Leonardo da Vinci [antikvár]

Introduction Plate 2 Landscape drawing 1473 pen and ink 7+ X 1in (19 X 28.5 cm) Uffizi, Florence This drawing is inscribed in Leonardo's mirror writing, 'Day of Our Lady of the Snows, 5th August. 1473'. The Feast in question commemorated a miraculous fall of snow in Rome in August. When, at the age of 21, Leonardo made this drawing we can see that the weather, as usual at that time in Italy, was very hot, and as he was a notorious sceptic in religious matters we may well wonder whether the unnecessarily conspicuous inscription was not included as a subtle way of saying that he did not believe the legend. It is this inscription, nevertheless, which authenticates the drawing. Though the handwriting is more elaborate that was normal with him later on, it is already unmistakably Leonardo's-more so, perhaps, than the drawing itself, which is not exactly like any of his others. Though extremely accomplished, both in its suggestion of shimmering heat on the trees, and in the technique, which appears almost Chinese, it is somewhat freer than his later work, when both his drawing and his handwriting became neater. The idea of Leonardo da Vinci as the universal genius-the man who is a genius at everything—is what most interested the 19th century about him, and what still fascinates many people today. Leonardo himself was fully conscious of his own universality and boasted of it in a letter to the Sforza dictator of Milan when he was still a young man. Even in an age of versatile men he was unusually versatile. But during the 17th and i8th centuries there was less interest in figures of the past in terms of personality. What interested such critics of those periods as concerned themselves with men of the Renaissance was what they had left-their paintings or their writings. And Leonardo seemed to have left remarkably little. In Italy, indeed, there was only one great painting readily accessible- The Last Supper-and that had already been pronounced little more than a ruin within the 16th century. The very few other paintings which he had finished, or nearly finished, such as the Mona Lisa, the Madonna and Child with St Anne and the Infant Baptist or the first version of The Virgin of the Rocks, were not very easily accessible in the French royal collection, and his voluminous notes were almost all unpublished. It was not until the 19th century that the tide turned. The exhibition, in 1878, of a number of the Windsor drawings (by a very long way the greatest collection), together with the publication of photographs of them, showed him as one of the very greatest draughtsmen of all time, while the issue, in 1883, of J. P. Richter's Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci revealed a mind of altogether phenomenal range. The two together admirably fitted the conception of the great man, the super-genius, which had been an invention of the Romantic age, and which continued to exercise general appeal for many years to come. From that time, despite the scarcity of his finished works, Leonardo was on a pinnacle with Michelangelo as one of the two quintessential geniuses of the Italian Renaissance. Within the last generation the emphasis has shifted again. It is not that we decry the genius of Leonardo, either absolutely or in relation to his contemporaries and successors, but rather that we are perhaps less interested in the idea of genius as such. And in compensation-if that is the right word-we are more interested in those aspects of Leonardo which seem to foreshadow the afflictions of our own time-in his vision, as it seems from his Deluge drawings