The deeply romantic colour of Leonardo's imagination

Interesting as are the theories and precepts propounded in the Trattato, and important in their bearing on Leonardo's own painting, it contains entries of a far deeper significance. These are the passages in which he reveals, often unconsciously, his own preferences, prejudices, and the real colour of his imagination. His own manuscripts, for all their enormous bulk, so seldom contain the least expression of personal feeling that the passages preserved by the unknown editor of the Trattato are worth examining at length. In the first place, Leonardo makes fairly frequent reference to the sort of subject the painter might wish to treat. Here is one of them, the 65th chapter of the Trattato, headed Placere del Pittore.

The painter can call into being the essences of animals of all kinds, of plants, fruits, landscapes, rolling plains, crumbling mountains, fearful and terrible places which strike terror into the spectator; and again pleasant places, sweet and delightful with meadows of many-coloured flowers bent by the gentle motion of the wind which turns back to look at them as it floats on; and then rivers falling from high mountains with the force of great floods, ruins which drive down with them uprooted plants mixed with rocks, roots, earth and foam and wash away to its ruin all that comes in their path; and then the stormy sea, striving and wrestling with the winds which fight against it, raising itself up in superb waves which fall in ruins as the wind strikes at their roots.

The rest of the passage is a description of the struggle between wind and water, in which the water takes the form of rain to assault the sea from above, but finally "Pressed back it turns into thick clouds, and these become the prey of the conquering winds". Here is Leonardo carried away by his true feelings. He begins to enumerate the subjects that delight a painter, and instead of compositions of figures, classical and religious legends, beautiful faces and draperies, all the subjects which pleased the patrons and artists of his time, he describes this combat of the elements, a subject for Turner, in the language of Victor Hugo. Nor was this an isolated freak. All his longest and fullest descriptions of pictorial subjects are of great battles, storms and deluges and, as we shall see, he carried out these subjects in the most personal of all his designs. Unfortunately, we have no hint of how he would have executed another subject, which he describes with equal pleasure, a night piece with a fire, and when we try to picture it our eye cannot rid itself of the strong images created by an artist at the farthest remove from Leonardo, the night pieces of Rembrandt.

The figures which are seen against the fire look dark in the glare of the firelight; and those who stand at the side are half dark and half red, while those who are visible beyond the edges of the flames will be feebly lighted by the ruddy glow against a black background. As to their gestures, make those which are near it screen themselves with their hands and cloaks, to ward off the intense heat, and some with their faces turned away as if drawing back. Of those further off, represent some of them with their hands raised to screen their eyes, hurt by the intolerable splendour of the flames.

These descriptions not only show the deeply romantic colour of Leonardo's imagination: they imply a sense of form completely at variance with that of his contemporaries. Instead of the firmly defined forms of the quattrocento or the enclosed forms of the high Renaissance, the subjects he describes could only be treated with the broken, suggestive forms of romantic painting. That Leonardo felt the full evocative power of such forms is proved by a famous passage in the Trattato:

I shall not refrain (he says) from including among these precepts a new and speculative idea, which although it may seem trivial and almost laughable, is none the less of great value in quickening the spirit of invention. It is this: that you should look at certain walls stained with damp or at stones of uneven colour. If you have to invent some setting you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills and valleys in great variety; and then again you will see there battles and strange figures in violent action, expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose strokes you may find every named word which you can imagine.