Leonardo da Vinci

“ Science gives men stones for bread, and, verily, if you look at those who follow the teaching of this world, you will find in them that even their hearts are become as stones.'
'Who knows little, loves little. Great love is the daughter of great knowledge!' had said Leonardo da Vinci.
Only now did Giovanni realise the profundity of these words, as he listened to the anathema of the monk against knowledge and art, and remembered the wise reasonings of Leonardo, the calm of his countenance, his cold look, his wise and enchanting smile. ”

“ Through Leonardo's strange veil of sight things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through deep water.
And not into nature only; but he plunged also into human personality, and became above all a painter of portraits: faces of a modelling more skilful than has been seen before or since, embodied with a reality which almost amounts to illusion, on dark air. To take a character as it was, and delicately sound its stops, suited one so curious in observation, curious in invention. ”

“ One authentic portrait of Leonardo by his own hand exists—the red chalk drawing in the library at Turin. Dating from the last years of his life, it shows the face of a seer, moulded by incessant thought into firm, strongly marked lines. The eyes lurk deep beneath shaggy brows, the hair and beard are long and straggling—it is the face of a man who has peered into hidden things and who has pondered deeply over what he discerned. ”

“ He saw a Woman in shining garments, with flaming countenance and fiery wings, standing among fleeting clouds, her feet on the crescent moon; over her was a seven-pillared tabernacle, with the inscription:—
'Wisdom hath builded her an house.'
Prophets and patriarchs surrounded her, saints and angels, thrones and dominions and powers, and all the company of Heaven. And among the prophets at Wisdom's very foot stood John the Precursor with his white plumes as on the icon, but wearing the face of Leonardo da Vinci, who had dreamed of wings for men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ancient paintings of half their charm, has but added charm to his, by deepening- the shadows in which the imagination loves to wander—shadows like veils, which half dissolve to show the vision of a secret thought; colors that are dead, like the colors of things in moonlight. ”

“ It was thought by Vasari, that in his "Judgment," Michael Angelo had imitated him. At this period of the "dawn of modern art, Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour which distanced former excellence; made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius; favoured by education and circumstances—all ear, all eye, all grasp; painter, poet, sculptor, anatomist, architect, engineer, chemist, machinist, musician, man of science, and sometimes empiric, he laid hold of every beauty in the enchanted circle, but without exclusive attachment to one, dismissed in her turn each." ”

“ Leonardo da Vinci is the inventor by anticipation of all the modern ideas and of all the modern curiosities, a universal and refined genius, a solitary and inappeasable investigator, pushing his divinations beyond his century so as at some times to reach ours. ”

“ Sumner looked out of the window, and then hastened to say:—
"I think you all have learned that the chief quality of Leonardo da Vinci's work is his rendering of facial expression—complex, subtile expression: yet he excelled in all artistic representation;—in drawing, in composition, in color, and in the treatment of light and shade. He easily stands in the foremost rank of world painters. But, see! we are drawing near to Milan,—bright, gay little Milan,—the Italian Paris." ”

“ The things in Leonardo da Vinci that his unconscious, high-spirited, automatic senses gathered together for him, piled up in his mind for him, and handed over to him for the use of his soul, would have made a genius out of anybody. ”

“ Be that as it may, this drawing is a striking example of how, in the hands of a master, the most profuse and detailed decoration can be made subservient to the main theme. The eye follows with delight the exquisite imaginative drawing in armour and helm. Nothing is insistent; nothing is superfluous. Every quaint and curious detail leads up to the firm contour of the face. Leonardo saw the theme as a whole, and the decorator's ingenuity has throughout remained subservient to the artist's vision. ”

“ Leonardo da Vinci, by the principles which he so effectually realised, has always been considered as having established the manly as well as the graceful age of modern art. But manhood is never so fixed as to be incapable of progress. The manhood then attained in art was capable of farther advancement beyond the growth which the powers of Da Vinci had given it. This was eminently illustrated by the sublimity of style which was attained by the genius of Michael Angelo and of Raphael;--quality equally original in both, although issuing from different principles. ”

“ Jameson calls Leonardo da Vinci, in her "Early Italian Painters," "The miracle of that age of miracles. Ardent and versatile as youth; patient and persevering as age; a most profound and original thinker; the greatest mathematician and most ingenious mechanic of his time; architect, chemist, engineer, musician, poet, painter!" ”

“ Leonardo da Vinci found in drawing the readiest and most stimulating way of self-expression. The use of pen and crayon came to him as naturally as the monologue to an eager and egoistic talker. The outline designs in his "Treatise on Painting" aid and amplify the text with a force that is almost unknown in modern illustrated books. Open the pages at random. Here is a sketch showing "the greatest twist which a man can make in turning to look at himself behind." The accompanying text is hardly needed. The drawing supplies all that Leonardo wished to convey. ”

“ Leonardo stood watching the wild scene, noting every detail, his mind preoccupied. The fiery glow, the voices of the crowd, the pealing of the bells, the boom of the guns, all brought back his discovery. Imagination pictured the waves of sound, the waves of light swelling tranquilly, circling outwards like the ripple on water where a stone has fallen, intersecting each other without mingling or confusion, each keeping its own centre in the point of its origin. ”

“ His charm is reserved for those who by deeper examination are enabled to discern and appreciate those subtle and hidden meanings with which his works are charged. Leonardo da Vinci's name has been and ever will be a popular one; his art can never be that; it is too lofty, too sublime. ”

“ Giovanni's Diary
On the 25th of March 1494 I entered myself as a disciple in the studio of Messer Leonardo da Vinci, the Florentine master.
This is the order of his teaching:—perspective; the dimensions and proportions of the human body; drawings from examples by the best masters; drawings from nature.
To-day Marco d'Oggionno, my fellow-disciple, has given me a book, taken down entirely from the words of our Master. The book begins thus:—
'The purest joy is given to the body by the light of the sun; to the spirit, by the clear shining of mathematics. ”

“ Remarkable as a thinker alone, he preferred to enlist thought in the service of art, and make art the handmaid of beauty. Leonardo saw the world not as it is, but as he himself was. He viewed it through the atmosphere of beauty which filled his mind, and tinged its shadows with the mystery of his nature. To all this, his birthright as a painter, a different element was added. A keen desire for knowledge, guiding his action in life, spurred him onward. Conscious of this dominant impulse, he has fancifully described himself in a Platonic allegory. ”

“ With him the Child is always a child, acting like a child. In a drawing in the British Museum he clutches a protesting cat in his chubby arms, while the mother smiles—the eternal, personal smile of Leonardo that haunted him, as it fascinates us. In another drawing the Child is dipping a chubby hand into a bowl of porridge, and again the Mother smiles—the enigmatic, persisting smile of Leonardo. There are no fewer than twenty-seven drawings of animals on one sheet at Windsor. The majority are cats, but in some instance his imagination has invented a hybrid animal to which no name can be given. ”

“ And always the eyes of his women are cast down, an attitude that he rarely gives to his men, whose heads often have a touch of caricature, a hint, but never pushed to the extreme that he allowed himself in the grotesque.
In the bust of a woman in profile at Milan we have a sketch that in the unflattering presentment of a likeness is akin to his remarkable drawing of Isabella d'Este, now in the Louvre. ”

“ PREFACE. A singular fatality has ruled the destiny of nearly all the most famous of Leonardo da Vinci's works. Two of the three most important were never completed, obstacles having arisen during his life-time, which obliged him to leave them unfinished; namely the Sforza Monument and the Wall-painting of the Battle of Anghiari, while the third—the picture of the Last Supper at Milan—has suffered irremediable injury from decay and the repeated restorations to which it was recklessly subjected during the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries. ”

“ THE LIFE
OF
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Leonardo da Vinci, the Author of the following Treatise, was the natural son of Pietro da Vinci, a notary of Vinci, in Tuscany [1] , a village situated in the valley of Arno, a little below Florence, and was born in the year 1452 [2] .
Having discovered, when a child, a strong inclination and talent for painting, of which he had given proofs by several little drawings and sketches ”

“ He did nothing to degrade art; he only exalted it to a perfection where certain charming qualities of the delicious primitives became impossible.
Leonardo is the most thoughtful of all painters, unless it be Albrecht Dürer. The mind and its infinite suggestions are his realm. With Raphael it is beauty and harmony; with Michelangelo it is passion and strength; with him it is thought and feeling—thought so deep that voice can never utter it, feelings so sensitively delicate, so preternaturally refined, that they elude our grasp ”

“ It is true that the estimation of Leonardo da Vinci was in France too high for him to attack without risking his own character for judgment and taste, and he has therefore found it necessary for his purpose insidiously to suggest that these chapters were interpolations; but of this he has produced no proof, which, had it been the fact, might have been easily obtained, by only getting some friend to consult Leonardo’s manuscript collections in the Ambrosian library. ”

“ But their error was afterwards clearly proved by the works of Leonardo da Vinci, who, giving a beginning to that third manner which we propose to call the modern—besides the force and boldness of his drawing, and the extreme subtlety wherewith he counterfeited all the minutenesses of nature exactly as they are—with good rule, better order, right proportion, perfect drawing, and divine grace, abounding in resources and having a most profound knowledge of art, may be truly said to have endowed his figures with motion and breath. ”

“ Its interior will be of pure gold, very massive, and it hath a Baldachin of velvet, embroidered with our ducal arms. A similar seat has no other prince, neither the Pope, nor the Emperor, nor the grand Turk. It will excel in beauty that one famed by Martial in his epigram. My lord, Ludovico, had wished Leonardo da Vinci to contrive a musical-organ in its Interior, but he hath excused himself on some flimsy pretext, such as the finishing of his Colossus, or his Cenacolo. You prayed me, beloved Sister, to lend you this Painter for a time. ”

“ Now it so happened that just at the time when Leonardo da Vinci died, a certain young Russian courtier named Eutychius came a second time to Amboise in the train of Karachiarov, the Russian ambassador. On his journey this young courtier, who brought a gift of gold and of priceless Persian falcons for King Francis, visited Florence, and had seen the bas-relief on the Campanile, which represented Dædalus experimenting with waxen wings. It had given Leonardo in his boyhood the first idea of Wings for Man ”

“ This was seen and acknowledged by all men in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, in whom, to say notliing of his beauty of person, which yet was such that it has never been sufficiently extolled, there was a grace beyond expression which was rendered manifest without thought or effort in every act and deed, and who had besides so rare a gift of talent and ability, that to whatever subject he turned his attention, however difficult, he presently made himself absolute master of it. ”