Leonardo's Fantastic Drawings-I

Author(s): Martin Johnson

Source: The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 80, No. 471 (Jun., 1942), pp. 141-145
Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/868603
Accessed: 15/08/2009 02:22

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=bmpl.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Burlington Magazine Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs.

http://www.jstor.org

tendencies are already to be noticed and they obviously
are an ancient Indian inheritance.19 But where Muskin
seems to be outstanding among the other masters, who
worked on our manuscript-though they all occasionally
adopt the same devices-is the very clever way in which
he bases his entire compositions on diagonal lines,
which, in binding together the different parts of the
pictures, add to the impression of depth already given
by the different scenes. Furthermore, he disposes,
wherever it is possible, these different scenes of action
on different levels, indicated through the mountainous
inequality of the soil or through architectural devices;
he also makes his "receptacles"-houses, tents, rocks, etc.,
-as well as the single figures and groups overlap, so that
the ground loses a little of its unnatural extension. The
remoteness of the background is clearly indicated
through a tangible difference of size between its details
and those of the foreground, and, comparing his pictures
with those of other painters, we shall detect a better pro-
portion between figures and architecture or landscape.
Two examples, chosen for their similarity of subject-
PLATEIII, C21 (outline by Muskin, painting by Sarwan),
representing The Building of Agra, and PLATEIII, D22,
(outline by Tulsi the elder, painting by Bhawani),
showing The Building of FathpurSikri-may emphasize
this difference.
It is obvious, that Muskin, though he is deeply rooted
in Indian tradition, or perhaps just because this trend
is so much stronger in him than the Persian one, was one
of the first Mogul painters who really absorbed the
European influences, which were to become so much
stronger only a few years later; and surely it is not a
mere chance, that very complicated subjects, as the
sieges and assailments of mountain forts, have been
chiefly assigned to Muskin, in the Bankipore Timur-
namahas well as in our manuscript. It may be supposed,
that in all these pictures he has also exercised some
influence on the colouring; for they all show much
similarity; and in most of them the clouds of fire and
smoke emanating from guns and cannons help, by
enveloping in a haze the contours of far away things, to
suggest the impression of their remoteness.
Farukh Beg is, in our manuscript, the noblest rep-
resentative of a different tradition. Coming from Persia,
he has remained true to his origins in the greater poise
of his pictures, in the minuteness of details, in the subtle
harmonies of his colouring. In no other illustrations
of the Akbar-namahdo we meet with such a fine net of
ornaments spread over the architectural features, over
18 H. GLUCK;Die indischen desHamza-Romanes,
Miniaturen Zurich,
Vienna, Leipzig [I925],
19 Compare the subtle analysis given by ST. KRAMRISCH:A
Surveyof Painting in the Deccan, London, [1937], P. 4 ff.
20 V. A.
21 V. A.
Mus., No. 46, Akb. N. II, p. 372.
Mus., No. 86, Akb. N. II, p. 530.
22 V. A.
Mus., No. I17, Akb. N. II, p. 25, 26.
LEONARDO'S FANTASTIC
BY MARTIN JOHNSON, D.Sc.
fi y- aT is now recognized that the strange
*xT ~genius of Leonardo must be approached
not only through his few surviving
paintings and doubtful sculptures, but
also through his many hundred drawings
An Akbar-namah
Manuscript
the garments, harnesses and standards as in PLATEI, D,
Akbar'sEntry into Surat,23and nowhere do the flowers
of the lawns, the stones of the paths, the leaves and
blossoms of the trees form as regular and as ruglike a
pattern as they do here. The figures too have a type
absolutely their own. Of the three pictures he contri-
buted to our manuscript, two, according to the signa-
tures, have been done by him alone whilst in the third
one (Akbar Watchingtwo Fighting Elephants)24only the
portraits have been added by Basawan, a fact which
seems to emphasize the gap between him and his
fellow-artists, whose colouring may to a certain extent
have deviated of his own conceptions. For even in
this miniature, his own way of chosing very soft hues
and intermediate notes is quite remarkable, though this
picture is much more assimilated to the bulk of the other
illustrations than both the others.
These comparatively short notes-short, if we
consider the great amount of pictures of our manu-
script and the amount of masters who have worked
on it-aim at putting forward the following points :
I. That we have here the identical book, or one
of the books made for the emperor and mentioned
by Abul Fazl-for otherwise it would be a strange
coincidence indeed that exactly the identical masters
he names are prominent in our manuscript, whilst
it seems quite natural, that they should work on the
manuscript, in which both he and his imperial
master were most interested.
2. That, in spite of the great equality of style
throughout the whole work, due perhaps partly to
the collaboration of several artists on the same pic-
ture, it still seems possible to recognize at least the
most prominent of the artistsas distinct personalities,
though not in our, the European, sense.
3. That at that period ofAkbar's reign the Indian
painters were the leading artists at his court. And
the works of these painters, though very much in-
debted to Persia, definitely show that they are rooted
in the old pictorial traditions of India though until
now no direct line can be drawn from the old classical
art, as we know it from Ajanta, to these relatively
modern paintings. Perhaps we may assume, that
it is a certain affinity-an innate sensefor volume and
space, a desire to representthings in a way suggesting
their reality-which made them able to assimilate
up to a certain point western influences, though these
influences do not yet play in our manuscript the
important part characteristic of them in the latest
phase of Akbar's reign.
23 V. A.
Mus., No. 8i,Akb. N. III, p. 40.
24 V. A. Mus., No. I15, Akb. N. II. p. 432.
DRAWINGS-I.
and several thousand pages of MSS. It seems likely
that the sheets now treasured at Windsor, Paris,
Milan, and elsewhere, are fairly representative, in
spite of the dispersal which began about fifty years
after his death in I519, when the descendants of
I41
Leonardo's
FantasticDrawzngs-I.
Melzi seem to have allowed the sculptor Pompeo
Leoni to scatter Leonardo's sketches and other
papers over Spain and Italy. Many of the manu-
script pages are Leonardo's illustrated notes on
scientific research, and they overlap the character
of the more deliberate drawings when angels or
Madonnasor monsterscrowd the marginsof machine
designs and the diagrams of a biologist's dissections.
For the purpose of confronting the most acute
problem set by Leonardo to the modern mind, we
suggest the following tentative classification of the
drawings : selection by chronology is now possible
through the work of Sir Kenneth Clark and others,
but selection according to the mood inevitably
forced upon a beholder may afford clues to the mood
of the artist.
i. First there are the drawings which suggest
mental stressexpressedin animal or human anatomy.
[PLATE D]. Strict naturalism is exploited fully in
conveying the everwhelming sense of urgency, the
muscular mechanism as perfect for a composite
creature with dragon's wings as for a horse and rider
in mortal agony.
24 In contrast, there are drawings full of the
unselfconscious grace of children or animals, for
example the many sketches of Madonna with the
baby who is teasing a cat or struggling with a lamb.
3. The most violent are drawings of cosmic
disaster. Here the occasional human figures are
tiny things expressing the extremity of despair
while their cities are overwhelmed in flood or
tornado or volcanic outbreak.
4. In contrast, are the studies of unassailable
serenity in which the steadfast gaze of the faces
suggestsa confident reliance upon some secret know-
ledge. This strong peace of mind is the most subtle
and elusive, but perhaps the most memorable, of the
impressions from Leonardo drawings [PLATE A].
5. At the other extremeare Leonardo'sgrotesques.
Many represent hideous malformations in facial
anatomy. The expressions conveyed are often of
maniacal fury, but sometimesof pathetic resignation,
and sometimes of complacent acquiescence in the
most fiendish ugliness [PLATEB].
We submit that the most profound mystery left
by Leonardo is the difficulty of seeing in a single
personality the unearthly serenity and the unearthly
horror of these drawings, while in the same person-
ality we discover the scientist'sstrict confinement to
matters of fact and their unexaggerated recording.
For in view of occasional suggestions that his
scientific activities represented merely a dilettante
straying, indulged in by many renaissance artists,
we make here the following brief revaluation from
his MSS. His innumerable geometrical devices
served physical ends,just as chemistryand metallurgy
interested him mainly as means for effecting the
preparation of substances needed in other sciences
and arts. Mechanicsand physics,on the other hand,
he pursued for their own sake, and they largely
142
conditioned his attitude to both inanimate and living
environment. But he was not a great theorist, and
when we say that he anticipated the balancing of
action and reaction, or even the principle of inertia,
we mean that his notes reveal their unconscious
use in solving particular problems, rather than that
he possessed any of the generalising power of a
Newton or Einstein. He was, in fact, most absorbed
by experimental and observational exactitude, and
this educated his sober patience in recordingnatural
phenomena and developing similar behaviour in
apparatus of precision. This appears especially in
his aerodynamics,where shrewd mechanical analysis
of observeddetails in bird flight led to his remarkable
explorations of the possibility of human control
over the same forcesin the same medium. The same
qualities gave him peculiar insight into living mech-
anism, notably in embryology. In human and
animal and plant biology it typifiesthe same strength
and weakness seen in his physics that precision of
experimental detail was again of greater interest to
him than generalisation; as with the principle of
inertia, his anticipation of understandingthe blood
circulation was an incident ratherthan a deliberated
conclusion. In palaeontologyand physicalgeography
and meteorologyhe was again the most acute observer
of his century, but his rarer astronomical work
suggests, like his geometry, that he returned more
eagerly to problems upon which he could actually
experiment. It is not generally realised that his
MSS contain many fragmentsindicating a primitive
but strictly observational science of psychology.
For instance he anticipated modern methods of the
semi-conscious implanting of suggestion and he
commented upon the sublimation-value of certain
kinds of intellectual labour. Much of his treatise on
painting betrays shewd self-analysis in classifying
the best sequence for developing a learner'sabilities.
Contemporarieseven reportsome crudeexperimental
psychology, such as his trick of selecting strangers
with striking features, to tell them jokes and then
study their facial contortions in laughing. We
recollect that he controlled by music the expressions
of Mona Lisa while painting the famous portrait.
Throughout, the essence of his methods was to
adhere rigorously to a truthfulness of record open
to any experimenter'simpartial verification.
Taken in conjunction with these note-books, our
analysisof the drawingsleaves us unable to evade the
problem of Leonardo's divided personality. To
Leonardo, drawing was not merely the painter's
preliminary to formal composition, and was more
often the scientist's instinctive reaction to any new
thing observed; but when those shrewd and strict
recordings of animal anatomy suddenly escape into
the non-existent monstrosityof his fantasies,what is
it that he is observing? The same question is raised
by the cosmic fury of his catastrophicdrawings and
the loathsome deformity and maniac expression of
his grotesques,as well as the heavenly serenitywhich
A-PROFILE OF A LADF. SILVER POINT DRAWING, B-FAWEASTIC BEfRO THAIi. SILVER
32 BY 20 CM. (H.M. THE KING, WINDSOR CASTLE) POINT DRAWING, 26.2 BY 12.3 CM. (H.M.
THE KING, WIN1)SOR CASTLE)

C-STUDY FOR THE LAST SUPPER. RED CHALK D-DI>SSECTED FOOf OF MOArSTER.INK SUBSEQUENT TO
AND INK, 25.2 BY 17.2 CM. (H.M. THE KING SILVER POINT, 16.2 13.7 CM. (H.M. THE KING WINDSOR
13Y
WINDSOR CASTLE) CASTLE)

LEONARDO'S FANTASTIC DRAWINGS I.


subsequent ages have tried in vain to see in living
faces.
One prevalent source of misconception must be
guarded against, as soon as the emotional intensity
is recognised in these creations of a scientist who
has often been labelled "cold." Many com-
mentators have failed to see that while personal
feelings are relevant in artisticcreation and irrelevant
in scientific investigation, this distinction will need
very careful interpretation for the unique case of
Leonardo. There always is an ambiguity attending
any discussion of the emotions conveyed by a work
of art; the artist may be expressinghis own feelings
or he may be acting as a comparatively impassive
recorder of feelings observed or inferred in others.
In the rare instance where the artist happens also
to be a scientist, it is true that in his character
of scientist his responsibility for causes as well
as for mere phenomena demand of him a strict
impartiality; bVt it is rash to mistake this for an
inability to participate personally in any emotions
depicted. In contrastingLeonardo'scharacterwith,
for instance, the gentle piety of Fra Angelico or the
superb arrogance of Michelangelo which permeate
all their works, we must beware of going further than
crediting him with an ability to see his subjectsmore
nearly sub specieaeternitatis; otherwise we find our-
selves regarding his Last Supper-most emotional of
all representations of the scene-as a piece of
OLD ENGLISH CANDLESTICKS
AND
VENETIAN PROTOTYPES
BY W. G. MACKAY THOMAS
HOUGH prior to I6o0 the English
had evolved designs in candlesticks
unlike those on the Continent, yet they
did not scruple on occasion to incor-
porate details copied from 'either the
Venetians or the Flemings, and sometimes all three
sources contribute to a composite design in a single
candlestick. The present article will be restricted
mainly to a consideration of the designs borrowed
from the Venetians, for not until the sixteenth
century does Flemish influence play an important
part in English design.
For this purpose it will be necessary, first to trace
the source and the course of Venetian design, then
to show why its influence should have extended to
this country, and finally to note from English
examples how much we were indebted to the art
of Venice.
A colony of Arabs had settled in Venice at the
beginning of the fourteenth century, and from them
the Venetians learned the art of making both candles
and candlesticks. PLATE I, A shows an Arabian
candlestick in the British Museum and bearing
M
Leonardo's
FantasticDrawings-I.
impassive juggling with a set of feelings which had
no part in Leonardo's own experience [PLATE C].
Hence the common use of adjectives " cold," " dis-
passionate," or even " objective" must be regarded
with suspicion, until habits or moods can be recog-
nised in him beyond the isolated occasions of single
pictures.
It is these moods to which our classificationof the
drawings may be, we suggest, a legitimate clue. The
ambiguity as to whether the scientistis a participating
or a merely recording artist, reaches in this case the
most poignant solution: for the most disturbingly
suggestive of emotion are just those drawings to
which nothing in external nature can have been an
observedprototype. Those grossparodiesof physical
reality can only be symbols of an internal, not an
external world.
It is futile to guess at the source of such profound
emotional reactions, until we gain some insight into
the harmony or disharmony of Leonardo's relation
to environment. We seek this insight by proceeding
to assess some ways in which the relevant artistic
and scientific influences developed his powers at the
expense of his peace. The actual growth of the
scientific habit, at first sight so remote from the
ecstasy and fury of the artist, may possibly have been
the source of mental conflict which expressed itself
in the other half of this divided personality.
(To be concluded)
THEIR
the arms of the patrician family of Boldu who lived
in Venice during the fourteenth century. This is
possibly the earliest example known, having a separ-
ate central drip tray, a horizontal disk of metal
extending beyond the sides and which takes the place
of the flat top of the bell. This gives a more truncated
bell form and the sides still curve gradually outward
to the lower rim; a design popular in Western
Europe at a much later period. As Venetian in-
fluence was responsiblefor the change in the surface
decoration, we assume also the change in form was
due to Venetian ideas and PLATE I, B shows a
Venetian stick of the fifteenth century, having the
same type of base and drip tray but modifications in
the socket and stem, the former becoming laterally
symmetrical, a feature consistentlypresent in English
candlesticks for at least two hundred years.
Once the Venetians had embarked on the pro-
duction of candlesticks, changes in design followed
one another in quick succession, so by the end of the
sixteenth century little trace of Arabic influence
remained, with the exception of the art of damascen-
ing still used as a surfacedecoration. About the year
I45