In the northern countries, clothes, being more necessary, assume a greater importance in pictures also. They are a very prominent feature in this picture of “The Adoration of the Magi.” We detect at a glance Dürer’s fondness for depicting stuffs, embroidery, and objects of curious and beautiful workmanship.
In the first place, no one has excelled him in delineating “textures.” You may see in this picture with what truth the different surfaces of wood, stone, hair, fur, feather, metal-work, embroidery, and so on, are represented, In this instance, it is to contrast the splendor of the visitors from the East with the lowliness of the Mother and Child, and with the meanness and ruin of their surroundings; also, to compare the gentle dignity of the Mother, the innocent sweetness of the Babe, and the profound reverence of the Wise Men. When we study it we discover that one reason why it impresses us so strongly is the skill with which the artist has represented all these things.
Here is the point at which the genius of Dürer, and that of Leonardo, similar in many respects, branch out like a Y into separate directions. It is not the outward appearance of objects, but their inward meaning, that most interested Leonardo, A glance at his picture “The Virgin of the Rocks” is sufficient to make us feel that the artist is not trying to impress us with the actual appearance of things; the outlines of his figures are not emphasized as in Dürer’s picture: the cavern curiously formed of a strange rock, and the little peep beyond of a rocky landscape and a winding stream, the group of figures in the foreground by the side of a pool of water,—all are seen as through a veil of shadowy mist. Leonardo loved to peer into the mysteries and secrets of nature and life. He was at once an artist and a man of science; turning aside, for a time, from painting to build canals, contrive engines of war, to make mechanical birds which flew, and animals that walked. He foresaw the possibilities of steam and of balloons, and several important discoveries of later scientists. Mathematician, chemist, machinist, and physiologist, geologist, geographer, and astronomer, he was also a supreme artist. And always it was the truth—just beyond the common experience of man, hidden in nature, or dimly discerned in the mind of man—that he strove to reach. Partly he grasped it, partly it escaped him; much of his life was spent in restless striving after the unattainable; so to him life presented itself as a mixture of certainty and uncertainty, of truth that is clearly seen and truth that is only felt. And in his pictures we find, first, extreme delicacy in the study and representation of faces and forms, and then a veiling of all in a gossamer web of light and shade. He did not invent the principles of light and shade in painting, but he was the first to cause light and shade to have a poetical effect. Others, as I explained last month, had secured the modeling of form, by the contrast of light upon the raised parts, with shadow on those farther from the eye; but Leonardo was the first to notice that, in nature, this contrast is not a violent one, but made up of most delicate gradations, so that the light slides into the dark and the dark creeps into the light, and even the darkest part is not opaque, but an almost transparent shadow.
How exquisite Leonardo’s skill was may be noted in this picture; for example, in the modeling of the bodies of the two infants, so soft as well as firm, and in the lovely mystery of the Virgin’s and angels’ faces, with their broad, high foreheads, dreamy eyes beneath drooping lids. and a smile, very sweet and a little sad. For, as he searched nature for her mysteries, so he scanned the face of woman to discover the inward beauty that was mirrored in the outward.
So, while he and Dürer were alike in many ways, in their eager study of nature and in the study of their art, each had a different ideal. The one is full of the meaning of actual things the other, of the mystery that lies behind them. Dürer is vigorous, direct, and powerfully interesting: Da Vinci is sensitive, strangely winning, but yet baffling and magical: and the character of each painter is reflected in his pictures.
II.
By the beginning of the sixteenth century the great Italian artists Leonardo da Vinci, Michel-
