Leonardo Da Vinci 1452-1519

In spite of the universal praise of his cartoon, Leonardo did not persevere with the picture, and the monks of the Annunziata had to give back the commission to Filippino Lippi, at whose death the task was completed by Perugino. It remains un certain whether a small Madonna with distaff and spindle, which the correspondent of Isabella Gonzaga reports Leonardo as having begun for one Robertet, a favourite of the king of France, was ever finished. He painted one portrait, it is said, at this time, that of Ginevra Benci, a kinswoman, perhaps sister, of a youth Giovanni di Amerigo Benci, who shared his passion for cosmographical studies; and probably began another, the famous "La Gioconda," which was only finished four years afterwards. The gonfalionere Soderini offered him in vain, to do with it what he would, the huge half-spoiled block of marble out of which Michelangelo three years later wrought his "David." Cesare Borgia (1502).—In the spring of 1502 he took service with Cesare Borgia, duke of Valentinois, occupied in consolidating his recent conquests in the Romagna. Between May 15oz and March 1503 Leonardo travelled as chief engineer to Duke Caesar over a great part of central Italy. Starting with a visit to Piom bino, on the coast opposite Elba, he went by way of Siena to Urbino, where he made drawings and began works ; was thence hastily summoned by way of Pesaro and Rimini to Cesena; spent two months between there and Cesenatico, projecting and direct ing canal and harbour works, and planning the restoration of the palace of Frederic II. ; thence hurriedly joined his master, momen tarily besieged by enemies at Imola ; followed him probably to Si nigaglia and Perugia, through the whirl of storms and surprises, vengeances and treasons, which marked his course that winter, and finally, by way of Chiusi and Acquapendente, as far as Orvieto and probably to Rome, where Caesar arrived on the i4th of February 1503. The pope's death and Caesar's own downfall were not destined to be long delayed. But Leonardo apparently had already had enough of that service, and was back at Florence in March. He has left dated notes and drawings made at most of the stations we have named, besides a set of six large-scale maps drawn minutely with his own hand, and including nearly the whole territory of the Maremma, Tuscany and Umbria between the Apennines and the Tyrrhene sea.

Battle-piece for Florence.

At Florence he was at last per suaded, on the initiative of Piero Soderini, to undertake for his native city a work of painting as great as that with which he had adorned Milan. This was a battle-piece to decorate one of the walls of the new council-hall in the palace of the signory. He chose an episode in the victory won by the generals of the republic in 1440 over Niccolo Piccinino near a bridge at Anghiari, in the upper valley of the Tiber. To the young Michelangelo was pres ently entrusted a rival battle-piece to be painted on another wall of the same apartment ; he chose, as is well known, a surprise of the Florentine forces in the act of bathing near Pisa.

In one of the sections of his projected Treatise on Painting, Leonardo has detailed at length, and obviously from his own observation, the pictorial aspects of a battle. In his mss. there occur almost as many trenchant sayings on life and human affairs as on art and natural law; and of war he has disposed in two words as a "bestial frenzy" (pazzia bestialissima). In his design for the Hall of Council he set himself to depict this frenzy at its fiercest. He chose the moment of a terrific struggle for the colours

between the opposing sides ; hence the work became commonly known as the "Battle of the Standard." Judging by the accounts of those who saw it, and the fragmentary evidences which re main, the tumultuous medley of men and horses, and the ex pressions of martial fury and despair, must have been conceived and rendered with a mastery not less commanding than had been the looks and gestures of bodeful sorrow and soul's perplexity among the quiet company on the convent wall at Milan. The place assigned to Leonardo for the preparation of his cartoon was the Sala del Papa at Santa Maria Novella. He for once worked steadily and unremittingly at his task. His accounts with the signory enable us to follow its progress step by step.

Influence on Contemporaries.

He had finished the cartoon in less than two years (1504-05), and when it was exhibited along with that of Michelangelo, the two rival works seemed to all men a new revelation of the powers of art, and served as a model and example of the students of that generation, as the frescoes of Masaccio in the Carmine had served to those of two generations earlier. The young Raphael, whose incomparable instinct for rhythmical design had been trained hitherto on subjects of holy quietude and rapt contemplation according to the traditions of Umbrian art, learnt from Leonardo's example to apply the same instinct to themes of violent action and strife. From the same example Fra Bartolommeo and a crowd of other Florentine paint ers of the rising or risen generation took in like manner a new impulse. The master lost no time in proceeding to the execution of his design upon the mural surface; this time he had devised a technical method of which, after a preliminary trial in the Sala del Papa, he regarded the success as certain ; the colours, whether tempera or other remains in doubt, were to be laid on a specially prepared ground, and then both colours and ground made secure upon the wall by the application of heat. When the cen tral group was done the heat was applied, but it was found to take effect unequally; the colours in the upper part ran or scaled from the wall, and the result was a failure more or less complete. The unfinished and decayed painting remained for some so years on the wall, but after 1560 was covered over with new frescoes by Vasari.

The cartoon did not last so long. After doing its work as the most inspiring of all examples for students it seems to have been cut up. When Leonardo left Italy for good in 1516 he is recorded to have left "the greater part of it" in deposit at the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, where he was accustomed also to deposit his moneys, and whence it seems before long to have disappeared.

Our only existing memorials of the great work are a number of small pen-studies of fighting men and horses, three splendid studies in red chalk at Budapest for heads in the principal group, one head at Oxford copied by a contemporary of the size of the original cartoon (above life) ; a tiny sketch, also at Oxford, by Raphael after the principal group; an engraving done by Zacchia of Lucca in 1558 not after the original but after a copy; a 16th century Flemish drawing of the principal group, and another, splendidly spirited, by Rubens, both copies of copies; with Ede linck's fine engraving after the Rubens drawing.