DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.69463#0271
THE VIRGIN, SAINT ANNE, &c.
« Leonardo da Vinci, made up of all the elements,
without the preponderance of any one, gave universal
hints, and wasted life insatiate in experiment: now on
the wing after beauty, then grovelling on the ground
after deformity; now looking full in the face of terror,
then decking it with shards,* and shells, and marks,
equally attracted by character and caricature, by style
and common nature. He has drawn rudiments of all,
but like a steam lost in ramification, vanished without a
trace.
“Want of perseverance alone could make him abandon
his Cartoon of the celebrated group of horsemen, destined
for the great council-chamber at Florence, without paints
ing the picture. For to him, who could organize the
limbs of that composition, Michael Angelo himself could
be no object of fear. And that he was able to organize
it, we may be certain, from the sketch that remains of it,
however pitiful, in the 1 Etruria Pittrice, lately published,
but still more from the admirable print of Edelinck, after
a drawing of Rubens, who was his great admirer, and
has said much to impress us with the beauties of his last
supper at Milan, which he abandoned likewise, without
finishing the head of Christ, exhausted by a wild chace
after models of the heads and hands of the apostles.
Had he been alive to conceive the centre, the radii must
have followed of course, Whether he considered that
magic of light and shade which he possessed in an un-
paralleled degree in his smaller pictures, as an inferior
principle in a work of such dignity, or as unable to
* Shells of Beetles. This requires some explanation: Leonardo was
employed to paint a head of Medusa. A beautiful woman sat to him
for the same. The adjuncts of horror he sought for in the fields,
fringing home for them occasionally in his walks nettles, thorns,
beetles, spiders, toads, adders, £c.
« Leonardo da Vinci, made up of all the elements,
without the preponderance of any one, gave universal
hints, and wasted life insatiate in experiment: now on
the wing after beauty, then grovelling on the ground
after deformity; now looking full in the face of terror,
then decking it with shards,* and shells, and marks,
equally attracted by character and caricature, by style
and common nature. He has drawn rudiments of all,
but like a steam lost in ramification, vanished without a
trace.
“Want of perseverance alone could make him abandon
his Cartoon of the celebrated group of horsemen, destined
for the great council-chamber at Florence, without paints
ing the picture. For to him, who could organize the
limbs of that composition, Michael Angelo himself could
be no object of fear. And that he was able to organize
it, we may be certain, from the sketch that remains of it,
however pitiful, in the 1 Etruria Pittrice, lately published,
but still more from the admirable print of Edelinck, after
a drawing of Rubens, who was his great admirer, and
has said much to impress us with the beauties of his last
supper at Milan, which he abandoned likewise, without
finishing the head of Christ, exhausted by a wild chace
after models of the heads and hands of the apostles.
Had he been alive to conceive the centre, the radii must
have followed of course, Whether he considered that
magic of light and shade which he possessed in an un-
paralleled degree in his smaller pictures, as an inferior
principle in a work of such dignity, or as unable to
* Shells of Beetles. This requires some explanation: Leonardo was
employed to paint a head of Medusa. A beautiful woman sat to him
for the same. The adjuncts of horror he sought for in the fields,
fringing home for them occasionally in his walks nettles, thorns,
beetles, spiders, toads, adders, £c.