Page:Masters in art. Leonardo da Vinci.djvu/41

 took to paint a moment, to delineate the effect of a single word upon twelve men seated at a table, and to do this without sacrificing the tranquillity demanded by ideal art, and without impairing the divine majesty of Him from whose lips that word has fallen. The ideal representation of a dramatic moment, the life breathed into each part of the composition, the variety of the types chosen to express the varieties of character, and the scientific distribution of the twelve apostles in four groups of three around the central Christ, mark the appearance of a new spirit of power and freedom in the arts. What had hitherto been treated with religious timidity, with conventional stiffness, or with realistic want of grandeur, was now humanized, and at the same time transported into a higher intellectual region; and though Leonardo discrowned the apostles of their aureoles, he for the first time in the history of painting created a Christ not unworthy to be worshipped as the praesens Deus."

F works ordinarily claimed for Leonardo," writes Sidney Colvin, "the best and nearest to his manner, if not actually his, is the portrait known as 'La Belle Féronnière.'" This picture, formerly believed without question to be the work of Leonardo, has of recent years been the subject of much controversy among the critics, of whom Morelli, Frizzoni, Richter, Armstrong, Berenson, and others see in it no mark of Leonardo's hand; while Müntz, Rosenberg, Lübke, Brun, Gruyer, and others uphold the authorship of that master. Conjectures as to the identity of the person represented have also been numerous. That the lady was the wife of the French advocate Féron, a theory which won for the picture the title by which it is still known, is no longer credited, According to some critics, the portrait is a likeness of Isabella of Mantua; according to others it represents a Milanese lady, Lucrezia Crivelli by name.

Although disfigured by cracks and injured by repainting, the picture still possesses great charm. "It has all the freshness and simplicity of the primitives," writes Müntz, "with an added grace and liberty." Rosenberg, who gives the picture unreservedly to Leonardo, assigning it to the early part of the master's stay in Milan, reasons that, "notwithstanding a certain sharpness in the modelling, and notwithstanding that it shows no sign of that celebrated sfumato of Leonardo's,—the blending of colors and dissolving of outlines in a vaporous light,—if we think not of Leonardo as he was in later days, but only of those who were his contemporaries when this picture was painted, it will be difficult to name any who could have so fathomed the human soul and caused it to speak through the eyes as Leonardo has succeeded in doing in this portrait."

N the year 1470, or 1472, when Leonardo was but eighteen or twenty years of age, Vasari tells us that he painted "an angel holding some vestments" in Verocchio's picture of the 'Baptism of Christ,' and that "al-