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| wae High ear al Mannerism BT AAR TS da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael ar ‘frequently spoken Group tha itis” often forgotten how much older Leonardo T4835) 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 7 D0 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

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