For another version of the same subject, see 659.
1002. ST. SEBASTIAN.
Zaganelli (Ferrarese: about 1500).
The only known work by a master who signs himself Bernardino (of) Cotignola (in the Duchy of Ferrara). He was a brother of Francesco Zaganelli, and is believed to have worked towards the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century.
This picture formed the chief panel of an altar-piece formerly in the church of the Carmine at Pavia, and thus described by Bartoli:
In the twelfth chapel (is) an ancient picture divided into six compartments, of which the three larger exhibit, in the centre St. Sebastian, and at the sides St. Nicholas and St. Catherine of Alexandria, while the three smaller which are above represent the body of the Redeemer supported by two angels in the centre, and at the sides the Virgin Mary and the Announcing Angel. This (altar-piece) is the work of Bernardino da Cotignola, who has affixed to it his name on a feigned label.
For the story of St. Sebastian, see under 669.
1093. OUR LADY OF THE ROCKS.
Leonardo da Vinci (Florentine: 1452-1519).
There is no more fascinating and illustrious name in the annals of art than Leonardo, of Vinci, a town in the Val d'Arno below Florence. He has been well called, from the many-sidedness of his efforts, the Faust of the Renaissance. The great public which knows him best by his few pictures and many drawings does not always remember that he was also musician, critic, poet, sculptor, architect, mechanist, mathematician, philosopher, and explorer. In a letter addressed to Ludovico il Moro, Prince of Milan, in whose service he lived for sixteen years (1483-1499), he enumerates as his chief qualification his skill in military engineering, and throws in his art as an incidental accomplishment. "I will also undertake any work in sculpture, in marble, in bronze, or in terra-cotta; likewise in painting I can do what may be done as well as any man, be he who he may." The range and amount alike of his theoretical discoveries and practical ingenuities were extraordinary. He divined the circulation of the blood. He anticipated Copernicus in propounding the theory of the earth's movement. He declared that "motion was the cause of all life." He forestalled Lamarck's classification of vertebrate and invertebrate. He takes his place, in virtue of his researches into rocks and fossils, with the masters of modern science who have proclaimed the continuity of geological causes. He was the first inventor of screw propulsion. He made paddle-wheels. He attacked the problem of aerial navigation. He invented swimming belts. He anticipated by many years the invention of the camera obscura. He was great alike as a civil and a military engineer. He watered the Lombard plain by the invention of sluices; he was one of the first to recommend the use of mines for the destruction of forts, and he anticipated the inventions of our time in suggesting breech-loading guns and mitrailleuses. He shrank neither from the highest speculations nor from the humblest contrivances. For centuries after his death the burghers of Milan minced meat for their sausages with machines invented by the painter of "Monna Lisa."
This marvellous curiosity in science and invention could not but profoundly influence Leonardo's work as an artist. One result is as obvious as it was unfortunate. He paid the penalty of versatility in undertaking more than he could fulfil. His dilatoriness is well known. He went once to Rome, but the Pope, Leo X., offended him by exclaiming, "Ah! this man will never do anything; he thinks of the end before the beginning of his work" (He had made elaborate preparations for varnishing his picture before he began it.) Many of his works were thus unfinished, and others, owing to premature experiments in material, are ruined—especially his famous Last Supper at Milan, of which there is an original drawing at the Royal Academy. "Leonardo's oil painting," says Ruskin,—not, however, without a touch of exaggeration—"is all gone black or to nothing." "Because Leonardo made models of machines, dug canals, built fortifications, and dissipated half his art-power in capricious ingenuities, we have many anecdotes of him;—but no picture of importance on canvas, and only a few withered stains of one upon a wall" (Queen of the Air, § 157). But Leonardo's curiosity, his wide outlook, his sense of the immensities, added something to his art which otherwise it might not have contained, and which is intensely characteristic of it. Who, for instance, has ever penetrated the secret of Leonardo's smile?—of the ineffable, mysterious, plaintive, and haunting smile that has fascinated and perplexed the world century after century in the portrait of La Gioconda? That unfathomable smile, with so much of mystery and with something of weirdness in it, was the reflection of Leonardo's mind, which had explored the depths and heights, and ever came back from the pursuit with the sense of the inscrutable Mystery beyond. "What is that," he asks, "which does not give itself to human comprehension, and which, if it did, would not exist? It is the infinite, which, if it could so give itself, would be done and ended." In the "Last Supper," says M. Müntz, "he had realised his ideal." Leonardo himself would not have said so. His was one of those lofty minds before which an unattainable ideal ever hovers. "It is of a truth impossible," said a friend of the master to him, "to conceive of faces more lovely and gentle than those of St. James the Great and St. James the Less. Accept thy misfortune, therefore, and leave thy Christ imperfect as He is, for otherwise, when compared with the Apostles, He would not be their Saviour and Master." Leonardo took the advice, and never finished the head of Christ. But he fixed the outward type of Christ for succeeding generations. Apart from the credit due to Leonardo as an ennobler of style in art, he stands out further in the history of painting as the first who investigated the laws of light and shade. There are "three methods of art, producing respectively linear designs, effects of light, and effects of colour. In preparing to draw any object, you will find that practically you have to ask yourself, Shall I aim at the colour of it, the light of it, or the lines of it? The best art comes so near nature as in a measure to unite all. But the best art is not, and cannot be, as good as nature; and the mode of its deficiency is that it must lose some of the colour, some of the light, or some of the delineation. And in consequence, there is one great school which says, 'We will have delineation, and as much colour and shade as are consistent with it.' Another, which says, 'We will have shade, and as much colour and delineation as are consistent with it.' The third, 'We will have the colour, and as much light and delineation as are consistent with it.' The second class, the Chiaroscurists, are essentially draughtsmen with chalk, charcoal, or single tints. Many of them paint, but always with some effort and pain. Leonardo is the type of them" (compressed from Ariadne Florentina, §§ 18-21).
To his artistic genius and intellectual alertness, Leonardo added great personal beauty ("the radiance of his countenance, which was splendidly beautiful, brought cheerfulness," says Vasari, "to the heart of the most melancholy") and great physical strength. He could bend a door-knocker, we are told, or a horse-shoe as if it were lead. He was left-handed and wrote from right to left. Besides his physical strength, Vasari mentions his kindness and gentleness, and tells us how he would frequently buy caged birds from the dealers, in order to give them back their liberty. Scandalous accusations were at one time brought against him, but researches made in the archives during the last few years have effectually disposed of the charge. One curious trait in the character of Leonardo remains to be noticed. In his art he created a feminine type of extraordinary and haunting beauty. "And yet," says his latest biographer, "Leonardo, like Donatello, was one of those exceptionally great artists in whose life the love of woman seems to have played no part.... The delights of the mind sufficed him. He himself proclaimed it in plain terms. Cosa bella mortal passa e non arte.' Fair humanity passes, but art endures.'" This extraordinary man was the son of a peasant-mother, Caterina, and was born out of wedlock, his father being a Florentine notary; and amongst Leonardo's manuscripts is a record of a visit to Caterina in the hospital, who soon after his father's death had married in her own station, and of expenses paid for her funeral. His life has three divisions—thirty years at Florence, nearly twenty years at Milan, then nineteen years of wandering, till he sinks to rest under the protection of the King of France. (1) Leonardo was the pupil of Verrocchio (see 296), "a master well chosen, for in his earnest and discursive mind were many points of contact with that of his illustrious pupil." Leonardo seems to have retained his connection with Verrocchio until 1477, but the records of his Florentine period are very scanty. His earliest undoubted work is the unfinished "Adoration" in the Uffizi. To this period also belongs the head of the "Medusa" in that collection, celebrated in Shelley's verses—a work, says Mr. Pater, in which "the fascination of corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty." (2) In 1483 Leonardo removed to Milan to take service with Ludovico Sforza. He served his patron in those multifarious ways for which his talents fitted him,—as musician and improvisatore, as director of court pageants, as sculptor, painter, and civil and military engineer. To this Milanese period belong two of the master's most celebrated productions—the present picture and the "Last Supper," executed in oil colours on an end wall of the refectory in the Dominican Convent of S. Maria della Grazia. At Milan, Leonardo founded the famous Vincian Academy of Arts over which he presided, which attracted so many pupils, and which may be said to have established a new Milanese School. For his Academy he made the elaborate notes for a Treatise on Painting which were posthumously published.(3) In 1500, consequent upon the flight of the Duke before the French army, Leonardo left Milan and returned to Florence. His stay, however, was not long, for he took service for a time with Cæsar Borgia as architect and military engineer. He was again in Florence in 1503, and was commissioned with Michelangelo to paint the Hall of Council in the Palace of the Signory. His subject was the Battle of Anghiari. The painting was begun but never completed. The cartoon, now lost, remained and excited the greatest admiration, "The man who had presented the solemn moment of the Last Supper with a dignity and pathos never equalled, who could portray feminine loveliness with a sweetness and grace peculiar to his pencil, was no less successful in bringing before the eye the turmoil of battle and the fierce passions inspired by the struggle for victory." One great work of his of this period (1504) happily survives—the famous portrait of Monna Lisa, known as La Gioconda, in the Louvre. For the next ten years (1506-1516), Leonardo alternated between Milan, Florence, and Rome. Other works of this period are the "St. Anne" and "St. John," also in the Louvre. In 1516 he accompanied the French King, Francis I., to France, who lodged him and his faithful friend Melzi in the Château de Cloux, near Amboise. Three years later he died, having made his will (the text of which has recently been discovered) a week before the end—"considering the certainty of death and the uncertainty of the hour, of its approach." He was buried, by his own instructions, in the church of St. Florentin at Amboise. Of Leonardo as a young man, no authentic portraits exist. In the Royal Collection at Windsor and at Turin there are portraits of himself in red chalk; and on the Sacro Monte at Varallo, one of Gaudenzio Ferrari's sculptured figures is a portrait of the great master. Leonardo's drawings are very beautiful and numerous—the Windsor Collection being the richest; they show us with what infinite searching the master drew near to his ideals. The picture before us makes upon the spectator the impression of rapid and spontaneous creation; but the drawings for it show that it was in fact one of the most laborious of Leonardo's works (see on this subject Müntz's Leonardo da Vinci, i. 162 in the English translation. This is the best life of the master. The most penetrative study of Leonardo remains Mr. Pater's, in his Renaissance).