The period of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo's landscapes

Behind the Mona Lisa stretches a circle of rocky spires and pinnacles which sustain the mood of her smile. This is Leonardo's most characteristic landscape, as quintessential as the figure it surrounds, and we may suitably digress to consider his backgrounds in general. From his earliest work he had always felt that the only possible background to a picture was a range of fantastic mountains. He had rebelled instinctively against the landscapes taught in Verrocchio's shop, the tranquil undulations of Perugino, or the neat man-made landscapes which his Florentine contemporaries had imitated from Flemish art. To him landscape seems to have represented the wildness of nature, the vast, untamed background of human life; so the resemblance of his mountains to the craggy precipices of Chinese painting is no accident, for the Chinese artist also wished to symbolise the contrast between wild nature and busy, orderly human life. Yet between Leonardo and the Chinese there is also a profound difference. To the Chinese a mountain landscape was chiefly a symbol, an ideograph of solitude and communion with nature, expressed in the most correct and elegant forms which the artist could command. To Leonardo a landscape like a human being was part of a vast machine, to be understood part by part and, if possible, in the whole. Rocks were not simply decorative silhouettes. They were part of the earth's bones, with an anatomy of their own, caused by some remote seismic upheaval. Clouds were not random curls of the brush, drawn by some celestial artist, but were the congregation of tiny drops formed from the evaporation of the sea, and soon would pour back their rain into the rivers. Thus, Leonardo's landscapes, however wildly romantic his choice of subject matter, never take on the slightly artificial appearance of the Chinese. To realise the deep knowledge of natural appearance behind them, we have only to compare the background of the Mona Lisa, in some ways the most romantic of all, with the caricature of Leonardo's landscape in such a schoolpiece as the Resurrection, in Berlin, where the mountains are arranged like the scenery in a toy theatre.

The period of the Mona Lisa is no arbitrary point at which to examine Leonardo's landscapes, because to about this period belong a number of the landscape drawings at Windsor. One of these, a red chalk drawing of a storm breaking over a valley in the Alps, must date from a few years earlier, and is one of the studies from nature which precede the background of the Mona Lisa. The way in which a complex panorama is compressed into a few square inches recalls Turner, though even in such a romantic subject we feel the Italian grasp of formal design beside which Turner looks diffuse. The landscape drawings of about 1503 are less romantic. They show the influence of Leonardo's practical pursuits during the preceding years, his map-making for Cesare Borgia, and his studies of watersheds and canalisation. Many of them are done from a high point of view--some are almost maps--and contain rivers or canals. The most exquisite are those drawn with short delicate strokes of the pen in a pale ink impossible to reproduce. They have a Japanese fantasy and precision in the placing of the chief accents: perhaps Leonardo's vision, in admitting some flavour of actual life into his ideal landscapes, has undergone the same process by which Chinese painting was transformed into the Japanese print.

The range of Leonardo's interest in nature is further shown by a group of plant studies, done at about the same period as these panoramic landscapes. He drew flowers throughout his life. The grasses in the Uffizi Annunciation, the flowers in the Munich Madonna are already the work of someone who understands the inner nature of plant life. Vasari and the Anonimo tell us of a cartoon of Adam and Eve with un prato di erbe infinite of which not a trace remains; and the first entry on the list is molti fiori ritratti di naturale--all now lost. The only drawings of plants of this early period are in the pages of MS. B, and can be connected with the Virgin of the Rocks; to a later period, about the years 1503-6, belong ten studies of flowers at Windsor. Technically, they are amongst Leonardo's most miraculous drawings. The majority are in red chalk, on prepared paper, a medium more colouristic than precise; yet Leonardo has given the greatest possible fullness of definition. No one but Watteau seems to have been able to sharpen his chalk to such a fine, firm point, let alone use it. In others, he has added touches with a pen to gain sharpness of accent. In the finest of all, pen and chalk are equally combined, giving a wide range of tone which might have tempted a less learned draughtsman into facile effectiveness. A masterpiece of this kind is the study of a Star of Bethlehem among swirling grasses which combines the rhythmic movement of his hand with the microscopic steadiness of his eye, so that it becomes an essential tken of his art when freed from all conscious intuitions, dramatic or professional.