Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/479

 LEONARDO 459 a.lmirably wrought bust now preserved in the Louvre, of which the features are those of Ludovico s wife, the duchess Beatrice. These services, especially the maintenance of Ids cele brated Academy, required on the part of Leonardo no in considerable outlay. On the other hand, the payments received by him seem to have been neither adequate nor regular, at all events during the latter part of his resi dence at the ducal court, when the exigencies of war and policy were already pressing hard upon Ludovico. Leon ardo had finished his Last Supper between 1497 and 1499. In the spring of the latter year we find that he received, in consideration of payments due, the gift of a vineyard outside the city. Within a month or two his patron had fallen. Milan was taken and held in hostile occupa tion by the French. A contemporary historian has related with what admiration the invading monarch, Louis XIL, when he entered the refectory of Sta Maria delle Grazie, fixed his gaze on the work of Leonardo, and how he desired, were it possible, that it should be transported across the Alps to France. But by this time or soon afterwards the painter himself had left Milan. In the spring of 1500 we hear of him working at Venice, where, among other things, he painted (not, it appears, from life) a portrait of Isabella Gonzaga, marchioness of Mantua. The well-known head in the manner of Leonardo at the Louvre, commonly known as the Belle Ferronniere, has sometimes been identified as the portrait in question ; but not on sufficient grounds. Early in the next year, 1501, Leonardo was once more in Florence ; and thither the same marchioness, Isabella Gonzaga, sent an envoy to endeavour to attach him to her service. His answer was not unfavourable, but the envoy reported that, though recently engaged upon one or two small pictures, he was for the moment indifferent to the brush, and wholly absorbed in mathematics. In the end he attached himself, not to the court of Mantua, but to the service of Csesar Borgia, then in the plenitude of his criminal power, and almost within reach of the realization of his huge ambitions. Leonardo s new patron had been one of the worst enemies of the fallen Ludovico, and had entered Milan as a conqueror in the suite of the French king. But artists and men of letters formed, in those days, a caste apart, and changed service not less readily than did the condottieri or hired military commanders. Between the beginning of 1502 and the catastrophe which overtook the house of Borgia in the summer of 1503, Leonardo travelled as engineer in the employ of Duke Caesar over a great part of Central Italy. In Umbria and the Marches, he visited Urbino, Pesaro, Rimini. Cesena, Cesenatico, Buonconvento, Perugia, and Foligno : in Tuscany, he was at Chiusi, at Siena, at Piombino on the coast over against Elba, and southward at least as far as Orvieto and Lake Bolsena, or even, it would appear, as far as Home. He has left notes and drawings taken at each of the stations we have named, besides a set of six large-scale maps drawn minutely with his own hand, and including nearly the whole territory of Tuscany and the Maremma between the Apennines and the Tyrrhene Sea. His excursions seem to have come to an end early in 1503, as by March of that year we find him once more in Florence. To the period of three years wandering which followed Leonardo s departure from Milan there ensued another period of three years, during which he lived a settled life at Florence. He was now fifty-one years of age, and the most famous artist of Italy, though within a year or two the young Michelangelo was destined to challenge his supremacy, and the still younger Piaphael to apprehend and assimilate the secrets of his skill, as he did those of the skill of every great predecessor and every distinguished rival in succession. The first important commission put into Leonardo s hands at Florence was that for an altar- piece for the church of the Servite monks (Santa Maria dell Annunziata). The work had been already entrusted to Filippino Lippi, who had even made some beginning with it, but willingly gave up his claim in favour of his illustrious fellow-citizen. The monks undertook to lodge and nourish Leonardo in their convent while he carried on the work. After long premeditation he began, and prepared that admirable cartoon in black chalk which is now the treasured possession of the Royal Academy in London. The Virgin, partly seated on the left knee of St Anne, holds by the body the infant Christ, who leans across the figure of the elder woman, and lifts his hand in benediction of the little St John leaning against her knee. In the lines and management of the composition there is not less charm than there is research. The elder mother smiles upon her daughter, and the daughter smiles upon her child, each with a look of loving prescience and rapt self-congratulation which is the sweetest of all those mysterious expressions that Leonardo loved to seize and to perpetuate. When the cartoon was finished and exhibited, all Florence came flocking in delight to see and praise it. Between fastidi ousness and preoccupation Leonardo, however, carried the undertaking no farther, and the work was put once more into the hands of Filippino Lippi, and on his death into those of Perugino. Leonardo s next great enterprise at Florence was a historical painting for the Palace of the Signory. He had been on the commission of artists appointed to determine where Michelangelo s statue of David should be placed, and now he was chosen, along with his young rival, to finish a mural picture for the new Hall of Council. Each painter chose a battle subject : Michelangelo, as is well known, the surprise of the Florentine forces in the act of bathing near Pisa ; Leonardo, an episode in the victory of the generals of the republic over Niccolo Picciuino at Anghiari, in the upper valley of the Tiber. In one of the sections of the Treatise on Painting, Leonardo has detailed at length, and obviously from his own observation, the pictorial aspects of a battle. His choice of such a subject was certainly not made from any love of warfare or indifference to its horrors. In the writings of Leonardo there occur almost as many trenchant sayings on life and human affairs as on art and natural law ; and of war he has disposed in two words as a &quot; bestial frenzy &quot; (j)azzia bestialissima}. In his design for the Hall of Council, Leonardo set himself to depict this frenzy at its fiercest. He chose the moment of a terrific struggle for the colours between the opposing sides ; hence the work became known in the history of art as the Battle of the Standard. Judging by the accounts of those who saw it, the tumultu ous entanglement of men and horses, and the expressions of martial fury and despair, must in this case have been combined and rendered with a mastery not less command ing than had been the looks and gestures of soul s perplexity and dismay among the peaceful company on the convent wall at Milan. Leonardo had finished his cartoon in less than two years (1504-1505), and when it was exhibited along with that of Michelangelo, the two rival works seemed to all men a new revelation of the powers of art, and served as a model and example to the students of that generation, as the frescos of Masaccio in the Carmine had served to those of two generations earlier. ! The young Raphael is well known to have been one of those who profited by what they saw. Other Florentine artists who were especially influenced at this time by Leonardo were Fra Bartolommeo, Jacopo da Pontormo, Ridolfo del Ghirlandajo ; and in sculpture Baccio Ban- dinelli and Rustici. He also speaks of having among his pupils G. F. Penui called &quot; II Fattore,&quot; a certain Lorenzo, and a German Jacopo. who cannot be further identified.