Essays on Art | Page 6

fulfil it, neither has mankind;
but he believed that all things could be done and lived a great life in
that faith.
Another Florentine almost equals him in renown. Men watched and
whispered when Dante passed through the streets of Florence; but
Dante lives in his achievement, Leonardo in himself. Dante means to us
an individual soul quivering through a system, a creed, inherited from
the past. Leonardo is a spirit unstraitened; not consenting to any past
nor rebelling against it, but newborn with a newborn universe around it,
seeing it without memories or superstitions, without inherited fears or
pieties, yet without impiety or irreverence. He is not an iconoclast,
since for him there are no images to be broken; whatever he sees is not
an image but itself, to be accepted or rejected by himself; what he
would do he does without the help or hindrance of tradition. In art and
in science he means the same thing, not a rebirth of any past, as the
word Renaissance seems to imply, but freedom from all the past, life
utterly in the present. He is concerned not with what has been thought,
or said, or done, but with his own immediate relation to all things, with

what he sees and feels and discovers. Authority is nothing to him,
whether of Galen or of St. Thomas, of Greek or mediæval art. In
science he looks at the fact, in art at the object; nor will he allow either
to be hidden from him by the achievements of the dead. Giotto had
struck the first blow for freedom when he allowed the theme to dictate
the picture; Leonardo allowed the object to dictate the drawing. To him
the fact itself is sacred, and man fulfils himself in his own immediate
relation to fact.
All those who react and rebel against the Renaissance have an easy
case against its great representative. What did he do in thought
compared with St. Thomas, or in art compared with the builders of
Chartres or Bourges? He filled notebooks with sketches and conjectures;
he modelled a statue that was never cast; he painted a fresco on a wall,
and with a medium so unsuited to fresco that it was a ruin in a few
years. Even in his own day there was a doubt about him; it is expressed
in the young Michelangelo's sudden taunt that he could not cast the
statue he had modelled. Michelangelo was one of those who see in life
always the great task to be performed and who judge a man by his
performance; to him Leonardo was a dilettante, a talker; he made
monuments, but Leonardo remains his own monument, a prophecy of
what man shall be when he comes into his kingdom. With him, we
must confess, it is more promise than performance; he could paint "The
Last Supper" because it means the future; he could never, in good faith,
have painted "The Last Judgment," for that means a judgment on the
past, and to him the past is nothing; to him man, in the future, is the
judge, master, enjoyer of his own fate. Compared with his,
Michelangelo's mind was still mediæval, his reproach the reproach of
one who cares for doing more than for being, and certainly
Michelangelo did a thousand times more; but from his own day to ours
the world has not judged Leonardo by his achievement. As Johnson had
his Boswell so he has had his legend; he means to us not books or
pictures, but himself. In his own day kings bid for him as if he were a
work of art; and he died magnificently in France, making nothing but
foretelling a race of men not yet fulfilled.
Before Francis Bacon, before Velasquez or Manet, he prophesied not
merely the new artist or the new man of science, but the new man who
is to free himself from his inheritance and to see, feel, think, and act in

all things with the spontaneity of God. That is why he is a legendary
hero to us, with a legend that is not in the past but in the future. For his
prophecy is still far from fulfilment; and the very science that he
initiated tells us how hard it is for man to free himself from his
inheritance. It seems strange to us that Leonardo sang hymns to
causation as if to God. In its will was his peace and his freedom.
O marvellous necessity, thou with supreme reason constrainest all
efforts 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.
Who would believe that so small a space could contain the images of
all the universe? O mighty process,