Leonardo (1452-1519) is the first in date of the great men who had the desire to create in a picture a kind of mystic unity brought about by the fusion of matter and spirit. Now that the Primitives had concluded their experiments, ceaselessly pursued during two centuries, by the conquest of the methods of painting, he was able to pronounce the words which served as a password to all later artists worthy of the name : painting is a spiritual thing, cosy mentale. Leonardo, in fact, found himself on the borders of two worlds; architect, sculptor, painter, alchemist, engineer, he was the last great figure of the Middle Ages, and carried to the highest degree that ardour for investigation and scientific discovery which continually drove forward the preced ing generations : and he was the first modern artist by virtue of his invention of chiaroscuro and of his psychological curiosity. He completed Florentine draughtsmanship in applying to model ling by light and shade a sharp subtlety which his predecessors had used only to give greater precision to the contours. This marvellous draughtsmanship, this modelling and chiaroscuro he used not solely to paint the exterior appearance of the body but, as no one before him had done, to cast over it a reflection of the mystery of the inner life. In the Mona Lisa, the St. Anne and his other masterpieces he even used landscape not merely as a more or less picturesque decoration, but as a sort of echo of that interior life and an element of a perfect harmony.
Relying on the still quite novel laws of perspective this doctor of scholastic wisdom, who was at the same time an initiator of modern thought, substituted for the discursive manner of the Primitives the principle of concentration which is the basis of classical art. The picture is no longer presented to us as an almost fortuitous aggregate of details and episodes. It is an organism
in which all the elements, lines and colours, shadows and lights, compose a subtle tracery converging on a spiritual, a sensuous centre. On a small panel, that of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo depicted an epitome of the universe, creation and created : woman, the eternal enigma, the eternal ideal of man and the sign of the perfect beauty to which he aspires, nature here evoked by a magician in all its mystery and power. Behind the lovely, calm face, behind the forehead, young and yet thoughtful, appear mountains, glaciers, waters and rocks; and, in this very small portion of the painted surface, a vast revelation, beside the eternal feminine, of our whole planet, our mother the Earth.
Of this same Florentine draughtsmanship enriched by Leonardo, Michelangelo (1475-1564), like Leonardo, a man of many parts, sculptor, architect, painter and poet, made the apotheosis of muscular movement and effort, which were to him the plastic equivalent of passion. He moulded his draughtsmanship, bent it, twisted it, constrained it to the extreme limits of possibility and to the pulsation of his great tormented soul. There are not, so to speak, any landscapes in Michelangelo's painting. All the emotions, all the passions, all the thoughts of humanity were personified in his eyes in the naked bodies of men and women. He never conceived these bodies—or very rarely—in attitudes of immobility or repose. His great seated or reclining figures, those of the Medici Tomb, his Night, his Thinker, his Moses, whether they dream, meditate or command, give an impression of barely restrained tumult. But the powerful hand even of a Michel angelo moulded marble in vain : the conditions of sculpture opposed impassable barriers to him. It was, we may say, in order to escape from these that Michelangelo became a painter, so that he could express in a more malleable material what his titanesque soul felt, what his sculptor's imagination saw, but what sculpture refused him. Thus this admirable sculptor be came the creator at the Vatican of the most lyrical and the most epic decoration ever seen in the history of painting.