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Show 6 • llnlverslty Joumlll • MDndll'/,ADI/USt 5, 1996 (continued from page 5) 1600 he returned.to Florence for six years (by way of Mantua and Venice), and then made his way back to Milan in 1506 for an other six years, wi th a brief sixm onths' return to Florence during 1507-1508. In 15 13 he went to Ro me for a peri od of three years, finally leaving Italy fo r good in 15 16, to serve in the court of King Francis I of France. And there he died three years later, in 15 19. Continuous references have been made over the centuries to the "disdainful aloofness" of Leonardo, to his loneliness, to his penchant for solitude, to his sometimes harsh and condemnatory rhetoric. His secret estrangement has remained a m ystery. He, like the objects in nature he sought to understand, has been analyzed and psychoanalyzed by the best of mindsincluding Sigmund Freud's. In a " half-fictional" work published in 19 lO, Freud sought the answer to this enigmatic personality in Leonardo's childhood. But Freud was explaining only one aspect of Leonardo's personality, derived from an incident in Leonardo's youth. A young m an of I 7 was accused of having a ho mosexual affair with fou r other youths fro m the city of Florence, one of whom was Leonardo. Such charges were not uncommon in Florence in the 15th century. T hey seemed, indeed, to be alm ost invited. By means of a tambu ro, a box placed outside the Palazzo Vecchio, secret charges could be made agai nst anyone in the city, charges which the "vice squad" could investigate. Leonardo was called before the police and cruelly interrogated unti l, one imagines, his soul was laid q uite bare; then, after a few weeks of no furthe r action, the charges were dropped. ut one might suppose that Leonardo never saw the world in the sam e way after that excruciating experience. While he may have exhibited an androgynous nature in his art, it is perhaps because he saw the world in all its complicated relatedness. But, it is claimed, he never saw men or women as sex objects, judging by the written testimony of his own hand, or the sex act as anything but disgusting. Even after the passing of many years he was to write, "The act of coitus and the members that serve it are so hideous that, 1f it were not for the beauty of faces and craftsmen ornamentation and the liberation of the spirit, the human species would lose its humanity." There is no evidence to suggest that Leonardo had a woman in his life in any intimate way, no female companions, no one to smile on him or offer words of encouragement. By his own admission, he preferred it that way: "So that prosperity of the body may not ruin prosperity of the mind, the painter must live solitary. Alone, you are all yourself; with a companio n you are half yourself. And so you squander yourself according to the indiscretion of your company." Leonardo always had someone around him, often very young apprentices, as he himself once was, or older men assisting with some unrealized project. Still, there was always an antisocial element in Leonardo, and he retained his aloofness and haughtiness to the very end. The Renaissance sought to affirm the healthier gj I return to Florence. T he " Madonna with St. Anne" was painted during his second stay in Milan, and "St. Jo hn the Bapt ist," a product of his brief stay in Rome, was pai nted in 1515. The " Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper" are am ong the m ost popular paintings ever produced by human hand . version of the G reek idea of sexless love, which is the ki nd Leonardo seems to have chosen. And this Greek ideal- at least in Athens-which had been "softened in Alexandria, coarsened in Rome, and damned by Christianity," re-emerged in Florence with vigor and passion. If Leonardo took as his apprentices slim, handsome boys, what of that? He himself had been one in Verrochio's workshop. Besides, they were needed to pose for the religious figures they represented, such as David. If Leona rdo was thought to be "strangely beautiful," that was hardly his fault. Moreover, there is no evidence that Leonardo himself was overcome by Platonic love as was, for example, Michelangelo, who gave himself over to it with the enthusiasm that exceeded that of Dante or Petrarch. Yet so little is known of Leonardo's personal life that it is dangerous to push any theory too far-a fact even Freud recognized. Anyhow, the "beauty of faces" referred to by Leonardo in his morose reference to sex is ho w the world first came to know him. In his "Baptism of Christ," painted in collaboration wit h Vcrrochio in 1472, Leonardo depicts the "beauty of faces" in a way that has hardly been surpassed. Throughout his career as a painter, he continued to paint face after face of exquisite beauty. Leonardo once claimed that the painter has two chief things to paint-man and the contents of his mind. But whatever subject was selected, it must come from nature, and be governed by the same laws that govern nature. Of Leonardo's paintings, only about ten that arc certifiably his exist. Another half a dozen are in dispute. What his paintings have in common is their breathtaking beauty. It could be seen as early as his "Baptism of C hrist," and his "Adoration of the Magi," completed just before he entered the service of the Duke of Milan in 1482. His first version of the "Virgin of the Rocks" was finished soon after his arrival in Milan, and "The Last Supper" just a couple of years before he left that city. The "Mona Lisa" (sometimes called " La Giaconda") was painted in 1503, after his all of th is art, Leonardo shows himself o be a master of the High Renaissance tyle, with his o riginal studies in light nd shade, in paying less attenti on to ccessory detail, and in the more generalized statem e;1t made by establishing clear, logical relati onships among the objects of the painting. Still, m any of his paintings were not given the final to uch of his brush . (T he "Battle of Anghiari, " like "The Last Supper," was pai nted in an experimental medium, and the colo rs ran soon after were app lied. Nothing of it remai ns. It, alo ng wi th a painting by Michelangelo, was desti ned fo r the Hall of the Great Council in the Palazzio Vecchio.) T he conceptualization of projects was always mo re fruitful for Leonardo than th eir execut ion . In the last yea rs of his life, he turned exclusively to drawing, believing it to be the basic form of art because it alo ne can reflect the essence of things. Moreover, he lost interest in color in art, because he considered it both external and superficial. Still the school of painting inspired by Leonardo is considered more important than that of any other artist at any time, and it incl udes at least fo rty-five painters, including Raphael, Rubens, and Michelangelo. In sculpture, too, Leonardo, often left works unrealized. Leonardo is thought to have studied sculpture in Vcrrochio's studi o. Some minor pieces of sculpture arc mentioned by Vasari, his first biographer, but nothing by Leonardo remains. Although Leonardo had written in his Treatise on Painting that sculpture is a "lesser genius than painting," he goes on to point out that he has worked " no less in sculpture than in painting, being equall y adept at the one and the other." Two of his grandly conceived monuments were not completed. "The Horse" (a mo nument in memory of Francesco Sforza) was to be 20 feet high and require 20,000 pounds of bronze. The bronze was diverted to making cannons, and the French used the li fe-size clay model for target practice. His second project, a tomb sculpture for Trivulsio, did not get even so far as a clay model. Still, his reputation was great enough to win him appointment to the committee established to select an appropnatc location in Florence for Michelangelo's "David." Leonardo's work in architecture also had a lack of finality about it. Although he had a lifelong interest in architecture, and was at o ne time in competition with Bramante, the architect of St. Peter's in Rome, his work was confined by chance or by choice to that of an advisor; but his brilliance in architecture is reflected in his surv iving sketches. During his first Milan years, in the 1480s and 1490s, Leonardo began his "Notebooks," on which pages were recorded his astonishing drawings of a scientific nature-the anatomy of the human body, plans fo r (continued on page 7) |