The love of allegory

The love of allegory revealed in the notebooks is also expressed in some very beautiful drawings. They date from about the period of the bestiary in MS. H 1494, and several of them illustrate fabulous events of natural history, the ermine, the lizard and others which I cannot interpret. These differ from most of Leonardo's drawings in that they are complete compositions: that of the lizard, in particular, has a suggestion of atmosphere and the vibration of light which was one of Leonardo's most precious gifts when he chose to use it. In contrast to these charming fables is a series of macabre allegorical drawings at Christ Church, Oxford. They seem to have some political meaning which is lost to us, and may have attracted Leonardo chiefly as an outlet for his bizarre fancies. We see two witches seated on a gigantic toad, while a third rides a skeleton with a load of arrows: there are two-headed monsters, wild pursuits, unexpected checks and repulses, all the inhabitants of a nightmare drawn with the flashing, flickering touch which Leonardo only used when the subject really interested him.

Closely connected with such fantasies are those once popular specimens of Leonardo's art--the grotesques or caricatures. For three centuries these were the most typical of his works, familiar in numerous engravings. To-day we find them disgusting, or at best wearisome. But Leonardo's immediate successors were right in recognising the caricatures as essential to his genius, concentrating many elements of his spirit. In the first place, they express his love of phenomena--of eccentric nature. They are part of the same curiosity which led Dürer to make an engraving of a pig with eight legs. Vasari describes how Leonardo would follow extraordinary types for a whole day in order to memorise their features. We know that he even took the address of those which had interested him, "Giovanina, viso fantastico, sta a St.a Caterina all' ospedale". It is one of the very few references to a woman in all Leonardo's notebooks. Given this interest in freaks, we can see that many of the so-called caricatures are much more realistic than at first sight we believe. In a humanitarian age we instinctively shut our eyes to such horrors, and lunatic asylums, good doctoring and false teeth have greatly reduced their number. "Monsieur Degas, pourquoi faites-vous toujours les femmes si laides?" "Madame, parceque la femme en générale est laide." Mixed with his motive of curiosity lay others, more profound: the motives which led men to carve gargoyles on the Gothic cathedrals. Gargoyles were the complement to saints; Leonardo's caricatures were complementary to his untiring search for ideal beauty. And gargoyles were the expression of all the passions, the animal forces, the Caliban gruntings and groanings which are left in human nature when the divine has been poured away. Leonardo was less concerned than his Gothic predecessors with the ethereal parts of our nature and so his caricatures, in their expression of passionate energy, merge imperceptibly into the heroic. Most typical of such creations is the bald, clean-shaven man, with formidable frown, nut-cracker nose and chin, who appears sometimes in the form of a caricature, more often as an ideal. His strongly accentuated features seem to have typified for Leonardo vigour and resolution, and so he becomes the counterpart of that other profile which came with equal facility from Leonardo's pen--the epicene youth. These are, in fact, the two hieroglyphs of Leonardo's unconscious mind, the two images his hand created when his attention was wandering, and as such they have an importance for us which the frequent poverty of their execution should not disguise. Virile and effeminate, they symbolise the two sides of Leonardo's nature, a dualism I have already suggested in the contrast between his life in Florence and in Milan. It is no accident that the heroic type appears with almost caricatural emphasis in the masterpiece of his Florentine period, the Battle of Anghiari; and that the epicene type is drawn with the greatest affection in those Milanese years, soon after 1490, when Salai entered Leonardo's studio. But as usual both types go back to his earliest Florentine years, were indeed taken from Verrocchio, the elegant youth from such a head as the David, the warrior from the lost Darius relief. Both types appear, contrasted for the first time, on the famous sheet at Windsor of about 1478, but there they have a Florentine quattrocento character, which they lose as they become more expressive. The warrior is still classical, the boy still young. Later the warrior's profile is distorted by the violence of his resolution, the boy becomes blowsy and self-satisfied. Yet the change is slight and subtle, more one of expression than of morphology, and shows that these two images reflect deep and fixed necessities in Leonardo's nature. Even in his most conscious creations, even in the Last Supper, they remain, as it were, the armature round which his types are created.

The two most important of Leonardo's studies at this period remain to be mentioned. They are anatomy and the action of light. His treatment of these subjects springs from his belief in painting as a science. They are two of the means by which the uncertainty of mere appearances may be given some of the certainty of meaured facts.