Leonardo da Vinci, the disciple of experience

The St Anne and the St John are easily recognisable as the pictures now in the Louvre. But the portrait of a Florentine lady cannot be the Mona Lisa, which was certainly not done at the instance of the "the late Magnificent, Giuliano de' Medici". This must have been a work in Leonardo's late style, and no replica of such a picture exists to give us any hint of what the original was like. De' Beatis's description of the notebooks inspires confidence in his veracity, and makes it more than ever difficult to know how we should interpret his account of Leonardo's paralysis. That Leonardo was paralysed in an ordinary sense is demonstrably untrue, since we have plenty of manuscripts of a later date than October 1517, including a sheet in the Codice Atlantico, inscribed "in the Palace of Cloux at Amboise, 24th June, 1518". On these the writing, sometimes blunted by the roughness of the paper, is still beautifully clear and firm. It is true, however, that the lines of shading in the drawings of water are rather more ragged than formerly, and we may conjecture that Leonardo's paralysis did not affect his fingers, but prevented him from moving his arm with any freedom. This would account for the statement that he was still able to make designs; and if he could draw, the inability to colour with that sweetness which had cost him so much pains would not greatly distress Leonardo. Of these designs, as I have said, we have no solid evidence; but on grounds of style I would attribute to the French period some drawings handled even more broadly than the masquerade costumes: such for example as the head of an old man at Windsor, 12,500, where the broken touch no less than the feeling of grave authority recall the late self-portraits of Titian. Leonardo's own self-portrait, the red chalk drawing at Turin, is in a fine, clear style which must indicate an earlier date. He has represented himself as being of a great age, but we know that Leonardo looked older than his years. De' Beatis speaks of him as being more than seventy, though actually he was only sixty-four at the time, and the self-portrait may date from about 1512 when Leonardo would be sixty. This is the only authentic likeness of Leonardo. The numerous portraits in profile are copies which gradually come to approximate more and more to the idealised representation of a sage. But even the self-portrait is, to my mind, remarkably unrevealing. This great furrowed mountain of a face with its noble brow, commanding cavernous eyes, and undulating foothills of beard is like the faces of all the great men of the nineteenth century as the camera has preserved them for us--Darwin, Tolstoy, Walt Whitman. Time, with its spectacle of human suffering, has reduced them all to a common level of venerability.

Leonardo died in the Castle of Cloux on 2 May 1519, leaving to his friend and pupil, Melzi, the great store of drawings and manuscripts through which we should be able to form a clear conception of his character. But in spite of this mass of material his image changes like a cloud. Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself, and although I have tried to interpret his work as impersonally as possible, I recognise that the result is largely subjective. Certain things in his art are clear and definable; for example, his passionate curiosity into the secrets of nature, and the inhumanly sharp eye with which he penetrated them--followed the movements of birds or of a wave, understood the structure of a seed-pod or a skull, noted down the most trivial gesture or most evasive glance. But even in his art there are chords which seem to be left unresolved. One of these I have stressed throughout, the conflict between his aesthetic and his scientific approach to painting, the former deeply, even extravagantly romantic, comparable to such painters as El Greco and Turner, the other, found in the composition of the Last Supper, forming the foundation of later academism.

Even more bewildering is the contrast between his drawings and his note-books. In all his writings--one of the most voluminous and complete records of a mind at work which has come down to us--there is hardly a trace of human emotion. Of his affections, his tastes, his health, his opinions on current events we know nothing. Yet if we turn from his writings to his drawings, we find a subtle and tender understanding of human feelings which is not solely due to the efficiency of the optic nerve. In his contemplation of nature, this human understanding seems to have been gradually swamped; and here, perhaps, is a hint of some unifying principle in all Leonardo's work. From the first he is obsessed by vital force and finds it expressed in plants and creatures; then, as his scientific researches develop he learns the vast power of natural forces and he pursues science as a means by which these forces can be harnessed for human advantage. The further he penetrates the more he becomes aware of man's impotence; his studies of hydrodynamics suggest a power of water beyond human control; his studies of geology show that the earth has undergone cataclysmic upheavals of which ordinary earthquakes are but faint and distant echoes; his studies of embryology point to a central problem of creation apparently insoluble by science. The intellect is no longer supreme, and human beings cease to be the centre of nature; so they gradually fade from his imagination, or when they appear, as St Anne or St John, they are human no longer but symbols of force and mystery, messengers from a world which Leonardo da Vinci, the disciple of experience, has not explored, though he has earned the right to proclaim its existence. La natura è piena d' infnite ragioni che non furono mai in esperienza.