Sidney Colvin

“ It was indeed from Italy that the races of the north caught the impulse of intellectual freedom, the spirit of science and curiosity, the eager retrospect towards the classic past; but joined with these in Germany was a moral impulse which was her own, a craving after truth and right, a rebellion against spiritual tyranny and corruption—the Renaissance was big in the north, as it was not in the south, with a Reformation to come. The art of printing had been invented in good time to help and hasten the new movement of men’s minds. ”

“ In drawing from life he had early found the way to unite precision with freedom and fire—the subtlest accuracy of expressive definition with vital movement and rhythm of line—as no draughtsman had been able to unite them before. He was the first painter to recognize the play of light and shade as among the most significant and attractive of the world’s appearances, the earlier schools having with one consent subordinated light and shade to colour and outline. ”

“ In matters of the heart, if any consoling or any disturbing passion played a great part in his life, we do not know it; we know only (apart from a few passing shadows cast by calumny and envy) of affectionate and dignified relations with friends, patrons and pupils, of public and private regard mixed in the days of his youth with dazzled admiration, and in those of his age with something of reverential awe.
The Drawings of Leonardo.—These are among the greatest treasures ever given to the world by the human spirit expressing itself in pen and pencil. ”

“ He was on terms of friendship or friendly communication with all the first masters of the age, and Raphael held himself honoured in exchanging drawings with Dürer. In his own country, all orders of men, from the emperor Maximilian down, delighted to honour him; and he was the familiar companion of chosen spirits among the statesmen, humanists and reformers of the new age. The burgher life of even Nuremberg, the noblest German city, seems narrow, quaint and harsh beside the grace and opulence and poetical surroundings of Italian life in the same and the preceding generation. ”

“ His architectural and engineering projects were of a daring which amazed even the fellow-citizens of Alberti and Brunelleschi. History presents few figures more attractive to the mind’s eye than that of Leonardo during this period of his all-capable and dazzling youth. He did not indeed escape calumny, and was even denounced on a charge of immoral practices, but fully and honourably acquitted. There was nothing about him, as there was afterwards about Michelangelo, dark-tempered, secret or morose; he was open and genial with all men. ”

“ The mere attempt to conquer the kingdom of light and shade for the art of painting was destined to tax the skill of generations, and is perhaps not wholly and finally accomplished yet. Leonardo sought to achieve that conquest and at the same time to carry the old Florentine excellences of linear drawing and psychological expression to a perfection of which other men had not dreamed. ”

“ They show him gradually throwing off the last restraints of the 15th-century manner; gradually acquiring a complete mastery of the new oil medium introduced in Venice by Antonello da Messina about 1473, and mastering with its help all, or nearly all, the secrets of the perfect fusion of colours and atmospheric gradation of tones. The old intensity of pathetic and devout feeling gradually fades away and gives place to a noble, if more worldly, serenity and charm. ”

“ In science he was the first among modern men to set himself most of those problems which unnumbered searchers of later generations have laboured severally or in concert to solve. Florence had had other sons of comprehensive genius, artistic and mechanical, Leon Battista Alberti perhaps the chief. But the more the range and character of Leonardo’s studies becomes ascertained the more his greatness dwarfs them all. ”

“ The full splendour of Venetian colour invests alike the figures, their architectural framework, the landscape and the sky. The altar-piece of the Frari at Venice, the altar-piece of San Giobbe, now at the academy, the Virgin between SS. Paul and George, also at the academy, and the altar-piece with the kneeling doge Barbarigo at Murano, are among the most conspicuous examples. ”

“ To splendid beauty and activity of person he joined a winning charm of temper and manners, a tact for all societies, and an aptitude for all accomplishments. An inexhaustible intellectual energy and curiosity lay beneath this amiable surface. Among the multifarious pursuits to which the young Leonardo set his hand, the favourites at first were music, drawing and modelling. ”

“ The imaginative force of the presentation, coming from a man of Dürer’s powers, is intense; but what consciously occupied him most may well have been the problem how to draw accurately the proportions and action of a horse in motion. This problem he here solves for the first time, with the help of an Italian example: at least his design so closely repeats that of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous and early destroyed equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza that we must certainly suppose him to have seen either the model itself or such a drawing of it as is still preserved by Leonardo’s own hand. ”

“ Leonardo, though no special student of the Greeks, has perfectly carried out the Greek principle of expressive variety in particulars subordinated to general symmetry. He has used all his acquired science of linear and aerial perspective to create an almost complete illusion to the eye, but an illusion that has in it nothing trivial, and in heightening our sense of the material reality of the scene only heightens its profound spiritual impressiveness and gravity. ”

“ Michelangelo and Raphael, who had both, as we have seen, risen to greatness partly on Leonardo’s shoulders, were fresh from the glory of their great achievements in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze. Their rival factions hated each other, but both, especially the faction of Michelangelo, turned bitterly against the veteran newcomer. The pope, indeed, is said to have been delighted with Leonardo’s minor experiments and ingenuities in science, and especially by a kind of zoological toys which he had invented by way of pastime, as well as mechanical tricks played upon living animals. ”

“ The picture, painted for the elector Frederick of Saxony, is now in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna; the overcrowded canvas (into which Dürer has again introduced his own portrait as a spectator alongside of the elector) is full of striking and animated detail, but fails to make any great impression on the whole, and does not do justice to the improved sense of breadth and balance in design, of clearness and dignity in composition, which the master had undoubtedly brought back with him from his second visit to Italy. ”

“ The man who carried in his brain so many images of subtle beauty, as well as so much of the hidden science of the future, must have lived spiritually, in the main, alone. Of things communicable he was at the same time, as we have said, communicative—a genial companion, a generous and loyal friend, ready and eloquent of discourse, impressing all with whom he was brought in contact by the power and the charm of genius, and inspiring fervent devotion and attachment in friends and pupils. ”

“ With a predilection for tall and slender proportions, he draws the human figure with a flowing generalized grace and no small freedom of movement; but he does not approach either in mastery of line or in vehemence of action a Florentine draughtsman such as Antonio Pollaiuolo. Jacopo’s influence on the development of Venetian art was very great, not only directly through his two sons and his son-in-law Mantegna, but through other and independent contemporary workshops of the city, in none of which did it remain unfelt. ”

“ In the school of Wolgemut Dürer learned much, by his own account, but suffered not a little from the roughness of his companions. At the end of his apprenticeship in 1490 he entered upon the usual course of travels—the Wanderjahre—of a German youth. Their direction we cannot retrace with certainty. There had been no one at Nuremberg skilled enough in the art of metal-engraving to teach it him to much purpose, and it had at one time been his father’s intention to apprentice him to Martin Schongauer of Colmar, the most refined and accomplished German painter-engraver of his time. ”

“ Dürer’s powers of hand and eye are already extraordinary and in their way almost unparalleled, but they are often applied to the too insistent, too glittering, too emphatic rendering of particular details and individual forms, without due regard to subordination or the harmony of the whole. Among the earliest seem to be two examples of a method practised in Italy especially by the school of Mantegna, but almost without precedent in Germany, that of tempera-painting on linen. One of these is the portrait of Frederick the Wise of Saxony, formerly in the Hamilton collection and now at Berlin ”

“ When Leonardo, having received a commission for a picture, was found distilling for himself a new medium of oils and herbs before he had begun the design, the pope was convinced, not quite unreasonably, that nothing serious would come of it. The only paintings positively recorded as done by him at Rome are two small panels for an official of the papal court, one of a child, the other of a Madonna, both now lost or unrecognized. ”

“ The best of these engravings produced in the workshop of Marcantonio—those, namely, done by his own hand, and especially those done during the first few years after he had attached himself to Raphael—count among the most prized and coveted examples of the art. In them he enters into the genius of his master, and loses little of the chastened science and rhythmical purity of Raphael’s contours, or of the inspired and winning sentiment of his faces ”

“ But it must be remembered that Leonardo was already full of projects in mechanics, hydraulics, architecture, and military and civil engineering, ardently feeling his way in the work of experimental study and observation in every branch of theoretical or applied science in which any beginning had been made in his age, as well as in some in which he was himself the first pioneer. ”

“ About the same time Leonardo took part in the debate on the proper site for Michelangelo’s newly finished colossal “David,” and voted in favour of the Loggia dei Lanzi, against a majority which included Michelangelo himself. Neither Leonardo’s genius nor his noble manners could soften the rude and taunting temper of the younger man, whose style as an artist, nevertheless, in subjects both of tenderness and terror, underwent at this time a profound modification from Leonardo’s example. ”

“ The evidence of the young man’s predilections and curiosities is contained in the legends which tell of lost works produced by him in youth. One of these was a cartoon or monochrome painting of Adam and Eve in tempera, and in this, besides the beauty of the figures, the infinite truth and elaboration of the foliage and animals in the background are celebrated in terms which bring to mind the treatment of the subject by Albrecht Dürer in his famous engraving done thirty years later. ”

“ A third and smaller commemorative design, the Triumphal Car, originally designed to form part of the second but in the end issued separately, was entirely Dürer’s own work. A far more successful and attractive effort of his genius in the same service is to be found in the marginal decorations done by him in pen for the emperor’s prayer-book. This unequalled treasure of German art and invention has in later times been broken up, the part executed by Dürer being preserved at Munich, the later sheets, which were decorated by other hands, having been transported to Besançon. ”

“ On His right and left are ranged the disciples in equal numbers. The furniture and accessories of the chamber, very simply conceived, have been rendered with scrupulous exactness and distinctness; yet they leave to the human and dramatic elements the absolute mastery of the scene. The serenity of the holy company has within a moment been broken by the words of their Master, “One of you shall betray Me.” In the agitation of their consciences and affections, the disciples have started into groups or clusters along the table, some standing, some still remaining seated. ”

“ There existed no such academy at Milan, with Leonardo as president. The academies of the day represented the prevailing intellectual tendency of Renaissance humanism, namely, an absorbing enthusiasm for classic letters and for the transcendental speculations of Platonic and neo-Platonic mysticism, not unmixed with the traditions and practice of medieval alchemy, astrology and necromantics. ”