ART
" LEONARDO'S life is changeful and uncertain. It is thought he lives only for the day." Since this was written, rather disapprovingly, by Pietro da Novellara 451 years ago, no change, no uncertainty and no moment of a day which Leonardo spent with pen or chalk or brush in his hand has ceased to be an object of wonder and reverence to the world. There are no superlatives left fresh enough to apply to the stature of his mind, no comparisons to be made which are not by now worked to death. Yet what a tragic history of supernormal failure must Leonardo himself have felt his life's work to have been. His pictures decayed, his sculpture destroyed, his researches un- exploited : was any man of genius so bedevilled by his own restless- ness ?
The magnificent exhibition of his drawings gathered together at the Royal Academy to commemorate the fifth centenary of his birth almost all relate to some unfulfilled or lost or ruined scheme, some masterpiece " in sculpture in marble, bronze or clay," or some plan to be " doing in painting whatever may be done as well as any other, be he who he may," or to those ten several items specified in the famous letter to Ludovico Sforza, which carried that simple, monumental and proud statement of qualifications.
Leonardo's forte was conjecture, his restlessness the restlessness of search and research, and one of the strangest aspects of his mind is the curious enigmatic serenity, disturbingly filled with unrevealed, unknowable implications-, which appears suddenly from time to time among his works. In the midst of a whorl of activity connected with the study of optics, anatomy, mechanics or biology, he suddenly seems to withdraw from the penetration of natural laws to produce a drawing like the nymph who points into the distance behind a little waterfall (237), or even to pursue nature so near her secret centre that, as in the drawings of the deluge, she gives up to him more than the law which governs moving waters and reveals some element beyond mere understanding.
Yet the spectator must feel, even in the midst of these wonders, a curious dislocation, a paradox in Leonardo's nature, which separates him so from mankind that, despite his dissections and anatomies, his search for physical truth and his incredible sensitivity in conveying the lineaments of a human face, he was not in contact with men, nor sympathetic, finally, towards human beings. The mysterious St. John in the Louvre, even the seemingly tender relationship of the Virgin, St. Anne and the Child, is curiously bloodless. And, specific- ally in his paintings, out of the dusky verities of form which, both disguised and explained by the velvet technique of sfumato, are so perfectly achieved, an almost repulsive quality makes itself felt, a quality of antipathy.
This exhibition is enormously rewarding and immensely revealing. It is a titanic record of incredible achievement, consisting almost entirely of preparations for the unachieved. Perhaps it is a record of man himself united in the universal man, or perhaps a gigantic commentary on the text that vanity is vanity. The visitor cannot fail to leave it, not only with awe, but with disturbed self-questioning.
The opening sentence of the first of Leonardo's notebooks, now known as the Arundel MS. 263, runs : " This will be a collection without order, taken from many papers I have copied here, hoping afterwards to arrange them in order, each in its place according to the subjects treated of." This was written in March, 1508, in Florence. In March, 1952, at Burlington House, it may be seen how Leonardo's papers have been set in order and " according to the subjects treated of," that they embrace almost every aspect of those studies most vital to the ordering of life.
MICHAEL AYRTON.
(In next week's Spectator Mr. F. Sherwood Taylor, Director of the Science Museum, will be writing on Leonardo as scientist and inventor.)
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