The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

by Unknown

The late librarian of Chatsworth also comments upon the copies and forgeries of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci that abound at Chatsworth, as in other collections. The process of sifting the pictures ascribed to Leonardo may be said to be complete. John William Brown, in the Appendix to his life of Leonardo, published in 1828, catalogues nearly fifty pictures from the hand of the master. Mr. McCurdy, in his study of the records of Leonardo's life, has reduced that generous estimate to ten. There is still considerable disagreement about some of the drawings, but there are enough indubitably authentic, a bewildering variety indeed, for all practical purposes of study, and to proclaim the abounding genius of this flame-like Florentine, whose mind was a universe and who "painted little but drew much" with "that wonderful left hand." The fact that Leonardo was left-handed, with the result that the shading of his drawings usually runs from left to right, and not from right to left, should be evidence, as Morelli and others have pointed out, of the authenticity of those drawings whose lines of direction run from left to right. But this test is far from perfect, as it is the first business of a forger to study mannerisms. Many of the drawings bear comments in his handwriting, which also usually ran from right to left, the famous letter to the Duke of Milan being an exception. A pen-drawing in the Uffizi has, in the lower part, a note from which the beginning has been torn away. The words that remain are: ". . . bre 1478 ichomiciai le 2 Vgine Marie," which may be interpreted, "October 1478, I began the two of the Virgin Mary."

Most of the drawings are made with the pen, others are in chalk and silver-point. In the well-known Isabella d'Este of the Louvre there are traces of pastel, and some of the sketches of drapery are drawn on fine linen with a brush.

One of Leonardo's earliest drawings, if not his first attempt, is the landscape dated 1473 in the Uffizi, done when he was twenty-one years of age. It is signed, and these words are inscribed in the left-hand top corner: "The day of S. Mary of the Snow, the fifth day of August, 1473."

Another drawing that can be assigned to a period is the sketch in pen and ink of a youth hanging from a rope with his hands fastened behind his back. This unfortunate was Bernardo Bandini, who was hanged for the murder of Giuliano de Medici in 1479. It is supposed that Leonardo was commissioned to paint a picture of the execution, and that he made the drawing of Bandini as a preparatory study. Leonardo was nothing if not conscientious. On the margin of the sketch, which is in the possession of M. Bonnat, is this note describing Bandini's costume: "Small tan-coloured cap, black satin doublet, lined black jerkin, blue coat lined with fur of foxes' breasts, and the collar of the cloak covered with velvet speckled black and red; Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli; black hose."

As we turn over and examine the diversified drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, we are continually reminded of the passion that draughtsmanship was to him. Pen and pencil bear witness that his mind was never at rest. He drew for the love of it; his hand raced to obey the thronging pictures that his brain conceived, and he drew, not necessarily as a preparatory stage for the making of a picture, but because draw he must. Despite the hundreds of drawings that remain as examples of his industry, there are no studies extant for the Monna Lisa, although it has been suggested that the hands from the Windsor Collection reproduced in this volume were preparatory sketches for the marvellous hands of that third wife of a Florentine official upon whose head all "the ends of the world are come." Critics differ on this point, but there is no difference of opinion as to the beauty of Monna Lisa's hands. "The right hand," says Mr. McCurdy, "is perhaps the most perfect hand that was ever painted."

Probably many of the sheets of drawings of children, women, cats, and lambs were for Madonna pictures that have been lost or destroyed. He was never content with the stereotyped and conventional arrangement for a sacred picture, such as satisfied Francia. He was ever curious, as well as a seeker after beauty, and life being his province, he loved to intrigue the human element into a Madonna and Child motive. The Child playing with the cat, hugging a lamb, learning his lessons at his mother's knee, numbers of them testify to Leonardo's direct and large-hearted humanity. With him the Child is always a child, acting like a child. In a drawing in the British Museum he clutches a protesting cat in his chubby arms, while the mother smiles—the eternal, personal smile of Leonardo that haunted him, as it fascinates us. In another drawing the Child is dipping a chubby hand into a bowl of porridge, and again the Mother smiles—the enigmatic, persisting smile of Leonardo. There are no fewer than twenty-seven drawings of animals on one sheet at Windsor. The majority are cats, but in some instance his imagination has invented a hybrid animal to which no name can be given. In a drawing at Milan the Child is apparently receiving a lesson in geometry—one of Leonardo's special studies. "He is entirely wrapped up in geometry, and has no patience for painting," writes a correspondent to Isabella d'Este in reply to a letter from her asking what Leonardo was doing. "Since he has been in Florence," continues the correspondent, "he has worked only on one cartoon. This represents an infant Christ of about one year, who, freeing himself from his mother's arms, seizes a lamb, and seems to clasp it."

There is no record that these pictures of the Child with cat or lamb, or dropping his hand into a bowl of porridge, were ever finished; but the drawings were seen by the young Raphael, who drew inspiration from them. It is curious to turn from these imaginative designs to the literal study of a tree, searched out as carefully as Leighton's drawing of a lemon-tree, but so much bolder and so much more confident in treatment; or to that drawing that might have been produced in an engineer's office, showing a number of nude figures lifting a heavy cylinder by lever-power, probably a design dating from the period when he held the post of military engineer to Caesar Borgia. During his residence at Pavia, when, among other activities, he constructed the scenery for a kind of masque produced in honour of the marriage of Gian Galeazzo with Isabella of Aragon, and on another occasion arranged a tournament, he also designed an apparatus of pulleys and cords to convey the relic of the Sacred Nail to a different position in the Cathedral. The sketch is inscribed, "In the Cathedral for the pulley of the Nail of the Cross."

Moderns who try to paint without first undergoing the drudgery of drawing for some years in the schools should ponder over Leonardo's studies of the nude, reading at the same time the chapters on "Proportion" in his "Treatise on Painting." What whole-hearted pre-occupation in his work the following extract shows! It is entitled "Of studying in the Dark, on first waking in the Morning, and before going to Sleep." "I have experienced no small benefit, when in the dark and in bed, by retracing in my mind the outlines of those forms which I had previously studied, particularly such as had appeared the most difficult to comprehend and retain; by this method they will be confirmed and treasured upon the memory."

Flowers, trees, and wings he studied with the same fidelity and felicity that he gave to hands and drapery. He was for ever preparing and experimenting, for ever storing and developing his mind, for ever increasing the cunning of his hands, as if life were endless. His sixty-seven years of activity were all too short for this giant, who excelled in every worthy pursuit of mortals except commerce and politics. A Florentine poet of the Quattrocento, who knew Leonardo in his early manhood, described him as the man who "perhaps excels all others, yet cannot tear himself away from a picture, and in many years scarce brings one to completion." His mind was continually putting forth fresh shoots. We can imagine him, before beginning to paint the wings of the angel in his picture of The Annunciation in the Louvre, studying the ways of birds at rest and in flight, and considering the problem of the possibility of man ever achieving the conquest of the air. Such ideas never came to fruition, but there is a passage in his writings, written in a moment of exaltation, when he had vision of man floating on pinions in the ether, and himself as inventor and originator of the triumph. In that moment of vision of a perfected Santos-Dumont, Leonardo wrote: "He will fill the universe with wonder and all writings with his fame, and will give deathless renown to the nest which witnessed his birth."

Through all his dreams, through all his scientific, human, and grotesque imaginings, he never ceased from the quest of beauty, that obsession of the true artist, which he expressed so often in the faces of his women, their hair and hands, in the looks of children, in the fall and fold of draperies, and in the figures of armed knights setting forth to tourney or to battle. One only has to recall the face of St. Anne in the Louvre picture, the curling, plaited hair about the head of Leda in the Windsor drawing, the strange sexless charm of the smile of St. John the Baptist in the Louvre picture, Monna Lisa, the "sceptical" angel in The Virgin of the Rocks, and the head of St. Philip in the Windsor drawing, to be impressed again by the enigmatic beauty, always new, never palling, that Leonardo gave to the world. In the cartoon of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne which hangs in the Diploma Gallery at Burlington House, one of the nation's greatest treasures, which so few Londoners ever visit, this country possesses a characteristic and unapproachable Leonardo. It differs materially from the picture in the Louvre, the heads of the Virgin and St. Anne being nearly on a level; St. Anne is gazing at the Virgin, not at the Child, her hand is upraised, the finger points upwards, and the Baptist is included in the composition. But in each the face of St. Anne has the Leonardo inward, extenuating smile, suggesting that attribute of aloofness of which the mediaeval schoolmen write. The upward-pointing hand of St. Anne is almost identical with the motion of St. Thomas's hand in The Last Supper at Milan, and with the hand of St. John in the Louvre. Comparing the Diploma Gallery cartoon with the finished picture in the Louvre, and with the sketch at the Venice Academy, we realise the years of labour that Leonardo gave to a picture before he would call it finished. One of the drawings of drapery reproduced in this volume is an exquisite study for the garment that enfolds the Virgin's limbs in the Louvre picture.