| wae High
ear al
Mannerism
BTAAR TS
da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael ar
‘frequently spoken Group tha itis”
often forgotten how much older Leonardo
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When the beginnings of the High Re-
naissance are being discussed, Leonardo
was than the other two men. This tendency
to think of the three artists almost as if
they were a unit is a clear reflection of
contemporary opinion in Florence, which
recognized very quickly that Leonardo
was an artist different not only in degree
but in kind from the other painters of
his day. The age gap was considerable:
almost a whole generation lay between
Leonardo’s birth in 1452 and that of
Michelangelo in 1475, and greater still
for Raphael, born in 1483, so that before
the youngest man finally arrived in
Florence in about 1504 or 1505 Leonardo’s
major works were behind him and he was
already an elderly man of fifty-two or fifty-
three. Why was there this great divide
between Leonardo and his strict con-
temporaries? Partly it stemmed from the
fact that his major works were known only
by repute rather than being in
ee he had gone i Milan by
Florence, since -
leaving behind him the Adaration of
which was sensational enough to
d admirers to crowd to see
ished state. There was
‘the Kings,
cause artists ani
it despite its unfin TI
handful of smaller paintings — an
also the i
“Annunciation, the angel in Verrocchio's
Baptism of Christ, a group of three small
PART 1}: ITALY
Chapter One
The New Century
Madonna and Child pictures ~ which
displayed such strikingly new qualities of
technique, such outstanding intellectual
powers in the treatment of the figures and
the world about them, as to make very
obvious the gap between this new YORB
Virtuoso and competent praeitiones Ee
Jandaio, Lorenzo di Credi, and even
“so imaginative an artist as Botticelli
Wh rdo went t never
been fully explained. There was nothing in
Milan to attract any Florentine painter of
more than run-of-the-mill abilities, since
artistically the Sforza patronage was of the
most prosaic kind, though enlightened in
“mathematics, architecture and science.
‘The artist had been in trouble over an
accusation of homosexuality when he was
still in Verrocchio’s studio, but this had
been smothered — nothing further was
heard of it, anyway. Politics may have
entered into it, since the eventual owner,
and therefore the probable patron, of the
‘Adoration was a political opponent of the
Medici. He went, so Vasari records, as the
bearer of a magnificent musical instrument
sent by Lorenzo de’ Medici to Ludovico
Sforza, yet it is quite clear that he did not
expect to return, since he drafted a letter to
the Duke of Milan which is a long list of
his abilities in virtually everything from
the design of fortifications to bronze
casting, with his talents as an artist merely
tacked on in a last paragraph, even though
7D0 Da Viner Adoration of the Kings 1481
it is one suggesting pride in consummate
powers: ‘Item, I can carry out sculpture in
marble, bronze or clay, and also in
painting I can do as well as any man’ ~a
long-distant echo of Jan van Eyck’s motto
‘Als Ich Kan’,
The fruits of his Milanese life as a court
artist are a couple of portraits, the huge
mass of his researches into everything
under the sun which interested him from
architecture, from
natural history to
8
ines to canal systems, from hie
to aerial perspective, accumulate
mell in the famous notebooks, 2
masterpieces: the two versions
Virgin of the Rocks, and the Last Supp
When the Sforza dynasty fell, L«
fled first to Mantua, and then to escap’"
devouring egoism of its Duchess, Isabé
Este, fied on to Venice. He wes °
d his comfortable
nardo
ape th
stable
forty-seven, an