Essays on Art | Page 8

something we should never
have expected from his drawings. "The Last Supper" is but a shadow
on the wall, yet still we can see its greatness, which is the greatness of
pure design, of Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesa. Goethe and
others have found all kinds of psychological subtleties in it, meanings
in every gesture; but what we see now is only space, grandeur, a
supreme moment expressed in the relation of all the forms. The pure
music of the painting remains when the drama is almost obliterated;
and it proves that Leonardo, when he chose, could withdraw himself
from the delight of hand-to-mouth experience into a vision of his own,
that he had the reserve and the creative power of the earlier masters and
of that austere, laborious youth who taunted him. If it were not for "The
Last Supper" we might doubt whether he could go further in art than
the vivid sketch of "The Magi"; but "The Last Supper" tells us how
great his passion for reality must have been, since it could distract him
from the making of such masterpieces.
That passion for reality itself made him cold to other passions. We
know Michelangelo and Beethoven as men in some respects very like
other men. They were anxious, fretful, full of affections and grievances,
and much concerned with their relations. Leonardo is like Melchizedek,
not only by the accident of birth, for he was a natural son, but by choice.
He never married, he never had a home; there is no evidence that he
was ever tied to any man or woman by his affections; yet it would be
stupid to call him cold, for his one grand passion absorbed him. Monks
suspected him, but in his heart he was celibate like the great monkish
saints, celibate not by vows but by preoccupation. It is clear that from
youth to age life had no cumulative power over him; as we should say
in our prosaic language, he never settled down, for he let things happen
to him and valued the very happening. He was always like a strange,
wonderful creature from another planet, taking notes with unstaled
delight but never losing his heart to any particular. Sex itself seems
hardly to exist for him, or at least for his mind. Often the people in his
drawings are of no sex. Rembrandt draws every one, Leonardo no one,
as if he were his own relation. Women and youths were as much a
subject of his impassioned curiosity as flowers, and no more. He is
always the spectator, but a spectator who can exercise every faculty of

the human mind and every passion in contemplation; he is the nearest
that any man has ever come to Aristotle's Supreme Being.
But we must not suppose that he went solemnly through life living up
to his own story, that he was mysterious in manner or in any respect
like a charlatan. Rather, he lived always in the moment and overcame
mankind by his spontaneity. He had the charm of the real man of
genius, not the reserve of the false one. The famous statement of what
he could do, which he made to Ludovico Sforza, is not a mere boast but
an expression of his eagerness to do it. These engines of war were
splendid toys to him, and all his life he enjoyed making toys and seeing
men wonder at them. His delight was to do things for the first time like
a child, and then not to do them again. Again and again he cries out
against authority and in favour of discovery. "Whoever in discussion
adduces authority," he says, "uses not intellect but rather memory"; and,
anticipating Milton, he observes that all our knowledge originates in
opinions. Perhaps some one had rebuked him for having too many
opinions. We can be sure that he chafed against dull, cautious, safe men
who wished for results. He himself cared nothing for them; it was
enough for him to know what might be done, without doing it. He was
so sure of his insight that he did not care to put it to the test of action;
that was for slower men, whether artists or men of science. His
notebooks were enough for him.
In spite of the notebooks and the sketches, we know less about the man
Leonardo than about the man Shakespeare. Here and there he makes a
remark with some personal conviction or experience in it. "Intellectual
passion," he says, "drives out sensuality." In him it had driven out or
sublimated all the sensual part of character. We cannot touch or see or
hear him in anything he says or draws. The passion is there, but it is too
much concerned with universals to be of like nature