. The Silenus from whom he forced the song was the double nature of man and of the world.