The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Leonardo’s reputation as one of the great artists of the West rests, of course, on his painting, which was never excelled. But the remains of his painting are tantalizingly few. His energetic sixty-seven years left only seventeen surviving paintings that can be reliably attributed to him, and several of these are unfinished. The cryptic smile of the Mona Lisa, the most famous Western painting, still entices us. Following Vasari’s report, centuries called her La Gioconda, wife of the Florentine Francesco del Gioconda, and said she was painted about 1503. “After toiling over it for four years, he left it unfinished.… He made use, also of this device: Mona Lisa being very beautiful, he always employed, while he was painting her portrait, persons to play or sing, and jesters, who might make her remain merry, in order to take away that melancholy which painters are often wont to give to the portraits they paint.” Now we know that this was one of Leonardo’s last works in Florence, after 1514, probably an idealized portrait of one of Giuliano de Medici’s mistresses.

  The Last Supper, painted for the refectory of the cloister of Dominican friars in Milan (1495–98), is commonly considered Leonardo’s masterpiece. The contemporary writer Matteo Bandello (1480?–1562) recalled:

  Many a time I have seen Leonardo go early in the morning to work on the platform before the Last Supper; and there he would stay from sunrise till darkness, never laying down the brush, but continuing to paint without eating or drinking. Then three or four days would pass without his touching the work, yet each day he would spend several hours examining it and criticising the figures to himself. I have also seen him, when the fancy took him, leave the Corte Vecchia when he was at work on the stupendous horse of clay, and go straight to the Grazie. There, climbing on the platform, he would take a brush and give a few touches to one of the figures: and then suddenly he would leave and go elsewhere.

  (Translated by Kenneth Clark)

  Leonardo could not have painted the work so sporadically if it had been fresco, which would have incorporated his labors into the body of the wall. Fresco had to be painted speedily and on schedule while the plaster was still moist. Instead, Leonardo painted The Last Supper with oil and varnish, the wall was damp, and the paint quickly deteriorated. By 1556 Vasari reported “nothing visible except a muddle of blots.” In the following centuries the painting has been repeatedly “restored.” And Leonardo’s greatest work, despite expert modern efforts, survives only as a ghost of itself.

  Leonardo secured his most important commission in Florence in 1503 through his friend Machiavelli (1469–1527), then a city official. This was to paint a monumental mural (twenty-three by fifty-six feet; twice as large as The Last Supper) for the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. For his subject he chose the Battle of Anghiari, where, in 1441, the Florentines had defeated the Milanese forces of the pope. Leonardo intended to depict the moment of victory when the enemy’s standard was captured. In a Florence of so many artists, to be chosen for this work was a great honor. But Leonardo’s pleasure was diluted a few months later when a commission for the other half of the wall went to his youthful archrival Michelangelo. Leonardo, who had long wanted to paint a battle, luxuriated in notebook visions of leaping horses and “the conquered and beaten pale, their brows raised and knit, and the skin about their brows furrowed with pain, the sides of the nose with wrinkles going in an arch from the nostrils to the eyes, and … the nostrils drawn up and the lips arched upwards discovering the upper teeth; and the teeth apart as with crying out and lamentations.” His many preparatory sketches of men and horses captured the fury of battle, incorporated in a cartoon of the large design that has not survived.

  The Battle of Anghiari, the commission for which he was probably best known in his own time, was never painted, for Leonardo delayed this work to take on still another assignment, an urgent invitation from the governor of Milan to return there for three months “to furnish us with a certain work [perhaps the London version of The Virgin of the Rocks] which we have had him begin.” When the governor of Milan asked Leonardo to stay on, the Council of Florence complained that “Leonardo da Vinci … has not borne himself as he ought to have done towards this republic, in that he has received a good sum of money and has made little beginning of a great work which he is under obligation to execute, and has already comported himself as a laggard.” Leonardo returned to Florence briefly in 1507, not to fulfill his commission but to bring a lawsuit against his brothers over his father’s estate.

  Although he made no effort to complete the Battle of Anghiari, Leonardo had prepared for it by putting binder on the wall. But it soon peeled off. Both Leonardo and Michelangelo drew their sketches on the palazzo wall, and as long as these remained, Benvenuto Cellini observed, these were “the school of the world.” Posterity can judge Leonardo’s effort only from some of his own surviving sketches and from a sketch by Rubens of another artist’s engraving of a fragment.

  The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and other “unfinished” paintings make up in quality what his lifework as a painter lacked in quantity. Leonardo’s early years in Florence produced his Saint Jerome and his large Adoration of the Magi, both left unfinished when at the age of thirty he went to Milan. There in Milan he produced his superb Virgin of the Rocks notable for its sfumato, the mysterious haze that became Leonardo’s hallmark. Leonardo’s scientific writings themselves were overcast by the sfumato that enchants his painting. For the science of art had made “the work of the painter … nobler than that of nature, its mistress.”

  This “unfinished” quality of Leonardo’s work is essential to his character as an artist, the self-styled Disciple of Experience. While revelation and dogma might be sharp and clear, experience was always revising itself. Leonardo’s most characteristic works and his lifelong favorite creations were notebooks and fragmentary drawings that expressed his genius more spontaneously than his finished paintings. It is not surprising that many of his playful sketches for grand monuments were never finally frozen into bronze, for he enjoyed the first encounter more than the laborious execution.

  Drawing, though it did not have the prestige or command the price of a painting, was the ideal medium for experiment and for Leonardo’s “fragmentary abundance.” A grotesque nose or ear or chin might not have merited a painting, but was perfect for a drawing. These were not caricatures but exercises of his imagination, capturing the whole spectrum of visual experience. Through this freedom of drawing he finally expressed his apocalyptic visions of the forces of nature—“Visions of the End of the World” and the “Deluge.” Few medieval drawings have survived to modern times, for the artist then would not casually consume a costly piece of paper to sketch momentary impressions. But the experimental Renaissance brought fondness and even prestige for drawings and rough sketches. The capacity for achievement, to which drawings were clues, came to be revered almost above the achievement itself.

  Leonardo, who never sought eminence as a scientist, applied art to all the sciences. Unlike Galileo, he was not adept at abstracting principles from experience, but found his home in experience of the visible world. Leonardo created his own kind of scientific exposition, which he called dimostrazione. And so, incidentally he became the pioneer of modern scientific illustration. Whether depicting the vascular system or the vertebrae of man, or the wing structure of a bird, or a new lifting machine, Leonardo’s drawings verified the function, the stability and motion of every part. “Let no one read me who is not a mathematician,” he wrote in the margin of an anatomical study. He valued mathematics for its visual “fruits,” and for him “Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences.”

  “Occasionally,” Vasari observed of Leonardo, “in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace, and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind.” Leonardo’s life would be a dramatic competition between science and art. In the Empire of the Eye the painter was the sovereign creator. “If the painter wishes to see beauties that would enrap
ture him,” Leonardo said, “he is master of their production, and if he wishes to see monstrous things which might terrify or which would be buffoonish and laughable or truly pitiable, he is their lord and god.”

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  “Divine Michelangelo”

  A legacy from the Renaissance, the belief in genius, something rarer than skill or talent, would transform the arts. It has taken us from respect for the trained talent, manipulating the experience that is out there for all to know, to awe before the uniquely inspired self. From admiration to awe, from the imitation of nature to the re-creation of nature. From the artist filling a patron’s orders, to the patron awaiting an artist’s creations. “Talent,” observed James Russell Lowell, “is that which is in a man’s power; genius is that in whose power a man is.”

  In ancient Roman religion, the “genius” (Latin: the begetter) was the ruling spirit that perpetuated a household or a family. It came to mean the guardian spirit of a guild, a place, or an individual, which a person might worship on his birthday. After Augustus the “genius” of an emperor would be worshiped. The spirit of a woman or a goddess was known and worshipped as a “Juno.”

  Medieval Europe did not put a high value on originality. If it had been proved that Leonardo da Vinci had copied the items in his notebooks from other books it would only have increased respect for his learning, and would not have stirred charges of plagiarism. “Individualism”—“a novel expression to which a novel idea has given birth”—did not enter our English vocabulary until 1835, when Tocqueville used it to describe what he found in America. But “genius,” suggesting originality, had deeper roots. Supremely embodied in Michelangelo, the unique unpredictable creator has cast a spell over the arts in modern times.

  Suger, Dante, and Giotto were admired for the awesome immortality of their works. Yet the word “divine” was rarely applied to living artists or poets before the sixteenth century. Alberti in his work on painting (1436) already saw in the artist a “divine” power. Leonardo, too, declared the painter’s work “nobler than that of nature” and his painter was “a second god.” The Portuguese painter Francisco de Hollanda observed in Rome in 1538, that “in Italy, one does not care for the renown of great princes, it’s a painter only that they call divine.”

  During the Middle Ages the artist had been a man of trained skills and disciplined life. The earliest painters’ guilds in the late thirteenth century oversaw the lives and works of members, their religious activities, their contracts of apprenticeship, and their relation to patrons. In Florence after 1293 no one had civic rights who was not a member of his proper guild, and defiance of the guild was unusual. When Brunelleschi refused to pay his dues to the guild of building workers in 1434, he was imprisoned for eleven days, until the authorities secured his release to work at the cathedral. Guilds were losing their monopolies, but not until 1571 did a decree exempt members of the Florentine Academy from guild membership. The Protestant Reformation, wary of images in churches, deprived painters and sculptors of their best traditional patron. But about the same time merchant bankers like the Medici created a more varied demand, offering the artist a new chance to be original.

  The roles of patron and of artist were being strangely reversed. When the marchioness Isabella d’Este of Mantua, collecting works by the best painters of her time, contracted with Perugino on January 19, 1503, for an allegorical picture to be delivered by the following June, she still specified every detail. “You are at liberty to omit figures but not to add anything of your own.” But we see the modern spirit in her dealings with Leonardo da Vinci. In 1501 she wrote to the Carmelite vicar-general of Florence, “Your Reverence might find out if he would undertake to paint a picture for our studio. If he consents, we would leave the subject and the time to him; but if he declines, you might at least induce him to paint a little picture of the Madonna, as sweet and holy as his own nature.” Giovanni Bellini in 1506 in Venice let her specify the size of the painting but insisted that all else be left to his imagination. In this same year Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg (1471–1528), who happened to be in Venice, was impressed by this independence of Italian artists. “Here I am a gentleman,” he wrote, “and at home a mere parasite.”

  Even when court painters were exempt from guild restrictions they could not accept outside work without permission. They painted everything to order and, like other craftsmen, were paid by the hour. But by the end of the fifteenth century the best Italian artists were well-off and were paid like professionals. Leonardo received a substantial annual salary in Milan and later from the king of France. Raphael and Titian could afford a notoriously luxurious way of life. Michelangelo himself received three thousand ducats for the Sistine ceiling, and had a large income from his work. When he refused payment for his work on St. Peter’s he was already a wealthy man, which made his modest way of life all the more remarkable. Established artists like Giovanni Bellini and Titian could count on sinecures or salaried offices with few duties.

  When the artist was no longer a mere craftsman trying to do better what others had already done, his life became interesting, worth writing and reading about. We know of no Western artist before Brunelleschi whose life was written by a contemporary. The new era, as we have seen, was emphatically announced in the copious and readable Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), by Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574). Commonly called the first Western historian of art, Vasari should more precisely be called the first historian of artists, for his work was a celebration of individual artist geniuses. At a lively dinner party in Rome in 1546 at Cardinal Farnese’s, Vasari was challenged to write an account of “all illustrious artists from the time of Cimabue up to the present.” Disciple and friend of Michelangelo (they wrote each other regularly when they were separated), and a competent artist, Vasari was at home with the leading artists of his day. No one saw more vividly the artist’s new role.

  Vasari grouped his artists into three periods, each distinguished by its artist geniuses. The first, led by Cimabue and Giotto, marked “a new beginning, opening the way for the better work which followed; and if only for this reason I have to speak in their favour and to allow them rather more distinction than the work of that time would deserve if judged by the strict rules of art.” His second period, which included Uccello, Botticelli, and Mantegna, “was clearly a considerable improvement in invention and execution, with more design, better style, and a more careful finish.… Even so, how can one claim that in the second period there was one artist perfect in everything.… These achievements certainly belong to the third period, when I can say confidently that art has achieved everything possible in the imitation of nature and has progressed so far that it has more reason to fear slipping back than to expect ever to make fresh advances.” This third period opened with Leonardo. “It is inherent in the very nature of these arts to progress step by step from modest beginnings and finally to reach the summit of perfection”—in Michelangelo.

  From printed sources, manuscripts, interviews, and travel reports enriched by legend, anecdote, and rumor, Vasari produced two volumes in Florence in 1550 containing 133 lives. The success of this work and his growing intimacy with Michelangelo then led him to produce an enlarged and illustrated second edition (1568) of three volumes treating 161 lives. Here he provided the framework for art historians in later centuries. Vasari inspired the classic caricature of the typical artist in the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571). And he led another Michelangelo disciple, Condivi, to write a corrective biography of their hero.

  Climaxing his history of artists with a life of his teacher and idol Michelangelo that was several times as long as any of the others, Vasari depicted the genius artist, the modern creator, the Sovereign Self. His “Divine Michelangelo” ironically signaled a secular religion of art. Back in the days of Giotto “all artists of energy and distinction were striving to give the world proof of the talents with which fortune and their own happy temperaments had endowed them.�
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  Meanwhile, the benign ruler of heaven graciously looked down to earth, saw the worthlessness of what was being done,… and resolved to save us from our errors. So he decided to send into the world an artist who would be skilled in each and every craft … so that everyone might admire and follow him as their perfect exemplar in life, work, and behaviour and in every endeavour, and he would be acclaimed as divine.… And … he chose to have Michelangelo born a Florentine, so that one of her own citizens might bring to absolute perfection the achievements for which Florence was already justly renowned.

  (Translated by George Bull)

  There was little in his family or his circumstances to explain this ascent to divinity.

  Michelangelo was born on March 6, 1475, to Lodovico Buonarroti, a substantial citizen and mayor of the village of Caprese, near Arezzo, of a family that boasted its descent from the counts of Canossa. “A fine nativity truly,” Condivi noted, “which showed how great the child would be and of how noble a genius; for the planet Mercury with Venus in seconda being received into the house of Jupiter with benign aspect, promised what afterwards followed, that the birth should be of a noble and high genius, able to succeed in every undertaking, but principally in those arts that delight the senses, such as painting, sculpture, and architecture.” The family soon moved to Florence. Michelangelo’s mother died when he was only six, and the artist liked to note that his nurse was the daughter of a stone carver and the wife of a stone carver. “If my brains are any good at all,” he told Vasari, “it’s because I was born in the pure air of your Arezzo countryside, just as with my mother’s milk I sucked in the hammer and chisels I use for my statues.”