Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/476

 456 LEONARDO reasoned discovery in the ensuing age. No wonder, therefore, if there has always been a mysterious attraction about his name. He stands out to after times in the character of a great if only half-effectual magician, one pre-eminent less by performance than by power. He has been called the Faust of the Italian Renaissance. The description would be just if the legend of Faust had con ferred upon its hero the artist s gift of creation, as well as the ingenuity of the mechanical inventor, and the philosopher s passion for truth. As it is, these three powers, the shaping or artistic, the contriving or mechanical, and the reasoning or philosophical, had never even been imagined as existing, still less have they ever been known actually to exist, in combination, in the same measure in which they were all combined in Leonardo. The man thus extraordinarily gifted was the son of a Florentine lawyer, born out of wedlock by a peasant mother. The place of his birth was Vinci, a &quot; castle &quot; or fortified village in the Florentine territory near Empoli, from which his father s family derived its name. The Christian name of his father was Piero (the son of Antonio the son of Piero the son of Guido, all of whom had been men of law like their descendant). Leonardo s mother was called Caterina. Her relations with Ser Piero da Vinci seem to have come to an end almost immediately upon the birth of their son. She was soon afterwards married in her own rank of life. Ser Piero on his part was four times married, and had by his last two wives nine sons and two daughters ; but the boy Leonardo had from the first been acknowledged by his father, who brought him up in his own house, principally, no doubt, at Florence. In that city Ser Piero followed his profession, and was after a while appointed notary to the signory, or governing council of the state, a post which several of his forefathers had filled before him. The son born to him before marriage grew up into a youth of manifest and shining promise. To signal beauty and activity of person he joined a winning charm of temper and manners, a tact for all societies, and an aptitude for all accomplishments. An inexhaustible energy lay beneath this amiable surface. Among the multifarious pursuits to which he set his hand, the favourite were modelling and drawing. His father, perceiving this, sought the advice of an acquaintance, Andrea del Verrocchio, who at once recognized the boy s vocation, and was selected by Ser Piero to be his master. Verrocchio, as is well known, although not one of the great creative or inventive forces in the art of this age at Florence, was a thoroughly capable and spirited craftsman alike as goldsmith, sculptor, and painter, while in teach ing he was particularly distinguished. In his studio Leonardo worked for several years in the company of Lorenzo di Credi and other less celebrated pupils. He had soon learnt all that his master had to teach more than all, if we are to believe the oft-told tale of the figure, or figures, executed by the pupil in tho picture of Christ s Baptism designed by the master for the monks of Vallombrosa. The work in question is now in the Academy at Florence. According to Vasari the angel kneeling on the left, with a drapery over its right arm, was put in by Leonardo, and when Verrocchio saw it his sense of its superiority to his own work caused him to forswear painting for ever after. The latter part of the story is certainly false. Moreover, a closer examination seems to detest the hand of Leonardo, not only in the figure of the angel, but also in that of Christ and in the land scape background, which are designed with extreme refine ment, and painted in the new medium of oil, while the remainder of the picture has been executed by Verrocchio in his accustomed vehicle of tempera. The work was probably produced between 1480 and 1182, when Leonardo was from eighteen to twenty years of age. By the latter date we find him enrolled in the lists of the painters guild at Florence. Here he continued to live and work probably for eight or nine years longer. Up till 1477 he is still spoken of as a pupil or apprentice of Verrocchio ; but in 1478 he receives an independent commission from ths signory, and in 1480 another from the monks of San Donato in Scopeto. He had in the meanwhile been taken into special favour by Lorenzo the Magnificent. The only memorials now existing of Leonardo s industry during this, period consist of a number of scattered drawings and studies, most of them physiognomical, in chalk, pen, and silver point, besides two painted panels. One of these is- a large and richly composed picture, or rather a finished preparation in monochrome for such a picture, of the Adoration of the Kings ; this may have been done for the monks of San Donato, and is now in the Uffizi ; the other is a similar preparation for a St Jerome, now in the Vatican gallery at Rome. We possess, however, the record of an abundance of other work which has perished. Leonardo was not one of those artists who sought in the imitation of antique models the means of restoring art to its perfection. He hardly regarded the antique at all, and was an exclusive student of nature. From his earliest days he had flung himself upon that study with an unprecedented passion of delight and curiosity. In drawing from life he had found ths way to unite precision with freedom, the subtlest accuracy of definition with vital movement and flow of line, as no draughtsman had been able to unite them before. He was the first painter to recognize light and shade as among the most significant and attractive of the world s appearances, and as elements of the utmost importance in his art, the earlier schools having with one consent neglected the elements of light and shade in favour of the elements of colour and line. But Leonardo was not a student of the broad, regular, patent appear ances only of the world ; its fugitive, fantastic, un accustomed appearances attracted him most of all. Strange shapes of hills and rocks, rare plants and animals, unusual faces arid figures of men, questionable smiles and expressions, whether beautiful or grotesque,, far-fetched objects and curiosities, these were the things which he most loved to pore upon and keep in memory. Neither did he stop at mere appearances of any kind, but, having stamped the image of things upon his brain, went on indefatigably to probe their hidden laws and causes. The laws of light and shade, the laws of &quot; perspective,&quot; includ ing optics and the physiology of the eye, the laws of human and animal anatomy and muscular movement, and of the growth and structure of plants, all these and much more furnished food almost from the beginning to his insatiable spirit of inquiry. The evidence of his preferences and preoccupations is contained in the list of the lost works which he produced during this period. One of these was a painting of Adam and Eve in opaque water-colours ; and in this, besides the beauty of the figures, the infinite- truth and elaboration of the foliage and animals in the background are celebrated in terms which bring to niiucl the treatment of the subject by Albert Diirer, in his famous engraving done thirty years later. Again, a peasant of Vinci having in his simplicity asked Ser Piero to get a picture painted for him on a wooden shield, the father is said to have laughingly handed on the commission to h r.s son, who thereupon shut himself up with all the noxious insects and grotesque reptiles he could find, observed and drew and dissected them assiduously, and produced at last a picture of a dragon compounded of their various shapes and aspects, which was so fierce and so life-like as to terrify all who saw it. With equal research and no less effect he painted on another occasion the head of a snaky-