Page:EB1911 - Volume 16.djvu/468

 or clusters along the table, some standing, some still remaining seated. There are four of these groups, of three disciples each, and each group is harmoniously interlinked by some natural connecting action with the next. Leonardo, though no special student of the Greeks, has perfectly carried out the Greek principle of expressive variety in particulars subordinated to general symmetry. He has used all his acquired science of linear and aerial perspective to create an almost complete illusion to the eye, but an illusion that has in it nothing trivial, and in heightening our sense of the material reality of the scene only heightens its profound spiritual impressiveness and gravity. The results of his intensest meditations on the psychology and the human and divine significance of the event (on which he has left some pregnant hints in written words of his own) are perfectly fused with those of his subtlest technical calculations on the rhythmical balancing of groups and arrangement of figures in space.

Of authentic preparatory studies for this work there remain but few. There is a sheet at the Louvre of much earlier date than the first idea or commission for this particular picture, containing some nude sketches for the arrangement of the subject; another later and farther advanced, but still probably anterior to the practical commission, at Venice, and a MS. sheet of great interest at the Victoria and Albert Museum, on which the painter has noted in writing the dramatic motives appropriate to the several disciples. At Windsor and Milan are a few finished studies in red chalk for the heads. A highly-reputed series of life-sized chalk drawings of the same heads, of which the greater portion is at Weimar, consists of early copies, and is interesting though having no just claim to originality. Scarcely less doubtful is the celebrated unfinished and injured study of the head of Christ at the Brera, Milan.

Leonardo’s triumph with his “Last Supper” encouraged him in the hope of proceeding now to the casting of the Sforza monument or “Great Horse,” the model of which had stood for the last three years the admiration of all beholders, in the Corte Vecchio of the Castello. He had formed a new and close friendship with Luca Pacioli of Borgo San Sepolcro, the great mathematician, whose Summa de aritmetica, geometrica, &c., he had eagerly bought at Pavia on its first appearance, and who arrived at the Court of Milan about the moment of the completion of the “Cenacolo.” Pacioli was equally amazed and delighted at Leonardo’s two great achievements in sculpture and painting, and still more at the genius for mathematical, physical and anatomical research shown in the collections of MS. notes which the master laid before him. The two began working together on the materials for Pacioli’s next book, De divina proportione. Leonardo obtained Pacioli’s help in calculations and measurements for the great task of casting the bronze horse and man. But he was soon called away by Ludovico to a different undertaking, the completion of the interior decorations, already begun by another hand and interrupted, of certain chambers of the Castello called the Saletta Negra and the Sala Grande dell’ Asse, or Sala della Torre. When, in the last decade of the 19th century, works of thorough architectural investigation and repair were undertaken in that building under the superintendence of Professor Luca Beltrami, a devoted foreign student, Dr Paul Müller-Walde, obtained leave to scrape for traces of Leonardo’s handiwork beneath the replastered and whitewashed walls and ceilings of chambers that might be identified with these. In one small chamber there was cleared a frieze of cupids intermingled with foliage; but in this, after the first moments of illusion, it was only possible to acknowledge the hand of some unknown late and lax decorator of the school, influenced as much by Raphael as by Leonardo. In another room (Sala del Tesoro) was recovered a gigantic headless figure, in all probability of Mercury, also wrongly claimed at first for Leonardo, and afterwards, to all appearance rightly, for Bramante. But in the great Sala dell’ Asse (or della Torre) abundant traces of Leonardo’s own hand were found, in the shape of a decoration of intricate geometrical knot or plait work combined with natural leafage; the abstract puzzle-pattern, of a kind in which Leonardo took peculiar pleasure, intermingling in cunning play and contrast with a pattern of living boughs and leaves exquisitely drawn in free and vital growth. Sufficient portions of this design were found in good preservation to enable the whole to be accurately restored—a process as legitimate in such a case as censurable in the case of a figure-painting. For these and other artistic labours Leonardo was rewarded in 1498 (ready money being with difficulty forthcoming and his salary being long in arrears) by the gift of a suburban garden outside the Porta Vercelli.

But again he could not get leave to complete the task in hand. He was called away on duty as chief military engineer (ingegnere camerale) with the special charge of inspecting and maintaining all the canals and waterways of the duchy. Dangers were accumulating upon Ludovico and the state of Milan. France had become Ludovico’s enemy; and Louis XII., the pope and Venice had formed a league to divide his principality among them. He counted on baffling them by forming a counter league of the principalities of northern Italy, and by raising the Turks against Venice, and the Germans and Swiss against France. Germans and Swiss, however, inopportunely fell to war against each other. Ludovico travelled to Innsbruck, the better to push his interests (September 1499). In his absence Louis XII. invaded the Milanese, and the officers left in charge of the city surrendered it without striking a blow. The invading sovereign, going to Sta Maria delle Grazie with his retinue to admire the renowned painting of the “Last Supper,” asked if it could not be detached from the wall and transported to France. The French lieutenant in Milan, Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, the embittered enemy of Ludovico, began exercising a vindictive tyranny over the city which had so long accepted the sway of the usurper. Great artists were usually exempt from the consequences of political revolutions, and Trivulzio, now or later, commissioned Leonardo to design an equestrian monument to himself. Leonardo, having remained unmolested at Milan for two months under the new régime, but knowing that Ludovico was preparing a great stroke for the re-establishment of his power, and that fresh convulsions must ensue, thought it best to provide for his own security. In December he left Milan with his friend Luca Pacioli, having first sent some of his modest savings to Florence for investment. His intention was to watch events. They took a turn which made him a stranger to Milan for the next seven years. Ludovico, at the head of an army of Swiss mercenaries, returned victoriously in February 1500, and was welcomed by a population disgusted with the oppression of the invaders. But in April he was once more overthrown by the French in a battle fought at Novara, his Swiss clamouring at the last moment for their overdue pay, and treacherously refusing to fight against a force of their own countrymen led by La Trémouille. Ludovico was taken prisoner and carried to France; the city, which had been strictly spared on the first entry of Louis XII., was entered and sacked; and the model of Leonardo’s great statue made a butt (as eye witnesses tell) for Gascon archers. Two years later we find the duke Ercole of Ferrara begging the French king’s lieutenant in Milan to let him have the model, injured as it was, for the adornment of his own city; but nothing came of the petition, and within a short time it seems to have been totally broken up.

Thus, of Leonardo’s sixteen years’ work at Milan (1483–1499) the results actually remaining are as follows: The Louvre “Virgin of the Rocks” possibly, i.e. as to its execution; the conception and style are essentially Florentine, carried out by Leonardo to a point of intense and almost glittering finish, of quintessential, almost overstrained, refinement in design and expression, and invested with a new element of romance by the landscape in which the scene is set—a strange watered country of basaltic caves and arches, with the lights and shadows striking sharply and yet mysteriously among rocks, some upright, some jutting, some pendent, all tufted here and there with exquisite growths of shrub and flower. The National Gallery “Virgin of the Rocks” certainly, with help from Ambrogio de Predis; in this the Florentine character of the original is modified by an admixture of Milanese elements, the tendency to harshness and