The Latin literature alone of this century would be enough to assure it a place as one of the wonderful productive periods in world letters. The "Imitation of Christ" was not written during the century, though its author seems to have put it into the ultimate form in which we now know it about the beginning of our period. It was during this time that it came to be recognized as a great source of consolation, a marvellous study of the human heart in time of trial and of triumph and the most influential book that had ever come from the hand of man. We have gathered together a small sheaf of the tributes that have been paid to it by some of the serious thinkers in all generations since, but it would be easy to fill a volume with words of highest commendation. In the Latin literature of this period also must be counted Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," which has been read in every generation that has taken its social problems seriously ever since, and never more so than in our own time. It deserves a place in world literature beside Plato's "Republic," and it is far ahead of any of the attempts at the description of a socialized state made in our time. For scholars at least Erasmus' writings represent an enduring contribution to Latin literature of the classic type, a storehouse of information with regard to the scholarship and also lack of scholarship of the time. For those interested in mystical subjects St. Ignatius' "Spiritual Exercises" is another of the Latin works of the period which, though it can scarcely be classed as literature, for, as we have said, Ignatius like Michelangelo wrote things rather than words, must take its place amid Columbian letters of lasting value since it is more used now than ever before.
There are not many surpassing works of vernacular literature from this time, and yet Machiavelli's history represents the only contribution to historical literature that takes a place in human interests beside the immortal trio of classical historians, Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus. Ariosto represents one of the favorite works of Italian scholars, and as the Italians have been the most cultured people in the world ever since, their critical judgment must be accepted as of great value. In popular literature the Tales of Chivalry, the Picaresque romances or tales of roguery and the almost endless {xlii} number of Italian novels show how wide must have been the popular reading of the time. In France Villon has always been a favorite for all classes, and with Charles of Orleans he has been known by scholars at least outside of France and thoroughly appreciated. French modes of verse following the Italian came to influence the other countries of Europe at this time and have never ceased to supply ideas for the form of the less serious modes of poetry at least for all the generations down to our own. The influence of Clément Marot, of Brantôme and the Pleiades was felt in every literature of Europe, and has not completely disappeared even after the nearly four centuries that have elapsed since their time.
The literature of the century contains besides the names of Rabelais as well as Calvin in France, Baldassare Castiglione, Michelangelo, Vasari, Politian, Bembo, Lorenzo de' Medici, Pico della Mirandola and the learned ladies Vittoria Colonna, Margaret of Navarre, Lucretia Tornabuoni, the mother of Lorenzo de Medici, as well as the great scholars of the period in Italy. In Spain St. Teresa and the great mystical writers were compensating for the triviality and worse of the picaresque romances and the tales of chivalry. In Portugal the young genius of Camöens was nurtured, while in England Sir Thomas More was laying the foundations of modern English prose, the great Morality Plays, "Everyman" and the "Castle of Perseverance," were written, and the first fruits of English dramatic literature in its more modern form came in "Ralph Royster Doyster" and "Gammer Gurton's Needle." In Germany the literary product of the vernacular was less significant, but Luther's great popular hymns and his vernacular translation of the Scriptures gave a vigorous birth to modern German verse and prose, while Hans Sachs and the Minnesingers did as much for popular poetry. Few periods can present a literature so rich in every country, so varied, with so many enduring elements and with so much that remains as the constant possession of scholars ever since. The literature of the time may not equal its art or even its science, but no apologies are needed for it.
In a word, then, the books of the arts, the deeds and the words of Columbus' Century when read even a little carefully {xliii} show us a marvellous period in which man's power of achievement was at its very highest. Its art in every department has never been excelled and has only been equalled by that of the Greeks, from whom, however, we possess no painting worthy of the name. Its intellectual achievements in scholarship and in science give it the leadership in education in the modern world at least. What it accomplished for men in great works of humanity represent a triumph of humanitarianism in the best sense of that word, and present achievements worthy to be emulated by the modern time. The book of its words is of less import, and yet there are not more than two or three periods in the world's history that have surpassed it and there are some modes of literature in which it is unexcelled. In the midst of this century the discovery of America instead of being a surprise cannot but seem the most natural thing in the world. Everywhere men were doing things that for many centuries men had been unable to do and they were achieving triumphs in every form of human effort. Given the fact that there was a large undiscovered portion of the world, it was more likely to be discovered at this time than at any other time in the world's history. That is the background of Columbus' Discovery of America, which anyone who wants to understand its place must know.
Any attempt at proper consideration of the book of the arts of Columbus' Century must begin with the three great names of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. They are the greatest trio in the history of art--all their names associated with a single city at the beginning of their lives but deeply influencing the world of art before the end of them. Of the three as a painter Raphael is undoubtedly the greatest, though surely here, if anywhere in the history of art, comparisons are odious. Each of these geniuses in his own department of painting was supreme,--as a religious painter Raphael, as a portrait painter Leonardo, as a great decorative artist Michelangelo. Raphael rivals Leonardo, however, in the painting of portraits and some of Leonardo's religious paintings are almost the only ones worthy to be placed besides Raphael's great religious visions. Michelangelo, however, could on occasion, as he showed in the Sistine, prove a rival of either of them in this mode.
As is so true of the men of this time as a rule, all three of these men were much more than painters. Raphael died at the early age of thirty-seven, yet he reached distinction as an architect and as an archaeologist, besides accomplishing his great painting. Leonardo insisted on not being thought of as a painter, but as an engineer and architect, though he has painted the greatest portrait ever made and beat Michelangelo once in a competition in sculpture. Michelangelo reached supremacy in all four of the greatest modes of art. He is a painter second to none in all that he attempted, he is the {2} greatest sculptor since the time of the Greeks, he is one of the greatest architects of all time, yet with all this, by what might seem almost an impossible achievement, he was one of the greatest of poets and has written sonnets that only Dante and Shakespeare have equalled. These men of Columbus' Century not only were never narrow specialists but quite the contrary; they were extremely varied in their interests and felt in contradiction to what seems the prevalent impression in our time that such breadth of interest only increased their powers of expression in anything that they attempted.
Of the three probably Raphael has had the widest popular influence. His paintings have all unconsciously to most people colored and visualized for them the Biblical scenes, especially of the New Testament, and since his time painters have been greatly influenced by his compositions. He has deeply affected all the world of art and as for several centuries now some of his greatest works have been held outside of Italy, they have been producing their effect and giving artists the thought of how well deepest vision could be expressed.
This man, who by universal consent was the greatest painter that ever lived, was about nine years old when Columbus discovered America. According to tradition he died on his birthday at the age of thirty-seven in 1520. In less than two decades of active artist life he had painted a series of pictures that were a triumph even in that glorious period of marvellous artistic accomplishment. They have been the subject of loving study and affectionate admiration ever since. Many of them have been the despair of the artists who came after him. But Raphael is not an artists' artist in any exclusive sense of the word. He is as popular an idol with those who confess to having no critical knowledge of art as he is the hopeless model of those whose lives are devoted to art.
RAPHAEL, DRAWING OF SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS (tapestry, VATICAN)
Unlike many a genius, though his family was poor his early years were surrounded by conditions all favorable for the development of his talents. Raphael is his baptismal name and his family name was Santi. (The name Sanzio often attributed to him has no warrant in history.) His father Giovanni Santi filled the post of art expert, so far as that office was formally constituted at that time, to Duke Frederick, {4} reigning Prince of Urbino, and it was here that Raphael was born. The Duke was one of the most distinguished and perhaps the most discriminating of the great Renaissance patrons of art as well as of letters, and a series of well-known painters, among them Piero della Francesca, Melozzo da Forli and Justus of Ghent, were in his service at this time. Duke Frederick's interest in everything artistic had made the capital of his little principality one of the most important art centres of this time and his palace is still the Mecca for visitors to Italy who are interested in the development of art, for it possesses some of the great masterpieces of the Renaissance painters. Raphael in his boyhood had in a more limited way almost as favorable surroundings as Michelangelo enjoyed in Florence, but with his father's favor of his studies instead of the opposition that this Florentine contemporary encountered. Urbino was indeed almost as much of a centre of intellectual influence and progress at this time as the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, at which Michelangelo was brought up. It was at Urbino that Baldassare Castiglione wrote "Il Cortigiano," the book of The Gentleman, the elegant setting forth of what was represented by that term in the Renaissance period.
When Raphael was about eleven his father died, but fortunately the maternal uncle under whose guardianship he passed was quite as favorable to art as his father had been. Yielding to the wishes of the boy he permitted him to enter the studio of Timoteo Viti, a pupil of the artist Francia, who had lately returned from his studies in other portions of Italy to take up his residence in his native country. During the next few years Raphael devoted himself to that training in drawing which was to mean so much for him. Just about a century ago a sketchbook was found, now in the Academy of Venice, having been purchased for the city, in which there are over a hundred pen-and-ink drawings of various pictures copied by Raphael, and competent critics declare that the masterly genius of the artist can already be recognized in them.
Besides these he painted a series of pictures in Timoteo's studio. Some of these have been preserved. Probably the best known is "St. George and St. Michael," now in the Louvre, though the "Dream of the Knight" in the National Gallery, {5} London, has been the admiration of young folk particularly for many generations. There are some who claim that the most charming of these early pictures painted at Urbino is the "Three Graces of the Tribune of Chantilly."
RAPHAEL, DREAM OF THE KNIGHT
After this Raphael studied for a time, probably for some four years, with Perugino at Perugia. This period of his life is mainly interesting from the fact that while he acquired Perugino's technique, Raphael went far beyond his master, though for a time his development was probably hindered rather than helped by that master's influence. Only one of the paintings made at Perugia, "The Coronation of the Virgin," painted for the Franciscans of that city, and now to be seen in the Vatican, reveals as art critics declare the real genius of Raphael shining through and above the qualities that he had borrowed from his Perugian master.
After Raphael's years of fruitful student work in the Hill Country so dear to students of Italian culture for its four periods of great art, there came his Florentine period, which represents a new and wonderful evolution of his artistic genius. Here, when he arrived in 1504, Leonardo da Vinci in his productive forties and the young Michelangelo in his revealing later twenties were at work at their famous historical cartoons, and the atmosphere of the city was deeply imbued with the Renaissance spirit. It is a little difficult now to think of Raphael as merely a young struggling artist, making his living by painting portraits for rather commonplace people, and executing his earlier Madonnas for private oratories, partly from love of his work but mainly because he needed the money, yet this constituted his occupation. [Footnote 1]
[Footnote 1: As pointed out by Grimm in his "Life of Michelangelo" the patrons of the Renaissance painters at the beginning of that period, and indeed until after the climax of its development had been reached, were either of the middle class or consisted of the religious orders and ecclesiastical authorities intent on the decoration of churches. The town folk ordered pictures for their homes or for the decoration of churches. The artist was a craftsman, like the goldsmith or any other. When artists became the favorites of princes and kings and rulers, when they came to occupy positions at courts, it was not long before decadence began. Lives at court were not calculated to bring out what was best nor to encourage profound thinking nor provide the leisure which is necessary for great art, and truth lost its attraction in jealous rivalry and the desire to please a patron.]
His Madonnas soon made him famous. At the end of his first year in Florence came one of his masterpieces, the "Madonna of the Grand Duke," still to be seen at the Pitti. At this {6} time Raphael was under the influence of the great Dominican painter Fra Bartolommeo, though undoubtedly the specimens of Fra Angelico's work so frequent in Florence had their power over him. The sweetness and mystical beauty which, added to the human tenderness of his lovely mothers, make his Madonnas so charming are the fruit of Raphael's studies in Florence. Under the influence of the two Dominican painters such great pictures as "La Belle Jardinière," of the Louvre, the "Madonna of the Goldfinch" now in the Uffizi, Florence, and the "Madonna of the Meadow," one of the treasures of the Vienna collection, were produced.
Just before he left Florence he painted for Atlanta Baglioni an "Entombment" which is his first attempt at an historic picture. The critics declare that it was spoiled somewhat by overwork at it and overanxiety to rival some of the great paintings of this kind from Leonardo and Michelangelo which Raphael had so much admired. However that may be, it is undoubtedly one of the world's greatest pictures, especially when the age of the artist, twenty-five, is taken into account. Just after he finished it he was summoned to Rome by that discerning patron of genius Pope Julius II. His great opportunity had arrived. Only a little more than ten years of life lay ahead of him, but in that ten years the art of the world was to receive almost its greatest treasures. In their "Italian Cities" the Blashfields have told the story of his Roman career:--
"Raphael's conquest of his surroundings was almost magical: he arrived a youth, well spoken of as to skill, yet by reputation hardly even par inter pares; in ten short years--how long if we count them in art history--he died, having painted the Vatican, the Farnesina, world-famous altar-pieces, having planned the restoration of the entire urbs, having reconciled enemies and stimulated friends, and having succeeded without being hated.
"He achieved this success by his great and manifold capacity, but, most of all, because in art he was the greatest assimilator and composer who ever lived. The two words are each other's complements; he received impressions, and he put them together; his temperament was exactly suited to this marvellous forcing house of Rome, for a Roman school never really existed, it was simply the Tusco-Umbrian school throned upon seven hills and growing grander and freer in the contemplation of Antiquity.
"To this contemplation, Raphael brought not only a brilliant endowment but an astonishing mental accumulation; the mild eyes of the Uffizi portrait were piercing when they looked upon nature or upon art, and behind them was an alembic in which the things that entered through those eyes fused, precipitated, or crystallized as he willed."
Pope Julius II, himself one of the great geniuses of history, with a dream of a united Italy long before there was any possibility of its accomplishment, and with an appreciation of genius that alone would have given him a commanding place among the world's great rulers, had summoned to Rome for the decoration of the apartments of the Vatican some of the greatest painters of the time. Even from distant Flanders came Reuisch and then there were Perugino, Raphael's old master, now advanced in years, and Signorelli, quite as old, and Lotto and Sodoma and Peruzzi and others. It was beside these that Raphael had to do his work. Within a year of Raphael's coming he, the youngest of them all, not yet twenty-six years of age, was selected by the Pope--how well advised he was--as the one to whom all the important decorations should be entrusted. Then came the opportunity to do the Camera della Segnatura, that triumph of decorative art. "This chamber of the Vatican" became, as Raphael's biographer in the Catholic Encyclopaedia says, "a sort of mirror of the tendencies of the human mind, a summary of all its ideal history, a sort of pantheon of spiritual grandeurs. Thereby the representation of ideas acquired a dramatic value, being no longer as in the Middle Ages the immovable exposition of an unchangeable truth but the impassioned search for knowledge in all its branches, the moral life of humanity."
His decorations of the Camera de la Segnatura are probably among the greatest contributions to decorative art ever made. They are certainly among the most interesting. Only Michelangelo's wonderful decorations in the Sistine Chapel rival them and there are some critics who would concede the palm to Raphael. Here we have the index not only of his power to paint marvellously but also of his intellectual genius and his judgment of values in the history of literature and philosophy. Such pictures as the "Disputa" and the "School of Athens" are real contributions to the history of human thought. Only a man who was himself of profound intellectuality on a plane of equality with the great intellectual geniuses whom he was painting could have conceived and completed these magnificent groups of the world's greatest men successfully. It has been well said that to appreciate properly the pictures of the Segnatura is of itself an education. To be able to take them in their full significance as essays in art and in the history of literature and philosophy is to have gone far on the road to culture. Raphael's achievement here is that of a great mind gifted with a wonderful power of comprehension as well as an almost unrivalled faculty of expression. No decorative pictures of the modern time, however great, can be placed beside them.
It has often been a source of wonder how Raphael was able to paint so appropriately the figures of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and others in his great picture of the "School of Athens." Only the genius that gives men intuition, that enabled Shakespeare to portray wonderfully the character of the men of all times and the blind Homer to give us an enduring picture of man could have enabled him to do it. It was the time of the New Learning and the recently aroused interest in the classics, but no mere accumulation of information would ever have made him capable of such a representation. As Gladstone once said of Homer, a whole encyclopaedia of information with regard to the Greeks of Homer's time would not have told us as much about them as Homer has given us. At the time when he did the painting Raphael was not much more than thirty and his life had been occupied with painting and not with the accumulation of erudition. Henry Strachey in {9} his sketch of Raphael calls attention to the fact that none of the great contemporary Italian humanists were in Rome at this time. Neither Bembo nor Bibbiena nor Castiglione were where they might be readily consulted, and it was only Raphael's genius insight that enabled him to accomplish so wonderfully the task he had been set. For while the subjects were probably chosen for him he had to work out the details for himself, and indeed these wonderful compositions show this very clearly.
Raphael, School of Athens
Raphael revealed for us in the "Camera della Segnatura," as almost no one else has done, the attitude of mind of his period with regard to the meaning of life. Years of scholarly devotion to the study of pagan antiquity and especially the great Greek philosophers and poets, as well as the remains of its sculpture, had awakened in men's minds a broader view of life and its significance than had been possible for centuries. Raphael has summed this up in the wonderful documents that he has left in the Vatican and put on canvas what the great scholars of the time tried to express in words. The late Professor Kraus of Munich in his chapter on Medicean Rome in the second volume of the Cambridge modern History has told the story of this:
"The four pictures of the camera represent the aspirations of the soul of man in each of its faculties; the striving of all humanity towards God by means of aesthetic perception (Parnassus), the explanation of reason in philosophical inquiry and all scientific research (the School of Athens), order in Church and State (Gift of Ecclesiastical and Secular Laws) and finally Theology. The whole may be summed up as a pictorial representation of Pico della Mirandola's celebrated phrase, philosophia veritatem quaerit, theologia invenit, religio possidet; and it corresponds with what Marsilio says in his Academy of Noble Minds when he characterized our life's work as an ascent to the angels and to God."
Artists and poets and writers have vied with each other in saying strong words of high praise with regard to these decorations. The Blashfields in their "Italian Cities" have told the story of the limitations under which he worked, those of the room, lighted from two sides with two walls pierced by {10} windows, and then the fact that to a great extent probably his subjects were dictated, yet he must needs body them forth in concrete form and clearly. How well the young artist not only overcame these difficulties but out of the very difficulties created the most marvellous portions of his masterpieces the Blashfields have also told.
In one paragraph they have detailed the story of Raphael's associations with the artists of Rome at that period. Because it gives some idea of the wealth of artistic genius existent in this time it concerns us deeply here. They say: "The Urbinate (Raphael) strong as he was, had felt the need of strengthening himself still further by acquiring the friendship of other artists, and creating a kind of little court. We are told that almost nightly at his table there met, Luca Signorelli, Pietro Perugino, Baldassare Peruzzi, Giovanantonio Bazzi and Lorenzo Lotto. What an age! when a single supper party could furnish such an assemblage of world-famous artists, who in turn, as they went from their quarters in the Borgo Vecchio, might meet Michelangelo returning from the Vatican with the contingent of Florentines, Bugiardini, Granacci, Aristotile da Sangallo, and l'Indaco, who were helping him in the Sistine Chapel."
So much has been said of the Camera della Segnatura that it is sometimes forgotten that there are other rooms at the Vatican decorated by Raphael, only less wonderful than this. If they existed anywhere else they would be prized very highly, and if they were by any other artist would place him among the great artists of all time. The Camera del Incendio, so called because of the representation of "The Fire in the Borgo," has in this scene one of the most dramatic pictures ever painted. There are other great dramatic subjects finely treated here, as "The Oath of Leo III" and the "Coronation of Charlemagne." In this work Raphael was probably assisted to a noteworthy extent by pupils and associates, yet all of it is stamped with his genius. There are in the Camera del Eliodoro such pictures as "Jacob's Dream," the "Sacrifice of Isaac" and the "Burning Bush," which show Raphael's wonderful power of composition and at the same time the readiness of genius which enabled him to turn from one subject to another, accomplishing {11} so much that one is astounded to think of how ideas must have crowded on him and yet how well all is done considering that the artist so often needs above all the element of time to perfect his work. Had Raphael been spared to the ordinary length of life or to such years as Michelangelo's four score and ten or Titian's almost five score, what an abundance of his art there would be in the world.
One of Raphael's greatest works at Rome is comparatively little appreciated except by those whose attention has been particularly called to it. This was his making of the cartoons for the series of tapestries to be hung in the Sistine Chapel. These tapestries were to be manufactured in the Low Countries, but the Pope wanted the subjects that were to be represented to come from Raphael. Raphael consented to make the cartoons for them, though he knew that they would be cut into rolls some two inches wide to be handed over to the weavers. He had no idea that they would ever be exhibited except in the imperfect way in which tapestry can represent painting. Most artists of high rank would probably refuse such a commission. Certainly it seemed rather derogatory to his dignity as an artist to think that he should furnish only copies that were themselves to have no place among his collected works and prove at most a dubious addition to his fame. Under these circumstances it would not have been surprising if the composition and the manner of execution of the cartoons had been far below that of his works in painting and fresco.
He gave himself to the commission, however, whole-heartedly and executed a series of designs that are among the greatest compositions that have ever come from an artist's hand. These cartoons, after having been copied in tapestry, lay in the narrow rolls into which they had been slit in the tapestry factory in the Low Countries until, resurrected almost in our own time, they became the most precious treasures of the South Kensington Museum in London. Here they have been the favorite study of artists from all countries and have added laurels to Raphael's crown of artistic glory. He had the artist's true sense of joy in work and the artistic conscience to satisfy the canons of his own judgment and taste, even in a task that was to represent him only at second hand. Almost {12} never in history has the great artist consented thus to make himself subsidiary to the artisan, and that Raphael, the greatest of artists, should have done it shows the genuine spirit of true art as developed at this time.
Some of these cartoons, as "St. Paul Preaching to the Athenians," are considered among Raphael's greatest works. Raphael has well been called the greatest decorator who ever lived, yet he consented to add his mite to the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, in which Michelangelo's triumphant work stood out so grandly above, in order that the hangings on the walls might be worthy of that wonderful chapel that a great Pope had planned and had had the happy faculty of securing the greatest men of all time as collaborators in finishing.
Perhaps nothing shows the wonderful artistic power and influence of Raphael more than the fact that his compositions have dictated practically all the interpretation of Bible scenes for the after time. Quite unconsciously men have adopted his way of looking at things. He did not costume Biblical characters in the clothes of his own time, but on the other hand, in spite of his wide knowledge as an archaeologist, he did not attempt to make his pictures true to the genuine life of the times and the costuming of the older period. The set of cartoons particularly illustrate how well he visualized the scenes and yet the Apostles are dressed in garments that they never wore. As I write there is before me an engraving of Paul preaching to the Athenians. That Unknown God whom they had worshipped he is come to preach to them. It is a wonderful composition. Probably nothing has ever excelled it. There is probably not a single feature in it, however, that in any way represents what is true to history in the scene or the people. After his time for centuries his visualization satisfied people's minds, so much is genius able to impose itself on humanity.
The Sistine Madonna, the only picture of Raphael's painted on canvas, is usually considered to be the greatest religious painting that ever was executed and one of the most wonderful realizations of vivid poetic imagination that the world possesses. Everything in it is full of sublime suggestion. The majestic attitude of the Madonna posed upon the clouds, her face of perfect beauty, her far-away gaze of rapt veneration {13} and absorption in her motherhood, but motherhood of the Divine, proclaim her a vision from Heaven. No more wonderful conception of the human mother of the Divinity has ever been reached and yet critics and artists are a unit in proclaiming that the Virgin Mother is surpassed in wondrous realization of profound imagination by the Divine Child Whom she holds so tenderly in her arms. He looks out into the world from those arms with solemn sacred eyes that somehow give the idea of His profound interest in all that He sees and of an all-embracing vision. Then there is the rugged, bearded Pope Sixtus gazing upward with rapt devotion and the graceful, beautiful Saint Barbara adequately representative of the modest virgins who all over the world, for all the time since the coming of Christ, modestly cast their eyes down before the Virgin Mother and her child. Below are the two exquisite boy angels, whose charming childish attitudes of rapture have always roused so much interest.
It is said that these were the portraits of two little boys who came to gaze, boy fashion, curiously into the window of the studio while Raphael was painting. His transformation of the mischievous, inquisitive, supremely boyish faces into the look of angelic rapture is one of the triumphs of the picture that have always made it of the greatest interest. Painted originally for an Italian Church it is now the treasure of the gallery of Dresden, where it occupies a room by itself that is more like a shrine to which devout worshippers come from all over the world and in which as in some sacred place the visitor distinctly lowers his voice and walks on tiptoe. Nothing tells more of what the picture means than to watch the crowds that come from all over the world to see it and the way in which it is almost worshipped by those whose opinion is worth the most.
After the Sistine Madonna, unfortunately for art, Raphael's attention was drawn more and more from its special sphere of work as a painter and his time was taken up and his attention absorbed by the larger, wider pursuits of art director and archaeologist. This would not have been so sad perhaps only for the brevity of the life destined to be his. Had he lived to three score and ten the ten years devoted to these {14} phases of art work, as they may well be called, would probably have proved beneficial to his development. As it was we are likely to think of it as time wasted by a great genius painter. His art directorship proves the genius of the man. His workshop at Rome gradually took on the character of a school of art. In this designs were prepared not only for fresco but for mosaic work, for tapestry, for the carving of wood and stone and even for engraving and other phases of art. Vasari mentions fifty scholars who were employed as pupils and assistants in this workshop. In the meantime Raphael's interest in art history and his passion for classical art led him to dispatch artists to Naples and Athens, to make drawings of noteworthy antiquities that had been discovered. His manifold interests serve to show how broad were his own sympathies with everything artistic.
Towards the end of his life, though Raphael at thirty-five had no idea that death was impending, he devoted himself to the study of Roman antiquities and to the direction of the archaeological excavations which were then being carried on in Rome. He had conceived the design of reconstructing an entire plan of ancient Rome, based partly on the discoveries of the excavators and partly on the descriptions of classical writers. For this he made numerous plans and sketches with his own hand, and though these have unfortunately perished, there is in the Library at Munich a copy of the report which he drew up on this subject. It is in the form of a Latin letter to Pope Leo X, showing how deeply the Pope was interested in the scheme and that very probably it was due to his urging that Raphael took it up. This letter has been declared a monument to the industry and the archaeological learning of the artist. Ordinarily in the modern time we are likely to think that the artist devotes himself to his painting and leaves to the professional scholar such work as this. We do not look for many-sidedness in the artist. Raphael, however, like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, evidently had a magnificent breadth of intellect that would have given the most precious fruits of the spirit in many lines besides painting, had he only lived to anything like the years of so many of his great contemporaries.
RAPHAEL, POETRY (MOSAIC, VATICAN)
When it was announced that the "Mona Lisa" had been stolen from the Louvre a thrill of solicitude that was almost dismay went through the civilized world. Its recovery has been a triumph. It is only a woman's portrait, herself of no importance, with what some might call a conventional landscape behind it, all on a comparatively small canvas, with its colors rather dimmed by time and by unfortunate surroundings during its somewhat over four hundred years of existence, yet it was looked upon as one of the most precious art treasures of the race. Critics with a right to an opinion have often declared that it was probably the greatest portrait of a human being that had ever been painted. When we recall how magnificently Rembrandt portrayed the Dutch burghers of his time, with what marvellous expression Raphael painted some of the personages he knew and how wondrously Velasquez painted some of his contemporaries; the placing of Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" above them by good critics shows what a supreme place must be accorded to it in the history of art. Art critics have expressed themselves in almost unmeasured terms as to the significance of the expression on the face of the "Mona Lisa." They do not hesitate to proclaim that Leonardo painted the very soul and not merely the bodily features of a woman. Walter Pater in his "The Renaissance" has written an almost dithyrambic description of it that is well known and yet deserves to be quoted again if only to show how a really great critic can be carried away by a favorite work of art:--
"'La Gioconda' is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness, only the 'Melancholia' of Dürer is comparable to it; and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We all know the face {16} and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least.
"The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire. Here is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed? All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands."
While the "Mona Lisa" was undoubtedly the greatest of Leonardo's portraits, perhaps the best possible idea of Leonardo's power as an artist is to be found in the "Last Supper." Instead of making a placid group he has chosen the moment just after the Lord had said that one of the Twelve will betray Him and when all are asking "Is it I, Lord?" He represents not only the individual shock but also the natural grouping that occurred as a consequence of the announcement There are four groups of three each, separate and with very distinct interest and yet they are so arranged as not to break the unity of the picture. On the left side the outer three {17} are all intently gazing on the Lord while the external group on the other side are gazing away from Him, but their hands all point towards Him. The inner three on the right are talking directly to Him while the corresponding three on the left are occupied among themselves and yet evidently intent on Him. There was probably never put together a more expressive set of faces. Each one is eminently individual, and each one shows marvellously the character of the Apostle represented. It has been said that it is as if the painter had made a condensed biography of each one of them with his brush. All the special characteristics of the different Apostles that we know are here to be seen in their faces. He has painted the souls and characters of the men in the imaginary portraits that he makes.
There is an old tradition mentioned by Vasari, that charming gatherer of legends with regard to the old painters, that Leonardo, unable to satisfy himself with the head and face of Jesus, left it unfinished. This would indeed have been a sad loss to art. Leonardo hesitated for long, wondering above all whether he should follow a model, but finally made his peace with tradition, accepted the type of head for the Lord that had been created by Giotto, and refining it still more succeeded in giving a look of mystic superhumanity to it that would evoke the idea of divinity. It is easy to see how much he borrowed but it is harder to realize how much he added, yet artists who have studied it have felt that here indeed was a triumph and that, as far as possible, Leonardo had represented the human face divine. He followed his model strictly in the case of the Apostles' heads and none knew better than he how to select models, but in the head of Christ he turns from the model and works out his design from ideals of the human face of which so many existed in his well-stored fancy. The face of Christ was left somewhat vague, trembling, undissolved like faces seen in cloud or in the fire. Leonardo himself once counselled his students to look for suggestions in curious cloud and fire shapes and even to study the vague forms that occur in imitation of human faces on cracked and stained surfaces of ruined walls, and some of his own devotion to this seems to have been of help to him in this marvellous face.
Much has been said about the head of Judas in this picture. According to Vasari, Leonardo fairly outdid himself on this face and head and he talks about "the force and truth with which the master has exhibited the imperious determination, hatred and treachery of Judas." According to another legend he had haunted the purlieus of Florence for months, searching for a head and face expressive enough in its malignity for his Judas. Possibly one might expect to find a human monster then in the Apostle traitor. In spite of Vasari's traditions, who here seems to have indulged his fancy for the sensational, Judas has a very interesting human face, rather weak than strong, but with redeeming qualities in it. After all it must not be forgotten that the face had to recall or at least not negative the fact that this man had been for three years in the company of the Lord, chosen as one of the Twelve, with possibilities of as great accomplishment for good as the others if he had not turned aside. Judas was not foreordained to be a traitor, but he made himself such. It was not his nature that compelled him to the crime, but his failure to control certain elemental passions, above all the craving for money, that led him into it. Many a good man since has been led off the same way. We have the face of a man who might have been one of the honored Apostles. That he was not is his own fault. It is said that the same model was used by Leonardo for Peter and Judas. If so, surely it was a stroke of genius. Peter too was weak. He even denied the Master, but had it in him to realize his weakness and repent. Peter's face is in the light, Judas' face in the shadow of Leonardo's picture. If Leonardo had not given Judas the bag to carry, thrown his face out of the line of the Apostles near him who are in the light, and made him ominously upset the salt while reaching for a better quality of bread than that near him, it would have been rather difficult to pick him out from among the others.
One thing is absolutely true in this great work of art. All the faces of the Apostles, with the possible exception of John's, are rudely strong. The men who were to carry on the work of the Master and convert the world to Christianity were not effeminate in any sense, and above all they had been the rough {19} fishermen of Galilee. Their costumes are modernized, their beards are probably less unkempt than if they were really Judeans, but here is a group of men whose very strength of feature makes them striking.
As has been well said, Leonardo broke up the old formality and immobility of the earlier painters and brought life and action into the scene. For the first time the personages are deprived of their halos and there is nothing to make the group of men anything more than human beings deeply interested in a great purpose and disturbed to the depths of their beings by the suggestion from the Master Himself that now that purpose was to be thwarted by the treason of one of their number. This conception seems all the more natural when we recall that none of them had as yet been confirmed in grace, that one was to deny, another betray and all were to be hesitant and cowardly in a great moment of trial.
With all this of thought in Leonardo's picture it might be expected that all of his attention would be given to the faces and little to the composition itself and to the setting of the picture. The exact contrary is what happens. The composition is probably the most wonderful ever done. The room itself is so arranged that everything leads the eye toward the centre of the picture where the Master sits, while behind Him the middle one of three windows, with an arched casement, frames Him apart from the Apostles. Through these three windows at the back can be seen one of the varied mountainous landscapes that Leonardo delighted in. The extent of the landscape which can be seen shows that the supper was held in an "upper room." The bare beams of the ceiling in that coffered arrangement common in Italy, the walls ornamented with large panel spaces filled in with a damasked pattern are all worked over with artistic completeness of detail. It is details of this kind one might expect the painter of the Last Supper to have overlooked in his intentness on the sublime moment and the characters. The tablecloth, moreover, is beautifully worked and the linen and the pattern of it and the folds are done with as meticulous care as one might expect from a genre painter of tissues. The glasses and table service are very carefully drawn and every detail was executed with {20} an artistic conscience and eye to perfection, even of trifles, that reveals the thoroughness and all-embracing skill of the artist.
The more one knows of Leonardo's power to paint detail and of his devoted study of nature, the less surprise is there at the traditions with regard to his head of Medusa. It was much for an artist to attempt to make a picture of this hideous head on which were the writhing serpents, the sight of which, according to tradition, turned beholders to stone, but he has succeeded in accomplishing a presentation of the horrible as far as it is possible. The writhing serpents are done with a devotion to detail and a lifelike naturalness that only a great observer of nature could have reached. Besides the serpents in all their varieties there are bats and lizards and vermin of many kinds in the picture, while the cloudy mephitic breath which can be seen issuing from the mouth completes the picture. The intense realism of these details of low animal life is a surprise at that period, but above all a surprise that it should have been done by a man who had such wonderful power of idealization when he wished to use it. It is this combination of qualities so opposite in themselves and often thought mutually exclusive that makes the never-ending surprise of Leonardo's genius. That the painter of the "Last Supper" and the charming "Madonna of the Rocks" should have also made this "Head of Medusa" is indeed difficult to understand, and yet not more than might be expected from one of the greatest of the artists of the Renaissance who is at the same time almost the world's most manifold genius.
LEONARDO DA VINCI, MADONNA OF THE ROCKS (LONDON)
With all this of magnificent accomplishment in painting, which sets him on a pinnacle by himself in this great department of art, it might be thought that Leonardo's main claim to recognition was because of his painting. He himself, however, would have been the first to object to estimation of him on any such grounds. He probably scarcely considered himself to be a painter at all, or at least occupied himself with painting only in his leisure moments. He beat Michelangelo once in a competition in sculpture, but doubtless thought less of himself as a sculptor than as a painter. He made what his generation declared to be the greatest equestrian statue {21} ever modelled and his generation knew what they meant by that, for they had before them two such triumphs of equestrian statuary as Donatello's "Gatamelata" and Verrocchio's "Colleoni." Just as in painting, when he wanted to do sculpture he could do it with a supreme perfection that is unrivalled. Strange as it may seem, Leonardo thought of himself as an engineer. He actually took on himself the contract for extending the canal system around Milan and accomplished it so well that his work still remains in use. During the course of this he invented the wheelbarrow, the movable derrick, the self-dumping derrick, various modes of moving rock, locks for canals and a system for maintaining a navigable level of water in rivers which were usually nearly dry in the summer time.
Leonardo had the thorough appreciation of himself that genius is so likely to have and that in smaller men seems conceit. He knew that there was practically nothing to which he cared to turn his hand in which he could not work out original ideas. He was only in his middle twenties when he wrote the letter to Ludovico Sforza in which he tells his future patron very calmly all the things he might be expected to do if the Duke should have need of them.
"MOST ILLUSTRIOUS LORD.--Having studied and estimated the works of the present inventors of warlike engines, I have found that in them there is nothing novel to distinguish them. I therefore force myself to address your Excellency that I may disclose to you the secrets of my art. 1. I have a method of bridges, very light and very strong; easy of transport and incombustible. 2. New means of destroying any fortress or castle (which hath not foundations hewn of solid rock) without the employment of bombards. 3. Of making mines and passages, immediately and noiselessly, under ditches and streams. 4. I have designed irresistible protected chariots for the carrying of artillery against the enemy. 5. I can construct bombards, cannon, mortars, passavolanti; all new and very beautiful. 6. Likewise battering rams, machines for the casting of projectiles, and other astounding engines. 7. For sea combats I have contrivances both offensive and defensive; ships whose sides would repel stone and iron balls, and explosives, unknown to any soul. 8. In {22} days of peace, I should hope to satisfy your Excellency in architecture, in the erection of public and private buildings, in the construction of canals and aqueducts. I am acquainted with the arts of sculpture and painting, and can execute orders in marble, metal, clay or in painting with oil, as well as any artist. And I can undertake that equestrian statue cast in bronze, which shall eternally glorify the blessed memory of your lordship's father and of the illustrious house of Sforza.
"And if any of the above seem extravagant or beyond the reach of possibility, I offer myself prepared to make experiment in your park; or in whatsoever place it may please your Excellency to appoint; to whose gracious attention I most humbly recommend myself."
Was there ever a more confident genius? There was never a man who fulfilled all his promises better.
What Leonardo was able to accomplish as an engineer can be seen in the canal some 200 miles in length still in existence by which he conducted the waters of the Adda over the arduous passes of the Valtellina to the gates of Milan. In its own way and considering the conditions under which he had to work and the obstacles that he had to overcome, this was as great an engineering feat as the digging of the Panama Canal, certainly a much greater engineering project than the completion of the Suez Canal, though until Panama came to shroud the glory of that our generation was inclined to be rather proud of that achievement.
So far from being merely an artistic mind Leonardo da Vinci had typically the scientific and inquiring mind. Whenever a scientific problem came up to him, no matter how others had solved it before him and above all no matter how his contemporaries were solving it, he solved it for himself and almost inevitably in the true light of science. For instance while he was engineer, in charge, to use our modern term, of the canals of central Italy, the cuttings necessary for them brought to light a series of fossils. These were mainly shells resembling the seashells of his time, though not exactly like them. Before this a number of such finds had been made and man had found it very hard to explain them. They were usually {23} uncovered beneath a rather thick layer of earth. They looked like shells that belonged to creatures that had lived on a seashore. How could their presence be explained far from the sea and completely covered up? Occasionally, when found near the surface on the tops of rather high mountains a distance from the sea, the explanation had been offered and generally accepted that they had been deposited there by the Deluge. The buried shells and especially those deeply buried could not be thus explained. Scientists, and let us not forget that it was scientists in the true sense of the term who were especially concerned with such objects, men who knew their mathematics and principles of science very well and who had made valuable observations in other departments of science, evolved a learned theory of their presence. These were incomplete beings occurring in the earth because of a surplusage of creative power that had not quite finished its work. Their development had been arrested as it were before they actually became living creatures. When Leonardo da Vinci ran across the shells in the cuttings for his canals, he suggested another and a simpler explanation as it seemed to him. These were actually marine shellfish, which had been deposited where they now were at a time when this portion of land was submerged by the sea. They had become covered during the process of sedimentation and transformation of the land which had gradually pushed the sea far away. It always requires a genius to offer so simple an explanation as that, and as a rule it seems quite out of the question to most of his contemporaries, because of its very simplicity. They usually express their disdain for such simple-mindedness or wrong-headedness rather forcibly, though after a time they come to accept the explanation of it, but usually refuse to give the inventor any credit for his idea, because it now seems so obvious that they cannot think of it as so very new, after all.
We know that Leonardo had made a series of studies of the shells of the seashore, though ordinarily it was presumed that his studies had been directed rather to their artistic beauty than to scientific knowledge with regard to them. Apparently his very familiarity with them, however, led him to lay the foundation stone of the science of palaeontology. There are {24} sketches of a number of the spiral shells to be found in his notebooks. These are all charming in their pretty curves, and they caught his artistic eye. Nature never makes anything merely useful. This strong outwardly rude cover of shell for the amorphous ugly shellfish--that is, ugly according to most human standards--is very pretty in its forms and its color. The fine use that Leonardo made of his study in seashells was pointed out by someone who studied some of the spiral staircases for the corners of palaces in Northern Italy which Leonardo is said to have planned. These were only private stairways leading usually from the ladies' apartments to the gardens of the castles and were probably designed to be useful as fire escapes. They projected sometimes from the angles of the building. We know what hideous things fire escapes can be. These were very pretty and effectively decorative. They were planned in imitation of the spirals of some of the whorl seashells that Leonardo had been studying.
Everywhere we find that mixture of the devotion to the useful and the practical as well as the aesthetic, to the scientific as well as the artistic. He made a series of dissections. These dissections were made at a time when, if we would believe certain of our modern historians of science in its relation to religion, the Church had absolutely forbidden dissection. Such declarations are all the more incomprehensible because not only did all the anatomists and surgeons of this century do dissection quite freely, and the greatest dissections were done in Rome by the Papal Physicians in the Papal Medical School, but every artist of the time studied anatomy for art purposes through dissections. We have dissections from Raphael and from Michelangelo and from many others as well as from Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo proposed after making a large number of dissections to write a text-book of anatomy. Ordinarily it might seem that such a text-book from an artist's hands would be eminently superficial and not at all likely to further the science of anatomy, though it might be helpful for students of art, especially in their dissection work. During the past twenty years, however, a series of Leonardo's sketches made from his dissections have been republished from a number of {25} collections of the originals in important libraries in Europe. The collection at Windsor Castle in England is particularly valuable and the sketches are very complete. Anyone who looks over these republications will realize at once that had Leonardo written his text-book of anatomy and illustrated it with his own drawings, it would have been an epoch-making landmark in the history of anatomy and of medicine.
It was not until a quarter of a century after the artist's death that Vesalius, but five years old when Leonardo died, published his great anatomical text-book. At the time Vesalius was only twenty-seven years of age, but his work revolutionized anatomy and he is rightly greeted as the father of modern anatomy. Had Vesalius had the opportunity to consult Leonardo's work, his own would have been greatly facilitated. It was not merely anatomy for art purposes but for all purposes, scientific as well as artistic, that Leonardo with characteristic thoroughness had studied.
There are studies of his in zoology, made evidently for the sake of his work in sculpture, that represent important additions to this scientific department. The same thing is true with regard to botany. Flowers caught his artistic eye, but they appealed quite as much to the scientific sense and so we find sketches of many varieties of them that are very interesting but also very startling from a scientific standpoint because they show a knowledge of the parts of the flowers in detail not usually supposed to exist at that time. One is not surprised to hear that he did distinguished work in mathematics. Somehow the exact scientific bent of his mind and its literalness in all matters pertaining to science would lead us to expect that. There probably never has been a mind so thoroughly rounded out as his. Aristotle had greater scientific precision and wider knowledge, but lacked something at least of Leonardo's power to execute his artistic ideas, or we would surely have some great art from him or traditions of it. It is even not startling, with this knowledge of the scientific side of Leonardo's mind, to find that he advanced a theory of evolution. That generalization far from being new, as is often imagined, has appealed to many great investigating minds down the centuries, according to the title of a modern {26} scientist's history of the theory all the way "From the Greeks to Darwin."
One of the most interesting anticipations of a set of ideas that are definitely considered quite modern, and indeed have developed so recently that we are not quite sure of all their significance as yet, is Leonardo da Vinci's occupation with muscular movements and the saving of time and labor by carefully regulating these movements. He suggested that each different kind of work done by human muscular labor should be carefully studied, with the idea of simplifying and reducing the number of movements necessary for its accomplishment in order to save both time and effort. In a word he anticipated practically the modern ideas of the efficiency engineer of the present time though, as I have said, we are rather prone to think these ideas quite new and recent.
The personality of this universal genius is one of the most interesting that mankind has to study. Every detail is of special import. Leonardo da Vinci was born of the noble Florentine house of Vinci in the Val d'Arno. He was a precocious child, attracting attention by his beauty of feature and by his winning ways. There are stories of his improvising music and songs even when he was very young. A little later we hear of him pitying the caged songbirds and buying them and setting them free. As a growing boy he liked colors; indeed, they may almost be said to have had a fascination for him, and the bright dresses of the Florentine girls and of the peasants from the vicinity caught his eye. Tradition also connects him with a fancy for spirited horses. As if these were not enough to show an artistic temperament, while still scarcely more than a boy he began to design and sketch and even mould objects that he was interested in. Vasari's stories of him show that even at this early date, when he was only a boy, his sketches and plastic work had for subjects smiling women.
His vocation seemed clear and his father took him for education to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, then the greatest artist in Florence and one whose work has always maintained an influence over succeeding generations. Those of us who have seen his "Colleoni" in Venice are likely to think {27} of him as a great sculptor. Undoubtedly he was one of the great sculptors of the world, but he had the broad artistic spirit of the men of the Renaissance, and there was no form of art in which he was not interested and in which he did not accomplish things worthy of his great time to be the admiration of succeeding generations. Verrocchio was a great painter as well as a sculptor, but he was also a worker in metals and, as so many of these artists of the Renaissance, quite ready to design household objects for even ordinary use, provided only he was allowed to put beauty in them. Drinking vessels, instruments of music, gates, wooden doors and above all any objects that were meant for sacred uses he was glad to take commissions for.
It was just the place to train such a many-sided genius as Leonardo, though rather let us say it was just the place for such a many-sided genius to find and train himself. Certainly the young Leonardo must have owed very little except suggestion and some minor directions in technics to anyone else. He very soon came to surpass his master in painting at least, and the master recognized that fact apparently without any jealousy. According to the story as we have it, Verrocchio was employed by the Brethren of Vallombrosa to paint the "Baptism of Christ." Leonardo was given by the master permission to paint an angel in the left-hand corner. There was such a striking contrast between the fresh youthful work of the pupil and the labored work of the master that Verrocchio is said to have painted no more, or at least made no more ambitious attempts at great pictures. Sculpture was always the favorite of the old master, however, so that it was not so much of a tragedy.
It was after this, in his early manhood, that Leonardo became interested in the things of nature around him and made many investigations into their meaning. He took up astronomy for a time and anticipated some of the thoughts that Copernicus was to put in order in his great theory. Such ideas in astronomy were in the air at that time. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa had more than hinted at them when, about the middle of the fifteenth century, he declared that the earth moved in the heavens like the other stars. Astronomical subjects were {28} favorite speculations for intellectual genius. Regiomontanus, who died before he was forty, was alive in Leonardo's boyhood, and after having begun that series of astronomical leaflets which later were to influence so deeply Columbus and the Portuguese navigators, was invited down to Rome to reform the calendar. Toscanelli made the observations on comets, out of which later their orbits were confirmed. Every form of natural observation caught the inquiring Leonardo's eye, and he studied the plants around him and meditated on crystal formation and occupied himself with all the forms of living things. Somehow his feeling seemed to be that such broadening of his intelligence would help him to breadth of expression in art, though probably it was only his native curiosity occupying itself in the insatiable youthful years with everything that came to hand. His achievements in science are sketched hurriedly in the chapter on Physical Science.
Leonardo seems to have occupied himself much with mechanical toys. He made mechanical birds that flew, mechanical lions that walked and a lizard which crawled and whose horns and eyes moved while the oscillating wings were constantly in motion. Every one of these contrivances, however, was the result of serious study. He took up with great assiduity the problem of flying and was quite sure that he would be able to make a machine by which men would accomplish locomotion through the air. He studied the wings of birds very carefully, and anticipated the knowledge of most of the principles of flight as they developed in later years. He used his mechanical lion as a bait to catch the attention of Francis I. The beast is said to have walked across the audience chamber towards the monarch until, when close to him, it stood up and disclosed the fact that the "Lily of France" was stamped upon its heart. Leonardo's own name is derived from lion and this was supposed to be his declaration of patriotic affection and loyalty to the French King.
Something of the busyness of his mind can be understood from the gossip that one hears about him in the letters of the time or even from what may be concluded from his own diary. It is said, for instance, that in the midst of the painting of the "Last Supper" there was quite an interruption in the work {29} because Leonardo became very much interested in the invention of a new machine for mincing meat and making sausages. The head of one of the Apostles was left unfinished for a time because Leonardo could not get the blades of the new machine fixed so as to make them more to his satisfaction. Unfriendly critics said that he would do anything so as to get away from his painting. Those who least understood declared that this was because he was trivial of mind and incapable of concentrating his attention. Anyone who has done artistic work of any kind, or indeed has devoted himself to literary work of any description, is likely to understand Leonardo's ways in such matters. The time comes when the particular vein of thought is exhausted for the moment and new ideas come slowly and with difficulty. The serious self-critical writer or artist recognizes that what he does at such times has not the significance he would like it to have and that he is likely to have to erase or greatly modify most of it afterwards or to regret it if he does not. If he is wise, then, he turns aside and gives his mind a complete rest by devoting it to something quite different from that in which he has been engaged before. If he insists on continuing his work after inspiration ceases or his particular vein of thought runs out, it becomes more and more difficult and more and more of a drudgery. Finally, unless he is almost entirely without proper self-appreciation, he literally has to give up the work that has become so difficult.
Leonardo did not wait for this, but after a certain set of ideas had run out devoted himself to other and quite different things. He had had trouble with cleaning his brushes, and had found that a rather strong lye could be extracted from fowls' droppings. He at once devoted considerable time to finding out whether the material thus obtained could not also be used for the washing of linen. Indeed, his attention to inventions for the relief of domestic difficulties stamps him as quite modern in his notions. Besides his sausage-making machine he invented a spit for the roasting of pigs and designed various forms of utensils that would be handier than those commonly in use at that time.
Some of Leonardo's expressions are well worth chronicling {30} because they show us so well the character of the man. He did not write any moral essays, but a number of expressions of his that have been preserved show that he had decided and very definite opinions with regard to many important human interests. His greatest picture was probably the "Battle of the Standards," in which, according to the descriptions preserved for us, he pictured all the horrors of war. He depicted the frenzy of contest at its fiercest. In one of his famous expressions he disposes of war in two words as pazzia bestialissima. I find it a little hard to translate that in the force of the original, but I suppose it would be something like "the climax of animal frenzy." Even that is not as strong as that superlative bestialissima in Italian.
The ease with which he transferred his services from one distinguished noble master to another has led some to suggest that he was lacking in loyalty, or at least was quite satisfied with life so long as he found someone to pay him for his work. As a matter of fact he often spent much more in experiments of various kinds than he was paid for the results of his labors, and money seems to have meant very little to him. He was known to be generous to his friends, and he once said "the poor are those who have many wants." He realized very well that poverty is entirely relative, and if a man is dissatisfied with what he has he is poor, no matter how much he has. As might be expected, above all Leonardo realized the preciousness of work. For him indeed blessed was the man who had found his work. His expression was "as a day well spent gives joyful sleep, so does a life well spent give joyful death."
With the disturbed conditions in Italy in his time he probably had to suffer many injustices, frequently had his labors interrupted, his work often undone, and it is easy to understand how much the jealousy of smaller men around him must have irritated him. He realized, however, that happiness depends on not permitting one's self to be bothered by such trifles. The only satisfaction is to go on with one's works. As he said, "The best shield against injustice is to double the cloak of longsuffering." His philosophy of life was in many ways ideal, then. Something of a stoic one needs must be to follow {31} it, but why should the petty trivialities of foolish human squabbling disturb a man who has all of art and science spread out before him and who knows so much more than others of his generation, but whose knowledge surely must have made it very clear to him how little after all he knew of all that was to be known?
Like his Italian contemporaries, generally, Leonardo remained faithful in his adhesion to the old Church. His charming "Madonna" and his "Last Supper" could scarcely have come from one who was not a believer. If these things were mere matters of imagination for the artists of the Renaissance, they would not have been expressed with such marvellous reality. We do not know much about his life, though we know so much about his work and thought. When he came to die, however, he left a legacy for masses for his soul. This was the custom of the time and might very well be considered only a conventional acknowledgment of his adhesion to the customs of his contemporaries. Besides, however, he left a sum of money for candles to be burnt at the shrine of the Blessed Virgin in the little village where he had been raised as a boy and where he had often prayed. This would seem to indicate that the faith of his childhood was still precious to him or had come back in its boyish tenderness at the end of his life. His whole career is that of a wonderfully-rounded man who could scarcely fail to recognize the place of the spiritual in life and its significance for man's understanding of the universe.
Burckhardt concludes one of the chapters of his work on "The Renaissance in Italy" with words that probably sum up better than any others Leonardo's character. No one was better fitted to know whereof he spoke than the great German historian of the Renaissance. "The colossal outlines of Leonardo's nature can never be more than dimly and distantly conceived."