he went to France. Now Leonardo could not have arrived in France until the early spring of 1516. After his arrival he was at Fontainebleau and other places with his patron Francis I in connection with architectural and other works. He could, therefore, not have been settled down in Cloux until well into the autumn of 1516. But Vasari tells us the King pressed him to paint the St. Anne, 'but Leonardo, according to his custom, kept the King a long time waiting with nothing better than words.' The duration of this 'long time' we cannot estimate, but we know the picture was shown as it is to-day to the Cardinal of Aragon on October 10, 1517. Yet the Cardinal's secretary tells us that at this date 'a certain paralysis has attacked his right hand which forbids the expecting of any more good work from him, but he has given a very good training to a Milanese pupil who works extremely well.'[1] Now let us analyse this sentence. At this date paralysis had already attacked Leonardo's right hand, how long since he does not say, but it must have been some time previously, for there had been time to test the pupil's work that was described as 'extremely well' done. Therefore Leonardo, who had only completed three pictures from 1470 to 1516, is credited with completing seven pictures in as many months, or certainly in considerably under a year, and we have ample evidence as to the pace at which he worked! Hence the justifiable disagreement of the critics on the St. Anne and the Vièrge aux Rochers, though none of them question the Mona Lisa with the Alcina glow upon her countenance. The would-be, attempted modest look on the bent head of Saint Anne in the Louvre picture Gronau compares to that of the Mona Lisa and the Leda,[2] and he describes the smile as 'faintly visible, as in the portrait of Mona Lisa.' Leonardo probably noticed this and consequently prevented Melzi finishing the picture. The sickly smiles on the unsexed St. John and on the Bacchus are certainly not Leonardo's work, as the latest authorities frankly state. Had Leonardo the time to paint the Leda or the Pomona? Or is the Leda the picture in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, finished by Melzi, which Richardson mentions in his itinerary[3] as the accredited work of Leonardo, and
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- ↑ Müntz (vol. 2. p. 211), McCurdy (p. 70). These two authors give the same translation from the Italian almost word for word, while they both give the identical words in the portion of the sentence which I have italicised.
- ↑ Referring to the Leda, he says: 'The head with the downcast eyes is depicted in the way familiar to all who know the Mona Lisa or the Saint Anna' (p. 150).
- ↑ Richardson when visiting the galleries of Europe saw in the Palazzo Borghese in Rome a Leda, which he describes as 'In the room where the prince sleeps after dinner, the Leda of Leonardo da Vinci, the same my Lord Pembroke has; soft, mellow, and well drawn' (p. 184).
