A portrait of Isabella d'Este

On leaving Milan he seems to have gone straight to Mantua. He did not stay there long, but we know from a letter which he received in Venice on 13 March 1500 that he had had time to draw a portrait of Isabella d'Este. He seems to have impressed her all too favourably, for during the next four years she persecuted him with commissions, commanded or entreated, through her agent at Florence. She was particularly insistent that her portrait might be coloured, but as far as we know it remained no more than a cartoon, the general aspect of which has come down to us in a number of replicas. These show her wearing a widenecked dress, seated with her head in profile, her arms folded before her,, in a pose which must have influenced Venetian portraiture for the next ten years. One of these cartoons, now in the Louvre, 1 is usually accepted as the original, but it has been so much re-worked that no certain judgment is possible. It has been pricked for transfer so that we can be sure of the main outlines, and these show that the right arm was in a position anatomically false. The arm is shown correctly drawn in an otherwise feeble replica at Oxford, and the natural inference is that the Louvre cartoon never was Leonardo's original. All that is left for us to appreciate is the pose, which in its ease and breadth anticipates the Mona Lisa. It is curious that Leonardo, who always sought for movement into the depth, should have chosen to represent her head in profile; but we know from his early drawings that he took a pleasure in giving this, the least plastic of poses, a remarkable feeling of relief, and in the portrait of Isabella we may suppose that the austere design of the head was intended as a check to the ample movement of the bust and arms.

From Mantua Leonardo went to Venice. No doubt he had been there before, to study the horses of St Mark or to see his old fellow-pupil, Lorenzo di Credi, finishing the Colleoni monument. But since this is the only visit of which we have documentary evidence, I will take the opportunity to speak of Leonardo's connection with Venetian art. Vasari, in his life of Giorgione, says that "having seen some things from the hand of Leonardo delicately and deeply modelled with dark shadows, they pleased him so much that as long as he lived he made them his models, and in oil painting imitated them greatly". Modern writers have supposed that this statement was nothing but an example of Vasari's Tuscan patriotism, but I have already pointed out that among Leonardo's most personal and spontaneous images, both written and depicted, are many which recall by their deeply-coloured romanticism the art of early sixteenth-century Venice. Material evidence of his influence is Giorgione's picture of Christ carrying the Cross in S. Rocco which certainly derives from a design by Leonardo. This design is known to us as a whole through the replicas of Milanese pupils, evidently taken from a lost cartoon; from Leonardo's own hand we have only a silverpoint drawing, now appropriately in the Venice Academy. But more important, if less easily demonstrable, is the influence on Giorgione of Leonardo's whole way of looking at forms. This is most easily seen in a change of feminine type, whereby the wide shallow features of Bellini's Madonnas was replaced by a more plastic and more regular oval. The head of the gipsy in the Tempesta magnified and seen in isolation is intensely Leonardesque: the Giorgione portrait of a lady with laurel leaves in Vienna reflects the same sense of form as the Belle Ferronnière. And as a complement to this ideal beauty, Giorgione like Leonardo portrayed an ideal of ugliness. The old woman with the inscription Col Tempo in the Venice Academy, which I believe to be an authentic Giorgione, derives from Leonardo both in general conception and in the actual type. Finally, the drapery of the Judith, so completely unlike that of Bellini, or, it must be confessed, of Giorgione's other work, is directly inspired by Leonardo. The cunning, intricate folds which fly out round the left side of the figure can be compared with the drawing of angels in the Venice Academy.

These similarities of form are accentuated, as Vasari pointed out, by a similar use of light and shade. At first Leonardo's chiaroscuro seems to differ radically from that of the Venetians in that he professed to use shadow the more scientifically to render relief, they to heighten the emotional effect: or, to speak of actual practice, his shadow was an adjunct of form, theirs of colour. But Leonardo's chiaroscuro examined in the light of the Trattato seems less rigidly scientific; seems, in fact, to express an emotional approach to nature at least as intense as that of the Venetians. The subjects described in the Trattato--how to paint a night piece, how to paint a storm, how to paint a woman standing in the shadow of an open door--show that he delighted in effects of light and shade of a strangeness and violence which Giorgione and his school were the first to attempt.