He Drew like an AngelA. Throughout his life Leonardo da Vinci was troubled by a sense of failure, incompletion and time wasted. His favorite phrase, unconsciously repeated in whole or in part whenever he wrote something to see if a newly cut pen was working, was "Tell me, tell me if anything got finished." And indeed very little did. His big projects for sculpture were never completed—the huge clay model for one of them, meant to commemorate his patron Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan, ended up a shapeless mound, shot to pieces by occupying French archers. His big wall painting commemorating a Florentine victory, The Battle of Anghiariarson, became a wreck and was painted over. Little survives of his Last Supper in Milan. And so the sad catalog of rain and loss goes on.B. He never found time to edit the fascinating mass of his writings into books. His engineering and hydraulic projects either failed or were not started. Very few of his machines would have worked either. Probably not even the tanks that he hoped would creep like fatal snails across the battlefields of northern Italy would have harmed anyone, even assuming that their sweating and straining occupants could have got their wheels to go round at all, which is beyond probability.C. We remember Leonardo as a painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect and scientist. Yet if one is to judge by the self-advertising letter he sent to Sforza in Milan in 1481, he didn"t estimate his skills that way. Before anything else, he listed his strategic skill: he could design portable bridges, drains, bombard strong holds, design cannons, make fireproof ships, and so on and on. Not until item No. 10, the last on list, did he get around to saying that in painting too he could "do everything possible as well as any other." There may have been a simple reason for this, since being a military engineer was probably more profitable than being a painter, but this image is still vastly unlike the artist we think of today as Leonardo.D. Three things, however, can be said without hesitation about Leonardo. The first is that he was not a "Renaissance man". He did not typify his time. Many artists in the Renaissance worked, as Leonardo did, in a wide variety of media: drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture and so forth. None, however, not even the great Leon Battista Alberti, had Leonardo"s surprising and unsatisfied curiosity about the makeup and governing laws of the physical world or spent so much time and energy thinking about them.E. The second thing is, obviously, that he could draw like an angel. The idea that he was "the greatest" Italian draftsman of his time (born in 1452, he died at a considerable age in exile in France in 1519) is essentially meaningless, because the late 15th and early 16th centuries were full of amazing performers on paper. But not even contemporaries like Michelangelo were able to exceed, or regularly rival, him as a master of the kind of expressive and descriptive line that one sees in such drawings of his as the studies for equestrian sculpture (骑士雕塑) or in his surprising analyses of human bone and muscle structure—though some of them, of course, were artists with very different aims.F. The third thing is that Leonardo was one of the least transparent artists and, given the enormous losses and gaps in what we know about him, it is useless to hope that any exhibition could sum him up. He was conflicted, and almost incredibly hard to get at. It is not true, however, that his famous backward writing was an attempt to cover the secrets of his researches from prying eyes. This aspect of the Leonardo "mystery" is not a mystery at all, because he was left-handed, and it was natural for him to write that way. Still, was there ever an artist who was troubled by destruction—and it was a real trouble, not just an "as if" interest Not until Leonardo—and not after him either, one is tempted to add. He thought a lot about chaos and social collapse with great delight: the end of the world was his private horror movie or would have been if the 15th century had had movies.G. Words had no flame for this, so Leonardo had to content himself with his drawings. Throughout the show one sees an absolute mastery of the processes of drawing: the making of marks but also the making of the instruments with which to make them. In the 15th century one did not walk into a shop and buy a pencil. One had to make the silver-point of charcoal. One had to cut the pen and shape its point. All of this was wound in with the technique of drawing and helped to determine its intensity. That is one of the reasons why small drawings (and most of Leonardo"s drawings were small, in some cases hardly more than thumbnail sketches) can be just like handwriting.H. There are some amazingly ugly subjects, like the imaginary Bust of Grotesque Man in Profile Facing to the Right. Leonardo delighted in these. The pleasure that he took in human ugliness was almost as intense as the delight afforded him by beauty. Granted, cosmetic considerations were less to the fore in 16th century Europe than they would be four centuries later. Granted, social attitudes toward the repellent aspects of old age were different. And yet it is difficult to look at his numerous drawings of horribly, ugly old people—which would be copied by other artists and would make a final appearance during the Victorian Age in the triumphantly hideous image of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland—without sensing that Leonardo"s peculiar imagination is at a bit remove from ours.I. He is saying, "Idealize as much as you want, but avoid denial." The necessary other side of the ideal beauty of Leonardo"s Mona Lisa or Cecilia Gallerani was the ugliness of his grotesqueries (怪诞派作品)—an ugliness that ends all possibility of desire and has something evil, not just medical, about it. To see his grotesques as the mere play of a mind mixed with sadism (虐待) is to misunderstand them. They are an essential part of the impulse that turned Leonardo toward an attachment to beauty as a kind of saving principle.
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