Leonardo da Vinci the Creator

Leonardo is the illegitimate son of Sir Piero Antonio da Vinci. He was born in 1452, in northern Italy, near Florence. He is thus the contemporary of Raphael and Michelangelo; he keeps step with them, and with them forms the supreme trinity of the Renaissance.

At school his superiority showed in all branches. But his constant desire to draw obliged his father to nourish this bent in him, and he placed him in the studio of the painter Andrea Verrocchio as a pupil. Andrea was then at work on a picture representing the Baptism of Christ, and he entrusted his new pupil with painting one of the angels of that picture; and his angel came out so perfect that it exposed the faults of the other parts of the picture, which brought his master's resentment down upon him.

So he left the studio — he had by then attained such artistic ability as made him independent of teachers — and gave himself to independent work. Perhaps what most concerns us after that, among the events of his life, which I shall not go into, is a journey he made to the East in 1480 on an engineering mission; he visited Egypt, Syria, and Turkey, and returned after four years to Italy, and devoted the greater part of his life, which ended in 1519, to painting.

He nourished his artistic soul with everything he saw in nature and in life, keeping far, from his earliest youth, from fantasy, cleaving to his own self, indifferent — unlike the sons of his age — to drawing inspiration from the glories of the ancients, though he took care to study them. He was particularly enamored of the psychological side, and above all of persons of unusual character, with strange heads and odd beards. Indeed, if he saw a man of this kind, he would follow him the whole day long, until his impression had settled firmly in his mind; then he would go back and draw him as though he stood before him.

He went so deep into psychology that he arrived at the theory Freud propounded afterward; but his devotion to painting and to science did not allow him to expand upon its exposition or to preach it. And from this concern with psychology, Leonardo's art came to have a special mark: the preparing of his figures so as to place the appreciator in an atmosphere of the meanings of their souls — or rather, of their meanings in Leonardo's own soul, for he believed in the creative soul of the artist.

That mark appears plainly in most of his pictures, and especially in the Last Supper and in the Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda.

As for the Last Supper, or the secret supper, it is a picture representing Christ with his disciples at table, and the first thing its appreciator notices is that anxiety showing on the faces of the disciples, born of that pressing desire, possessing them all, to know the one who would betray the Master. Were the picture before us, we could study the other seats of beauty in it. It is related, apropos of the Last Supper, that Leonardo fell behind the time appointed him in finishing this picture, and the prior of the monastery complained of him to the governor of the city. The governor was intelligent and sensitive, but, to be rid of the prior's insistence, he summoned Leonardo, and after excusing himself — the summons being the fruit of tiresome insistence — he begged him, with all courtesy, to try to hasten the completion of the picture. When Leonardo sensed this in him, he began to speak to him of art, showing him how men of genius are in their most fertile season of production when they appear to people's eyes to be idle; for artistic masterpieces take shape in secret, within the artist, and then come forth by way of the hand or the tongue, so that people imagine that their coming forth is their creation — whence such conduct as the prior's. And wishing to jest with him, and to have a dig at the prior, he went on: "And I still need two faces to complete the picture: the face of Christ and the face of Judas. As for the first, I believe I cannot find it on earth, and to this hour I have not gained strength enough to be able to summon it up in my imagination with all its beauty, its perfection, and its heavenly grace. As for the second, it is hard to find a man of his character. But his reverence the prior has now solved the second half of the problem, and there remains to me only the face of Christ."

In fact Leonardo succeeded completely in painting both faces; but he was assured only of his success in painting Judas, and all his life he kept saying: I could not paint Christ.

Some historians of art have taken these words literally, and said that Leonardo did not finish the face of Christ. This is like the saying of Paul Valéry: I have never finished a poem in my life.

A few years after finishing the Last Supper, he began the picture of the Mona Lisa, at the opening of the sixteenth century, and spent four years painting it. Leonardo used to say: "For painting portraits we must have a special studio, its walls black and its roof closed against the sun, so that only a faint light may enter. If that is not possible for us, then let us refrain from painting except when the skies are heavy with clouds and the light is dim, for those are the best hours for painting."

And in one of those hours, on the evening of a day late in a misty spring, faint rays of sun looked out from behind the clouds upon the face of Mona Lisa. Leonardo saw her, and went off in rapture to make ready the painting studio, saying to himself: "Will she be pleased?..."

He first prepared everything painters need of brushes, colors, and cloths; then he built, in the courtyard of the studio, a little fountain whose waters fall upon special globes of glass, producing a soft, light, continuous music.

Around that fountain he planted all the flowers Mona Lisa loves, among them the white lily and the violet; then he called a special company of musicians to play, upon the violin and the guitar, a special piece that she adores and he adores, to serve as the "melody"; and he adorned the atmosphere of that melody with a picked company of musicians, singers, storytellers, and poets, so that he might study, in the face of his Mona Lisa, the changes of beauty in the different states of appreciation: from stories to poetry to music...

He prepared all that, and did not forget food for his friend, the little dog of the studio, and he waited for Mona Lisa. She was late; he grew anxious, and his anxiety mounted; and at last... the little dog barked, and Leonardo felt that she had come.

The lady-in-waiting appeared at the door of the studio, followed by a woman of thirty, wearing a black dress and a black veil, walking with the steps of the gods: this is Mona Lisa, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, Leonardo's friend.

He began the picture, and the first year passed, Mona Lisa and Leonardo in the rapture of that deep artistic atmosphere — both in one and the same rapture — he painting, and she feeding the little dog with her soft, enchanting hands, and the lady-in-waiting forever in the corner of the studio, reading the Gospel.

And the second year passed, and the picture was not yet finished. And although Francesco had every confidence in his wife and in his friend Leonardo, this delay disturbed him... And it was not the mere delay that disturbed him: there was something more important, which is that there appeared in the picture meanings he had not known in his wife — meanings that made him see in the picture more truth than he saw in his wife. It seemed to him that his wife shared certain secrets with the painter — and what secrets could they be! They are not secrets of love; or rather, they are not secrets in the familiar sense of that word.

Francesco had once heard Leonardo say: "Every artist inclines to endow the portraits of others with some of his own meanings. That is because what he produces is, before all else, a part of his own soul, which he creates and then makes known." He thought long upon that sentence, and came to see, day after day, that the portrait of his wife resembled Leonardo; then this grew upon him, until he came to see his wife herself resembling Leonardo... And he came to see that the smile he had observed on his wife's face and could not interpret — that smile which had taken an eternal place in his eyes — is the very smile he sees on all the faces in Leonardo's pictures. So that mysterious smile became a new enchantment for the husband, as it became the enchantment of the ages, and it made him feel that his wife was not of humankind — that she was loftier than humankind.

And the third year passed, and Leonardo was still seizing the moments of sullen weather, most careful that Mona Lisa should always be as she had been in the first hour of painting: in the same rapture, the same serenity, the same listening.

She came once, and sat on her chair listening to the music as was her custom, the little dog near her and the lady-in-waiting in the corner reading the Gospel. She waited for Leonardo to begin work, but he remained before her, contemplating her — an hour, two hours, three hours — and she calm, as if she understood the reason for the delay. At last he said: Madonna! What is the matter with you today? She answered: I was anxious about my daughter (her husband's daughter) all night; if you wish, let us leave the painting today. He answered her: No, we shall not waste the fruits of the clouds. Then he drew her on in a conversation that brought her back to her first state, and returned to painting.

And before the picture was finished, Leonardo felt that Mona Lisa had become something necessary to his life. He tried to enter into the depths of his own soul to see whether that was love, and he found that, though he sometimes felt in her the living beauty of woman, he felt it in others more violently, and for longer spells; so it was not love, then.

He felt that she was above humankind. What pleased him in her was that, with all the innate wisdom that had been granted her, she never once boasted of knowledge; she spoke with the simplicity of children, yet through that simplicity he perceived that her spirit was near to his spirit, and he came to feel that she was his eternal friend.

But then he would say again: Suppose I did love her — is there in that heavenly fabric of love anything that could touch her or touch me? Am I to await a fruit of love greater and loftier than that picture whose parents we have been?

All this, and the picture not yet finished. And it was as though Mona Lisa — that woman mysterious even to herself, and even to Leonardo — sensed what was within him, and pressed him to finish the picture. Leonardo answered her that he wished it, but that he still found in her, every day, new meanings. She understood then that the picture would never be finished; and she bade him farewell, and went away.

And he too felt that the picture would never be finished.