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New Zealand Tablet, 14 August 1919, Page 26

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♦ Leonardo Da Vinci In May the Italians forgot the war for a happyday in order to celebrate the fourth centenary of Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest—if not the first—of the great artists of Italy's golden age. Of da Vinci with truth Johnson's epitaph on Goldsmith might have been written, - Nihil (elegit quod item oriwvit. As a scientist, as a man of letters, as a poet, as a painter da Vinci was great. Chiefly, however, on his genius as a painter his immortal reputation rests secure and unassailable. Genius indeed was his, and of so elevated and aloof a kind that he passed through the world somehow as did Goethe later, with his head held too high to allow the mundane troubles and the petty turmoils that seethed around him to disturb his Olympian calm. What he did he did greatly. For the most part he was an enigma to his contemporaries, just as the expressions of his genius have become to posterity. For thirty odd years he lived in Florence, drinking in its loveliness and revelling in its culture. Twenty years he spent at Milan, and then another score sees his life ebbing away at the Chateau de Clou. He was centuries before his time. His mind like his art leaped ahead of his fellow students, and we find him grappling with problems of aesthetics that in our own day exercised Ruskin in England or Lotze in Germany. Men of science welcomed him to their laboratories and found shrewd help in his penetrating hints. Mathematics, astronomy, geology all claimed his interest, and his notes reveal a power of intuition that might be compared to Pascal's. The penumbra of the moon, the presence of sea-shells on mountaintops, the effects of light on moving waters were some of the problems which engaged this busy mind in those far-off years. ■ His Qualities V C From Pater we gather that the -peculiar notes of his best work were the power to reproduce an idea into

color, and imagery; a cloudy 'mysticism-:. refined to a subdued and graceful mystery; a certain seeking after bizarre effects in ■ his landscapes; a capriciousness . and a curiosity that left something enigmatic in his works; a constant desire for beauty; .] and a \ subtle, curious grace. All these notes are found in his masterpieces and give to ■ them - their ; charm and ;. mystery. You . find them in .. that marvellous Medusa in Florence at which men. gaze and gaze to-day as their fathers gazed before-them, puzzled and repelled, and attracted by that fearfully beautiful head, with its "fascination of i corruption." All the haunting charm is again found in the Last Supper, now all but lost to us through the fading of the oils on the plastered wall of the refectory. Above all, in La Gioconda, that disturbing, sphinx-like portrait which gold could hardly buy to-day, Leonardo's art at its highest and his genius in its full flower may be studied by any one who visits the Louvre and has eyes to seeas so many have not. Vasari tells that when its colors were fresh there was a touch of vermilion at the lips that has faded now, but on the whole the picture is admirably preserved and has suffered little from "decay's defacing finger.*" Like the Moses of Michelangelo, like the Madonna di San Sis to of Raphael, like Giotto's tower and Brunelleschi's dome. La Gioconda will remain for ever the monument acre perennivs of the long dead hands that painted her. Once already we quoted a few lines from Pater's splendid passage on this picture of Moiina Lisa or La Gioconda, as she is variously called. It will bear quoting again in commemoration of Leonardo's fourth centenary. Walter Pater on "La Gioconda" "The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come.' and the eyelids are a little, weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how they would be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed ! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle ages with its spiritual ambition and imaginative love. . ." And then follows the most wonderful piece of prose that Pater ever wrote "She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as St. Anne-, the mother of Mary ; and all this has been to her but as the sound' of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands." A Sonnet by the Artist on "Our Lady of the Rocks" We will conclude this souvenir with Rossetti's translation of Leonardo's sonnet for the picture called Our Lady of the Rocks Mother, is this the darkness of the end,. The Shadow of Death? and is that outer sea Infinite imminent Eternity? And does the death-pang by man's seed sustained In Time's each instant cause thy face to bend Its silent prayer upon the Son, while He , ,~ Blesses the dead with His -hand silently : To His long day which hours no more offend? .-

Mother of grace, that path is difficult,. j.-y.j-/ . • Keen. ; as ■ these rocks, : andi the bewildered - souls TAi Throng it like echoes, blindly shuddering - through. Thy ; name, O Lord, each spirit’s, voice extols, ' Amid the bitterness-of ~ things occult,: