LEONARDO 461
Vasari says, had accompanied Giuliano to Rome on the occasion of his brother's elevation to the papal chair. Ill success attended the now ageing master during his stay in the shadow of St Peter's. He is said, indeed, to have delighted the pope, who was himself something of an alchemist, by his experiments and ingenuities in science, and especially by a kind of zoological toys, which he had invented by way of pastime, as well as mechanical tricks played upon living animals. But when, having received a commission for a picture, he was found distilling for himself a new medium of oils and herbs before he had begun the design, the pope was convinced, not quite unreasonably, that nothing serious would come of it. The hostility of Michelangelo, with whom Leonardo was in competition for the façade of San Lorenzo at Florence, may also have done something towards hindering the employment of the elder master on any important works. At all events no such employment came to him, and he seems, while he was at Rome, to have painted nothing but two small panels, one of a child, the other of a Madonna, for an official of the papal court.
By the end of the year 1515 Leonardo had left Rome and returned once more to Milan. In the meantime the brief rule of Maximilian Sforza had been terminated by the victory at Marignano of Francis I., who prevailed on Leonardo, by this time in his sixty-fourth year, to enter his service and return with him to France. It was in the beginning of 1516 that the painter crossed the Alps, taking with him his friend, the youthful Francesco Melzi. The Château Cloux in Touraine, near Amboise, was appointed for his place of residence. But his race was nearly run. In France he projected some canal works, and painted two pictures of classical mythology, which have been lost, a Leda and a Pomona; and that was all. He desired to put in order some of his vast accumulations of MS. notes and researches, but soon discovered that he who had been endeavouring so insatiably for all these years, in his own words, to learn to live had only been learning to die. That form of strength and beauty, and that exquisitely shaping and all-searching mind, were dissolved before decay or infirmity impaired them. Leonardo died at Cloux, in the sixty-seventh year of his age, on the 2d of May 1519. King Francis, then at his court of St Germain en Laye, is said to have wept for the loss of such a servant; that he was present beside the death-bed and held the dying painter in his arms is a familiar but an untrue tale.
The contents of our narrative will have justified the definition of Leonardo with which we set out, as a genius all but universal and a man pre-eminently great, yet great rather by power than by performance. Thus, in painting, there have come down to us no more than ten undisputed works from his hand; and among those ten are included the picture by his master Verrocchio in which Leonardo had only a share, as well as the cartoon at the Royal Academy, and the unfinished panels at the Uffizi and the Borghese gallery. Of the remaining well certified works of Leonardo, one is at the National Gallery (the Suffolk Vierge aux Rochers), the others are the second Vierge aux Rochers, the Virgin and Child with St Anne, the portrait of Mona Lisa, and the young John the Baptist, all at the Louvre. The remains of the fresco said to have been painted by Leonardo and Melzi together, in the villa which belonged to the latter at Vaprio near Milan, are too fragmentary and disputable to be counted. Of works, in addition to these, ordinarily claimed for Leonardo's hand, the best and nearest to his manner, if not actually his, is the portrait commonly known as La Belle Ferronnière, also at the Louvre, which students conjecture to be in reality that of the marchioness of Mantua, others that of Lucrezia Crivelli. Another highly reputed picture in the manner of Leonardo is the Vierge au Bas-relief at Gatton Park; another version, however, of the same theme, said to be in no way inferior to that at Gatton, exists at Milan, and is there rightly attributed to Cesare da Sesto. The multitude of smiling daughters of Herodias, allegorical Floras, and the like, besides some admirable religious pictures (including the Christ Preaching to the Doctors, at the National Gallery), which are currently attributed in public and private galleries to Leonardo, belong really to the various pupils or imitators of his school – the greatest number to Bernardino Luini, who added to a peculiar grace and suavity of his own much of the great master's intellectual power and exquisiteness of choice and finish. Such as they are, the meagre original remains of Leonardo's craft in painting are enough to establish his place in history as the earliest complete painter of the Renaissance. In his work there are no longer to be perceived, as there are in that of all his contemporaries, any of the engaging imperfections of childhood; there is no longer any disproportion between the conception and its embodiment. He had wrestled with nature from the cradle, and for the purposes of pictorial representation had mastered her. He could draw with that ineffable left hand of his (the words are those of his friend Luca Pacioli) a line firmer, finer, and truer than has been drawn by the hand of any other man, excepting perhaps Albert Dürer. Further, Leonardo carried the refinement of solid modelling in light and shade to the same high point to which he carried the refinements of linear definition. Colour he left where he found it, or rather perhaps, by his predilection for effects of light and shade, did something towards bringing about the degradation of colour. Of character and action he was an unrivalled master – preferring for his own pleasure the more far-fetched and enigmatical, sometimes even the grotesque among human types and expressions, but capable on occasion, as in his masterwork of the Last Supper, of laying aside curiosity and strangeness, and treating a great theme in a great and classical spirit. If these qualities can be sufficiently discerned in the few extant paintings of this master, it is only by the study of his drawings and sketches that his industry and fertility in the graphic art can be appreciated. These are very numerous as well as very various in kind, and are widely scattered among different possessors, occurring sometimes apart from and sometimes in connexion with the sheets of his MS. notes and writings (see note below).
Passing from Leonardo's achievements in art to his attainments and inventions in science, a subject on which the present writer has no authority for speaking at first hand, it appears that, in this sphere also, the spirit of fanciful curiosity and ingenuity coexisted in Leonardo with an incomparably just and powerful grasp of natural fact and natural law. Gossiping biographers like best to speak of his mechanical birds, of his mechanical walking lion stuffed with lilies, of the lizard which he fitted with horns and artificial eyes and oscillating wings filled with quicksilver, and the like; but serious students assure us that he was one of the very greatest and most clear-sighted as well as one of the earliest of natural philosophers. They declare him to have been the founder of the study of the anatomy and structural classification of plants; the founder, or at least the chief reviver, of the science of hydraulics; to have anticipated many of the geometrical discoveries of Commandin, Autolycus, and Tartaglia; to have divined or gone far towards divining the laws of gravitation, the earth's rotation, and the molecular composition of water, the motion of waves, and even the undulatory theory of light and heat. He discovered the construction of the eye and the optical laws of vision, and invented the camera obscura. Among useful appliances he invented the saw which is still in use in the marble quarries of Carrara,
