Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/478

 458 LEONAKDO the master s special friend and favourite, Salai or Salaino. But by far the most important painter formed under Leonardo s influence at Milan was the admirable Bernardino Lnini. Other disciples or adherents of his school were Bazzi of Siena, called II Sodoma, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Andrea Solario, Bernardino dei Conti, and Ambrogio Freda or de Predis. Several of the pupils or adherents here mentioned belong, however, to a later period of the master s life than that with which we are now concerned. Leonardo s own chief undertakings in art during his residence at the court of Ludovico il Moro were two in number, namely, the equestrian monument of Francesco ; Sforza and the mural painting of the Last Supper. | For the former he had probably made some preparatory sketches and models before he left Florence. After his , arrival at Milan the work seems to have proceeded with | many interruptions, and according to a MS. note of his i own to have been finally and actively resumed in 1490. In the Royal Library at Windsor are preserved a whole series of small experimental studies for the monument, Leonardo was a great lover and student of horses, and would never be without some of the noble race in his stable. It is difficult to retrace the stages of development marked by the several sketches in question, or their relations to the final design. But it seems as if Leonardo had first proposed to represent his hero as mounted on a charger violently prancing or rearing above a fallen enemy, j and had in the end decided to adopt a quieter action, more ; nearly resembling that of the work upon which Verrocchio was simultaneously engaged at Venice. Some difficulties must have been encountered in the casting, or there would have been no meaning in the words of Michelangelo when twelve years afterwards he is said to have taunted Leonardo with incapacity on that account. But contemporary writings are explicit to the eS ect that the group of horse and rider, 26 feet in height, was actually cast in bronze, and set up to the admiration and delight of the people, under a triumphal arch constructed for the purpose, during the festivities held at Milan in 1493 on the occasion of the marriage of the emperor Maximilian to a bride of the house of Sforza. Within ten years the glory of that house had departed. Ludovico, twice overthrown by the invaders whom he had himself called into Italy, lay languishing in a French prison, and his father s statue had served as a butt to the Gascon archers of the army of Louis XII. In 1501 the duke Ercole d Este sought leave from the French governor of Milan to have the statue removed to his own city ; but nothing seems to have come of the project ; and within a few years Leonardo s master-work in sculpture had between mischief and neglect been irretriev ably destroyed. Only a little less disastrous is the fate which has overtaken the second great enterprise of Leonardo s life at Milan, his painting of the Last Supper. This, with the Madonna di San Sisto and Michelangelo s Last Judgment, is the third most celebrated picture of the world. It was painted, twenty years the earliest of the three, on the refectory wall of the convent of Santa Maria clelle Grazie at Milan, where its defaced remains are still an object of pilgrimage and wonder. The commission for the work came partly from the duke and partly from the monks of the con vent. Leonardo is said to have consumed upwards of ten years upon his task, a circumstance which is not surprising when we consider his fastidious spirit and the multiplicity of other calls upon his time. But the monks were impatient, and could not make allowance for the intervals of apparent idleness, intervals really of brooding and searching and meditation, which were incidental to Leonardo s way of work. On one occasion it became necessary for the duke himself, whose dealings with his gifted servant seem to have been consistently intelligent and kind, to take the painter s part against the prior of the convent. But in working out his conception of the scene, and in devising the pictorial means for its presentment, Leonardo allowed his craving for quintessential excellence to overmaster him. He could not rest satisfied without those richnesses and refinements of effect which are unattainable in the ordinary method of mural painting, that is, in fresco, but must needs contrive by his chemistry a method for painting on the wall in oil. Neither could any of the traditional ideals of art content him in the representation of the scene. He must toil and ponder until he had realized a more absolute set of types, and grouped them in more masterly and speaking actions, than had ever been attempted before. The master type of all, that of Christ, it is said that he could never even realize to the height of his conception at all, but left it to the last uncompleted. Unhappily Leonardo s chemistry was unequal to his purpose, and his work had begun to peel and stain within a few years of its execution. The operation of time and damp has since been accelerated at intervals by the vandalism of men. After almost disappearing, the picture has been revived once and again, latterly either from copies or from engravings taken during the earlier periods of its deteriora tion, until now there is probably not a vestige of the original workmanship remaining. Nevertheless, through all these veils of injury and disguise, it is still possible in some measure to appreciate the power of that creation which became from the first, and has ever since remained, the typical representation for all Christendom of the sacra ment of Christ s Supper. Goethe in his famous criticism has said all that needs to be said of the essential character of the work. The painter has de parted from precedent in grouping the company of disciples, with their Master in the midst, along the far side and the two ends of a long, narrow table, and in leaving the near or service side of the table towards the spectator free. The chamber is seen in a per fectly symmetrical perspective, its rear wall pierced by three plain openings which admit the sense of quiet distance and mystery from the open landscape beyond ; by the central of these openings, which is the widest of the three, the head and shoulders of the Saviour are framed in. On his right and left are ranged the dis ciples in equal numbers. The serenity of the holy company has within a moment been broken by the words of their Master, &quot; One of you shall betray Me.&quot; In the agitation of their consciences and affections, the disciples have started into groups 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 har moniously interlinked by some natural connecting action with the next. Leonardo, though no student of the Greeks, has perfectly carried out the Greek principle of expressive variety in particulars subordinated to general symmetry. The relations of his groups to one another, and of each figure within the several groups to its neighbour and to the central iigure of Christ, are not only triumphs of technical design, they are evidences of a complete science of human character, emotion, and physiognomy held at the service of a nobly inspired and nobly directed art. The furniture and acces sories of the chamber, very simply conceived, have been rendered with scrupulous exactness and distinctness ; yet they leave to the human and dramatic elements the absolute mastery of the scene. Neither do the academical draperies of the personages impair the sense of imaginative truth with which the representation impresses us. Our first glance at the ruins of this famous picture makes us feel, and study does but strengthen the conviction, that the painter rose to the height of his argument, and realized worthily and for good this momentous scene in the spiritual history of mankind. Of authentic preparatory studies for this work there remain but few. There is a sheet at the Louvre containing some nude sketches for the arrangement of the disciples about the table, and another of great interest at South Kensington, on which the painter has noted in writing the several dramatic motives which he pro poses to embody in the disciples. At Windsor and Milan are a few finished studies in red chalk for the heads. A highly-reputed series of black crayon drawings of the same heads, of which the greater portion is at Weimar, has no just claim to originality. Of the other pictures and sculptures which Leonardo is known to have produced while in the service of the duke, such as the painting of the Nativity, sent as a present to the emperor Maximilian, and the portraits of Lucrezia Crivelli and Cecilia G.alleraui, one of the duke s mistresses, no trace remains, nor is there sufficient reason for accepting the recently suggested attribution to Leonardo of an