Page:Masters in art. Leonardo da Vinci.djvu/42

 though but a youth, he completed the figure in such a manner that the angel was much better than the portion executed by his master, which caused the latter never to touch colors more." The last part of this story is certainly exaggerated, and probably false; but no one who has seen Leonardo's angel—"a space of sunlight in the cold, labored old picture," as Walter Pater calls it—can doubt that the marked ability of the pupil must have forcibly struck Verocchio, and that Leonardo's youthful work influenced, although it assuredly did not discourage, the older master.

A few authorities, Richter among them, believe that more than the left-hand kneeling angel in this picture was Leonardo's work, because much of it is painted in oils, while Verocchio's medium was tempera; but the majority of critics still consider that Leonardo's share in the work was confined to the figure assigned to him by Vasari.

HIS picture, which represents the Virgin, the young Christ, and St. Anne (usually called merely the 'St. Anne' ), is a work of singular nobility, of the most idyllic poetry, and of splendid virtuosity," writes Gruyer; "but one in which Leonardo, as in his picture of 'St. John the Baptist' has ruthlessly sacrificed religious conventions. What would Fra Angelico have thought of it? Seated on the knees of St. Anne, her mother, the Virgin leans towards Christ, who holds a lamb by both ears, attempting, with a most charmingly childlike action, to bestride it. His figure may possibly have been painted by a pupil or by an imitator; it is unfinished, but there are weak points in the technical execution. With St. Anne and the Virgin the case is quite different, for into these figures Leonardo has put all his genius, and in them the interest of the picture centres. One is the mother of the other; but Leonardo chose to represent them both as young with the same youth, beautiful with the same haunting beauty, and no logical objections prevented his carrying out this design. The pure loveliness and harmony of the two figures is enthralling. They are both enchantresses, dowered with a strange, mysterious and sensuous beauty that seems made up of light and shade,—pure spirit, with no admixture of human clay. Nowhere more fully than in the Virgin's face has the master expressed that seductive and profane loveliness which haunted his own visions. The landscape which serves as a background to the figures—a landscape of strewn rocks and water and purple distances hemmed in by azure mountains with the rugged and broken outlines that he loved—adds an ineffable something to their mystery, and their grandeur."

HIS unfinished work is generally believed to be the altar-piece which Leonardo was commissioned by the monks of San Donato at Scopeto to paint for their church, on condition that it should be finished within two years and a half. As Leonardo failed to comply with this condition, the work was intrusted to Filippino Lippi.