In pursuit of perfectibility

A detail from Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Virgin of the Rocks’

My experience going round the gripping Leonardo da Vinci show at London’s National Gallery (which finishes on February 5) was that of coming into the presence, and under the influence, of a mind – an extraordinary, restless, penetrating, philosophical mind – rather than an artist. I’ve seldom been to a show in which the physical objects on view seemed so immaterial or unphysical.

This is just one of the paradoxes that make Leonardo so fascinating, that give him his unique aura – established by Vasari – of which I had come to be suspicious. The exhibition’s full title is Leonardo, Painter at the Court of Milan, but you could question whether Leonardo was a painter at all, in any normal sense. There are only 15 “securely attributed” paintings in existence, of which just eight have made it to the dimly lit basement of the Sainsbury wing. Even among those, the authenticity of the unfinished “Musician” in the Vatican has been disputed. One of the most striking paintings, the tortured St Jerome, is less than half-finished. And as we all know, Leonardo’s crowning masterpiece as a painter, the mural of the Last Supper in Milan, started to deteriorate soon after it was finished and is now a crumbling ruin.

Clearly the reasons for this lie partly in Leonardo’s difficult character. You can see that this polymath, the original “renaissance man”, who arrived at the court of Milan primarily as a musician, would not have been happy to be confined in any conventional role. Constantly experimenting with different techniques, he was easily distracted. But it brings up a further paradox: that the man who has the reputation of the most perfect of artists left so many works in an imperfect state.

You cannot deny, however, that “perfection, of a kind, was what he was after”. Surely this is a perilous quest, in this imperfect world. The quotation comes from WH Auden’s poem “Epitaph on a Tyrant”, written in January 1939. Of course we cannot accuse Leonardo of the crimes of a Hitler but by trying to transform human clay into an inhuman perfection was he not performing an act of conceptual violence?

I would say that Leonardo’s quest for perfection, or for perfect human forms, leaves his work as an artist curiously lacking in certain respects. His paintings entirely lack the sensuous painterliness, the feeling of the physical enjoyment of the brushstroke, you find so superbly in Titian; they also lack the eroticism and emotional warmth of Correggio or Veronese; the wide humanity of Raphael; the poignancy of Antonello da Messina; the devotional intensity of Giovanni Bellini. You can walk down a street in Florence and be struck by a face that comes straight out of Verrocchio or Pinturicchio but you will never see a Leonardo face; his faces are too beautiful to be encountered on this earth.

Are they human at all? Has Leonardo committed a kind of blasphemy by converting humans into angels?

Over-idealised forms are not interesting: think of the angels and damsels that litter the works of 19th-century painter Edward Burne-Jones, and which all look exactly the same. Leonardo’s faces and forms don’t all look the same; you can see from his preparatory drawings and studies that they emerged from immense intellectual and even scientific effort.

The fact was that Leonardo was fundamentally interested in painting minds (or even souls), not faces. His interest in painting beautiful faces and forms was not an end in itself but part of a quest for spiritual perfection. What makes the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, “Lady with an Ermine”, so arresting is not her carnal beauty: this is not a girl you want to go to bed with, like Titian’s Danae or Velazquez’s “Rokeby Venus”, but a girl with whom you could have an endless conversation.

In this Leonardo is the heir, or the blood-brother, not of other painters but of a philosopher: Plato. Surely we want to believe the story that when Raphael came to paint Plato in his Vatican fresco “The School of Athens”, he gave him the features of the aged Leonardo.

Like Plato, Leonardo believed (as Irene Noel-Baker beautifully puts it in the introduction to her translation of the Phaedrus) that love can lead “the soul on towards knowledge through its desire for beauty”. Physical beauty matters immensely to both Plato and Leonardo because it draws the soul on. Love, or eros, also matters, “when it represents an acknowledgement of true relationship, true and intimate dialogue, lively creativity and a desire to reach for beauty and harmony”.

The quotation from Auden needs to be changed in the case of Plato and Leonardo. Perfectibility, not perfection, is what they are after. Both passionately believe that human beings are capable of being transformed by the soul’s quest for beauty and truth. Their inspiring and necessary message is that our powers and potentials are so much greater than we tend to believe, in this disillusioned world.

harry.eyres@ft.com

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