Leonardo da Vinci on beauty and ugliness: Carmen C. Bambach praises a ground-breaking exhibition of Leonardo's drawings from the Royal Collection

Apollo, March, 2004 by Carmen C. Bambach

Very few artists other than Leonardo appear to have felt a life-long need to articulate their ideals of beauty in drawings, along with seemingly endless variations on the theme of supine ugliness, and certainly none did so with comparable persistence or coherence of vision. As the great master's words intimate, 'beauty (bellezza) and ugliness (brutteza) appear each more powerful when seen in contrast, one with the other'. (1) In his conception of the 'ages of man', Leonardo would often juxtapose the ideally perfect beauty of youth with the grotesque deformity and decay of old age, because--as he inscribed below the sketch of an old hag--'a beautiful thing that is mortal passes and does not last'. (2) Between the late 1480s and the late 1490s, Leonardo's preoccupation with the human face (its proportions, expressions, and deterioration with age) resulted in especially penetrating physiognomic studies, and the sum of these drawings--which are notably heterogeneous in style and medium, for here one needs to think broadly about content, and include, for example, the pen and ink grotesque heads, as well as the chalk studies for the apostles in the Last Supper--appears to indicate that Leonardo had arrived at highly cogent, unified theories about gesture, some of which he probably covered in his lost treatise on painting and human motion. (3) In his role as a theorist of painting, Leonardo repeatedly stated that the two most formidable challenges facing the good painter were the portrayal of man and the intentions of the mind; in his lost Libro A of 1508-10, he had variously called the latter the 'passioni dell'anima', the 'accidenti mentali', and the 'moti mentali', and the very eclecticism of his vocabulary seems to indicate that he was both relying on different sources and returning to his own previous ideas, the earliest of which he may have formulated in 1490-92. (4) It is clear, therefore, from both his drawings and writings that the concern with the physical and psychological dimensions of gesture was a lifelong preoccupation.

A memorable and groundbreaking exploration of this aspect of Leonardo's work was provided in the recent exhibition, 'Leonardo da Vinci: The Divine and the Grotesqque', selected by Martin Clayton from the unparalleled holdings of the six hundred or so Leonardo drawings at the Royal Library, Windsor Castle. (5) As a scholarly contribution to the vast field of Leonardo studies, this exhibition was remarkably innovative in conception, and treated the material with extraordinary intellectual elegance. It displayed a number of drawings by Leonardo that have either not previously been exhibited, or very rarely so (for example, nos. 10, 11, 23, 49, 57, 67, 68-70, 75), and made the kinds of imaginative visual connections across themes that very much embody Leonardo's own method of drawing by analogy and permutation. The exhibition brought together seventy-six drawings (one, hors catalogue, RL 12576) that were arranged in eight sections designed to highlight the various dimensions of Leonardo's thought. In this regard, the visual experience of the display may have had a greater clarity of structure than the fine, accompanying scholarly catalogue. A monumental sheet in pen and ink of around 1478 (no. 1), portraying ideas for a nursing Madonna and Child with the infant St John the Baptist, along with numerous sketches and doodles of heads of men, women, and animals in profile, served as a centrepiece of the exhibition; it helped illustrate in germ form many of the recurrent themes in Leonardo's work over the next forty years of his career. An introductory section of thirteen drawings (nos. 2-14), entitled 'The divine body', cast a wide conceptual net over a great diversity of endeavours. (It is worth pointing out that 'divine' is not a term Leonardo himself used in describing physical beauty or bodily perfection.) Here represented were Leonardo's exploratory drawings of the body, whether human or equine, and these also included a variety of different drawing types (studies of anatomy, proportion, and of purely artistic intent). Although it perhaps wove together a few too many strands with an insufficient number of examples, this section on the 'divine body' provided, nevertheless, an entirely necessary springboard for the more integrated display of drawings that followed of Leonardo's ideal types of women and men, of bodily and facial expression (as was magnificently evident in the studies for the apostles in the Last Supper), of grotesque facial deformity, of portraits, and of the magical transformations from real to imagined creatures. A section on 'Fantasy and costume' (nos. 62-75), which included a number of Leonardo's designs for courtly spectacles, provided an arresting finale for this well-thought-out exhibition.

As the exhibition aptly demonstrated, for Leonardo, the human body, and especially the face, revealed an infinite capacity for expression. Possibly stimulated by his scientific method of comparative anatomy, which clarified for him the understanding of underlying structures (the regole or universal principles), he also drew potent pathognomic comparisons between man and beast (nos. 1, 22, 47, 49). (6) His drawings of mature male warrior types of leonine or dragon-like ferocity are a wonderful case in point. Within his studies of figural gesture and physiognomic types, however, it is the portrayals of the heads of beautiful youths and of grotesque old men and women that seemingly predominate. Their unrelenting recurrence prompted Kenneth Clark, A.E. Popham, and E.H. Gombrich to rely on psychoanalytic methods of interpretation (now often too readily dismissed), in reconstructing the deeper dimension of such imagery Leonardo's creative process. In many respects, this still remains one of the great enigmas of the artist's work. The grotesque heads ('visi mostruosi', to borrow Leonardo's actual words), which he drew in such obsessive profusion, also comprise the genre that made him famous in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the dissemination of countless drawn copies and reproductive prints, at a time when so much of his original work was inaccessible. Contrary to what is often assumed (as does Clayton on pp. 73-74 of the catalogue), there is considerable evidence to suggest that Florentine mid- to late quattrocento art, and especially prints, offered a stimulus for the young Leonardo's grotesque imagery. (7) The tendency in the literature has been to think of the artist's 'visi mostruosi' as a typical endeavour of his first Milanese period (1482/83-99), for if is true that such drawings survive most abundantly for these years in Leonardo's career, and that it was also such designs that his later Milanese pupils began to reproduce in great quantity. Yet this is to ignore, for example, a bawdy Florentine engraving of about 1465-80 of an old couple (rarely cited in the literature since A.M. Hind and E.H. Gombrich), from the group of 'Otto' prints, which represents an ugly man in profile at left facing a grotesque fleshy woman of heaving bosom at right, much as in some of Leonardo's pairings (Figs. 1, 2). Relying on a vocabulary that is indebted to Baccio Baldini, the brothers Pollaiuolo, and Maso Finiguerra, this anonymous Florentine print is completed by a framing wreath of music-making cupids and by a potentially lewd inscription above the couple, 'dammi conforto' ('give me comfort'), which might speak volumes in the case of Leonardo's many later drawings of such couples.