Leonardo da Vinci

“I cannot read the truth into these eyes. Their riddle still eludes me.” When the passion of two natures meets in perfect reciprocity the resulting fruit is genius. It is procreation in the divine sense—divine creation by deputy, that is to say—whereby the love that is in the souls of both, each for the other, blossoms in the flawless understanding. Leonardo, the glorious bastard, was the earnest of such a meeting—a moment rarely possible, but still possible to any union—and the seal of its creative ecstasy was on his hand and on his brow. He was beautiful as he was inspired; yet, even as the Fates keep secrets from the gods themselves, from him was withheld the full interpretation of his own transcendent visions.

The young man to whom he spoke, and into whose eyes he had turned to look, lowered his lids as if abashed or aggrieved, and just perceptibly shrugged his shoulders.

“Master,” he said, presuming on the Master’s tolerance, “is it not the mystery of original sin in them which baffles you? And where on this earth are eyes to lack that riddle? You are too old, Master, by near fifteen hundred years to find the model you seek. There was never but one in all the world.”

He looked up suddenly, an odd shadow of challenge or defiance in those same vilified orbs, and again veiled them under drooped lashes.

Messer Leonardo stood musing, half abstracted. He was wont to hunt for the faces for his pictures about the city, and when he marked a quarry, to pursue it in and out of the human warren like a weasel, tasting its life in anticipation, until the moment came to seize and drain it. So had he captured the model for his Christ—among the people, as was meet—Lucio, the widow’s son, who had a face like an angel’s, and the gift, it seemed, of immortal youth. Lucio’s mother was the poorest of the poor, and bedridden at that; yet the fond pride in her kept her grown child in idleness. She embroidered rich cloths for tailors, and made a sufficient pittance; but him she would never let soil his lovely hands in menial service. It had been a different thing, however, when Messer Leonardo, the Duke’s own petted protégé, had proposed to introduce Lucio into the great picture of the Last Supper he was about to paint for the monks of Santa Maria delle Grazie. And as its divine protagonist! Here was service deliriously sanctified. Lucio must be enraptured to consecrate his young glowing beauty to an end so sublime. And he went, indeed, to the great Master’s atelier in the Palace, and was made the subject of innumerable studies, pending his appearance in the fresco.

The fresco itself was to be painted on an end wall of the monastery refectory, continuing in perspective the actual rafters of the room, and so far consisted in no more than a charcoal drawing, masterly outlining the group assembled at the consecration. Only the Christ Himself bloomed in flowery suggestion from the midmost throng, a figure iridescent, half revealed, as if it were verily a dream materialising.

Before this figure da Vinci, tall, comely, a rapt look on his beardless, keen-cut features, the solemnity of the riddle in his eyes, stood one morning, his forefinger to his lip, and pondered—pondered. His model for the Christ stood at his shoulder.

“Ho, Lucio!” he said suddenly, like a man awakening; “you suggest it is thus; and perhaps it is thus. How, then, to elude the riddle which eludes me?”

“Why not paint me so, Master, with my lids down?”

Leonardo glanced quickly at the speaker; then, raising his left hand with the brushes and the pallet in it, selected here and there and began to work. Presently, as he modelled with deft fingers, half-murmured fragments of speech came from him.

“What is thine age, Lucio? I forget.”

“Yet under twenty-five, Master.”

“Why, a miracle, Lucio! The bloom of thee; the round chin of thee; the golden dusky wings of thy hair! What ensures such youth in manhood? Innocence? A mother’s love? Art thou very innocent, Lucio?”

“Who can be wholly innocent, Master, with the stain of that original sin in him?”

“True. Yet, for all that, a good son, a pious son. Show me thine eyes again. Ah, the shy revealing! Art afraid it will out—the answer to the riddle?”

“No, Master.”

“Once more, then. There! Now keep them so.”

Presently he spoke again:

“Your poor mother, Lucio—she mends?”

“She mends a little, Messer.”

“All due to the reliquary, is it not? Tell me the true story.”

“The story, Messer!”

“Saints, what a gasp! Yes, the story, Lucio. I had heard a whisper of it—how a dream came to the bedridden woman, down by the Volta gate, promising her she should recover if she would make gift to the Sanctuary of the Holy Virgin at Saronno of that possession which, next to her son, she held in all the world most dear. You know what thing that was—a little gold and crystal reliquary, empty of all save her child’s and her husband’s hair; you know—or doth the story lie? It relates at least of how the woman called her son to her, and yielded to him that treasure from its hiding-place, and bade him by his love of her do with it what he would. He did not hesitate, the good son who owed his mother all in all, but straightway he went his pilgrimage, fifteen miles thither and fifteen back, through perils and much hunger, and left his reliquary at the shrine, and won his guerdon. Well won, I say. He owed her all, and what he could pay he paid. There ends the story—and she mends, you say?”

“Faith is the great physician, Messer.”

“Well, God be thanked for it. I think it is.”

He looked round again quickly, then wrought on, while a long silence ensued. Presently, with an exclamation, he threw down his brushes.

“The stain!” he said. “What folly! It confounds the issue. I shall not find my Christ!”

He dismissed his model, and returned to the ducal Palace. On his way he encountered a birdseller; a number of wee songsters imprisoned in a yoke of netted sieves hung over his shoulders. He paid the man for all, cut the strings, and released the pretty flock. A wide-eyed child, his moist lips parted in an eager smile, watched the quivering escape heavenwards.

“There stands my Christ,” thought the artist. “For the moment his small soul is free, free from the world, free from the shadow of the Fall, mounting with the happy little birds all mirrored in his eyes.”

From that day he set aside the divine problem, and confined his labours to the grosser figures of his group. He worked, forgetting his former model, and Lucio, the ideal of guileless manhood, passed into the mist of half-remembered things.

Messer Leonardo was a very great man. His genius was as multifarious as it was gigantic; but of its very nature it confessed a flaw. One vast conception in him pushed out another, so that the last was for ever claiming precedence over all before. His mind was a great hall thronged with uncompleted Titans. A scheme once realised, the way pointed out, he was impatient of its mere achievement. No supreme creator ever left so many immortal works unfinished—the varnishing and the sand-papering, so to speak, were matters for lesser souls.

Of these, perhaps, was the Prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the aged Padre Bandelli. He “kicked” over the intolerable tardiness of the artist; years rolled by—five years, ten years, and more—and still the fresco was not done. At length all was finished saving only two heads, those of the betrayer and the Betrayed, the opposite poles of darkness and glory; and there once more, and finally it seemed, the composition halted. Bandelli protested, grew wroth, complained at last to the Duke himself. Leonardo responded with a demand for models—the one wholly guiltless of original sin, the other—Judas. Of the latter he lived in hopes; if he could find him, he might help him to the former, as the deepest darkness of a well betrays the stars above; if he could not, he might use the Prior himself at a pinch. The Duke laughed, sided with his favourite, and the Prior withdrew discomfited. More years went by.

At length one day, as he was strolling in the streets with Duke Ludovico, his Magnificence hanging familiarly on his arm, Leonardo looked up and saw his Judas. He was one of two criminals, being carted for their gibbeting, who went by at the moment. The rogues jogged in a tumbril, their arms spliced back, their teeth grinning without merriment. A monk, holding up a small crucifix and gabbling mechanically as he ogled the passing petticoats, faced them; the executioner, brawny and impassive, sat before, chewing a fig; a ragged contadino with straw in his shoes, leading a horse as dusty and threadbare as an old overbeaten carpet, shambled at the head. Leonardo exclaimed “At last!” and adding excitedly “Release unto me Barabbas!” halted the procession with a gesture. “Give me this man,” he appealed to the Duke, “for my Judas. Eternal infamy shall be his in lieu of death.”

It was a trifling gift; Ludovico graciously, of his omnipotence, bestowed it. Leonardo begged permission to return to the Palace, and thence ascended to his atelier, that unclean hostage slinking at his heels. In the room he stood the creature up against a wall and studied him. Low cupidity, bestial self-indulgence, sin at its meanest and rankest were struggling there, out of the abject terror of death, to reassert themselves. Squalid, fulsome, with battered evil face and wild eyes shadowed under hair, the tint and almost the texture of ruined thatch, the thing fawned on its preserver, and was repelled, and fawned again, but at a distance, and stood whimpering. And thenceforward Leonardo set himself to unravel the riddle of this monstrous life.

He wrought for many days; and then gradually a strange awe began to assail him. There was something emerging from the darkness, a light, a vibration, which shook and confused his purpose. What was it? A Judas—with the glimmer of some lost angel reappearing, faint and indefinite, in the backward abysm of his eyes! That would never do—or would it—perhaps the best of all? He stayed his hand in amazement. The wonder grew, and with it some emotion, some reluctant sympathy with the debased thing—reciprocal, he somehow felt it to be.

And then one morning suddenly the creature spoke. It was in the refectory, whither he had been conveyed, that the Master might consider him in his actual relation to the composition—whence, still flowered, faint and mystic, the unsolved riddle of the Christ—and his voice came in a moment like a breaking water:

“He lied to Heaven and his mother, Messer; he had never hung the little gold and crystal reliquary at the shrine of the Beata Virgine in Saronno!”

Leonardo started violently and faced round. He stood gazing rigid at the speaker, like one stricken by some mortal memory.

“He was a hypocrite and a libertine,” cried the apparition, wildly striking its breast. “He had never left Milan. He had hung the reliquary about the neck of a little evil courtesan of the Ghetto, and with it had bought of her the hour’s bliss he had long and greedily coveted. But his mother, believing him, was cured through her faith; and, when she was restored, she herself made a pilgrimage of gratitude to the shrine, and she discovered what alone was to be found there—the killing truth. And thence she returned, the false life ebbing from her drop by drop, and, coming home, she read the confirmation in his eyes and she died of it. And you could not read it, Messer, as a mother came to; but the riddle spoiled your Christ—as it need not spoil your Judas. I am well portrayed at last—I am well.”

He ceased, dropping his head; and Leonardo found his voice in a cry:

“Thou art Lucio!”

And the other muttered:

“Yes, I am Lucio, who came to thee for Christ and remain’st as Judas.”

Then Leonardo said:

“He forgave them on the cross. As thou look’st towards Him whom in thine own image thou hast betrayed, so shalt thou find mercy, even thou. In Judas’ eyes I find my Christ at last.”