Original subtitles

Good afternoon. Universal genius is daunting, and Leonardo da Vinci, born in 1452, died

in 1519, is probably the most famous universal genius in history. We must content ourselves

with just two lectures about his painting only, leaving aside any examination of his

work in sculpture and architecture, not to mention his speculations and explorations in

geology, anatomy, engineering, optics, military science, flight, and so on, and on, and on.

First, if you'll excuse the digression, there is the matter of his name and its proper usage in

English. Despite widespread misuse in popular writing and even in the newspaper of record,

it is incorrect to refer to da Vinci. That simply means from Vinci, the town near Florence in which he

was born, but so were other people, including members of his family, any of which could be

meant by da Vinci. So it is either Leonardo da Vinci or Leonardo. Any examination of the art

historical literature, from the Renaissance to the present, whether in Italian or English,

English will make apparent the correct usage. Henry David Thoreau said, and I paraphrase,

he who pronounces my name aright deserves my love and my service.

This is not, by the way, a rule which automatically applies to all other Italian artists. Exceptions will

be found, and there will be a variety of reasons for them, but there's no exception in the case of Leonardo.

In general, names of people should be given in the form they used themselves, or were used by their

contemporaries, and not casually altered by later generations. Even a genius has to have a beginning,

and in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, his artistic beginning, at 16 or 17,

was as an apprentice in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, whose sculpture we've already

looked at. You see here a painting, his best-known painting for a very good reason, a painting by

Verrocchio of the baptism of Christ, painted about 1470, and now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Verrocchio was also a painter, although his painted figures are often modeled as severely as though he were still

thinking as a sculptor. As usual in workshop practice, the more gifted studio assistants sometimes

had a hand in paintings by the master. The Baptism of Christ is the best-known example of his painting,

principally because of the collaboration of the young Leonardo. Made for a monastery outside Florence,

the baptism is obviously related to Verrocchio's sculpture of Christ and St. Thomas, on which he was

working at the time and at which we took a good look in a previous lecture. The treatment of the

principal figures in this baptism are modeled very much in the manner of sculpture, with a resultant

harshness in the shadows and an angularity of contour. In the baptism of Christ, Leonardo painted the

kneeling angel at the far left and part of the river valley behind him. This was recorded early in the

sixteenth century by Vasari in his Lives of the Artists, and it's manifestly true. The style in those passages

is in sharp contrast to Verrocchio's, but in complete accord with Leonardo's already mature style. The two

kneeling angels have long provided the exact contrast between the master and his apprentice. The head of

that on the right, the two angels, the head of that on the right, behind the other angel, is by Verrocchio,

and it has a wiry, descriptive linearity. While that on the left by Leonardo is painted with a melting softness,

which will develop into one of the miracles of art. The drapery of Leonardo's angel is very elaborate

and was based on a highly finished preparatory drawing. The landscape above their heads is painted

with a vaporous and visionary touch, and it is also an area or a type of painting that will become

characteristic of the landscapes of Leonardo. I've always thought, by the way, that Verrocchio's angel

looks at Leonardo's with a kind of wistfulness like, why can't I look like you?

To a remarkable extent, Leonardo's artistic language was fully formed by this time, and he was about 18 years

old. And his portrait of Ginevra de Benci, which you see, perhaps painted when he was about 22, around 1474,

is further evidence. In 1472, he had become a member of the Artists Guild of Saint Luke, and he could

accept commissions on his own, although he continued to work as well in Verrocchio's shop. The portrait of

Ginevra de Benci is generally dated from 1474 to 78. I favor the earlier date, but this is much open to

discussion. An anonymous writer in the 1540s reported, in Florence he painted the portrait of Ginevra de

Merigo Benci from Nature, a work which was so finished that it seemed not a portrait, but Ginevra herself.

That this portrait is in fact the one that was described by that writer seems confirmed by the

symbolic inclusion of the branches of juniper around her head, these spiky leaves of the vegetation

behind her. This is juniper, and juniper in Italian is Ginepro, and Ginevra is a variation, a corruption,

if you will, of the word Ginepro, and means juniper. It's her identifier, her attribute, if you will.

By the way, it was quite unusual in this period to pose a female sitter out of doors, almost always

in an interior setting instead. When the portrait was painted, Ginevra was the very recent bride of a

wealthy Florentine named Luigi Nicolini. So it could conceivably be a bridal portrait, a portrait that

was created at that time, but this too is open to discussion. Two aspects of this painting were recent

innovations in Italian portrait painting. The three-quarter pose, which replaced the profile

view that we've seen up till now, and the oil medium on panel, on a wood panel, was used, oil in conjunction

in this case with tempera, which was the usual medium before this period, before oil was introduced.

But Leonardo combines the two, as do other artists. Both innovations, the three-quarter pose and the new

medium, were borrowed from Flemish portraits, which were already to be found in Florentine collections.

We often underestimate the knowledge they had of Florentine painting. It wasn't just an altarpiece or

a portrait. There was a lot of, pardon me, of Flemish painting, a lot of Flemish painting in Florence

and in Italy during the later part of the Renaissance, and it had a great effect. I'll return to this,

but let me show you a Verrocchio sculpture, A Woman with Flowers. This was probably done between 1475 and 1480.

It's in the Bargello, the National Sculpture Museum. It's a half-length, as you see, a portrait of a woman

unidentified with flowers carved by Verrocchio close to the date of the Leonardo painting, and it's almost

surely the same sitter. I know how dangerous it is, I do know how dangerous it is to try to identify

portraits and base one on another and say, this is the same person, or even this is the same person at two

different ages, and so forth. It's very difficult, but I'm convinced that it is the same sitter in this

case. Apart from helping to confirm the date of Leonardo's portrait, this sculpture serves to

remind us that Ginevere de Benci rather remarkably lacks hands. Aside from the fact that Leonardo drew

very expressive hands, it's also notable that Renaissance portraits are rarely, if ever, square

as this one is. The inescapable conclusion is that the painting has been cut down, removing the hands,

which perhaps had been damaged. The reverse of the portrait confirms this. On the reverse of the

portrait, wooden panel, I remind you, there is a coat of arms and a motto. The coat of arms includes a wreath

of laurel and a palm of fame in encircling a sprig of juniper again, and weaving among these plants is a

scroll with the Latin motto, a Latin motto, which translates, beauty adorns virtue. And by the way,

the red wax seal in the upper right-hand corner is the mark of a former owner of the painting, The Prince

of Liechtenstein. The alteration of the painting's size is confirmed when we look at this reverse, because

the device and the motto have clearly been abbreviated by cutting. You can see that at the bottom, which is

where, on the opposite side, the hands ought to be. And a study of hands, a drawing, which is in

Windsor in the Royal Library, by Leonardo in a pose quite similar to that of Verrocchio's sculpture,

although reversed, has been proposed as the design for the missing hands, the now missing hands, of

Ginevra. And we'll look at the front view again. You see it is square, very unusual. You usually have a

portrait. A portrait is usually taller than it is wide. And the hands are missing. The extraordinary

beauty of the painting, however, has not otherwise really been compromised. What's really new in this

portrait, what was really original, was Leonardo's own style, quite unlike anything that had preceded it,

in the exquisite modeling of the skin tones, which are seamlessly controlled from light to dark,

with a smoky gradation. The word is sfumato for smoky in Italian, and it has come to apply

principally to Leonardo's modeling, though it can be applied elsewhere. It is a gradation, a smoky

gradation, this sfumato that is never abrupt, never disruptive to the flow of vision. Leonardo controls

our eyes reading of Ginevra's face through this modeling. And the slow progress, the slow progress

of our reading, of our eyes reading the painting, ensures that the face and the painting has a serenity

and a mystery that is hypnotic. I would point out also, in passing, and I don't even know that you'll

see it in a photograph, but there is damage to the painting. Wood panels do get damaged, and on the

chest of Ginevra, there are areas where the paint surface is cracked. But the control elsewhere,

everything is so smooth, so controlled, with the light so beautifully gentle and gliding that you

scarcely notice it. It doesn't disrupt our experience of the painting. Related to this slow reading of the

painting is the strangely unemotional character of the face, the dreamy eyes that don't really connect

with ours. And this seems to be more of a projection of Leonardo's own personality, his own secret of

personality, than a record of the sitters. I think that it is, in fact, generally true, of portrait

artists, that they project themselves to a large degree onto their sitters, particularly when it comes

to matter of character. I think you can demonstrate it. And I think the greater the portrait artists,

the more it's likely to happen. And this is something that one can find, certainly in Leonardo,

because otherwise, the ladies he painted would, generally speaking, all have an inward and sad

character, which is not necessarily to be expected. Most remarkably, in this painting, Leonardo,

still in his early twenties, has exhibited the characteristics of his mature style. He has

already, in Geneva da Vinci, given us the essentials of the Mona Lisa a quarter century before he painted

that. Leonardo expressed himself, first of all, through line. He was one of the greatest of all

draftsmen. He was equally gifted in perspective rendering, the mathematics of design, and in imaginative

improvisation, the poetry of design. His imaginary, his improvisatory drawings are really unbelievable.

And an entire course could be, and has been, taught on his drawings alone. But they are also the

underpinnings, emotional and structural underpinnings, of his paintings. I want to show you a landscape

drawing. This and one drawing later on, in the next lecture, will have to stand for his two drawings, or three will

have to stand for his drawing technique. But as a landscape drawing, this is extraordinary. It is a pen

drawing, 1473. It is dated, and you see an inscription in the upper left. You're undoubtedly aware, because it's a

famous fact that Leonardo wrote in mirror writing. He wrote everything as though he, to read it, you have to hold a

mirror to it. How he wrote all his notebooks in mirror script is something of a, something to ponder, obviously.

This drawing is a wonderful drawing. It belongs to the Uffizi Gallery. It is in the Arno Valley, and

it brings the Arno Valley to life. There is a sense, there's an organic sense here, which we have not seen

before. Not really, and certainly not in drawing in Italy of a landscape up to this time. You might have

found something like it in Northern Europe, but nothing in Italy. The sense of things growing, of

wind blowing through trees. Look at these trees along the hillside in the sense of vibration that is in

them. They're moving here, for instance. They literally seem to be moving. The wind is blowing

them, and the water is flowing, and everything is in motion. The water here, flowing into, down the

hillside at this point, and on into the river valley. Everything is in change. There is a sense here of

becoming, of process, which you may not find again until Cezanne, for all I know. There is a feeling of

things changing before your eyes in this drawing, which is utterly astonishing to me, at least.

This is the painting to which I alluded at least once in the last lecture, and at an earlier time,

I'm sure, his unfinished Adoration of the Magi, which he brought to this stage in 1481-82.

And it is typical of his early fame that such an unfinished altarpiece, really just a monochrome

underdrawing, had such a strong influence on some of his contemporaries, and was preserved and

honored so much. Its influence was astonishing. It remained in that monastery, the Sandonato,

which I mentioned outside the walls, where Filippino Lippi painted one to, in a sense,

replace it because this wasn't finished. But they owned this, and held on to this, and artists came

to see it. Its influence is all the more remarkable in that it is essentially a very large drawing.

Perspective plays its role here, particularly in the half-built architecture, if you can, if I can put

it that way, here in the background, a strange architectural fantasy for which there are some drawings.

Preliminary studies show more complete, even dominant, ideas for the architecture in this

area, but here it looks like a ruin or something possibly being constructed.

And there are other areas of importance here in the background that I might point out, for instance,

the horseman in the background here, which has its own influence and which also will,

in a sense, recur in Leonardo's own art later on. But the great impact of this painting came from the

foreground group of the Madonna and Child, who are utterly encompassed by haunted figures. The magi and

their retinue are not so much processing toward the Holy Pair as they are creeping uncertainly, even fearfully, toward them. The

unprecedented sacredness of the Christ child to those who have traveled so far to see him had never been given such a

profound psychological interpretation. It is a central Christian mystery of the incarnation,

and it's absolute in his image, but he gives it a psychology which goes far beyond the merely,

if I may put it that way, theological. The figures, and I would ask you to look well here at the figures on the right hand side. Look at this figure,

one of the retinue here, an old man, hand on top of his head, sticking his head up over the rock as though trying to get a closer look,

but afraid to get any closer than that. And there are a whole group of heads here, which are in the most astonishingly complex

relationship, one to the other. On the left hand side, a similar figure, and this figure, again, almost crawling up over the rock in the background.

One of the kings kissing the ground here, the other magus here, actually holding a chalice,

actually holding a chalice, which of course is the gift of the magus, but it becomes a chalice which links

with the idea of the incarnation and of the mass and all of the things that we've talked about before

in terms of the miracle of the transubstantiation. Well, it goes on and on. But these figures influence

an entire generation of artists. And of course, the hillock in which they, in front of which they sit,

sprouts a tree, the symbolic tree growing out of this, the tree of life, if you will,

representing both the tree from the Garden of Eden and the tree of the

new Adam and the salvation which the nativity represented.

In 1481, Leonardo left Florence for Milan, invited by the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. He wasn't

called the Duke yet, but we habitually call him that. And he remained there for 20 years,

working for the Duke, traveled some, but most of the time was centered in Milan. And there he produced

the Madonna of the Rocks between 1483 and 1486. This is in the Louvre. There are two versions of this

painting. The other one is in London in the National Gallery. This one, which I will show you, is in the Louvre.

It was in Milan that his famous and haunting Madonna of the Rocks was painted for an altarpiece,

just part of a larger altarpiece, in the church of San Francesco Grande. The Madonna of the Rocks

is a painting in which a new moment in Renaissance art, the High Renaissance, may be said to emerge.

We haven't used the term since the beginning of the lectures. Now we have something which is

different enough that it represents that period within a period that we call the High Renaissance.

The broad-based pyramidal composition that contains and unifies the complex group of figures is a core

design principle of the High Renaissance, of this culminating stylistic period of the central Italian

Renaissance. The High Renaissance, as a period, lasts for fewer than 40 years. For something of such great

fame, it's very ephemeral and very centralized on a few masterpieces in a few places.

This is a fully finished work, yet here, too, it is disegno. The Italian word disegno, D-I-S-E-G-N-O,

means two things, drawing and design, and it encompasses the two of them.

Disegno controls the painting, drawing and design, not just the grand foreground pyramid, but the

unforgettable background as well, which is more nightmare than dream, and is created again in a

in a way which uses these core structural principles. In the background, color is the absence of color,

brown-black, bluish-gray rock formations, fantastic rock formations, invented by Leonardo that seem,

as we peer into the background of this large painting, these background rock formations seem to

swallow us up, swallow up our perception anyway. We strain to see what's going on. We look through

into a brighter space, and then we're nowhere. We're lost in that space. Scholars have pointed out that

the tradition identified the cave of the nativity. The nativity is often shown in a cave and not in,

not merely in a stable, the cave of the nativity with the cave of the sepulchre, which holds the dead

Christ. As often with Leonardo, he paints this in a way which seems to resonate remarkably with images and

ideas of modern psychology. There's no explanation for this, but it's not surprising that Freud got

preoccupied with Leonardo, because these penetrations into a deep and fantastic and dreamlike background,

which then dissolves and which has no resolution for you, is something which seems to speak to

the modern understanding of dreams and of psychology. It's easy to be confused by the iconography of this

painting, for Leonardo's Madonna embraces the child John the Baptist, not the child Jesus, as you would

expect. This is the Baptist here, whose hands are in prayer. And then she extends her left hand over the

of the Christ child, who is being protected largely by this large extraordinary angel, the kneeling angel

behind her, who points a long finger at the Baptist while looking out of the picture toward the viewer

worshiper, in that way that Alberti had suggested at the beginning, in the early part of the century,

to attract our attention into the picture and then point to what is significant. The immediate foreground,

right here, shows a chasm, a precipice at least, that suggests a chasm that separates us from the sacred

figures, and therefore perhaps from salvation. And if I may remind you, it's reminiscent of the chasm or

rift in the earth in the later, later painting than this by Botticelli, the mystic nativity that we

recently looked at and had and which had a similar chasm. The profound mystery of the dark grotto and

the solemn group placed before it have prompted many subjective interpretations, although not as many

as has the Mona Lisa, to which we will turn in a few moments. First, however, I want to show you one of his

most beautiful female portraits, the exquisite Lady with an Ermine, a painting now in Poland, in Krakow,

which has been there since the French Revolution, a painting of about 1485. A painting, by the way,

which has been with us here, as we have been going through other masters, she has been accompanying us.

Portraits were an important part of the small body of Leonardo's work, the small body that exists.

As observed, he mastered the technical means at the beginning of his career, and his peculiar

psychological spell was also developed early. Yet there is a remarkable variety of pose and expression

in his portraits. The Lady with an Ermine was painted in Milan, about a decade after Ginevra de Benci.

The beautiful sitter, Cecilia Galarani, was the mistress of the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforzo,

who was called Il Moro because he was swarthy, he was called the Moor. The ermine which she holds

in Greek is called Gale, G-A-L-E, with an accent, which relates to her name, Galarani. So it's a speaking symbol,

just as Juniper and Ginevra are the same. Here, the ermine stands for her name. It still might strike you

as rather odd that she holds an ermine, that she has a pet of this sort, but it should be noted that

ermines instead of cats were sometimes kept as mouse hunters during the Renaissance, as they had been

in earlier times. There's a French inscription, it may even be invisible here, which is just as well,

in the upper left-hand corner, but it was a later edition. It was in a French collection at some time,

obviously, and it put Leonardo's name there, gave another nickname to the sitter, and so forth in

French. It disappeared from France during the revolution, and that's when it turned up in

Krakow, or at least in the private collection in Poland, liberated from some French collection,

obviously. The painting is one of the liveliest of Leonardo's portraits. It's expressively posed

and illuminated with the most beautifully, the most beautiful, elegant hand. The ermine itself is

perhaps the most beautifully designed part of the painting, and probably the best preserved part of

the painting as well. Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa has acquired a mystique unequaled by any other painting.

You can only try to look at this painting with unclouded eyes. This is the most often looked at,

seldom seen painting in the world. If one succeeds in penetrating the crowds invariably in front of it at

the Louvre, one must still penetrate the protective layers of glass, the discolored varnish of centuries,

and above all, the mythic status of the painting. It's a remarkable portrait, but to see it objectively

takes a long time, and I dare you to try to find that much time in front of it in the museum.

This was called, at one point in the 19th century, a mirror of tarnished steel. People had wonderful,

and still do, phrases for the painting. Well, she'd look very different if the varnish were removed.

She would no longer be, as Walter Pater called her in the 19th century, the submarine goddess of the

Louvre. That's just part of a very long page that you ought to read for its purple prose. She would,

if we could see her clearly, be simply Lisa di Antonio Maria Gerardini, the wife of Francesco del

Giocondo of Florence, and about 24 years old, if you can believe that when this was painted. Mona

Lisa is a, Mona is a contraction, as you doubtless know, of Madonna, my lady, and therefore the first

part of her name. Because of her husband's name, she is sometimes called La Gioconda, but we,

especially in English, usually refer to her as Mona Lisa. The portrait was made soon after Leonardo's

returned to Florence, and it shows the lady seated on a loggia. The parapet and the bases of the columns

are visible, if you are looking closely, but you see it has been cut undoubtedly, but there are the,

you can see the bottom of the colonnets left and right of her, and the parapet right behind her arm.

There is then a fantastic landscape of rivers and rocks stretching into the distance. The landscape is

related to those already imagined by Leonardo in earlier paintings, well, from the very beginning,

in the background of the baptism he helped Verrocchio on. And it's compositionally linked to the sitter's

head and shoulders in very beautiful and subtle ways. I mean, you can make, work this out for yourself,

but if you start following the lines of the background, the height, as it were, of the background

elements in relationship to the body, you see how carefully he has adjusted it to the figure itself.

There is nothing accidental about it. It's very organic. Her full figure, and she is full-figured,

is animated by the gentle turn from the three-quarter torso to the nearly frontal face. It's even more

complex than Geneva de Benci, the torso three-quarter, the head further forward. The modeling of the very

relaxed hands, and rather boneless hands, and face dissolves all line into shadow. It takes it further

than the Geneva de Benci. Anything that was linear just becomes little pools and pockets and areas of

shadow, and it imbues her features with a sense of a shifting and unfathomable expression. Unlike

Geneva de Benci, Mona Lisa looks directly at us, not into herself. She insists, if you will, that we return

her gaze. According to Vasari, Leonardo worked three years on this portrait, and in the end kept it for

himself. He didn't deliver it. Well, he obviously didn't deliver it because it was with him when he died in

France, and with other paintings that he had taken with him or made after he arrived in France, it entered

the French Royal Collection. And this one, of course, like the others, went into the Louvre. We have now seen

some of Leonardo's most famous and beautiful paintings, but his most celebrated creation, the revolutionary

Last Supper will be reserved for our next lecture. Thank you.