THE GOLDEN AGE

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CHAPTER XIX

WHEREIN WE MEET THE GIANT OF THE SPRINGTIME OF THE RENAISSANCE

Now dawns the Golden Age of the Renaissance-so men label the years. The striving of the Florentine genius to utter itself in painting has brought forth command of the hand over the tools of painting that enables the hand to do what the eye wills. The Florentines bent their will to the mastery of form, above all the human shape. They are mastering depth, by perspective of line, and by the aerial perspective, employing light and shadow to give the distance of objects bathed in their varying deeps of atmosphere. Leonardo da Vinci comes and completes that conquest.

It is the habit of the writers to speak of the giants of the Golden Age as being Leonardo da Vinci the Magician of the Age, Raphael the Melodist, Correggio the Fawn, and Michelangelo the Prophet. The tags fit well enough. But Leonardo da Vinci is rather the culmination and supreme genius of the great middle achievement of the Renaissance, its splendid blossom. However, 'tis all somewhat a vain affair and futile-this docketing into classes. The significance of Leonardo lies in this, that in him we are to see one who by his vigorous will, his abounding strength, and the keen inquisitiveness of his age, made his hand facile to state the human form, to yield its sense of [140] movement, to place it in the the deeps of its surrounding atmosphere, and to envelope it in that mysterious sense of life that is poetry, so that, even as we gaze upon his work it seems to give forth life. For, mark this well, the whole effort of Florence has been to create reality-to compel the sense of vision to utter itself in such consummate fashion that its works of art shall arouse, as fully and completely as skill can do it, the emotion of life in all who behold the pictured surface. The achievement of his hand, like the achievement of all Florence, is to be akin to the vision of the sculptor rather thatn of the painter-for the essential significance of the painter is colour; and Florence failed in colour-failed, that is to say, to make the hand's skill facile to utter the thing seen in the resonant terms of rhythmic colour.

Until, and to some extent even in, Leonardo da Vinci's skill, there is the feeling of the artist struggling with his skill of hand to utter the music of his vision-the hand does not quite achieve except by dogged labour.

Henceforth the hand's skill is to become more facile, leaps to the eye's desire. Michelangelo employs the significant phrase in one of his sonnets-"the hand obedient to the brain." The hand leaps to utter the artist's desire; the dragging sense of endeavour departs from it. Art conceals art. All that the Florentine genius is capable of doing within the limits of its skill of hand, it is now about to achieve-and in superb fashion.

I repeat: up to, and in a large degree including, the art of Leonardo da Vinci, there is in all Florentine art the sense of toil to create the impression. After Leonardo this sense of labour is flown. There is in Leonardo's art, for all its supreme force, a feeling akin to the century that created him, rather than to the century that followed. And it is [141] for this reason that I would class him as the supreme singer of the springtime of the Renaissance rather than one of the stars of the Golden Age. But the world has ordered otherwise ; therefore, so let it be. And, of a truth, the genius of Leonardo da Vinci was so compelling that the inquisition of his profound vision sought out the secrets of the later age-to that age he was a mighty forerunner ; and he stands, thereby, straddling like a giant between the two. It was given to only one man of the Golden Age to surpass him in intensity of power and sublimity of conception ; yet even Michelangelo was unable to touch some of the chords of Leonardo's astounding art.

LEONARDO DA VINCI
1452 - 1519

We have seen the Florentine genius develop along two paths, side by side. On the one hand, through the fourteen-hundreds, the spiritual and tenderly pietistic art of Fra Angelico passed into the more worldly piety of Fra Lippo Lippi, who went a-courting the beautiful nun, Lucrezia Buti ; then Lippo Lippi's pupil, Botticelli, " the reanimate Greek," brought the pagan gods dancing and piping within the precincts of the church, with Ghirlandaio working alongside of him; and Lippo Lippi's love-child, Filippino Lippi, completed the conquest of the great world over the simple faith of the forerunner, Fra Angelico. Then, it will be seen, the goldsmith-painters - since Filippino Lippi, though not a goldsmith, was of them by birth and blood and tradition and training-largely wrought out the pietistic development of Florentine art that aimed at beauty.

On the other hand, the tragic and sombre realism that Donatello and Masaccio created, wrought out the Florentine [142] spirit on its realistic side in broad and majestic fashion, with fearless eyes for the truth, and realising ugliness as well as beauty to be a significance ; seeing life more whole, and not flinching from it. From Masaccio and Donatello, through Andrea dal Castagno and Domenico Veneziano and Uccello, and Dei Franceschi, the tragic flame was handed on to the brothers Poliauoli, who as goldsmiths had turned their eyes to the sculptured form of the human nude, from whom the tradition passed to their pupil Verrocchio, likewise pupil to Donatello, whose superb equestrian statue of Gattamelata in bronze at Padua this Verrocchio rivalled with his famed equestrian statue of the condottiere Colleoni at Venice-two amongst the greatest works of man's hands.

In Verrocchio's painting was knit together something of the two Florentine temperaments in art and in life ; and it was fitting that out of Verrocchio's studio should come the youth who was still further to knit together her full significance, as he was also to create in his own person the sculpture and the painting of his century, gathering together, as unto a mighty flowering, the sap and tree of that century as Leonardo da Vinci.

LEONARDO DA VINCI was to express in his art, as he held in his genius, the full significance of his age-the triumphs of the scientific spirit of the Renaissance that arose to full honour under the mantle of the church. Over all that he wrought is the inscrutable smile of the Sphinx, the eternal question of the significance of life. Did he solve it ? For answer we can only turn to that baffling, questioning smile. Here is the Renaissance stated in terms of Art.

In the realm of colour he was not the greatest painter of Italy of the fourteen-hundreds ; but in his complete utterance as artist his achievement is prodigious. All that [143] had gone before, all that was being wrought about him, he made his own ; and his hand gave forth the impression of a vigorous and keen brain that saw, and of a quick inquisitive temperament that felt, the mystery of the miracle of Reality and its oneness with Spirituality. He employed colour with the prodigious restraint that was a part of all his restless, feverish activity-he employed it but to enhance the harmony of his deeply conceived impressions of things, so that it becomes resonant and deeply musical, compelling the eyes to the deeps of what he saw and felt. It is rather in the vibrant atmosphere which he creates about his figures, chiefly by a consummate employment of light and shade (what is called chiaroscuro, or the blackness and whiteness of darkness and light), so that his line and form lose their linear classical aim, that Leonardo moves the craftsmanship of art forward towards its vaster powers of impressionism; that is to say, by the employment of masses in their relation to each other, he becomes the forerunner of a mighty advance in artistry. He was too steeped in, too much a child of, his age, wholly to rid himself of its exquisite classical sense of the rhythm of line ; but his inquisitive and keen searching eyes had beheld in sculpture the play of light and shade upon the surfaces, giving the living sense of movement and mystery ; and he bent all his compelling genius to create by draughtsmanship and painting this illusion of life upon the painted object, held in the play of atmosphere. There is revealed by his art at once a power never before known in painting ; but for which the age of Praxiteles had striven in ancient Greece-the effort to express the subtlety of life in the painted flesh.

He who gazes at the all too rare masterpieces of Leonardo da Vinci will be touched by the sense of this subtle movement, as though the objects painted on the flat [144] surface were in a deep mirror, stirring and looming and rhythmic as though they were attune to sound, affecting the senses like some haunting music. Botticelli's exquisite sense of line and colour have vanished into lineless massing that holds an intensity of life and moves in one's senses as though the breath stirred their surfaces. Not only have we now the height and width of a flat decorated surface; not only the depth of vision of things seen as though in a mirror ; but a strange subtlety of atmosphere that surrounds each living thing.

In the mid-century of the fourteen-hundreds, 1452, Leonardo da Vinci was born, as his name tells us, in the little village of Vinci, set high on the top of a hill amidst the hills that lie by Empoli in the valley of the Arno. He was one of the world's great illegitimates. The natural son of Ser Piero, a notary of Vinci-this Ser Piero's forefathers had been notaries for four generations before him-and of one Caterina, who afterwards married Accattabriga di Piero del Vaccha of Vinci, he is first mentioned as being five years of age in a taxation return made in 1457 by his grandfather, Antonio da Vinci ; nor is his birth likely to have been recorded with elaborate care. This grandfather seems to have been a true gentleman, for the boy was brought up and educated in his house ; and the father seems to have had the boy legitimised in his early youth. This Ser Piero was much given to marrying as well as to affairs of the heart, for he was four times a bridegroom, and by his third and fourth wives had eleven lawful children -which probably caused considerable friction in youth for Leonardo.

In youth his personal beauty was renowned, his speech fascinating, and his charm of manner as remarkable.

XVII
LEONARDO DA VINCI
1452 - 1519
FLORENTINE AND MILANESE SCHOOLS
"THE VIRGIN OF THE ROCKS"
(NATIONAL GALLERY)
The Virgin kneels amid flowers beneath dark basaltic rocks. She places her right hand on the shoulder of St. John the Baptist ; her left held out in benediction over the Infant Christ seated on the ground beside an angel.
Painted on wood, arched at the top. 6 ft. o 1/2 in. h. x 3 ft. 9 1/2 in. w. (1.841 x 1.155).