Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D
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from her need of Pisa as a port by canalizing the Arno from Florence
to the sea. `050793 Leonardo was not a Utopian dreamer, but he planned
his studies and works as if he had a dozen lives to live.
Armed with the great text of Theophrastus on plants, he turned his
alert mind to "natural history." He examined the system on which
leaves are arranged about their stalks, and formulated its laws. He
observed that the rings in a cross section of a tree trunk record
the years of its growth by their number, and the moisture of the
year by their width. `050794 He seems to have shared several delusions
of his time as to the power of certain animals to heal some human
diseases by their presence or their touch. `050795 He atoned for
this uncharacteristic lapse into superstition by investigating the
anatomy of the horse with a thoroughness to which recorded history had
no precedent. He prepared a special treatise on the subject, but it
was lost in the French occupation of Milan. He almost inaugurated
modern comparative anatomy by studying the limbs of men and animals in
juxtaposition. He set aside the superannuated authority of Galen,
and worked with actual bodies. The anatomy of man he described not
only in words but in drawings that excelled anything yet done in
that field. He planned a book on the subject, and left for it hundreds
of illustrations and notes. He claimed to "have dissected more than
thirty human cadavers," `050796 and his countless drawings of the
foetus, the heart, lungs, skeleton, musculature, viscera, eye,
skull, and brain, and the principal organs in woman, support his
claim. He was the first to give- in remarkable drawings and notes- a
scientific representation of the uterus, and he described accurately
the three membranes enclosing the foetus. He was the first to
delineate the cavity of the bone that supports the cheek, now known as
the antrum of Highmore. He poured wax into the valves of the heart
of a dead bull to get an exact impression of the chambers. He was
the first to characterize the moderator band ( catena ) of the right
ventricle. `050797 He was fascinated by the network of bloodvessels;
he divined the circulation of the blood, but did not quite grasp its
mechanism. "The heart," he wrote, "is much stronger than the other
muscles.... The blood that returns when the heart opens is not the
same as that which closes the valves." `050798 He traced the
blood-vessels, nerves, and muscles of the body with fair accuracy.
He attributed old age to arteriosclerosis, and this to lack of
exercise. `050799 He began a volume De figura umana, on the proper
proportions of the human figure as an aid to artists, and some of
his ideas were incorporated in his friend Pacioli's treatise De
divina proportione. He analyzed the physical life of man from birth
to decay, and then planned a survey of mental life. "Oh, that it may
please God to let me also expound the psychology of the habits of
man in such fashion as I am describing his body!" `0507100
Was Leonardo a great scientist? Alexander von Humboldt considered
him "the greatest physicist of the fifteenth century," `0507101 and
William Hunter ranked him as "the greatest anatomist of his
epoch." `0507102 He was not as original as Humboldt supposed; many
of his ideas in physics had come down to him from Jean Buridan, Albert
of Saxony, and other predecessors. He was capable of egregious errors,
as when he wrote that "no surface of water that borders upon the air
will ever be lower than that of the sea"; `0507103 but such slips
are remarkably few in so vast a production of notes on almost
everything on the earth or in the sky. His theoretical mechanics
were those of a highly intelligent amateur; he lacked training,
instruments, and time. That he achieved so much in science, despite
these handicaps and his labors in art, is among the miracles of a
miraculous age.
From his studies in so many fields Leonardo rose at times to
philosophy. "O marvelous Necessity! Thou with supreme reason
constrainest all effects to be the direct result of their causes,
and by a supreme and irrevocable law every natural action obeys thee
by the shortest possible process." `0507104 This has all the proud
ring of nineteenth-century science, and suggests that Leonardo had
shed some theology. Vasari, in the first edition of his life of the
artist, wrote that he was of "so heretical a cast of mind that he
conformed to no religion whatever, accounting it perchance better to
be a philosopher than a Christian"- `0507105 but Vasari omitted this
passage in later editions. Like many Christians of the time,
Leonardo took a fling now and then at the clergy; he called them
Pharisees, accused them of deceiving the simple with bogus miracles,
and smiled at the "false coin" of celestial promissory notes which
they exchanged for the coinage of this world. `0507106 On one Good
Friday he wrote: "Today all the world is in mourning because one man
died in the Orient." `0507107 He seems to have thought that dead
saints were incapable of hearing the prayers addressed to
them. `0507108 "I could wish that I had such power of language as
should avail me to censure those who would extol the worship of men
above that of the sun.... Those who have wished to worship men as gods
have made a very grave error." `0507109 He took more liberties with
Christian iconography than any other Renaissance artist: he suppressed
halos, put the Virgin across her mother's knee, and made the infant
Jesus try to bestride the symbolic lamb. He saw mind in matter, and
believed in a spiritual soul, but apparently thought that the soul
could act only through matter, and only in harmony with invariable
laws. `0507110 He wrote that "the soul can never be corrupted with the
corruption of the body," `0507111 but he added that "death destroys
memory as well as life," `0507112 and "without the body the soul can
neither act nor feel." `0507113 He addressed the Deity with humility
and fervor in some passages; `0507114 but at other times he identified
God with Nature, Natural Law, and "Necessity." `0507115 A mystic
pantheism was his religion until his final years.
VIII. IN FRANCE: 1516-19
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Arrived in France, Leonardo, sixty-four and ill, was established
with his faithful companion Francesco Melzi, twenty-four, in a
pretty house at Cloux, between the town and chateau of Amboise on
the Loire, then the frequent residence of the King. His contract
with Francis I designated him as "painter, engineer, and architect
of the King, and state mechanician," at an annual salary of seven
hundred crowns ($8750). Francis was generous, and appreciated genius
even in its decline. He enjoyed conversation with Leonardo, and
"affirmed," reported Cellini, "that never had any man come into the
world who knew so much as Leonardo, and that not only in sculpture,
painting, and architecture, for in addition he was a great
philosopher." `0507116 Leonardo's anatomical drawings amazed the
physicians at the French court.
For a time he labored manfully to earn his salary. He arranged
masques and pageants for royal displays; worked on plans to bind the
Loire and the Saone with canals and to drain the marshes of
Sologne, `0507117 and may have shared in designing parts of the
Loire chateaux; some evidence links his name with the jewel loveliness
of Chambord. `0507118 Probably he did little painting after 1517,
for in that year he suffered a paralytic stroke that immobilized his
right side; he painted with his left hand, but needed both hands for
careful work. He was now a wrinkled wreck of the youth whose repute
for beauty of body and face came down to Vasari across half a century.
His once proud self-confidence faded, his serenity of spirit yielded
to the pains of decay, his love of life gave place to religious
hope. He made a simple will, but he asked for all the services of
the Church at his funeral. Once he had written: "As a day well spent
makes it sweet to sleep, so a life well used makes it sweet to
die." `0507119
Vasari tells a touching story of how Leonardo died, on May 2,
1519, in the arms of the King; but apparently Francis was elsewhere at
the time. `0507120 The body was buried in the cloister of the
Collegiate Church of St. Florentin in Amboise. Melzi wrote to
Leonardo's brothers informing them of the event, and added: "It
would be impossible for me to express the anguish that I have suffered
from this death; and while my body holds together I shall live in
perpetual unhappiness. And for good reason. The loss of such a man
is mourned by all, for it is not in the power of Nature to create
another. May Almighty God rest his soul forever!" `0507121
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How shall we rank him?- though which of us commands the variety of
knowledge and skills required to judge so multiple a man? The
fascination of his polymorphous mind lures us into exaggerating his
actual achievement; for he was more fertile in conception than in
execution. He was not the greatest scientist or engineer or painter or
sculptor or thinker of his time; he was merely the man who was all
of these together and in each field rivaled the best. There must
have been men in the medical schools who knew more of anatomy than he;
the most notable works of engineering in the territory of Milan had
been accomplished before Leonardo came; both Raphael and Titian left a
more impressive total of fine paintings than has survived from
Leonardo's brush; Michelangelo was a greater sculptor; Machiavelli and
Guicciardini were profounder minds. And yet Leonardo's studies of
the horse were probably the best work done in the anatomy of that age;
Lodovico and Caesar Borgia chose him, from all Italy, as their
engineer; nothing in the paintings of Raphael or Titian or
Michelangelo equals The Last Supper; no painter has matched Leonardo
in subtlety of nuance, or in the delicate portrayal of feeling and
thought and pensive tenderness; no statue of the time was so highly
rated as Leonardo's plaster Sforza; no drawing has ever surpassed The
Virgin, Child, and St. Anne; and nothing in Renaissance philosophy
soared above Leonardo's conception of natural law.
He was not "the man of the Renaissance," for he was too gentle,
introverted, and refined to typify an age so violent and powerful in
action and speech. He was not quite "the universal man," since the
qualities of statesman or administrator found no place in his variety.
But, with all his limitations and incompletions, he was the fullest
man of the Renaissance, perhaps of all time. Contemplating his
achievement we marvel at the distance that man has come from his
origins, and renew our faith in the possibilities of mankind.
IX. THE SCHOOL OF LEONARDO
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He left behind him at Milan a bevy of younger artists who admired
him too much to be original. Four of them- Giovanni Antonio
Boltraffio, Andrea Salaino, Cesare da Sesto, and Marco d'Oggiono-
are figured in stone at the base of the patriarchal statue of Leonardo
in the Piazza della Scala in Milan. There were others- Andrea
Solari, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Bernardino de' Conti, Francesco Melzi....
All had worked in Leonardo's studio, and learned to imitate his
grace of line without reaching his subtlety or depth. Two other
painters acknowledged him as their teacher, though we are not sure
that they knew him in the flesh. Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, who allowed
himself to come down in history under the name of Sodoma, may have met
him in Milan or Rome. Bernardino Luini exalted sentiment, but with
an engaging straightforwardness that charms away reproach. He chose as
his repeated subject the Madonna and her Child; perhaps he rightly saw
in this most hackneyed of all pictorial themes the supreme
embodiment of life as a stream of births, of love as surmounting
death, and of womanly beauty that is never mature except in
motherhood. More than any other follower of Leonardo he caught the
master's effeminate delicacy and the tenderness- not the mystery- of
the Leonardesque smile; the Holy Family in the Ambrosiana at Milan
is a delectable variation on the Master's Virgin, Child, and St.
Anne; and the Sposalizio at Saronno has all the grace of Correggio.
He seems never to have doubted, as Leonardo did, the touching story of
the peasant maid who bore a god; he softened the lines and colors of
his paintings with a simple piety that Leonardo could hardly feel or
represent; and the unwilling skeptic who can still respect a lovely
and inspiring myth will pause longer, in the Louvre, before Luini's
Sleep of the Infant Jesus and Adoration of the Magi than before
Leonardo's St. John, and will find in them a profounder satisfaction
and truth.
With these elegant epigoni the great age of Milan died away. The
architects, painters, sculptors, and poets that had made Lodovico's
court surpassingly brilliant had seldom been natives of the city,
and many of them sought other pastures when the gentle despot fell. No
outstanding talent rose in the ensuing chaos and servitude to take
their place; and a generation later the castle and the cathedral
were the sole reminders that for a magnificent decade- the last of the
fifteenth century- Milan had led the pageant of Italy.
CHAPTER VIII: Tuscany and Umbria
I. PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA
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IF now we cross back into Tuscany, we find that Florence, like
another Paris, absorbed the talents of her dependencies, and left only
here and there among them a figure that bids us pause in our
pilgrimage. Lucca bought a charter of autonomy from the Emperor
Charles IV (1369), and managed to remain a free city till Napoleon.
The Lucchesi were properly proud of their eleventh-century
cathedral; they kept it in form with repeated restorations, and made
it a veritable museum of art. There eye and soul may still feast on
the lovely stalls (1452) and stained glass (1485) of the choir; on a
noble tomb by Iacopo della Quercia (1406); on one of Fra Bartolommeo's
profoundest pictures- Madonna with St. Stephen and St. John the
Baptist (1509); and on one handsome work after another by Lucca's own
son, Matteo Civitali.
Pistoia preferred Florence to freedom. The conflict of "Whites"
and "Blacks" so disordered the city that the government appealed to
the Florentine Signory to take over its management (1306).
Thereafter Pistoia received its art as well as its laws from Florence.
For the Ospedale del Ceppo- named from the hollow stump into which one
might drop contributions for the hospital- Giovanni della Robbia and
some aides designed (1514-25) a frieze of gleaming terra-cotta reliefs
of the Seven Works of Mercy: clothing the naked, feeding the hungry,
nursing the sick, visiting prisons, receiving strangers, burying the
dead, and comforting the bereaved. Here religion was at its best.
Pisa, once so rich that it could transform mountains of marble
into a cathedral, baptistery, and Leaning Tower, had owed its wealth
to its strategic position at the mouth of the Arno. For that reason
Florence beat it into subjection (1405). Pisa never reconciled
itself to this servitude; it rebelled again and again. In 1431 the
Florentine Signory expelled from Pisa all males capable of bearing
arms, and kept their women and children as hostages for their good
behavior. `05081 Pisa took advantage of the French invasion (1495)
to reassert its independence; for fourteen years it fought off the
Florentine mercenaries; finally, after a fanatically heroic
resistance, it succumbed. Many leading families, choosing exile rather
than vassalage, migrated to France or Switzerland- among them the
Sismondi ancestors of the historian who in 1838 wrote an eloquent
account of these events in his History of the Italian Republics.
Florence tried to atone for her despotism by financing the
University of Pisa, and sending her artists to adorn the cathedral and
the Campo Santo; but not even the famous frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli
in that Holy Field of the dead could comfort a city geologically
doomed to decay. For the detritus of the Arno gradually and
mercilessly advanced the shore line, creating a new port at Livorno-
Leghorn- six miles away; and Pisa lost the commercial situation that
had made its fortune and its tragedy.
San Gimignano took its name from St. Geminian, who saved the
incipient village from the hordes of Attila about 450. It rose to some
prosperity in the fourteenth century; but its rich families divided
into murderous factions, and built the fifty-six fortress towers
(now reduced to thirteen) that gave the town its fame as San Gimignano
delle Belle Torri. In 1353 the strife grew so violent that the city
accepted with resigned relief its absorption into the Florentine
dominion. Thereafter life seems to have gone out of it. Domenico
Ghirlandaio made the Santa Fina Chapel of the Collegiata famous with
his finest frescoes, and Benozzo Gozzoli rivaled his Medici Chapel
cavalcades with scenes from the life of St. Augustine in the church of
Sant' Agostino, and Benedetto da Maiano carved superb altars for those
shrines. But commerce took other routes, industry starved, stimulus
died; San Gimignano remained becalmed in her narrow streets and
disintegrating towers; and in 1928 Italy made the city a national
monument, preserved as a half-living picture of medieval life.
Forty miles up the Arno from Florence, Arezzo was a vital spot in
the web of Florentine defense and trade. The Signory itched and angled
to control it; in 1384 Florence bought the city from the duke of
Anjou; Arezzo never forgot the indignity. It gave birth to Petrarch,
Aretino, and Vasari, but failed to hold them, for its soul still
belonged to the Middle Ages. Luca Spinello, also called Aretino,
went from Arezzo to paint in the Campo Santo at Pisa lively frescoes
stirring with the shock of battle (1390-2), but also portraying Christ
and Mary and the saints with an intense and moving piety. If we wish
to believe Vasari, Luca portrayed Satan so repulsively that the
Devil appeared to him in a dream and reprimanded him with such
violence that Luca died of fright- at ninety-two. `05082
Northeast of Arezzo, on the upper Tiber, the town of Borgo San
Sepolcro seemed too small to have and to hold an artist of high
rank. Piero di Benedetto was called della Francesca after his
mother; for she, left pregnant with him after his father's death,
reared him lovingly, and guided and aided him to an education in
mathematics and art. Though we know that he was born in the Town of
the Holy Sepulcher, the earliest notice of him places him in
Florence in 1439. That was the year in which Cosimo brought the
Council of Ferrara to Florence; presumably Piero saw the gorgeous
costumes of the Byzantine prelates and princes who had come to
negotiate the reunion of the Greek with the Roman Church. We may
more confidently presume that he studied the frescoes of Masaccio in
the Brancacci Chapel; this was routine for any art student in
Florence. The dignity, power, and resolute perspective of Masaccio
mingled in Piero's art with the picturesque grandeur and majestic
beards of the Eastern potentates.
When he returned to Borgo (1442) Piero was elected, aged thirty-six,
to the town council. Three years later he received his first
recorded commission: to paint a Madonna della Misericordia for the
church of San Francesco. It is still preserved in the Palazzo
Comunale: a strange assemblage of somber saints, a semi-Chinese Virgin
enfolding eight praying figures in the robe of her mercy, a stiff
Archangel Gabriel making a very formal announcement of her
motherhood to Mary, an almost peasant Christ in a grimly realistic
Crucifixion, and vivid forms of the Mater Dolorosa and the Apostle
John. This is half-primitive painting, but powerful: no pretty
sentiment, no delicate decoration, no idealized refinement of the
tragic tale; but bodies soiled and consumed with the struggle of life,
and yet rising to nobility in the silence of their suffering, their
prayers, and their forgiveness.
His fame now spread through Italy, and Piero was in demand. At
Ferrara (1449?) he painted murals in the Ducal Palace. Rogier van
der Weyden was then court painter there; probably Piero learned from
him something of the new technique of painting with pigments mixed
in oil. At Rimini (1451) he pictured Sigismondo Malatesta- tyrant,
murderer, and patron of art- in an attitude of pious prayer,
redeemed by the presence of two magnificent dogs. In Arezzo, at
intervals between 1452 and 1464, Piero painted for the church of San
Francesco a series of frescoes that mark the zenith of his art. They
told mainly the story of the True Cross, culminating in its capture by
Khosru II, and its recovery and restoration to Jerusalem by the
Emperor Heraclius; but they found place also for such episodes as
the death of Adam, the Queen of Sheba's visit to Solomon, and the
victory of Constantine over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge. The
emaciated figure of the dying Adam, the worn face and drooping breasts
of Eve, the powerful bodies of their sons and their almost equally
virile daughters, the flowing majesty of the Queen of Sheba's retinue,
the profound and disillusioned face of Solomon, the startling
incidence of light in The Dream of Constantine, the fascinating
turmoil of men and horses in The Victory of Heraclius - these are
among the most impressive frescoes of the Renaissance.
Probably in the interludes of this major effort Piero painted an
altarpiece at Perugia, and some murals in the Vatican- later
whitewashed to make more space for Raphael's conquering brush. At
Urbino in 1469 he produced his most famous picture- the arresting
profile of Duke Federigo da Montefeltro. Federigo's nose had been
broken, and his right cheek scarred, in a tournament. Piero showed the
left side, intact but hilly with moles, and portrayed the crooked nose
with dauntless realism; he made the firm lips and half-closed eyes and
sober face reveal the administrator, the stoic, the man who has
plumbed the shallowness of wealth and power; we miss, however, in
these features, the refinement of taste that guided Federigo in
organizing music at his court and collecting his celebrated library of
classical and illuminated manuscripts. Paired with this portrait in
the Uffizi diptych is a profile of Federigo's wife, Battista Sforza- a
face almost Dutch, and pale to sallowness- against a background of
fields, hills, sky, and battlemented walls. On the obverse of the
portraits Piero painted two "triumphs"- one chariot drawing
Federigo, the other Battista, in solemn state; both elegantly absurd.
About 1480 Piero, now sixty-four, began to suffer from eye
trouble. Vasari thought he became blind, but apparently he could still
draw well. In those declining years he wrote a manual of
perspective, and a treatise De quinque corporibus regolaribus, in
which he analyzed the geometrical relations and proportions involved
in painting. His pupil Luca Pacioli adopted Piero's ideas in his own
book De divina proportione; and perhaps through this mediation
Piero's mathematical ideas influenced Leonardo's studies in the
geometry of art.
The world has forgotten Piero's books and has rediscovered his
paintings. When we place him in time, and note that his work was
completed when Leonardo's had just begun, we must assign him a rank
with the leading Italian painters of the fifteenth century. His
figures seem crude, their faces coarse; many seem cast in a Flemish
mold. What ennobles them is their quiet dignity, their grave mien
and stately carriage, the restrained and yet dramatic force of their