Print collector's quarterly (4.1914)

SOME EARLY DRAWINGS BY
LEONARDO DA VINCI
By osvald siren
Professor of History of Art, University of Stockholm, Sweden.

H LEONARDO was a son of the Etruscan soil.
" A scion of that Tuscan race which cluring
| its palmy clays attained to the purest ex-
s pression for the concentrated will, the keen
eye and the brawny hand. These later Etruscans never
primarily sought for beauty and harmony. Their art is
all-compelling character and stirring movement, full
reality, and an organism alive to the very finger-tips.
There is no people in Italy which has produced such
good realistic narrators as the people of Florence, no
artists who have interpretecl reality with such a deep
and true feeling for what is characteristic and valuable,
as the Florentines. Sharpness of expression and energy
of movement are developed to their highest pitch in
artists such as Donatello, Andrea del Castagno, and
Antonio Pollajuolo. Heroic poetry and clramatic sense
of life have never been foreign to the geniuses nurtured
in the city of Dante.
The true Creative power of the Florentine has always
resided in his will and in his constructive imagination.
He builcls in thought; he fashions his ideas plastically.
There is an uncompromising sharpness in his view of

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