The year 1494 is a momentous one in the history of Italian politics. In that year the long ousted and secluded prince, Gian Galeazzo, died under circumstances more than suspicious. In that year Ludovico, now duke of Milan in his own right, for the strengthening of his power against Naples, first entered into those intrigues with Charles VIII. of France which later brought upon Italy successive floods of invasion, revolution and calamity. The same year was one of special importance in the prodigiously versatile activities of Leonardo da Vinci. Documents show him, among other things, planning during an absence of several months from the city vast new engineering works for improving the irrigation and water-ways of the Lomellina and adjacent regions of the Lombard plain; ardently studying phenomena of storm and lightning, of river action and of mountain structure; co-operating with his friend, Donato Bramante, the great architect, in fresh designs for the improvement and embellishment of the Castello at Milan; and petitioning the duke to secure him proper payment for a Madonna lately executed with the help of his pupil, Ambrogio de Predis, for the brotherhood of the Conception of St Francis at Milan. (This is almost certainly the fine, slightly altered second version of the “Virgin of the Rocks,” now in the National Gallery, London. The original and earlier version is one of the glories of the Louvre, and shows far more of a Florentine and less of a Milanese character than the London picture.) In the same year, 1494, or early in the next, Leonardo, if Vasari is to be trusted, paid a visit to Florence to take part in deliberations concerning the projected new council-hall to be constructed in the palace of the Signory. Lastly, recent research has proved that it was in 1494 that Leonardo got to work in earnest on what was to prove not only by far his greatest but by far his most expeditiously and steadily executed work in painting. This was the “Last Supper” undertaken for the refectory of the convent church of Sta Maria delle Grazie at Milan on the joint commission (as it would appear) of Ludovico and of the monks themselves.
This picture, the world-famous “Cenacolo” of Leonardo, has been the subject of much erroneous legend and much misdirected experiment. Having through centuries undergone cruel injury, from technical imperfections at the outset, from disastrous atmospheric conditions, from vandalism and neglect, and most of all from unskilled repair, its remains have at last (1904-1908) been treated with a mastery of scientific resource and a tenderness of conscientious skill that have revived for ourselves and for posterity a great part of its power. At the same time its true history has been investigated and re-established. The intensity of intellectual and manual application which Leonardo threw into the work is proved by the fact that he finished it within four years, in spite of all his other avocations and of those prolonged pauses of concentrated imaginative effort and intense self-critical brooding to which we have direct contemporary witness. He painted the picture on the wall in tempera, not, according to the legend which sprung up within twenty years of its completion, in oil. The tempera vehicle, perhaps including new experimental ingredients, did not long hold firmly to its plaster ground, nor that to the wall. Flaking and scaling set in; hard crusts of mildew formed, dissolved and re-formed with changes of weather over both the loosened parts and those that remained firm. Decade after decade these processes went on, a rain of minute scales and grains falling, according to one witness, continually from the surface, till the picture seemed to be perishing altogether. In the 18th century attempts were first made at restoration. They all proceeded on the false assumption, dating from the early years of the 16th century, that the work had been executed in oil. With oil it was accordingly at one time saturated in hopes of reviving the colours. Other experimenters tried various “secrets,” which for the most part meant deleterious glues and varnishes. Fortunately not very much of actual repainting was accomplished except on some parts of the garments. The chief operations were carried on by Bellotti in 1726, by Mazza in 1770, and by Barezzi in 1819 and the following years. None of them arrested, some actually accelerated, the natural agencies of damp and disintegration, decay and mildew. Yet this mere ghost of a picture, this evocation, half vanished as it was, by a great world-genius of a mighty spiritual world-event, remained a thing indescribably impressive. The ghost has now been brought back to much of true life again by the skill of the most scrupulous of all restorers, Cavaliere Cavenaghi, who, acting under the authority of a competent commission, and after long and patient experiment, found it possible to secure to the wall the innumerable blistered, mildewed and half-detached flakes and scales of the original work that yet remained, to clear the surface thus obtained of much of the obliterating accretions due to decay and mishandling, and to bring the whole to unity by touching tenderly in with tempera the spots and spaces actually left bare. A further gain obtained through these operations has been the uncovering, immediately above the main subject, of a beautiful scheme of painted lunettes and vaultings, the lunettes filled by Leonardo’s hand with inscribed scutcheons and interlaced plait or knot ornaments (intrecciamenti), the vaultings with stars on a blue ground. The total result, if adequate steps can be taken to counteract the effects of atmospheric change in future, will remain a splendid gain for posterity and a happy refutation of D’Annunzio’s despairing poem, the Death of a Masterpiece.
Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” for all its injuries, became from the first, and has ever since remained, for all Christendom the typical representation of the scene. Goethe in his famous criticism has said all that needs to be said of it. The painter has departed from precedent in grouping the disciples, with their Master in the midst, along the far side and the two ends of a long, narrow table, and in leaving the near or service side of the table towards the spectator free. The chamber is seen in a perfectly symmetrical perspective, its rear wall pierced by three plain openings which admit the sense of quiet distance and mystery from the open landscape beyond; by the central of these openings, which is the widest of the three, the head and shoulders of the Saviour are framed in. On His right and left are ranged the disciples in equal numbers. The furniture and accessories of the chamber, very simply conceived, have been rendered with scrupulous exactness and distinctness; yet they leave to the human and dramatic elements the absolute mastery of the scene. The serenity of the holy company has within a moment been broken by the words of their Master, “One of you shall betray Me.” In the agitation of their consciences and affections, the disciples have started into groups or clusters along the table, some standing, some still remaining seated. There are four of these groups, of three disciples each, and each group is harmoniously interlinked by some natural connecting action with the next. Leonardo, though no special student of the Greeks, has perfectly carried out the Greek principle of expressive variety in particulars subordinated to general symmetry. He has used all his acquired science of linear and aerial perspective to create an almost complete illusion to the eye, but an illusion that has in it nothing trivial, and in heightening our sense of the material reality of the scene only heightens its profound spiritual impressiveness and gravity. The results of his intensest meditations on the psychology and the human and divine significance of the event (on which he has left some pregnant hints in written words of his own) are perfectly fused with those of his subtlest technical calculations on the rhythmical balancing of groups and arrangement of figures in space.
Of authentic preparatory studies for this work there remain but few. There is a sheet at the Louvre of much earlier date than the first idea or commission for this particular picture, containing some nude sketches for the arrangement of the subject; another later and farther advanced, but still probably anterior to the practical commission, at Venice, and a MS. sheet of great interest at the Victoria and Albert Museum, on which the painter has noted in writing the dramatic motives appropriate to the several disciples. At Windsor and Milan are a few finished studies in red chalk for the heads. A highly-reputed series of life-sized chalk drawings of the same heads, of which the greater portion is at Weimar, consists of early copies, and is interesting though having no just claim to originality. Scarcely less doubtful is the celebrated unfinished and injured study of the head of Christ at the Brera, Milan.
Leonardo’s triumph with his “Last Supper” encouraged him in the hope of proceeding now to the casting of the Sforza monument or “Great Horse,” the model of which had stood for the last three years the admiration of all beholders, in the Corte Vecchio of the Castello. He had formed a new and close friendship with Luca Pacioli of Borgo San Sepolcro, the great mathematician, whose Summa de aritmetica, geometrica, &c., he had eagerly bought at Pavia on its first appearance, and who arrived at the Court of Milan about the moment of the completion of the “Cenacolo.” Pacioli was equally amazed and delighted at Leonardo’s two great achievements in sculpture and painting, and still more at the genius for mathematical, physical and anatomical research shown in the collections of MS. notes which the master laid before him. The two began working together on the materials for Pacioli’s next book, De divina proportione. Leonardo obtained Pacioli’s help in calculations and measurements for the great task of casting the bronze horse and man. But he was soon called away by Ludovico to a different undertaking, the completion of the interior decorations, already begun by another hand and interrupted, of certain chambers of the Castello called the Saletta Negra and the Sala Grande dell’ Asse, or Sala della Torre. When, in the last decade of the 19th century, works of thorough architectural investigation and repair were undertaken in that building under the superintendence of Professor Luca Beltrami, a devoted foreign student, Dr Paul Müller-Walde, obtained leave to scrape for traces of Leonardo’s handiwork beneath the replastered and white-washed walls and ceilings of chambers that might be identified with these. In one small chamber there was cleared a frieze of cupids intermingled with foliage; but in this, after the first moments of illusion, it was only possible to acknowledge the hand of some unknown late and lax decorator of the school, influenced as much by Raphael as by Leonardo. In another room (Sala del Tesoro) was recovered a gigantic headless figure, in all probability of Mercury, also wrongly claimed at first for Leonardo, and afterwards, to all appearance rightly, for Bramante. But in the great Sala dell’ Asse (or della Torre) abundant traces of Leonardo’s own hand were found, in the shape of a decoration of intricate geometrical knot or plait work combined with natural leafage; the abstract puzzle-pattern, of a kind in which Leonardo took peculiar pleasure, intermingling in cunning play and contrast with a pattern of living boughs and leaves exquisitely drawn in free and vital growth. Sufficient portions of this design were found in good preservation to enable the whole to be accurately restored—a process as legitimate in such a case as censurable in the case of a figure-painting. For these and other artistic labours Leonardo was rewarded in 1498 (ready money being with difficulty forthcoming and his salary being long in arrears) by the gift of a suburban garden outside the Porta Vercelli.
But again he could not get leave to complete the task in hand. He was called away on duty as chief military engineer (ingegnere camerale) with the special charge of inspecting and maintaining all the canals and waterways of the duchy. Dangers were accumulating upon Ludovico and the state of Milan. France had become Ludovico’s enemy; and Louis XII., the pope and Venice had formed a league to divide his principality among them. He counted on baffling them by forming a counter league of the principalities of northern Italy, and by raising the Turks against Venice, and the Germans and Swiss against France. Germans and Swiss, however, inopportunely fell to war against each other. Ludovico travelled to Innsbruck, the better to push his interests (September 1499). In his absence Louis XII. invaded the Milanese, and the officers left in charge of the city surrendered it without striking a blow. The invading sovereign, going to Sta Maria delle Grazie with his retinue to admire the renowned painting of the “Last Supper,” asked if it could not be detached from the wall and transported to France. The French lieutenant in Milan, Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, the embittered enemy of Ludovico, began exercising a vindictive tyranny over the city which had so long accepted the sway of the usurper. Great artists were usually exempt from the consequences of political revolutions, and Trivulzio, now or later, commissioned Leonardo to design an equestrian monument to himself. Leonardo, having remained unmolested at Milan for two months under the new régime, but knowing that Ludovico was preparing a great stroke for the re-establishment of his power, and that fresh convulsions must ensue, thought it best to provide for his own security. In December he left Milan with his friend Luca Pacioli, having first sent some of his modest savings to Florence for investment. His intention was to watch events. They took a turn which made him a stranger to Milan for the next seven years. Ludovico, at the head of an army of Swiss mercenaries, returned victoriously in February 1500, and was welcomed by a population disgusted with the oppression of the invaders. But in April he was once more overthrown by the French in a battle fought at Novara, his Swiss clamouring at the last moment for their overdue pay, and treacherously refusing to fight against a force of their own countrymen led by La Trémouille. Ludovico was taken prisoner and carried to France; the city, which had been strictly spared on the first entry of Louis XII., was entered and sacked; and the model of Leonardo’s great statue made a butt (as eye witnesses tell) for Gascon archers. Two years later we find the duke Ercole of Ferrara begging the French king’s lieutenant in Milan to let him have the model, injured as it was, for the adornment of his own city; but nothing came of the petition, and within a short time it seems to have been totally broken up.
Thus, of Leonardo’s sixteen years’ work at Milan (1483-1499) the results actually remaining are as follows: The Louvre “Virgin of the Rocks” possibly, i.e. as to its execution; the conception and style are essentially Florentine, carried out by Leonardo to a point of intense and almost glittering finish, of quintessential, almost overstrained, refinement in design and expression, and invested with a new element of romance by the landscape in which the scene is set—a strange watered country of basaltic caves and arches, with the lights and shadows striking sharply and yet mysteriously among rocks, some upright, some jutting, some pendent, all tufted here and there with exquisite growths of shrub and flower. The National Gallery “Virgin of the Rocks” certainly, with help from Ambrogio de Predis; in this the Florentine character of the original is modified by an admixture of Milanese elements, the tendency to harshness and over-elaboration of detail softened, the strained action of the angel’s pointing hand altogether dropped, while in many places pupils’ work seems recognizable beside that of the master. The “Last Supper” of Sta Maria delle Grazie, his masterpiece; as to its history and present condition enough has been said. The decorations of the ceiling of the Sala della Torre in the Castello. Other paintings done by him at Milan are mentioned, and attempts have been made to identify them with works still existing. He is known to have painted portraits of two of the king’s mistresses, Cecilia Gallerani and Lucrezia Crivelli. Cecilia Gallerani used to be identified as a lady with ringlets and a lute, depicted in a portrait at Milan, now rightly assigned to Bartolommeo Veneto. More lately she has by some been conjecturally recognized in a doubtful, though Leonardesque, portrait of a lady with a weasel in the Czartoryski collection at Prague. Lucrezia Crivelli has, with no better reason, been identified with the famous “Belle Ferronnière” (a mere misnomer, caught from the true name of another portrait which used to hang near it) at the Louvre; this last is either a genuine Milanese portrait by Leonardo himself or an extraordinarily fine work of his pupil Boltraffio. Strong claims have also been made on behalf of a fine profile portrait resembling Beatrice d’Este in the Ambrosiana; but this the best judges are agreed in regarding as a work, done in a lucky hour, of Ambrogio de Predis. A portrait of a musician in the same gallery is in like manner contested between the master and the pupil. Mention is made of a “Nativity” painted for and sent to the emperor Maximilian, and also apparently of some picture painted for Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary; both are lost or at least unidentified. The painters especially recorded as Leonardo’s immediate pupils during this part of his life at Milan are the two before mentioned, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Ambrogio Preda or de Predis, with Marco d’Oggionno and Andrea Salai, the last apparently less a fully-trained painter than a studio assistant and personal attendant, devotedly attached and faithful in both capacities. Leonardo’s own native Florentine manner had at first been not a little modified by that of the Milanese school as he found it represented in the works of such men as Bramantino, Borgognone and Zenale; but his genius had in its turn reacted far more strongly upon the younger members of the school, and exercised, now or later, a transforming and dominating influence not only upon his immediate pupils, but upon men like Luini, Giampetrino, Bazzi, Cesare da Sesto and indeed the whole Lombard school in the early 15th century. Of sculpture done by him during this period we have no remains, only the tragically tantalizing history of the Sforza monument. Of drawings there are very many, including few only for the “Last Supper,” many for the Sforza monument, as well as the multitude of sketches, scientific and other, which we find intermingled among the vast body of his miscellaneous MSS., notes and records. In mechanical, scientific and theoretical studies of all kinds it was a period, as these MSS. attest, of extraordinary activity and self-development. At Pavia in 1494 we find him taking up literary and grammatical studies, both in Latin and the vernacular; the former, no doubt, in order the more easily to read those among the ancients who had laboured in the fields that were his own, as Euclid, Galen, Celsus, Ptolemy, Pliny, Vitruvius and, above all, Archimedes; the latter with a growing hope of some day getting into proper form and order the mass of materials he was daily accumulating for treatises on all his manifold subjects of enquiry. He had been much helped by his opportunities of intercourse with the great architects, engineers and mathematicians who frequented the court of Milan—Bramante, Alberghetti, Andrea di Ferrara, Pietro Monti, Fazio Cardano and, above all, Luca Pacioli. The knowledge of Leonardo’s position among and familiarity with such men early helped to spread the idea that he had been at the head of a regularly constituted academy of arts and sciences at Milan. The occurrence of the words “Achademia Leonardi Vinci” on certain engravings, done after his drawings, of geometric “knots” or puzzle-patterns (things for which we have already learned his partiality), helped to give currency to this impression not only in Italy but in the North, where the same engravings were copied by Albrecht Dürer. The whole notion has been proved mistaken. There existed no such academy at Milan, with Leonardo as president. The academies of the day represented the prevailing intellectual tendency of Renaissance humanism, namely, an absorbing enthusiasm for classic letters and for the transcendental speculations of Platonic and neo-Platonic mysticism, not unmixed with the traditions and practice of medieval alchemy, astrology and necromantics. For these last pursuits Leonardo had nothing but contempt. His many-sided and far-reaching studies in experimental science were mainly his own, conceived and carried out long in advance of his time, and in communion with only such more or less isolated spirits as were advancing along one or another of the same paths of knowledge. He learnt indeed on these lines eagerly wherever he could, and in learning imparted knowledge to others. But he had no school in any proper sense except his studio, and his only scholars were those who painted there. Of these one or two, as we have evidence, tried their hands at engraving; among their engravings were these “knots,” which, being things of use for decorative craftsmen to copy, were inscribed for identification, and perhaps for protection, as coming from the Achademia Leonardi Vinci; a trifling matter altogether, and quite unfit to sustain the elaborate structure of conjecture which has been built on it.
To return to the master: when he and Luca Pacioli left Milan in December 1499, their destination was Venice. They made a brief stay at Mantua, where Leonardo was graciously received by the duchess Isabella Gonzaga, the most cultured of the many cultured great ladies of her time, whose portrait he promised to paint on a future day; meantime he made the fine chalk drawing of her now at the Louvre. Arrived at Venice, he seems to have occupied himself chiefly with studies in mathematics and cosmography. In April the friends heard of the second and final overthrow of Ludovico il Moro, and at that news, giving up all idea of a return to Milan, moved on to Florence, which they found depressed both by internal troubles and by the protraction of the indecisive and inglorious war with Pisa. Here Leonardo undertook to paint an altar-piece for the Church of the Annunziata, Filippino Lippi, who had already received the commission, courteously retiring from it in his favour. A year passed by, and no progress had been made with the painting. Questions of physical geography and engineering engrossed him as much as ever. He writes to correspondents making enquiries about the tides in the Euxine and Caspian Seas. He reports for the information of the Arte de’ Mercanti on the precautions to be taken against a threatening landslip on the hill of S. Salvatore dell’ Osservanza. He submits drawings and models for the canalization and control of the waters of the Arno, and propounds, with compulsive eloquence and conviction, a scheme for transporting the Baptistery of St John, the “bel San Giovanni” of Dante, to another part of the city, and elevating it on a stately basement of marble. Meantime the Servite brothers of the Annunziata were growing impatient for the completion of their altar-piece. In April 1501 Leonardo had only finished the cartoon, and this all Florence flocked to see and admire. Isabella Gonzaga, who cherished the hope that he might be induced permanently to attach himself to the court of Mantua, wrote about this time to ask news of him, and to beg for a painting from him for her study, already adorned with masterpieces by the first hands of Italy, or at least for a “small Madonna, devout and sweet as is natural to him.” In reply her correspondent says that the master is wholly taken up with geometry and very impatient of the brush, but at the same time tells her all about his just completed cartoon for the Annunziata. The subject was the Virgin seated in the lap of St Anne, bending forward to hold her child who had half escaped from her embrace to play with a lamb upon the ground. The description answers exactly to the composition of the celebrated picture of the Virgin and St Anne at the Louvre. A cartoon of this composition in the Esterhazy collection at Vienna is held to be only a copy, and the original cartoon must be regarded as lost. But another of kindred though not identical motive has come down to us and is preserved in the Diploma Gallery at the Royal Academy. In this incomparable work St Anne, pointing upward with her left hand, smiles with an intense look of wondering, questioning, inward sweetness into the face of the Virgin, who in her turn smiles down upon her child as He leans from her lap to give the blessing to the little St John standing beside her. Evidently two different though nearly related designs had been maturing in Leonardo’s mind. A rough first sketch for the motive of the Academy cartoon is in the British Museum; one for the motive of the lost cartoon and of the Louvre picture is at Venice. No painting by Leonardo from the Academy cartoon exists, but in the Ambrosiana at Milan there is one by Luini, with the figure of St Joseph added. It remains a matter of debate whether the Academy cartoon or that shown by Leonardo at the Annunziata in 1501 was the earlier. The probabilities seem in favour of the Academy cartoon. This, whether done at Milan or at Florence, is in any case a typically perfect and harmonious example of the master’s Milanese manner; while in the other composition with the lamb the action and attitude of the Virgin are somewhat strained, and the original relation between her head and her mother’s, lovely both in design and expression, is lost.
In spite of the universal praise of his cartoon, Leonardo did not persevere with the picture, and the monks of the Annunziata had to give back the commission to Filippino Lippi, at whose death the task was completed by Perugino. It remains uncertain whether a small Madonna with distaff and spindle, which the correspondent of Isabella Gonzaga reports Leonardo as having begun for one Robertet, a favourite of the king of France, was ever finished. He painted one portrait, it is said, at this time, that of Ginevra Benci, a kinswoman, perhaps sister, of a youth Giovanni di Amerigo Benci, who shared his passion for cosmographical studies; and probably began another, the famous “La Gioconda,” which was only finished four years afterwards. The gonfalionere Soderini offered him in vain, to do with it what he would, the huge half-spoiled block of marble out of which Michelangelo three years later wrought his “David.” Isabella Gonzaga again begged, in an autograph letter, that she might have a painting by his hand, but her request was put off; he did her, however, one small service by examining and reporting on some jewelled vases, formerly the property of Lorenzo de’ Medici, which had been offered her. The importunate expectations of a masterpiece or masterpieces in painting or sculpture, which beset him on all hands in Florence, inclined him to take service again with some princely patron, if possible of a genius commensurate with his own, who would give him scope to carry out engineering schemes on a vast scale. Accordingly he suddenly took service, in the spring of 1502, with Cesare Borgia, duke of Valentinois, then almost within sight of the realization of his huge ambitions, and meanwhile occupied in consolidating his recent conquests in the Romagna. Between May 1502 and March 1503 Leonardo travelled as chief engineer to Duke Caesar over a great part of central Italy. Starting with a visit to Piombino, on the coast opposite Elba, he went by way of Siena to Urbino, where he made drawings and began works; was thence hastily summoned by way of Pesaro and Rimini to Cesena; spent two months between there and Cesenatico, projecting and directing canal and harbour works, and planning the restoration of the palace of Frederic II.; thence hurriedly joined his master, momentarily besieged by enemies at Imola; followed him probably to Sinigaglia and Perugia, through the whirl of storms and surprises, vengeances and treasons, which marked his course that winter, and finally, by way of Chiusi and Acquapendente, as far as Orvieto and probably to Rome, where Caesar arrived on the 14th of February 1503. The pope’s death and Caesar’s own downfall were not destined to be long delayed. But Leonardo apparently had already had enough of that service, and was back at Florence in March. He has left dated notes and drawings made at most of the stations we have named, besides a set of six large-scale maps drawn minutely with his own hand, and including nearly the whole territory of the Maremma, Tuscany and Umbria between the Apennines and the Tyrrhene Sea.
At Florence he was at last persuaded, on the initiative of Piero Soderini, to undertake for his native city a work of painting as great as that with which he had adorned Milan. This was a battle-piece to decorate one of the walls of the new council-hall in the palace of the signory. He chose an episode in the victory won by the generals of the republic in 1440 over Niccolo Piccinino near a bridge at Anghiari, in the upper valley of the Tiber. To the young Michelangelo was presently entrusted a rival battle-piece to be painted on another wall of the same apartment; he chose, as is well known, a surprise of the Florentine forces in the act of bathing near Pisa. About the same time Leonardo took part in the debate on the proper site for Michelangelo’s newly finished colossal “David,” and voted in favour of the Loggia dei Lanzi, against a majority which included Michelangelo himself. Neither Leonardo’s genius nor his noble manners could soften the rude and taunting temper of the younger man, whose style as an artist, nevertheless, in subjects both of tenderness and terror, underwent at this time a profound modification from Leonardo’s example.