The "Mona Lisa" is well enough, but another
hand might have executed the painting of it. It owes its popular fame to
the smile about which it is so easy to write finely; but in the drawings
we see the experiencing passion of Leonardo himself, we see him
feeling, as in the notebooks we see him thinking. There is the eagerness
of discovery at which so often he stopped short, turning away from a
task to further discovery, living always in the moment, taking no
thought either for the morrow or for yesterday, unable to attend to any
business, even the business of the artist, seeing life not as a struggle
or a duty, but as an adventure of all the senses and all the faculties.
He is, even with his pencil, the greatest talker in the world, but
without egotism, talking always of what he sees, satisfying himself not
with the common appetites and passions of men, but with his one supreme
passion for reality. If Michelangelo thought him a dilettante, there
must have been in his taunt some envy of Leonardo's freedom.
Yet once at least Leonardo did achieve, and something we should never
have expected from his drawings. "The Last Supper" is but a shadow on
the wall, yet still we can see its greatness, which is the greatness of
pure design, of Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesa. Goethe and
others have found all kinds of psychological subtleties in it, meanings
in every gesture; but what we see now is only space, grandeur, a supreme
moment expressed in the relation of all the forms.
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