Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D
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The jewel of Bergamo was the Cappella Colleoni. The Venetian
condottiere, born here, desired a chapel to receive his bones, and a
sculptured cenotaph to commemorate his victories. Giovanni Antonio
Amadeo designed the chapel and the tomb with splendor and taste; and
Sixtus Siry of Nuremberg surmounted the sepulcher with an equestrian
statue in wood, which would have won a wider fame had not Verrocchio
cast the great captain in prouder bronze. Bergamo was too near to
Milan to keep its painters home; but one of them, Andrea Previtali,
after studying with Giovanni Bellini in Venice, returned to Bergamo
(1513) to bequeath to it some paintings of exemplary piety and
modest excellence.
Brescia, subject at times to Venice, at times to Milan, held a
balance between the two influences, and developed its own school of
art. After disseminating his talent among half a dozen cities,
Vincenzo Foppa returned to spend his declining years in his native
Brescia. His pupil Vincenzo Civerchio shared with Floriano Ferramolo
the honor of forming the Brescian school. Girolamo Romani, called
Romanino, studied with Ferramolo, later in Padua and Venice; then,
making Brescia his center, he painted there, and in other towns of
northern Italy, a long series of frescoes, altarpieces, and portraits,
excellent in color, less laudable in line; let us name only the
Madonna and Child, in a magnificent frame by Stefano Lamberti, in
the church of San Francesco. His pupil Alessandro Bonvicino, known
as Moretto da Brescia, brought this dynasty to its zenith by
blending the sensuous glory of the Venetians with the warm religious
sentiment that marked Brescian painting to its end. In the church of
SS. Nazaro e Celso, where Titian placed an Annunciation, Moretto
painted an equally beautiful Coronation of the Virgin, whose
archangel rivals in delicacy of form and feature the most graceful
figures of Correggio. Like Titian he could paint, when he wished, an
appetizing Venus; and his Salome, instead of revealing a murderess
by proxy, shows us one of the sweetest, gentlest faces in the whole
gamut of Renaissance art.
Cremona gathered her life around her twelfth-century cathedral and
its adjoining Torrazo- a campanile almost challenging Giotto's and the
Giralda. Within the duomo Giovanni de' Sacchi- named Il Pordenone
from his native town- painted his masterpiece, Jesus Carrying His
Cross. Three remarkable families contributed successive generations
of talent to Cremonese painting: the Bembi (Bonifazio, Benedetto, Gian
Francesco), the Boccaccini, and the Campi. Boccaccio Boccaccini, after
studying in Venice and burning his fingers in a competition with
Michelangelo in Rome, returned to Cremona and won acclaim by his
frescoes of the Virgin in the Cathedral; and his son Camillo continued
his excellence. In like manner the work of Galeazzo Campi was
carried on by his sons Giulio and Antonio, and by Giulio's pupil
Bernardino Campi. Galeazzo designed the church of Santa Margherita
in Cremona, and then painted in it a magnificent Presentation in
the Temple. So the arts, in Renaissance Italy, tended to mate in
one mind, and flowered under geniuses of such versatility as not
even Periclean Greece had known.
CHAPTER VII: Leonardo da Vinci: 1452-1519
I. DEVELOPMENT: 1452-1482
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THE most fascinating figure of the Renaissance was born on April 15,
1452 near the village of Vinci, some sixty miles from Florence. His
mother was a peasant girl, Caterina, who had not bothered to marry his
father. Her seducer, Piero d'Antonio, was a Florentine attorney of
some means. In the year of Leonardo's birth Piero married a woman of
his own rank. Caterina had to be content with a peasant husband; she
yielded her pretty love child to Piero and his wife; and Leonardo
was brought up in semiaristocratic comfort without maternal love.
Perhaps in that early environment he acquired his taste for fine
clothing, and his aversion to women.
He went to a neighborhood school, took fondly to mathematics, music,
and drawing, and delighted his father by his singing and his playing
of the lute. In order to draw well he studied all things in nature
with curiosity, patience, and care; science and art, so remarkably
united in his mind, had there one origin- detailed observation. When
he was turning fifteen his father took him to Verrocchio's studio in
Florence, and persuaded that versatile artist to accept him as an
apprentice. All the educated world knows Vasari's story of how
Leonardo painted the angel at the left in Verrocchio's Baptism of
Christ, and how the master was so overwhelmed by the beauty of the
figure that he gave up painting and devoted himself to sculpture.
Probably this abdication is a post-mortem legend; Verrocchio made
several pictures after the Baptism. Perhaps in these apprentice days
Leonardo painted the Annunciation in the Louvre, with its awkward
angel and its startled maid. He could hardly have learned grace from
Verrocchio.
Meanwhile Ser Piero prospered, bought several properties, moved
his family to Florence (1469), and married four wives in turn. The
second was only ten years older than Leonardo. When the third
presented Piero with a child Leonardo eased the congestion by going to
live with Verrocchio. In that year (1472) he was admitted to
membership in the Company of St. Luke. This guild, composed chiefly of
apothecaries, physicians, and artists, had its headquarters in the
hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Presumably Leonardo found there some
opportunities to study internal as well as external anatomy. Perhaps
in those years he- or was it he?- painted the gaunt anatomical St.
Jerome ascribed to him in the Vatican Gallery. And it was probably he
who, toward 1474, painted the colorful and immature Annunciation
of the Uffizi.
A week before his twenty-fourth birthday Leonardo and three other
youths were summoned before a committee of the Florentine Signory to
answer a charge of having had homosexual relations. The result of this
summons is unknown. On June 7, 1476, the accusation was repeated;
the committee imprisoned Leonardo briefly, released him, and dismissed
the charge as unproved. `05071 Unquestionably he was a homosexual.
As soon as he could afford to have his own studio he gathered handsome
young men about him; he took some of them with him on his migrations
from city to city; he referred to one or another of them in his
manuscripts as amantissimo or carissimo - "most beloved,"
"dearest." `05072 What his intimate relations with these youths were
we do not know; some passages in his notes suggest a distaste for
sexual congress in any form. *05024 Leonardo might reasonably doubt
why he and a few others had been singled out for public accusation
when homosexuality was so widespread in the Italy of the time. He
never forgave Florence for the indignity of his arrest.
Apparently he took the matter more seriously than the city did. A
year after the accusation he was invited, and agreed, to accept a
studio in the Medici gardens; and in 1478 the Signory itself asked him
to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of St. Bernard in the Palazzo
Vecchio. For some reason he did not carry out the assignment;
Ghirlandaio took it over; Filippino Lippi completed it. Nevertheless
the Signory soon gave him- and Botticelli- another commission: to
paint- we cannot say to the life- full-length portraits of two men
hanged for the conspiracy of the Pazzi against Lorenzo and Giuliano
de' Medici. Leonardo, with his half-morbid interest in human deformity
and suffering, may have felt some fascination in the gruesome task.
But indeed he was interested in everything. All postures and actions
of the human body, all expressions of the face in young and old, all
the organs and movements of animals and plants from the waving of
wheat in the field to the flight of birds in the air, all the cyclical
erosion and elevation of mountains, all the currents and eddies of
water and wind, the moods of the weather, the shades of the
atmosphere, and the inexhaustible kaleidoscope of the sky- all these
seemed endlessly wonderful to him; repetition never dulled for him
their marvel and mystery; he filled thousands of pages with
observations concerning them, and drawings of their myriad forms. When
the monks of San Scopeto asked him to paint a picture for their chapel
(1481), he made so many sketches for so many features and forms of
it that he lost himself in the details, and never finished The
Adoration of the Magi.
Nevertheless it is one of his greatest paintings. The plan from
which he developed it was drawn on a strictly geometrical pattern of
perspective, with the whole space divided into diminishing squares;
the mathematician in Leonardo always competed- often co-operated- with
the artist. But the artist was already developed; the Virgin had the
pose and features that she would keep in Leonardo's work to the end;
the Magi were drawn with a remarkable understanding- for a youth- of
character and expression in old men; and the "Philosopher" at the left
was literally a brown study of half-skeptical meditation, as if the
painter had so soon come to view the Christian story with a spirit
unwillingly incredulous and still devout. And around these figures
half a hundred others gathered, as if every kind of man and woman
had hurried to this crib seeking hungrily the meaning of life and some
Light of the World, and finding the answer in a stream of births.
The unfinished masterpiece, almost erased by time, hangs in the
Uffizi at Florence, but it was Filippino Lippi who executed the
painting accepted by the Scopetini brotherhood. To begin, to
conceive too richly, to lose himself in experimenting with details; to
see beyond his subject a boundless perspective of human, animal,
plant, and architectural forms, of rocks and mountains, streams and
clouds and trees, in a mystic chiaroscuro light; to be absorbed in the
philosophy of the picture rather than in its technical accomplishment;
to leave to others the lesser task of coloring the figures so drawn
and placed for revealing significance; to turn in despair, after
long labor of mind and body, from the imperfection with which the hand
and the materials had embodied the dream: this was to be Leonardo's
character and fate, with a few exceptions, to the end.
II. IN MILAN: 1482-99
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There was nothing hesitant, no sense yet of the merciless brevity of
time, only youth's limitless ambitions fed by burgeoning powers, in
the letter that Leonardo, now thirty, sent in 1482 to Lodovico, regent
of Milan. He had had enough of Florence; the desire to see new
places and faces mounted in his blood. He had heard that Lodovico
wanted a military engineer, an architect, a sculptor, a painter; well,
he would offer himself as all these in one. And so he wrote his famous
letter:
-
Most Illustrious Lord, having now sufficiently seen and considered
the proofs of all those who count themselves masters and inventors
of instruments of war, and finding that their invention and use of the
said instruments does not differ in any respect from those in common
practice, I am emboldened without prejudice to anyone else to put
myself in communication with your Excellency, in order to acquaint you
with my secrets, thereafter offering myself at your pleasure
effectually to demonstrate at any convenient time all those matters
which are in part briefly recorded below.
1. I have plans for bridges, very light and strong and suitable
for carrying very easily....
2. When a place is besieged I know how to cut off water from the
trenches, and how to construct an infinite number of.... scaling
ladders and other instruments....
4. I have plans for making cannon, very convenient and easy of
transport, with which to hurl small stones in the manner almost of
hail....
5. And if it should happen that the engagement is at sea, I have
plans for constructing many engines most suitable for attack or
defense, and ships which can resist the fire of all the heaviest
cannon, and powder and smoke.
6. Also I have ways of arriving at a certain fixed spot by caverns
and secret winding passages, made without any noise even though it may
be necessary to pass underneath trenches or a river.
7. Also I can make covered cars, safe and unassailable, which will
enter the serried ranks of the enemy with artillery, and there is no
company of men at arms so great as not to be broken by it. And
behind these the infantry will be able to follow quite unharmed and
without any opposition.
8. Also, if need shall arise, I can make cannon, mortars, and
light ordance, of very beautiful and useful shapes, quite different
from those in common use.
9. Where it is not possible to employ cannon, I can supply
catapults, mangonels, traps, and other engines of wonderful efficacy
not in general use. In short, as the variety of circumstances shall
necessitate, I can supply an infinite number of different engines of
attack and defense.
10. In time of peace I believe that I can give you as complete
satisfaction as anyone else in architecture, in the construction of
buildings both public and private, and in conducting water from one
place to another.
Also I can execute sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also
painting, in which my work will stand comparison with that of anyone
else whoever he may be.
Moreover, I would undertake the work of the bronze horse, which
shall endue with immortal glory and eternal honor the auspicious
memory of the Prince your father and of the illustrious house of
Sforza.
And if any of the aforesaid things should seem impossible or
impracticable to anyone, I offer myself as ready to make trial of them
in your park or in whatever place shall please your Excellency, to
whom I commend myself with all possible humility.
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We do not know how Lodovico replied, but we know that Leonardo
reached Milan in 1482 or 1483, and soon made his way into the heart of
"the Moor." One story has it that Lorenzo, as a diplomatic bonbon, had
sent him to Lodovico to deliver a handsome lute; another that he won a
musical contest there, and was retained not for any of the powers that
he had claimed "with all possible humility," but for the music of
his voice, the charm of his conversation, the soft sweet tone of the
lyre that his own hands had fashioned in the form of a horse's
head. `05075 Lodovico seems to have accepted him not at his own
valuation but as a brilliant youth who- even though he might be less
of an architect than Bramante, and too inexperienced to be entrusted
with military engineering- might plan court masques and city pageants,
decorate dresses for wife or mistress or princess, paint murals and
portraits, and perhaps construct canals to improve the irrigation of
the Lombard plain. It offends us to learn that the myriad-minded man
had to spend irrecoverable time making curious girdles for
Lodovico's pretty bride, Beatrice d'Este, conceiving costumes for
jousts and festivals, organizing pageants, or decorating stables.
But a Renaissance artist was expected to do all these things between
Madonnas; Bramante too shared in this courtlery; and who knows but the
woman in Leonardo delighted in designing dresses and jewelry, and
the accomplished equestrian in him enjoyed painting swift horses on
stable walls? He adorned the ballroom of the Castello for the marriage
of Beatrice, built a special bathroom for her, raised in the garden
a pretty pavilion for her summer joy, and painted other rooms-
camerini - for palace celebrations. He made portraits of Lodovico,
Beatrice, and their children, of Lodovico's mistresses Cecilia
Gallerani and Lucrezia Crivelli; these paintings are lost, unless
La Belle Ferroniere of the Louvre is Lucrezia. Vasari speaks of
the family portraits as "marvelous," and the picture of Lucrezia
inspired a poet to a fervid eulogy of the lady's beauty and the
artist's skill. `05076
Perhaps Cecilia was Leonardo's model for The Virgin of the
Rocks. The painting was contracted for (1483) by the Confraternity of
the Conception as the central part of an altarpiece for the church
of San Francesco. The original was later bought by Francis I and is in
the Louvre. Standing before it, we note the softly maternal face
that Leonardo would use a dozen times in later works; an angel
recalling one in Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ; two infants
exquisitely drawn; and a background of jutting, overhanging rocks that
only Leonardo could have conceived as Mary's habitat. The colors
have been darkened by time, but possibly the artist intended a
darkling effect, and suffused his pictures with a hazy atmosphere that
Italy calls sfumato - "smoked." This is one of Leonardo's greatest
pictures, surpassed only by The Last Supper, Mona Lisa, and The
Virgin, Child, and St. Anne.
The Last Supper and Mona Lisa are the world's most famous
paintings. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, pilgrims
enter the refectory that holds Leonardo's most ambitious work. In that
simple rectangular building the Dominican friars who were attached
to Lodovico's favorite church- Santa Maria delle Grazie- took their
meals. Soon after the artist arrived in Milan Lodovico asked him to
represent the Last Supper on the farthest wall of this refectory.
For three years (1495-8), on and off, Leonardo labored or dallied at
the task, while Duke and friars fretted over his incalculable
delays. The prior (if we may believe Vasari) complained to Lodovico of
Leonardo's apparent sloth, and wondered why he would sometimes sit
before the wall for hours without painting a stroke. Leonardo had no
trouble explaining to the Duke- who had some trouble explaining to the
prior- that an artist's most important work lies in conception
rather than in execution, and (as Vasari put it) "men of genius do
most when they work least." There were in this case, said Leonardo
to Lodovico, two special difficulties- to conceive features worthy
of the Son of God, and to picture a man as heartless as Judas;
perhaps, he slyly suggested, he might use the too frequently seen face
of the prior as a model for Iscariot. *05025 Leonardo hunted
throughout Milan for heads and faces that might serve him in
representing the Apostles; from a hundred such quarries he chose the
features that were melted in the mintage of his art into those
astonishingly individualized heads that make the wonder of the dying
masterpiece. Sometimes he would rush from the streets or his studio to
the refectory, add a stroke or two to the picture, and depart. `05078
The subject was superb, but from a painter's point of view it was
pitted with hazards. It had to confine itself to male figures and a
modest table in a simple room; there could be only the dimmest
landscape or vista; no grace of women might serve as foil to the
strength of the men; no vivid action could be brought in to set the
figures into motion and convey the sense of life. Leonardo let in a
glimpse of landscape through the three windows behind Christ. As a
substitute for action he portrayed the gathering at the tense moment
Christ has prophesied that one of the Apostles will betray Him, and
each is asking, in fear or horror or amazement, "Is it I?" The
institution of the Eucharist might have been chosen, but that would
have frozen all thirteen faces into an immobile and stereotyped
solemnity. Here, on the contrary, there is more than violent
physical action; there is a searching and revelation of spirit;
never again, so profoundly, has an artist revealed in one picture so
many souls. For the Apostles Leonardo made numberless preliminary
sketches; some of these- for James the Greater, Philip, Judas- are
drawings of such finesse and power as only Rembrandt and
Michelangelo have matched. When he tried to conceive the features of
Christ, Leonardo found that the Apostles had exhausted his
inspiration. According to Lomazzo (writing in 1557), Leonardo's old
friend Zenale advised him to leave the face of Christ unfinished,
saying: "Of a truth it would be impossible to imagine faces lovelier
or gentler than those of James the Greater or James the Less. Accept
your misfortune, then, and leave your Christ incomplete; for
otherwise, when compared with the Apostles, He would not be their
Saviour or their Master." `05079 Leonardo took the advice. He or a
pupil made a famous sketch (now in the Brera Gallery) for the head
of Christ, but it pictured an effeminate sadness and resignation
rather than the heroic resolve that calmly entered Gethsemane. Perhaps
Leonardo lacked the reverent piety that, had it been added to his
sensitivity, his depth, and his skill, might have brought the
picture nearer to perfection.
Because he was a thinker as well as an artist, Leonardo shunned
fresco painting as an enemy to thought; such painting on wet and
freshly laid plaster had to be done rapidly before the plaster
dried. Leonardo preferred to paint on a dry wall with tempera-colors
mixed in a gelatinous substance, for this method allowed him to ponder
and experiment. But these colors did not adhere firmly to the surface;
even in Leonardo's lifetime- what with the usual dampness of the
refectory and its occasional flooding in heavy rains- the paint
began to flake and fall; when Vasari saw the picture (1536) it was
already blurred; when Lomazzo saw it, sixty years after its
completion, it was already ruined beyond repair. The friars later
helped decay by cutting a door through the legs of the Apostles into
the kitchen (1656). The engraving by which the painting has been
reproduced throughout the world was taken not from the spoiled
original but from an imperfect copy made by one of Leonardo's
pupils, Marco d'Oggiono. Today we can study only the composition and
the general outlines, hardly the shades or subtleties. But whatever
were the defects of the work when Leonardo left it, some realized at
once that it was the greatest painting that Renaissance art had yet
produced.
Meanwhile (1483) Leonardo had undertaken a work completely different
and still more difficult. Lodovico had long wished to commemorate
his father, Francesco Sforza, with an equestrian statue that would
bear comparison with Donatello's Gattamelata at Padua and
Verrocchio's Colleoni in Venice. Leonardo's ambition was stirred. He
set himself to studying the anatomy, action, and nature of the
horse, and drew a hundred sketches of the animal, nearly all of
snorting vivacity. Soon he was absorbed in making a plaster model.
When some citizens of Piacenza asked him to recommend an artist to
design and cast bronze doors for their cathedral he wrote
characteristically in reply: "There is no one who is capable except
Leonardo the Florentine, who is making the bronze horse of the Duke
Francesco, and you need take no count of him, for he has work that
will last his whole lifetime; and I fear that it is so great an
undertaking that he will never finish it." `050710 Lodovico at times
thought so too, and asked Lorenzo for other artists to come and
complete the task (1489). Lorenzo, like Leonardo, could not think of
anybody better than Leonardo himself.