Leonardo da Vinci as assimilator of the Realistic reforms—Botticelli as reactionary—His beginnings under Fra Filippo and Pollaiuolo—Height of his realistic achievement in Adoration of the Magi—Assertion of his fantastic vein in the Primavera—The Dante drawings and the distraught style of the later works, its æsthetic value—Minor Eccentrics: Filippino Lippi—Piero di Cosimo—Leonardo da Vinci, his gradual advance towards Chiaroscuro method, his ideals—His work with Verrocchio—The Adoration of the Kings, its disciplined richness—Cartoon of St. Ann—First Madonna of the Rocks—Leonardo at Milan. The Last Supper—At Florence again. The Battle Cartoon. Mona Lisa—Second Sojourn at Milan. The St. Ann, his influence—At Rome, in France and the end—Leonardo’s successors at Florence; Fra Bartolommeo— Andrea del Sarto—Agnolo Bronzino—Pontormo—Decline of Florentine independence and of the School.

The task before an ambitious young Florentine artist about 1475 was one of assimilation. Pretty much all the knowledge essential for the new painting existed, but in scattered shape. Masaccio had modernized Giotto’s monumental patterns, and had found for himself the new structural values of light and shade. Domenico Veneziano had introduced the handier method of oil painting, and, with Piero della Francesca, had attempted novel refinements in paler tonalities. He and Paolo Uccello had worked out the mysteries of linear perspective. Andrea del Castagno had achieved a systematic and learned anatomy. Antonio Pollaiuolo had added to this an extraordinary knowledge of the human body in violent action. Andrea Verrocchio had demonstrated that these realistic strivings were compatible with grace. It had occurred to no one to combine all these discoveries until Leonardo da Vinci reached his early maturity. The synthesis worked out by him between 1480 and 1498, the dates of his unfinished Adoration of the Kings and Last Supper respectively, is the foundation on which Raphael built. Leonardo da Vinci is the pioneer of the Golden Age.

It will help us to realize the greatness of his accomplishment to study first the career of a contemporary and friend, the exquisite artist, Sandro Botticelli. Botticelli, like Leonardo, came under the spell of Verrocchio’s fastidiousness, and went some distance in the direction of the new monumental beauty. Then abruptly he turned aside along solitary lines quite unprecedented, but akin to the mystic past of Siena. His great refusal of progress, his broken and eccentric career, give point to the humanistic centrality and social authority of Leonardo’s painting. The two men represent opposite escapes from the superficial brilliance of the art dominated by Ghirlandaio. Leonardo moved out towards the future, and has lived on as a fine inspiration of academic painting ever since. Botticelli withdrew into himself, and has survived flickeringly in the occasional admiration of kindred spirits. Both express, if in very different fashion, the profound discontent that preluded a new era of art. It will help us to perceive how great Botticelli is in his solitary poetry, to consider two younger contemporaries, Filippino Lippi, his pupil, and Piero di Cosimo, an intelligent imitator of Leonardo, both of whom, sharing Botticelli’s discontent, also sought escape in self-assertiveness of an eccentric sort. As the modern age begins to dawn, the modern temperamental artist appears. The bottega begins to be a studio. Thus Sandro Botticelli^[46] has a double importance for us—as an exquisite artist, and even more as the first individualist who strained sorely at the bounds imposed by the collective taste, required a select public, and painted to please himself.

There is nothing of this romantic isolation in his origins. He was born a tanner’s son, in 1444, and brought up in the smiling country towards Careggi. At thirteen he was still at school, hence was better educated than the average painter. Soon he was put with a goldsmith, very likely his brother Antonio, whose nickname—Il Botticello, the cask, paradoxically attached itself to the creator of the Primavera. Before his fifteenth year, 1459, young Botticelli was apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi, the most sensitive eye of the time. Young Botticelli presumably painted on the later frescoes at Prato, and I believe may have been permitted to design certain of the figures in The Feast of Herod. Two early pictures of the Adoration of the Kings, both in the National Gallery, London, show us how whole-heartedly Botticelli adopted his master’s discursive style, how sedulously he sought variety and richness of gesture and facial expression. But these crowded compositions lack Fra Filippo’s direct geniality. They are already imagined before they are observed. Fra Filippo went to Spoleto some time before 1468 and soon died there. So Botticelli was perhaps on his own resources from his twenty-fourth year, though he was not inscribed in the Company of St. Luke till 1472. What is certain is that he was fortifying himself by imitation of far more strenuous artists than his master. The delicate incisiveness of Verrocchio appears as an occasional inspiration, the rugged power of Antonio Pollaiuolo dominates his pictorial expression for many years.

A group of early pictures shows strikingly the interplay of realistic influences with the assertion of his own originality. The delicately expressive Madonna, Figure 128, in Mrs. John L. Gardner’s collection, is based on Filippo Lippi’s Madonna in the Uffizi, Figure 103. The general arrangement is the same. But what a change in feeling! All the overt picturesque relations which Fra Filippo loved—the girlish Virgin praying to her child, the chubby baby clutching at its mother, the impish angel grinning out of the picture—all that is eliminated. The Virgin wistfully reaches for the ear of wheat signifying her Son’s body that must be broken. A well-grown, reverent angel, enigmatically smiling, offers the grapes and wheat, symbols of the sacrament. The relation is between the Madonna and this mysterious acolyte. Their consciousness of a prophetic rite gains emphasis and pathos from the only unconscious thing in the picture, the graceful babyish action of the Divine Child. The forms of mother and Child are those of Filippo Lippi, but with elimination of superfluous ornament and commonplace action. The reserved, half-concealed smile of the angel and his strange beauty derive from Andrea Verrocchio. You may trace it from his youthful David to his disciple’s Mona Lisa. The date of the picture is merely a good guess, but since it is free from the influence of Pollaiuolo, it may be before 1469.

In that year the brothers Pollaiuolo undertook the painting of seven figures of the Virtues to decorate the wainscot behind the magistrates’ bench in the Mercanzia, the mercantile court. Evidently they were pressed for time, for they assigned one panel representing Fortitude, Figure 129, to Botticelli. John Ruskin has celebrated in eloquent phrase this frail embodiment of the courage of the mind. “Worn, somewhat, and not a little weary; instead of standing ready for all comers, she is sitting—apparently in revery; her fingers playing restlessly and idly—nay, I think, even nervously about the hilt of her sword. For her battle is not to begin today, nor did it begin yesterday. Many a morn and even have passed since it began, and now—is this to be the ending of it? And if this—by what manner of end?”

The passage beautifully illustrates the odd blend of purest insight and casual chatter in Ruskin’s criticism. Forget that the sword is a mace—Ruskin is never right in such trifles. Fortitude sits merely because her sister Virtues do so in the imposed decorative scheme. The nervous action of the hands is chiefly an elegance. Yet the whole characterization expresses with singular felicity the alert and thoughtful charm of this Fortitude amid the stolid effigies of Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo. Ruskin, as often, is most wrong where it least matters. We have more prosaic business with the Fortitude—to note the pouting snub-nosed type, and the elaborate ornaments, which are Fra Filippo’s, the solidly drawn but ill-shapen foot, which is Pollaiuolo’s, and the sensitiveness, which is Botticelli’s own.

A still more complete assimilation of Pollaiuolo’s energetic mode is revealed in the admirable little Judith, Figure 130, which must have been painted towards 1475. The faces are still Fra Filippo’s, and he could have invented the eager doglike obsequiousness of the maid. But the springy action and the fine, lean ankles and feet, the bony, expressive wrists and hands, the minutely featured landscape, are completely in Pollaiuolo’s vein. Botticelli’s specific invention is the sublimation of the theme—Judith’s sense of walking in a dream after the unspeakable ordeal of the night. And the flutter of the robes in the clean morning wind has a stylistic grace that amounts to Sandro’s signature.

As he came into his thirty-fifth year, 1478, Botticelli painted two pictures so different that without conclusive evidence we should hardly believe them the work of a single mind and hand. The Adoration of the Kings, Figure 131, with the sturdy Medici portraits, sums up all Botticelli’s realistic achievement, shows him the greatest and most typical Florentine master of the moment, and proves that his way was easy to such triumphs of popularity as Ghirlandaio was soon to enjoy uncontested. The other picture, The Allegory of Spring, evinces a strange and to many repellant originality, indulges dreams not of this earth, appeals to experiences inaccessible save to the æsthetically elect. It was an earnest of neglect and unpopularity, the opening of a solitary road that no artist would travel save under inner imperious impulsion.

The Adoration of the Kings is composed after the fashion of Fra Filippo and rendered with all the improvements of Pollaiuolo. The group of the Mother, Child and Joseph is set high and well back, the minutely drawn ruin, with its grace of wall-flowers, and the peacock on the ruined edge of the masonry are again pure Fra Filippo, as are the juvenile charm of Our Lady and the alertness of the Bambino. In Fra Filippo’s best style, too, are the flanking groups of portraits which swing back towards the central motive, leaving the centre free. Here are great personnages set forth with dignity and force. Masaccio also has counted for much in these portraits, and Antonio Pollaiuolo for more. The Mage kneeling by the Child is Piero de’ Medici, the one in front with his back turned is Cosimo. The beautiful young king addressing him is probably Giuliano, lately slain by the Pazzi conspirators. Lorenzo is unmistakable at the left with his proud military pose, his hands resting on a great sword. At the right, robed in yellow, is the fine manly figure of Botticelli himself. There are many other portraits of the most authoritative accent, but we have no means of identifying them.

Artistically this magnificent little picture suffers from two centres of interest. It is an ambiguity, however, that would have troubled no contemporary Florentine. He was willing to take the sacred group for granted and to gaze delightedly at the figures of his rulers and benefactors. In technical expression the picture is established through light, shade, and color, its linear quality counting for rather little in the effect. It is a logical and attractive combination of all the realistic experiments of fifty years past, no single feature being over-emphasized. It is prose of a most convincing and eloquent cadence.

Before turning to a picture which is all poetry, the Primavera, we may profitably consider Botticelli’s portrait, the robust body, the moody sensual face. He was a celibate. One need not espouse the vagaries of a Freud to know that such men, when gifted with imagination, dream strange dreams. The Primavera, Figure 132, was painted for the Medici Villa of Castello, where later Botticelli placed his Birth of Venus and Signorelli his Pan as God of Music. All these pictures represent that sudden homesickness for the idyllic scenes of classical antiquity which fell upon the Italian world about this time. The cassone painters, working for work-a-day people, had represented the mythologies as so many jolly stories. For the deeply cultured circle of the Medici, these retrospections were fraught with sadness. The life where the gods moved among alluring nymphs and amusing fauns seemed infinitely far off and infinitely desirable. Through Horace and Virgil and Theocritus one could glimpse it tantalizingly. Modern poets, like Angelo Poliziano, could recover it faintly in Greek and Latin, or more rarely in Italian verse. But the Italian loves to see, and here was the difficulty. The brown soil had not yet yielded up the great store of old marbles. The actual look of the bygone Golden Age, which within half a century was to become matter of archæological certainty, was now matter of hesitant intuition. One could brood over the old poets, arrange masques in which lightly robed Tuscan girls played the nymph or goddess—whatever expedient was used to live oneself back, the visual ingredients of the dream were inevitably local and Tuscan. Such pictures as the Primavera represent this transient and appealing mood. They tremble with unfulfilled aspirations, breathe exquisite nostalgias, perpetuate as no other records do the very soul of the humanists that surrounded Lorenzo the Magnificent.

For the fundamental decorative arrangement of the picture, white forms swaying before a vertical paling, Botticelli skilfully borrowed the motive of Pollaiuolo’s engraving, the Ten Nudes. Figure 109. From Pollaiuolo, too, come the nervous contours, the wiry ankles, and slender feet, and the curiously sprung knees. The old poets Lucretius and Horace give just the hint for the persons of the idyl. Lucretius tells of the coming of Spring blown in by the West wind, of Flora strewing flowers before, Figure 133, with Venus and her son as witnesses. And Horace tells how the three graces with ungirt robes dance before Mercury. But Botticelli has contributed what gives the work its penetrating, sad charm. His is the gloomy screen of orange trees and olives, the carpet of spring flowers, the billowing lines that sweep across the panel. It is conceived in two great rhythms of motion. The wave that is suave in playful Spring becomes crisp and sharp in the robe of Flora, and is nearly arrested in the heavy drapery of Venus, it passes with her raised hand to the shimmering veil of the dancing Graces, and dies in the firmly set form of Mercury, whose uplifted arm carries the movement into the steady background, which stabilizes it all. Even to mention the particular finesses and beauties of this fantastically lovely scene would require an essay. I have made a fuller if very imperfect analysis in my book, “Estimates in Art.” Now it is best to note merely that the only joyous forms are Zephyrus, Spring and Cupid, the rest are sad or enigmatically grave, as is Flora. Though they celebrate the renewal of life through love in springtime, those whose immortality has witnessed many springs carry in their faces and bearing the old knowledge that life and love are constantly reborn under death sentence, and that what is renewed spring after spring has but

Again and again the poets have told this to unregarding man. Nobody has made it visible save Botticelli.

I suppose only a score of people at the time knew how fine the Primavera was, and a few hundred in the world today may know it. The thing was hidden from the public, and Botticelli was painting himself into the most obscure sort of glory. In his remaining thirty-two years, there are a few reversions to his realistic vein, but his most characteristic works merely carry on the recondite charm, the acute and personal rhythms of the Primavera.

In 1480 was painted the Faust-like figure of St. Augustine. Figure 134. One feels in the gnarled features and hand clutching the breast the burden of lifelong meditation on the terrible mysteries of free will and God’s eternal decrees. It is the effigy of one who has agonized in thought, and is still seeking by that Calvary of the mind a tense and hazardous peace.

The next year Botticelli went to Rome to take charge of the decoration of the Sistine Chapel. We have already considered his best fresco there, Moses in Midian. Figure 114. Of the two others—the Temptation of Christ, and the Destruction of Korah—we need only add that they are immensely rich in details, effective as narratives, and as decorative arrangements surpassed on the Sistine walls only by Signorelli and Perugino.

There are rare moments of something like serenity in Botticelli’s troubled career. One was when he painted the Pallas and the Centaur, and another when he designed the loveliest of his round panels, the Madonna with Six Angels, in the Uffizi, Figure 135. Unlike the more famous and popular Magnificat, it is in immaculate preservation. The composition is subtler and less obvious, the worn and burdened look of the Madonna oppressed by her tragic fate, more specific and appealing. The late Herbert P. Horne, Botticelli’s best biographer, sets the picture about 1487. About the same time were done those nuptial frescoes for Lorenzo Tornabuoni and his bride, Giovanna degli Albizzi. Torn from the villa walls at Careggi, they are now among the treasures of the Louvre. Lorenzo is represented as received by the seven liberal arts, Giovanna as presented to Venus by the Graces. We have seen in the last chapter how these young people shared and illustrated the doom impending over Medicean Florence. Botticelli captures, if not their look, at least a fine symbol for their as yet unchallenged beauty and discretion.

A little earlier perhaps he added to the Primavera at Castello the Birth of Venus, Figure 136. It is conceived in the same bold rhythms, which this time converge on the slight, smooth form of Venus and are steadied by the horizon and the trees. Compared with the Primavera, the whole thing is less rich, varied and naturalistic. Everything is more schematic and conventional; gold is freely used without realistic pretext. The wistful mood is still that of the Primavera. Venus comes to earth with no joyous expectation. She glimpses unfulfilled desires, the eternally deferred goal of earthly love. She obeys a destiny with resignation and a pensive humility—almost asks pardon for the confusion she is fated to produce among mortals. These involutions and refinements have nothing to do with the whole-souled sensuousness of classical antiquity, they have everything to do with that scrupulous balancing of divine and earthly love which was the standing problem of the Neo-Platonists surrounding Lorenzo the Magnificent.

During the ’80s Botticelli was much occupied with the illustration of a great manuscript of the “Divine Comedy.” Figure 137. These outlines in silverpoint retouched with the pen find their equals only in the best Far Eastern art. The line whips and dances and swirls across the parchment, halting and turning to define a detail, then speeding anew on its task of suggesting motion. Figures that float, groups that march or dance as one, trailing smoke of incense—these volatile features are rendered with the most energetic delicacy. And the most incredible episodes of Dante’s poem gain credence with the eye through the deftest use of the pure line. It hardens to suggest bone and sinew, tightens to express joints that bear weight and preserve balance, loosens and gallops to give the flutter of drapery over twinkling limbs. And all this is done with a thin pen line that hardly changes thickness or blackness—done with a touch as light as a feather and yet as firm as the swing of a draughtsman’s compass. The study of such drawings is a liberal education in the æsthetics of pure line.

These drawings freely distort the actual forms for the sake of greater expressiveness. Such distortion is the characteristic mark of Botticelli’s latest style. One may note it in the furniture panels which tell the story of St. Zenobius and the tragic lot of the Roman heroines, Lucretia and Virginia; in the Annunciation of the Uffizi and the Last Communion of St. Jerome, in the Metropolitan Museum. The new manner is characterized by habitually vehement expression. Intensity becomes morbid, effective withal. We have to do with tortured but very fine nerves. What personal history is involved we can merely surmise. We know, however, that Botticelli followed eagerly the theocratic revolution of Savonarola and suffered deep chagrin when the attempt to make Florence a city of God collapsed amid sordid political jealousies. His art becomes that of a Piagnone, a Savonarolist, a contemner of the careless world. His method changes. The figures are unmodelled and flat, they hurtle wildly and glisten metallically before airless landscapes. Most of the hard-won Florentine realisms drop out, and the linear rhythms recall the Gothic poignancy of Simone Martini.

Perhaps the finest picture of this sort is the Calumny of Apelles, Figure 138, painted about 1490, and now in the Uffizi. It recreates after an anecdote of Lucian, made current by Leonbattista Alberti, a lost masterpiece by Apelles, which was painted to convince Alexander the Great of the evil of calumny. An innocent prisoner is haled before an ignorant judge. Calumny bearing a torch drags him by the hair. Treachery and Deceit act as her tiring maids. The sordid figure of Envy is her guide to a judge into whose asses’ ears Ignorance and Suspicion whisper their counsels. Naked Truth pleads in vain for the victim as Remorse turns to her with sullen helplessness. By a pictorial irony, the sinister whirling group is set in a stately court adorned with statues of magnanimous heroes of old, and one glimpses through the rich arches a cloudless sky and an untroubled sea. Very rich in imaginative content, ornate in its use of color and gold, sharp and definite in its rhythms, discreet in its expressive distortions, this is perhaps the masterpiece of Botticelli’s late style.

But one regards with surely almost pleasure and with more lively sympathy the little Nativity in the National Gallery, Figure 139, a celestial idyl in sentiment, and of greatest beauty of muted coloring. Above the shed where the Virgin Mother worships her Divine Child, a dancing ring of angels hovers. They hold olive branches from which depend martyrs’ crowns. Wreathed shepherds, figures from some Theocritan idyl, kneel outside the shed. Below, angels eagerly embrace three youthful crowned figures, while impish baffled fiends lurk in crevices of the rocks. The three figures may well typify Savonarola and his two fellow-martyrs. A Greek inscription gives the date of 1500 and hints at the fall of Savonarola and the shame of the French invasion. There is a tenderness about the picture that recalls the Primavera, but it is more elusive and unearthly, more implicit in every bit of the workmanship itself than dependent on explicit symbolism.

What Botticelli could achieve in stark tragedy at this time is shown in the Piet of the Munich gallery, a masterpiece which many critics have quite unaccountably ascribed to an inferior imitator. It is of tremendous effect. The compressing rocks seem to confine a grief too great to be liberated in space. A shudder concentrates itself upon the fair, youthful body of the dead Christ. One assists at a cosmic mourning, the intolerable tension of which is mercifully relieved in the swooning form of the Mother of Sorrows. The colors are sombre, the whole effect fairly sculptural, though mass is attained more by linear accents than by systematic light and shade. Balance and pose obey not a law of physics but one of feeling.

The picture may be one of Botticelli’s latest. He lived on till 1510, a lonely and indulged eccentric. He witnessed the youthful triumphs of Raphael and Michelangelo at Florence, and saw the superb maturity of his friend Leonardo da Vinci. He saw the artistic world move away from himself towards ideals of gravity and decorum and disciplined monumentality. He could have followed that high road himself. Instead he had sought a romantic self-expression leading to an impasse. At least he had made the impasse singularly thrilling. Being a wag as well as a poet, he had his compensations for neglect and doubtless he never regretted his impolitic choice. Among artists of febrile and romantic fibre he is one of the greatest. To know him thoroughly is an incomparable exercise in exquisite feeling.

Taken in its social aspect, Botticelli’s later style is a protest against the current, superficial, narrative and decorative modes. Against prevailing successful commonplace, he opposes a highly refined idiosyncracy. While the more stolid artists of the end of the century were content to rework Ghirlandaio’s glittering vein, the more sensitive spirits sought distinction in eccentricity. Eccentricity appears whenever an old style has gone stale and a new one is imminent. It is the natural expression of souls too independent to conform and too weak to reconstruct. The grotesque was in the air. Luigi Pulci in the “Morgante Maggiore” burlesques the ideal romances of chivalry, and mixes the old clear categories of good and evil. Lorenzo de’ Medici at once mimics and caricatures the simplicity of the peasant pastorals. Cynicism runs riot in the short-story writers and in the new comedy. There is a confusion of standards, a new complexity of appreciation, that at once bewilders and allures delicate spirits. Thus they really express such a moment of hesitation better than stronger or more ordinary artists. So a Post-Impressionist of today may have a high symptomatic importance even though his art be null, and a Filippino Lippi and Piero di Cosimo really tell us more about the time-spirit than a Leonardo da Vinci.

Filippino^[47] was born in 1457, at Prato, and presumably received his first instruction from his father, Fra Filippo. At fifteen we find him an orphan and studying with Botticelli, whom he probably assisted at Rome in 1482. At twenty-seven, in 1484, he had the extraordinary honor of completing Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. Doubtless he had his great predecessor’s sketches to aid him. With a somewhat lighter accent, he imitated as he might Masaccio’s simple and massive construction in light and shade. Filippino’s Peter before the Proconsul, Figure 140, and Crucifixion of St. Peter are of a gravity and weight to have passed for Masaccio’s with good critics. But the fine portraits are distinctive for the later date, as are the portraits and the graceful kneeling boy painted opposite in the fresco left unfinished by Masaccio.

As a work of pious assimilation, Filippino’s frescoes are amazing; all his more original work is so much falling-off from his beginnings. His characteristic sensitive prettiness may be best observed in the altar-piece in the Badia representing St. Bernard’s Vision of the Virgin. Figure 141. As he writes her praises, she approaches his desk escorted by eager angels. The scenic picturesqueness of the landscape, the accentuated prettiness of the faces are characteristic. Superficially like Botticelli, Filippino is less selective and always more sentimental. He is rudely shaken out of a mode in which he is attractive by the advent of the new giants of painting, Leonardo and Signorelli. In his last work, painted about 1502 for the Strozzi Chapel of Santa Maria Novella, he spends himself in superfluous and ineffective inventions,—trophies, archæological ornaments. To lend impressiveness and tragedy to the martyrdom of St. Philip and St. James, or to the miracle of Drusiana, Figure 142, he has recourse to hideous contortions of mouth and brows, to creaking joints and bursting muscles, to clamor and sensationalism of all sorts. It is the bankruptcy of the gentle spirit who only twenty years earlier had shown himself almost a great artist in the Carmine, and only ten years earlier had proved himself an accomplished decorator, at the Minerva, Rome. And the pity of this plunge into competitive and hopeless exhibitionism is that Filippino was a man of taste and character, a collector of classical antiques, an obliging and generous spirit. He died in 1504 at the moment when Leonardo da Vinci was planning a real and successful sensation for Florence, in The Fight for the Standard.

If Filippino became an eccentric through pressure of circumstances, Piero di Cosimo^[48] was one by nature. Born in 1462, he soon came under the dullest of masters, Cosimo Rosselli. To Cosimo’s four hopeless frescoes in the Sistine Chapel he added certain vivacious features, and there he learned to know some of the ablest artists of his day. Always a bachelor and recluse, he pursued serious studies in imitation of such stern realists as Antonio Pollaiuolo and Luca Signorelli. He lived sordidly in his bottega, literally from hand to mouth, on the eggs which he boiled in his glue pot, in weekly batches. Alone he planned strange mythologies, bestially pungent, and there he thought out odd terrible pageants which shocked and enthralled his Florence. And as he made these bizarre inventions, he mocked them and himself. His admirations were shifting—now Signorelli, again the Flemish realists and Leonardo: incompatible attractions.

You may sense his quality in two wall panels, now in the Metropolitan Museum,^[49] made for some palace. Piero had read over the legend of primitive man as told by Ovid, and quickly his mind bred phantoms. First he conceived a state where dominion trembled between man and the brute creation. Savage men with the unfair advantage of fire are exterminating the beasts, among whom fight those half-men, the centaurs, Figure 143. In the companion panel the mood changes abruptly from strife and tumult to the quaintly pastoral strains of a stone-age minuet. We assist at a troglodyte water-party. Lovely woman dominates the new scene. The now domesticated centaur proudly bears her. In courtly fashion skin-clad warriors hand her into a rude pleasure raft which may perhaps waft the picnickers to the joys of a cannibal feast. These inventions have immense fantastic power, and their real originality by no means precludes the suspicion that the artist is smiling at his own ingenuity and at our complaisance.

Take again his Cleopatra, Figure 144, at Chantilly. The snub-nosed Florentine beauty airs her abundant charms in a romantic landscape, while the asp does his by no means disagreeable duty. What a travesty of the dignity of Plutarch, and how fetching it is as distinguished burlesque!

Cautiously and perhaps grudgingly, in the early years of the new century, Piero follows the improvements of Leonardo. This influence is palpable in the Rescue of Andromeda, in the Uffizi. The chained princess carelessly displays her appetizing attractions, while the leering and hungry dragon lurches on the beach and surveys his prey. High up in the sky is hope, in the brisk, knightly figure of Perseus. A musical party lolls deliciously on the strand, equally prepared to enjoy a heroic rescue or a monster at feeding time. We are in the superbly irresponsible world of the fairy tale, and the thrilling raconteur has his clever tongue in his cheek.

Exceptionally, as in that wistful poesy, The Death of Procris, Figure 145, at London, Piero is serious enough. The girlish body lies very quiet amid meadow flowers. A puzzled faun and a more comprehending hound are very touching mourners amid the unregarding beasts and birds of a tranquil lake-side afternoon. Such refinements of sentiment are often the compensation for an unstable spirit. The vein is rare in Piero, who, aside from his mythological ironies and quite conventional religious pieces, is also a vivacious portraitist as the galleries of New Haven, Conn., the Hague, and London attest.

Piero lived on till 1521, surviving both Leonardo and Raphael. The greatest artistic effort of modern times had spent itself before his eyes, and he had mostly been content to be witty. He represents at least a fine scorn of his flimsy training, and remains a consummate type of the artist who lives, like a bear in winter, on his own fat.

After a long detour, we are once more on the high road. Perugino, with his simple and gracious symmetries, had shown the painting of the end of the century what ailed it. But his cure was too obvious to be acceptable until a youngster of Raphael’s entirely modest intelligence should come along. The reform, as often in other than artistic affairs, had to be made from within, and was conducted by one who had much sympathy with the random richness of the Early Renaissance style, Leonardo da Vinci.^[50]

Leonardo’s discoveries, pursued with the most patient and gradual care, shocked no one and were quickly taken up. He was nearly thirty before he reached consciousness of his mission, and having attained his artistic end, he dropped painting, with a kind of scorn, for mathematical and scientific investigation. In his admirable “Tractate on Painting” he has left the fullest and most eloquent records of his ideals. The first is that the painter must know clearly what he is about. “Without good theory no good practice is possible.” Next the artist should be in a filial relation to nature, admiring and imitating her directly, and not through the eyes of other artists. As to the main object of painting, Leonardo wavers between two definitions. Repeatedly he insists that that painting is greatest which through the postures of the body shows the emotions of the soul. As often, he uses a more technical definition—the chief business of painting is to create a sense of relief or projection where there is none. This relief is effected by delicate and accurate distribution of light and shade. Light and dark are conceived in a double fashion, as factors in relief and as offering intrinsic beauties in their gradations. We have a refinement on the method of Masaccio, which is merely structural and dramatic and without much intrinsic charm. But the new beauty of chiaroscuro soon turns out to be incompatible with the old beauty of frank color. Pictures become dusky and mysterious, tending to black and white values. Ever since Leonardo, academic painting has had the sore limitation of regarding shadow as negation of color. It is the defect of his teaching and practice.

On broader matters, however, Leonardo is profoundly right. Seeing is a mental process and should be selective. Represent all the muscles emphatically, and your nude will look like a sack full of nuts. Accuracy is necessary, but is of no value without accompanying dignity and grace. Choose the most gracious aspects of reality, the pervasive moderate light of evening rather than the sharp glare of the overhead sun. Observe deaf-mutes so that you may learn the possibilities of expression through gestures. Seek equilibrium and an active and vital balance whether in the pose of the single figure or in the relations of the figures to each other. Get the action right, and afterwards add the details. These are some of the precepts which Leonardo scribbled off about the year 1500 when he was nearing fifty and his work as a painter was almost over. He is really describing the principles under which, while accepting the richness and variety of the early Renaissance style, he had once for all put it in order.

Of course this was a very gradual process. To the end Leonardo retained something of a primitive quality, and he was by no means precocious. He was born in 1452, the lovechild of a peasant girl of Vinci and a young Florentine notary, Piero da Vinci. His earliest recollections must have been of the hills and distant mountain prospects of his native hamlet of Vinci, between Florence and Pisa. But he was soon taken into his father’s home at Florence, and given an education which hardly exceeded the proverbial “Three R’s”. Just when he was put with the painter and sculptor, Andrea Verrocchio, is uncertain, but it can hardly have been later than Leonardo’s thirteenth year, 1465. As a painter, Verrocchio exists for us chiefly in the work of his pupils. As a sculptor, however, he is a definite enough figure. His aim was plainly to infuse the new realism with an aristocratic elegance. What a young patrician is his David composing himself for the ordeal with a restrained well-bred smile! There is a splendid dandyism in his valor. Or consider the Madonna in terra-cotta, with her ornate head-dress, rich brooch, and carefully arranged robe, her almost too sweet self-possession. She is a clue to the fastidiousness of Verrocchio. Again consider the proud hard face and the marvelously firm and delicate hands of the unknown lady Verrocchio cut in marble. These things are dominant for the early development of Leonardo, as the alert, powerful and aggressive Colleoni monument is for his later heroic creations. Something of Verrocchio’s scrupulous and eminently dilatory character also passed over to his brilliant pupil. Verrocchio remained a bachelor and wholly devoted to his art, yet he took eighteen years to give to his famous bronze group of Christ and St. Thomas its dignity and sensitive feeling. Leonardo remained some ten years or more with Verrocchio, painting many works that are lost to us, and a few, I believe, that we may identify. In this most contested matter I follow in the main the views of Dr. Sirén.

For many years Leonardo ventured little on his own account, following with docility the directions of his master. The single painting which we may with certainty ascribe to Verrocchio, the Baptism of Christ, Figure 146a, in the Uffizi, already bears traces of Leonardo’s hand. The general composition is borrowed from an insignificant panel of Baldovinetti’s. The stalwart ugly forms derive from Pollaiuolo. Delightful features added in oils by Leonardo are the exquisite angel at the left, Figure 146, and the vaporous distance and mountain skyline. We may surmise that these improvements were added about 1470 to a picture started several years earlier. One other picture was designed by Verrocchio and finished after his death in 1488 by his assistant, Lorenzo di Credi. This Madonna, in the cathedral of Pistoia, affords an excellent contrast between the puffy forms of Lorenzo and the firm and living contours of Leonardo. The famous Annunciation in the Uffizi, Figure 147, seems a kind of joint product, the actual painting being by Leonardo, the badly balanced composition and intrusive heavy lectern, as well as the rather cheap attitude of surprise of the Virgin, representing a perfunctory mood of Verrocchio. The vista of remote mountains hanging pale in the blue sky is such as only Leonardo could have created. The delightful Gabriel also seems wholly his invention. The composition again rests on one of Baldovinetti’s, at S. Miniato, and the date of the picture may be about 1475. Of about the same date is a Madonna with an Angel in the National Gallery, which may well be a composition of Verrocchio interpreted by Leonardo. The note of sweetness is a little forced, as in most work of this kind. We meet Leonardo in his own right a little earlier, in a pen sketch of a broad landscape dated in midsummer summer of 1473, Figure 148. Its spaciousness and schematic handling of horizontals ally it to the landscape backgrounds we have been considering. The last work of this Verrocchian character is the Portrait of a Girl, in the Liechtenstein Gallery, Vienna. Here we are in a field where Leonardo and his master are almost indistinguishable, but the picturesquely broken background, the bit of landscape, and the ease of the contours, speak for the younger man. As late as 1476, his twenty-fifth year, Leonardo was still with Verrocchio. He probably set up his own bottega a year or so afterwards.