Page:Masters in art. Leonardo da Vinci.djvu/34

 silver lyre fashioned in the shape of a horse's head, and played upon it exquisitely. He studied anatomy, and drew admirable myologies of which he made no use. He manufactured all the materials he used, even to his varnishes and colors. He was distinguished as a military and civil engineer, as a geologist, geographer, and astronomer; he rediscovered the principles of the lever and of hydraulics; he was a great mathematician and machinist, a physiologist, and a chemist. He invented many serviceable instruments that are still in use, like the saws employed to-day at the quarries of Carrara. He designed breech-loading cannon, and demonstrated the advantages of conical bullets. He invented the camera obscura. He planned the great works of engineering that have controlled the courses of the Arno and the Po. He walked beside the sea, and understood that the waters were composed of countless molecules. He watched the billows in their rhythmical advance, and comprehended that light and sound moved onward in succeeding waves. He looked into the heavens, and perceived that the world was not the centre of created things, forestalling the discovery of Copernicus; and he saw that the universe is held together by the attraction of gravitation. He knew that the tides obeyed the moon, and that the waters of the sea must rise highest at the equator. Long before Bacon he evolved a philosophy, looking to human experiences and to nature for all solution of his doubts.

And yet you will be strangely astray, if, knowing of all these attainments, you conceive him as a dry pedant, or bent alchemist, toiling in some airless laboratory-like studio. No man was ever more human, more lovable, or more fascinating than this same Leonardo da Vinci. He was witty, graceful, polished. His bodily strength was so great that he could bend an iron horseshoe like lead. His physical beauty was flawless,—the beauty of an Apollo. Great painter that he was, painting was but one among his splendid gifts. …

His ideal, though it had all the purity, all the grace and perfection, of the antique, is in sentiment wholly modern. He invented, or rather he discovered in nature, a beauty as perfect as was the beauty of Greece, and yet which has no link with it. He is the only painter who has known how to be beautiful without being antique. He expresses subtleties, suavities, elegancies, quite unknown to the ancients. The beautiful Greek heads are, in their irreproachable correctness, merely serene; those of Leonardo are sweet, but not from any weakness of soul—rather from a sort of indulgent and benign superiority. It seems as if spirits of quite another nature than our own look out at us from his canvases, through the eye-holes of the human physical mask, with something of pitying commiseration, and something like a hint of malice. And the smile, half voluptuous, half ironical, which floats evasively upon those flexible lips—who has ever yet deciphered the enigma of it? It mocks and fascinates, it promises and refuses, it intoxicates and makes afraid! Has such a smile ever really hovered on human lips, or was it caught from the face of that mocking sphinx who forever guards the Palace of the Beautiful?

Painter of the mysterious, the ineffable, the twilight, Leonardo's pictures may be compared to music in a minor key. Time, which has robbed other