The studies for the Trivulzio monument

The studies for the Trivulzio monument, both by the way in which the black chalk is used and the watermark of the paper, help us to date a series of beautiful drawings for masquerade costumes. These drawings are like one another in style and conception and were probably all for the same masquerade, but which we cannot say. It must have taken place in 151112. The use of pen and ink on two of them seems to make them too late for Louis XII's residence in Milan in 1509: and the connection with the Trivulzio drawings is proof that they were not done for the masquerades which we know him to have directed in France. Nevertheless, these drawings have a subtly French flavour. The elegant artifice of the costumes, no less than the sentiment, recalls that silvery, lunar reflection of the Italian Renaissance which we see in the Châteaux of the Loire; and two of the figures wear corselets of straps and ribbons, elaborately crossed and plaited in a style which suggests that typical product of the French Renaissance, St Porchaire faience. Probably the reason for this effect is simply that Leonardo's own inherent love of interlaced movement influenced the trend of French design.

But we may also feel in these masqueraders something remote from the Italian spirit of the time, something dreamlike, as if seen through the eyes of a man to whom the golden life of the Renaissance was a distant, fanciful dream. For this reason they are remarkably like the drawings of the English Pre-Raphaelites, although the finest Burne-Jones would look thin and lifeless by comparison, and under the fluttering diaphanous skirts of Leonardo's masqueraders we catch sight of muscular legs, anatomically perfect and very different from the wooden, dainty limbs of Rossetti. Most magical of all these costume pieces is the figure of a woman standing in front of a little waterfall, pointing into the distance with a glance and a gesture which only Pater could have described. This should be Leonardo's last drawing, just as the Tempest should be Shakespeare's last play. In it he returns to the inspiration of his youth, the tradition of Fra Filippo and Botticelli, and presents it with the depth and mastery of age. It is the figure which had haunted him all his life, his angel, his familiar, transfixed at last. Unlike the St John in the Louvre, where a similar creature of his imagination is almost smothered in the labour of painting, this drawing is built of touches as broken and evasive as the latest Titian. We cannot imagine it being done part by part. A puff of wind has blown away the mist, and revealed this goddess, as stately as an elm, as subtle as a gothic Virgin.

The studies for the Trivulzio memorial and the masquerade costumes must be the last works Leonardo executed for his French patrons in Milan. In June 1512 an unholy alliance of Spaniards, Papal mercenaries and Venetians took over the government of the city, and Milan, which had been steadily declining as a centre of civilisation, became completely disorganised. The poets, artists and men of learning who at first hoped to find in the French occupation some afterglow of the Sforza patronage had already turned their hungry eyes elsewhere, and chiefly to Rome, whither Leonardo himself was soon to follow them. But for another year he remained in Milan, or nearby at Vaprio, in the house of his exquisite new friend and disciple, Francesco Melzi.

One of his occupations during this year must be noticed, since it provides us with our last dated evidence of his style of drawing. This is his study of anatomy. In 1510-11 he met Marc Antonio dalla Torre, the greatest anatomist of his time, who, according to Vasari, helped Leonardo in his anatomical researches. But of this help Leonardo's dated notebooks give no evidence. As we have seen, he was already studying anatomy in 1489 when Marc Antonio was only seven years old. By 1500 his researches had been carried far beyond anything necessary for the science of painting, and Leonardo had begun to cut deep into the central problems of biology by studying the processes of generation. A famous anatomical drawing representing the coition of a man and woman shows the strange detachment with which he regarded this central moment of an ordinary man's life. It must date from about 1497. A few years later he was at work on the same subject, and symbolising it, as we have seen, in the Leda. A large manuscript at Windsor, known as the Anatomical MS. A, bears the inscription "in the spring of this year, 1510, I hope to have completed all this branch of anatomy". The greater part therefore dates from the year 1509, before the meeting with Marc Antonio, and proves that Leonardo cannot have learnt anatomy from the younger man. This manuscript contains a number of drawings of écorché figures, beautiful in themselves and useful as dating Leonardo's pen technique. We see his system of shading following form carried almost to the point of mannerism. The line is dry and wiry, seldom betraying any feeling or vivacity, a sad, scientific style, compared to the beautiful anatomical drawings of 1489: yet the masquerade costumes of the same date show that Leonardo had not lost the magic of his touch when he chose to release it.

This manuscript deals chiefly with musculature: but as a whole his later anatomical studies show him interested less in the mechanical than the organic side of his subject. A whole notebook dating from about 1512 is devoted to embryology, and he makes what must be one of the first drawings of a child in the womb. When we remember the tenderness and delicacy of feeling which all early authorities attribute to Leonardo we can realise some of the noble and passionate curiosity which drove him to make such a terrible dissection, and to draw it with such a lucid and purposeful touch. His last anatomical manuscript, dated 9 January 1513, deals with the heart. It is characteristic that although he investigates the action of the heart and arteries with great thoroughness, he never brings himself to propose the circulation of the blood as a formulated theory. The manuscript is written with a blunt pen on coarse, blue grey paper, and the illustrative drawings have a deliberate carelessness of touch as though Leonardo were denying himself the comeliness of his earlier style. This is the technique of nearly all his latest drawings. It is not attributable to any physical decay, for we have writing of a later date of the greatest neatness: rather it seems to reflect the pessimism and the disillusion of old age, which rejects material beauty even if it consist in a dexterous line or a finely-turned cadence of verse.