From The Edinburgh Review. - bond of the Italian race; while, towards the close of the fifteenth century, the WHAT history is there of Christian spirit of local independence which had times which presents such endless ensured the prosperity of her small sources of thought to the philosopher, states was rapidly becoming extinguished. such glorious visions of art and beauty Small republics, however internally wise to the man of taste, such mournful won-and secure for a period, had never formed derment to the moralist, such insoluble a nation; and, as the stronger coveted enigmas to all, as the history of Italy and obtained dominion over the weaker towards the end of the fifteenth and dur- as Florence over Pisa - and they in ing the sixteenth centuries? Seen by their turn yielded to usurpers from withthe light of subsequent times, there is in or without, the conception of a comnothing so astonishing as the glory of mon patriotism, as of a common strength, her apogee but the completeness of her ceased even on this limited scale to exist. eclipse as the pride of her height but That a sturdy patriotism still survived in the humiliation of her fall as the splen- a few lofty minds who struggled and sufdour of one side of the picture but the fered in vain a line never extinct even darkness of its reverse. The lowness of in her darkest hours — is one of the most the level at which she lay-attractive touching features of this period of degraonly to friend and foe, to spoiler and ad-dation. But the immediate and most mirer, for the trophies of her past- mournful sign of the decay of "rich and receiving even in our own time the most royal Italy" was the fact that the majorcontemptuous appellation a country can ity of her children ceased not to be gay bear, that of "a mere geographical ex- and happy even in her bondage. Nothpression this was a stern and unmis-ing strikes us more than the enjoyment takable fact which endured for fully three of life and the activity of art and letters centuries. All inquiry, therefore, re- at a time and under conditions which solves itself into the question of the must have filled a loyal and thoughtful soundness of her immediately previous heart with the gravest forebodings. For prosperity; and no one can pursue the while the soil of Italy can produce, as it lives and careers of any of her grand and has never ceased to do, the noblest and gifted children within that epoch without most vigorous specimens of the human perceiving at every turn the deep hollow-plant, her sun has also fostered the most ness which underlay the lovely land at poisonous and ephemeral. Bondage, dethe very time when its surface was most pendence, and servility are as potent for brilliant. The reasons for such corrup- the development of evil as liberty for tion and collapse were doubtless owing that of good. If we can imagine the mainly to the virtual absence of the vital functions of a nation's health, and to the interruption of such as had supplied their place. For that consciousness of a common country which the word "nation "selves to the degrading conditions, and implies had never been in one sense the 1. Saggio delle Opere di Leonardo da Vinci, con ventiquattro Tavole fotolitografiche di Scritture e Disegni, tratti del Codice Atlantico. Milano: 1872. Edizione di 300 Exemplari. light of our English freedom suddenly quenched, no result would be sadder to behold than the number and the class of minds who would accommodate them find, as the Italians did, some congenial sunshine to live and flourish, to bask and buzz in. It is indeed but just to the Italian race to confess - what was evident to many even before their present revival, and will not be disputed now other European nation, once fallen so that any 3. Leonardo da Vinci and his Works; consisting of low, would have exhibited greater brutalA Life of Leonardo da Vinci, by Mrs. CHARLES W.ization of life and manners, though not HEATON; An Essay on his Scientific and Literary perhaps the same effeminacy and demorWorks, by CHARLES CHRISTOPHER BLACK, M.A.; and An Account of his most important Paintings. London: 1874. 2. Michel Ange, Léonard de Vinci, Raphael. Par CHARLES CLEMENT; avec une étude sur l'art en Italie, avant le XVIème Siècle. Paris: 1861. alization. There were, however, secondary rea The painter sons for the indifference with which, de courage chez les guerriers, peu de patowards the close of the fifteenth century, triotisme chez les citoyens." signs of approaching evil were regarded There was one great reality, however, - and reasons more immediately percepti- surviving all those by which Italy had led ble and traceable. These lay partially in the van before every other nation in Eu the nature of the letters then cultivated, rope a reality never more grand and as well as in the exclusive interest with splendid than at the period we are cor which they were pursued. The brilliant sidering-which has bequeathed monoepoch of the study of classic authors ments of national genius unequalled which ensued on the dispersion of an- since, and in virtue of which she remains cient manuscripts in Italy, consequent on a lawgiver to the present day. This realthe taking of Constantinople by the Turks ity was her art. In this form of national (1453); the ardour with which the various life Italy continued, even to the end of centres of Italy and her most learned the sixteenth century, to be a great men vied with each other in classic inter-country, and her artists true patriots, for pretation and research all this, further they endowed her with that which must promoted by the discovery of the art of ever excite the emulation and admiration printing, and hailed at the time by some of all really refined peoples. No careers thoughtful minds as an antidote to the more surely reflect the salient characterprevailing ambition, profligacy, and ava-istics and social standards of a race than rice, had its deeply injurious effect on those of the children of art. what we should now call the public wel- is himself an objet de luxe. He germi fare the remedy ultimately aggravating nates—a divinely-dropt seed - only the disease. Without the active principle where the soil has ripened into the req of national and political life such studies uisite richness to bear him. He is a were entrancing and benumbing, like the superfluity which thrives only where there paradise of the lotus-eaters. Men occu- is the demand, no matter what its nature pied with disputes and discussions, how-superstition, variety, or taste — for the ever polite and graceful, on the literature fruits of his pencil. He flourishes finally of a dead Past, were readily diverted from in courts and high places only where the questions of a living Present. Minds society has reached that culmination of a absorbed in the restoration of ancient real or seeming prosperity, when the letters, and in the fancied revival of a great and wealthy of the earth, sated Platonic philosophy, were least likely to with or secure of other pleasures, stretch miss the atmosphere of political liberty forth their hands to grasp those intelor of religious consistency. Palaces and lectual excitements to which genius alone gardens were used as places of debate on can minister. The painter, therefore, is, questions in which we now fail to see any in a certain sense, the sure thermometer practical utility. Accademie" were the of the atmosphere which he breathes; order of the day, and unproductive ped- but he lives, or can live, in an atmos antries were the consequence of such phere where higher things are stifled. Academies. A fictitious activity and real For his inspiration is not injured by license in topics worthless to a State took | causes which mortally affect the man of the place of all higher exercise of free-moral or patriotic aims. Certain condidom, and the literary erudition which raised more than one pontiff to the papal throne has hardly bequeathed a thought beneficial to the human race. "Beaucoup de beaux ouvrages, et peu de belles actions illustraient l'Italie; et tandis qu'on trouvait chez les érudits tant d'ardeur et de persévérance dans le travail, on trouvait peu de caractère chez les magistrats, peu | vol. v. p. 290. tions there are which minister to his vo cation; and these conditions, viz., a glorious climate, noble types in man and nature, a sensuous worship, and a luxurious society, no country ever possessed in greater perfection than the Italy of the cinquecento. Sismondi's Républiques Italiennes du Moyen Age, In all this there was the greater proof of the genius of the artist and of the triumph of art - too healthy in her instincts and certain in her processes to be affected by conditions, however unsympathetic, tyrannical, and even prohibitory they would now be pronounced. Our modern standard, therefore, of the claims of the craft to peculiar exemptions and privileges suffers great change when we track the course of Italian art from its rise to its culmination. First, hailed as a new wonder which the vulgar and From science, in the higher sense, the inaccurate and puerile, have sometimes Italian painter had no rivalry to fear. the value of a genuinely professional May it not be accepted as an axiom that criticism. the Church which utilizes art as an auxiliary to the extent employed by the papal hierarchy, will never tolerate the sterner sister? Such science as would help to destroy life, or animate an automaton, was readily welcomed, but he who ventured to assert that the earth revolved on her axis, and he who denounced the sale of indulgences, stood in the same condemned category at the court of Rome. It would, however, be a grave mistake to infer that Italian art in the person of her votaries received the same tribute of real respect and sympathy now paid to marvel-loving ran in crowds to see; then artists in our less gifted times—a tribute becoming perhaps both indiscriminate and excessive, paid rather to the intellectual rank with which the great Italian masters have endowed the idea of the painter's vocation than to the real value of the work. Partaking of the condition of a labourer in the service of the Church, the artist of the fifteenth century was, in that capacity, equally controlled and dictated to. High-flown conceptions of the deference paid to the painter, to his sensitive nature and capricious inspiration, are soon overturned if we examine the estimates and contracts between himself and the chapters of churches and superiors of convents, little differing in rigorous matter-of-fact stipulations from those we nowadays conclude with carpenter or mason. Nor was an appeal to taste so much as an item in the bargain, for the gratification of taste was neither the object of the Church nor the requirement of the faithful. Such "opinions of the press," Three great men in Italy stood highest too, as existed at the time were not cal-in the ranks of art at the highest time of culated to enlighten or encourage the her seeming greatness; closely connectman of acutely sensitive calibre. It ed in experience, widely separated in inwould be difficult to find writings more dividual character, each showing in vadull and pedantic and less cognizant of rious degrees the extraordinary gifts the real philosophy and true sphere of which, in some form, have never died art than those which were penned in out from the Italian race—all equally afpresence of the best glories of the cinque- fected by the manners and policy of the cento. No Italian work, indeed, has de- age; all "mighty men." These three scended to us of the slightest value to were Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angethe painter, as distinguished from the lo, and Raphael. To be a great artist mere historical student of art, excepting was by that time a passport both to emalways "Vasari's Lives," which, however ployment and to popularity. The world employed and incorporated as a regular handicraft in the service of the Church; next exalted or neglected, competed for or dismissed, petted or insulted, as the whim, vanity, superstition, or intrigue, full or empty exchequer, of pontiff or prince dictated; her own children, meanwhile, partaking of all the complexion of the period a race glorious and gifted, yet most of them what we now feel to be creatures of childish habits with the passions of men and the follies of children - fighting and quarrelling, maiming and murdering, destroying their own works from pique, and their neighbours' from jealousy, — art, for all that, is seen to hold on her course unfaltering; never making a false step, never undoing what she had once done; till who shall say what agencies could then have retarded her, and what would since have restored her; whence she comes, and why she goes? had then begun to seek them for them- bred, with an Italian's dignity, but a selves as well as for their art. Society courtier's mask; Raphael, young, beauhad reached that intellectual point when tiful, and unruffled; Michael Angelo's genius is not only patronized but lion- the mournfulest countenance we ized. No one of these three great men look upon. can was bound by convent rules or fettered We select for brief analysis the earlier by partnerships; each stood individual and foremost of the three, the man of and alone, though drawing numbers the "natura incontentabile," as termed round himself. The outline of their by his biographer Manzi," the first name characters, therefore, is lost in no com- of the fifteenth century," according to mon ground; and no thread of history is Hallam. Hitherto the life of Leonardo more trustworthy to follow than the lives da Vinci has inspired the sense of a suband fates of such men. Two of them,ject worn threadbare equally from lack of Leonardo and Michael Angelo, were be- material and from reiteration. What fore and beyond their age. the one in-light may be thrown upon the subject by tellectually, the other morally; while Ra- the researches of Messrs. Crowe and phael in both respects stood on a par Cavalcaselle is still uncertain. Meanwith it. Leonardo and Raphael were while there is a growing consciousness of men of the world, supple, courtier-like, the importance of all he thought as well swimming with the stream; Michael An-as did, and of the necessity for a more gelo was stern and upright, and always systematic study of his multiform rein conflict with it. Leonardo was the mains. In the present feeling of the greater genius; Michael Angelo the Italian people the vindication of Leonobler spirit; Raphael the happier man. nardo's many-sidedness, and (in the sense Of one so sympathetic and successful as of the world's age) precocity of intellectRaphael it is difficult to give a tellingual power, stands on the same level with outline. Misfortune did not try him, their interest in the approaching publisuccess did not spoil him, length of life cation of Michael Angelo's letters. On did not weary him; accordingly the occasion of the inauguration of the moncourse of the man and the painter pre-ument erected to him at Milan, and of sents that smoothness on which the mor- the exhibition of works of the Leonardalist can lay little hold. Leonardo's gifts esque school in 1872, the government were so incredibly numerous and varied of Italy published the fine work which as to hinder the development of his ca- heads this article, and of which only reer in any one of them; he was also three hundred copies were printed. It fastidious, procrastinating, and appar- has been edited by a commission, with ently unconscientious; and never was so Count Belgiogoso at the head, and conlofty a fame in art maintained by works tains expositions of the great master's so few, so ruined, and so uncertain as varied forms of art, science, and literathose he has left behind him. Michael An- ture, by competent hands; with photogelo was the impersonation of laborious- graphs, the size of the originals, from ness and conscientiousness, but his time sketches of various kinds, and especially and his genius were wasted by the au- from his magnificent hydraulic drawings. thority of ignorance and caprice; and it These are all selected from the enormous was only by the perseverance of an hon-volume called the "Codice Atlantico" est purpose, the energy of a great mind, and the opportunity of a long life that he accomplished the stupendous monuments that immortalize him. As to Raphael, the number of his creations as compared with the shortness of his career are such as lead us to infer that equal facility and perfection of production were never compatible before or since. Leonardo worked slowly; Michael Angelo furiously; of Raphael's mode of labour we can only be sure that it was a delight to him. In character of art Leonardo and Michael Angelo were both strictly new; Raphael not so new as so perfect. Final- So called from the size of the paper on which the ly, their portraits are the types of the MSS. and drawings are mounted-carta atlantica— men. Leonardo, handsome and high-corresponding with our imperial folio. preserved in the Ambrogian Library. For the present the Italian government have made no demand for the restitution of twelve volumes of Leonardo's MSS. detained by the French, or rather neglected to be claimed by the Austrians, in 1815, and still in the library of the Institut at Paris; but for a thorough investigation of Leonardo's labours these are indispensable; and the time may be anticipated when their reinstatement in the Ambrogian Library will do honour to the more enlightened sentiments of the French government. An English work also has been recently compiled by Mrs. Heaton, who has collated with much pains all that has hitherto been published on the life and works of the great master; including, it must be owned, anecdotes and conclusions long disproved, and lacking also the discriminating criticism requisite in such an undertaking. - greater area of intellectual ground than it does now. At all events, the father showed his discrimination by apprenticing the young lad to the distinguished Florentine artist, Andrea Cione, called Verocchio. father of the man. To his exceptional mental gifts were further added a splendid person, activity and ardour in every manly sport the varied accomplishments of a dancer, a musician, an improvisatore, and a poet with a spirit which delighted in mastering the wildest horse, and a strength that could bend the animal's shoe. It may be questioned whether the Leonardo da Vinci came into the world love of natural science did not predomclose upon the time when Fra Angelico inate in the restless young brain — left it. The art that one took up is curi- whether a chemist's laboratory, or an enous to compare with that the other laid gineer's office, would not nowadays have down; yet, in one sense, the younger received him. But the world was then in painter was the natural heir to the elder; the infancy of science; it was in the for Fra Angelico was the first to develop maturity of art. Science was then a susthat quality in art - expression-which picious occupation; art, a profitable one; Leonardo carried to its utmost perfec- and the art of that time covered a far tion. Leonardo was illegitimate and lefthanded, but neither proved a bar to his progress, either sinister or otherwise. He was born in 1452, at Vinci, in the Val d'Arno, when his father, Piero da Vinci, was twenty-five years of age; who in the same year married the first of his four wives, not one of whom was the mother of Leonardo, a certain Caterina, afterwards married to Accattabriga di Piero della Vacca, also of Vinci. Piero da Vinci had no children by his first two wives, but a numerous family-eight sons and three daughters-by his third and fourth wives, the eldest of whom, a daughter, was not born till 1476. When, therefore, Mrs. Heaton, like most of her forerunners on this topic, dwells on the fact of Leonardo's being educated in his father's family on a level point of affection and advantages with the legitimate offspring, she overlooks the chronology she has herself supplied, which shows us that Leonardo was well flown from the parent nest by the time the others began to occupy it, being twenty-seven years of age before his eldest half-brother, Giuliano - born 1479 - appeared on the scene. It is not surprising, therefore, that so long an only child in his father's house, and illegitimacy, as is well known, then no brand, he should have received that nurture and education which his abilities warranted. For the youthful promise of such genius could admit of no mistake. The inquiring mind which A man of this order was not likely to stamps the future man of science the fors wear the art of painting because a observing eye which heralds proficiency young pupil promised to excel him. in art the mathematical and logical Vasari's story to this effect has also that head, indispensable for the natural philosopher; in all these unlike the poetic, dreamy temperament which often lies dormant, and apparently dull, in early years the boy we may be sure was It has been usual to depreciate the merit of this master, in order, unnecessarily, to exalt that of his scholar. But the familiar appellation of " Verocchio," or the true eye, implies that quality for which Leonardo became most famed, and which it is fair to believe the teacher contributed to form. In other respects, too, Verocchio occupies that stage which led upwards to Leonardo. He was not only sculptor, goldsmith, carver, and painter, but also a student of perspective and a musician. Such pictures as he may have left are merged doubtless in the common character of the school, while his drawings are difficult to distinguish from those of Leonardo himself. In addition to these acquirements his nature was gracious and noble. For no tribute bears less the stamp of the mere flattery of the age, than that paid to him by Giovanni Santi, father of Raphael, in his “Cronaca." Il chiaro fonte stamp of puerile gossip which throws a doubt on many of his statements, and distinguishes those which have at present been proved to be untrue. Were it not that the figure of the angel in the "Bap |