The Apocalypse on a Postcard

By ROBERT HUGHES

At New York's Metropolitan Museum, the drawings of Leonardo

Who were the three greatest draftsmen in the history of Western art? There would be room for argument at the lower end of the ranking (Duerer? Raphael? Ingres?). But of the first two there can be little doubt. One was Michelangelo; the other was Leonardo da Vinci. The bastard son of a Florentine notary, Leonardo was born in 1452 and died in 1519. Almost from the moment that he emerged from Verrocchio's workshop in the 1470s and began his long, peripatetic and disappointed life among the courts of Rome, Milan, France and his home town, Florence, his graphic power was a source of utter astonishment to his contemporaries. When commentators applied the adjective divino to him (as they regularly did, in a conventional way, from the beginning of the 16th century onward), they implied that his talent was godlike in a nearly literal sense: just as the creator of the physical world knows all the secrets of its structure, so Leonardo's insatiable curiosity and apparently tireless power of scrutiny and notation had raised his art to an epic level of knowledge.

It still seems epic to us. There can never be another Leonardo, because no man today can even hope to encompass as many of the available facts about the natural world and its contents within the frame of 20th century knowledge as Leonardo gathered within the frame of his own time. Such a man, today, would necessarily be the victim of specialization. But Leonardo knew more than anyone else in the late 15th century about statics, dynamics, hydraulics, geology, paleontology, optics, aerodynamics and anatomy. In the realms of craftsmanship, from the construction of domes and earthworks to the casting of cannon to batter them down, he seems to have known at least as much as any guild master. Nobody else in his time or culture had such a range of interests. Nor did anybody else share his depth of pessimism; for Leonardo, in his old age, was not Edison but King Lear, obsessed to the point of anguish by human insignificance and apocalyptic doom.

The instrument for expressing all this was his drawing. The existing corpus of Leonardo's drawings and notes is no more than a fragment of his life's work, now mutilated and dispersed; still, it runs to thousands of pages, some 600 of which are in the collection of the English royal family at Windsor Castle. In aesthetic terms the Windsor drawings are of incomparable interest, not least because they include so many of Leonardo's most developed studies of inanimate nature-plants, landscapes, the effects of weather and light. A group of 50 of these nature studies (including his "deluge" drawings) is now on view at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, after having been shown during the winter at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, Calif. To these, the Met has added a group of Leonardo drawings and some related prints from its own collection. The show is curated by the leading active expert in Leonardo studies, Carlo Pedretti, with a catalogue preface by his predecessor in that role, Kenneth Clark. The result is a triumph of connoisseurship and presentation, as well as a demonstration of the real meaning of the verb "to draw."

What mesmerizes one, at first, is the technique. Most of the sheets are very small, and the detail in some of them is carried out at an almost microscopic level--a difficult enough feat with "hard" tools like pen or silverpoint, but an impossible one (or so one would suppose) with red crayon. One of the minor technical mysteries surrounding Leonardo's work was how he made his chalk hard enough to hold a needle point when sharpened. The steadiness of his hand was almost inhuman--helped, no doubt, by the diet of fruit and water he was always recommending to others, and by his justified refusal to have anything to do with Florentine doctors. Until well into his 60s, he was producing postage-stamp drawings, such as his studies of the Adda River in Lombardy, whose intensity of detail can hardly be appreciated by the naked eye.

This power of detailed synthesis was not the end of drawing, however, only the means. Leonardo could bring a steely exactitude and transparent freshness of observation to a botanical drawing, like the star-of-Bethlehem plant that he drew as a study for his lost painting of Leda and the swan. Yet the consciously serpentine wreathing of its leaves proclaims the image to be formed as much by style as by the impulse to "objective" description. The two work perfectly together. To see why, one may look at the most famous of his water studies, the image of water gushing from a pipe into a cistern. There seems to be no doubt, as Kenneth Clark pointed out a generation ago, that Leonardo's eye was preternaturally fast; he could grasp and isolate fractions of movement in time with a precision that would only be confirmed, more than four centuries later, by strobe photography. So with his drawing: the reflux of foam, the chrysanthemum-like poppling of the back eddies on the surface, the strings and rings of bubbles are seen with astounding acuity, as is the rendering of different levels of water motion in the transparent depth of the cistern.

The motion of water was Leonardo's key image of natural energy: braiding, coiling, spiraling, impartially taking form as hair, or leaves, or even wind. This apprehension of energy acted upon his drawings almost irrespective of their mood. It is present, for instance, in the exquisite black chalk study of the "pointing lady" standing by a stream, with her veil-like gathering and wreathing of drapery all' antica: a Leonardesque muse if ever there was one, pointing with a mysterious smile of affirmation toward something we cannot see. But its tragic form is in his visions of universal disaster.

The most worked-out emblem of Leonardo's pessimism occurs toward the end of his life, in the 1510s, with the deluge drawings. In them, the spiral that was his sign for life becomes the symbol, and instrument, of ultimate destruction. Perhaps the germ of these drawings lay in his witnessing, as Clark has suggested, some great flood resembling the one that hit Florence in 1966. In those rhythmical, abstract spirals, like vast shavings from a plane, that emanate from the tumbling mountain, the exploding lake and the destroying clouds, Leonardo found his sign for the dissolution of all matter: infinite energy, seen with detachment. These were his final answer to the Renaissance ideal of man as the measure of all things, and to the comforting delusion that human beings occupy the center of the universe. Michelangelo took a whole fresco to describe the end of the world--one kind of achievement. Leonardo managed to put it, so to speak, on the back of a postcard, which may be one reason why we still want to claim him, despite our ignorance of him and his vast cultural distance from us, as a modern artist.

--By Robert Hughes

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