his great mind regarded Art as but a secondary consideration, when confronted with the vast, the wondrous, the mysterious laws and works of Nature, which he studied untiringly and attentively. He tried to probe her secrets by a survey, deep and penetrating, but of too wide a range, so that it revealed little more than the surface, like a powerful searchlight, being too transitory to leave any immediate or permanent results of value behind. As Berenson justly and eloquently remarks: 'Painting was to Leonardo so little of a preoccupation, that we must regard it as merely a mode of expression used at moments by a man of universal genius, who recurred to it only when he had no more absorbing occupation, and only when it could express what nothing else could, the highest spiritual through the highest material significance.'[1] It was only under great personal pressure of Ludovico Sforza[2] that he finished the painting of the Last Supper, and we all know the anecdote told by Vasari about his dilatoriness in finishing this painting.[3] Michael Angelo, we are told, upbraided him in public for not having finished the equestrian statue to Francisco Sforza in Milan on which he had spent several years. 'Thou hast abandoned it to thy hurt and shame,'[4] cried his great rival. As a matter of history, Leonardo had left most of his works unfinished up to the time he migrated to France in 1516. He failed to carry through the commission given him in 1478 for the altar-piece for the Chapel of St. Bernardo in the Palazzo Vecchio, for which he was paid twenty-five florins on account. In the same year he left the St. Jerome in the Desert unfinished. Two years later (1480) the Monks at St. Donato at Scopeto commissioned him to paint an altar-piece for them, and paid him a sum down in advance, but he never got further than the drawing and cartoon, the Adoration of the Magi. The Sforza Monument, the St. Anne, the Battle of Anghiari, all were left unfinished, and for each of the latter he had received payments on
16
- ↑ 'The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance' (p. 68).
- ↑ 'Müntz (vol. 1, p. 186).
- ↑ The Prior complained to Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, that Leonardo was wasting his time and not finishing the fresco, causing the Convent great inconvenience. Whereupon the Duke summoned Leonardo to his presence and, questioning him upon the matter, the artist explained that he was at a loss for the completion of two heads: that of Christ, for which he could find no earthly model good enough, and that of Judas, for which he could discover none vile enough. Christ's head he feared he must leave unfinished, while if he could find nothing more suitable for Judas he would take the Prior's head to avoid further delay. The Duke smiled, while the Prior, fearful that his face might be handed down to posterity as that of Judas, kept silent on the subject ever after.
- ↑ Rosenberg (p. 102).
