Page:Masters in art. Leonardo da Vinci.djvu/33

 power; they overflow with unexpressed ideas and emotions. Alongside of them Michelangelo's personages are simply heroic athletes; Raphael's virgins are only placid children whose souls are still asleep. His beings feel and think through every line and trait of their physiognomy. Time is necessary to enter into communion with them; not that their sentiment is too slightly marked, for, on the contrary, it emerges from the whole investiture; but it is too subtle, too complicated, too far above and beyond the ordinary, too unfathomable and inexplicable. Their immobility and silence lead one to divine two or three latent thoughts and to suspect still others concealed behind the most remote; we have a confused glimpse of an inner and secret world, like an unknown delicate vegetation at the bottom of transparent waters.—

O painter is Leonardo da Vinci's superior. Raphael, Michelangelo, and Correggio may stand beside him on the mountain top; but none has ever scaled a loftier height. In respect of time the first of the great Florentines, it was he who led the way to that pitch of perfection which has never since been surpassed.

To be thus the leader and the unexcelled in art seems enough of glory; yet painting was but one of Leonardo's talents. So all-embracing was his genius, so endowed was he with every faculty, that he might have been equally great in any other domain of human effort. Not only was all the knowledge of the time his, but—a rarer quality—he had learned to look direct to nature, and to look with unclouded eves.

If you would take the full measure of his genius, remember that he worked after no set pattern or model; that each of his productions was an exploration along a new line. He did not, like other painters, multiply his works; but once having attained the especial goal at which he aimed, once the especial ideal realized, he abandoned that pursuit forever. He was the man to make an immense number of studies for a single picture, never using them again, but passing on at once to some different exercise. The model made, he broke the mould. His search was ever for the rare, the fundamental. Thus he has left traces of his passage in every path of art; his foot has scaled all summits, but he seems to have climbed only for the mere pleasure of the ascent, and thereafter to have at once come down, in haste to attempt some other height. To make himself rich or famous by availing himself of any of the superiorities he had acquired was quite outside his desire; he labored only to prove to himself that he was superior. Having created the one most beautiful of portraits, the one most beautiful picture, the one most beautiful fresco, the one most beautiful cartoon, he was content, and gave his mind to other things,—to the modelling of an immense horse, to the building of the Naviglio canal, to the contriving of engines of war, to the invention of a diving-armor, flying-machines, and other more or less chimerical imaginations. He suspected the usefulness of steam, and predicted the balloon; he manufactured mechanical birds which flew and animals which walked. He made a