Then, to comfort my solitude, I thought of giving corporeal form to thatdæmonin whom, according to my first master’s teaching, I believed as the infallible pledge which was to lead me to achieve the integrity of my moral being. I thought of committing to a noble, masterful mouth, red with the same blood as mine, the duty of repeating to me, “Oh thou, be what thou oughtest to be.”
Then, to comfort my solitude, I thought of giving corporeal form to thatdæmonin whom, according to my first master’s teaching, I believed as the infallible pledge which was to lead me to achieve the integrity of my moral being. I thought of committing to a noble, masterful mouth, red with the same blood as mine, the duty of repeating to me, “Oh thou, be what thou oughtest to be.”
Among the figures of my ancestors one above all others is most dear to me, and sacred as a votive image. He is the noblest and the most brilliant flower of my race, represented by the brush of a divine artist. It is the portrait of Alessandro Cantelmo, Count of Volturara, painted by Da Vinci between the years 1493 and 1494, at Milan, where Alessandro, attracted by the unheard-of magnificenceof that Sforza who wished to turn the Lombard city into aNew Athens, had taken up his abode with a company of men-at-arms.
There is nothing in the world that I prize so much, nor was treasure ever guarded with more passionate jealousy. I am never weary of thanking fortune for having caused such a noble figure to brighten my life, and for having granted me the incomparable luxury of such a secret. “If thou possess a beautiful object, remember that every glance cast on it by another is a usurpation of thy possession. The joy of possession is diminished when it is divided, therefore do thou refuse to share it. They say that some one declined to enter a public museum lest his glance should be mingled with that of strangers. Now, if thou do indeed possess a beautiful object, enclose it within seven doors, and cover it with seven veils.” And a veil hangs over the magnetic face; but the dream in it is so profound, the fire in it is so powerful, that at times the woven stuff trembles with the vehemence of the breathing.
And so I gave mydæmonthe form of this familiar genius, and in my solitude I felt him alive with a life far more intense than my own. Had I not before me by means of the lasting miracle of one of the world’s greatest revealers—had I not before me an heroic spirit, sprung from my own stock, and constituted of all the distinctive characteristics of that lineage which I was so eagerly striving to manifest in myself, and which in him appeared in such fierce relief as to be almost terrible?
There he is still before me, always the same, yet always new! Such a body is not the prison of the soul, but its faithful semblance. All the lines of the beardless face are as precise and firm as those of a deeply-chiselled bronze; the dark pallor of the skin conceals tough muscles, wont in moments of anger and desire to stand out clearly with a fierce tremor; the straight, rigid nose, the bony, narrow chin, the curved but energetically-locked lips express the boldness of the will; and his glance is like the flash of a beautiful sword coming from beneath the shadow of thick and heavy hair, violet-black in hue like the bunches of grapes on a branch in the burning sun. He stands immovable, visible from the knees upwards; but the imagination pictures at once how the strong, flexible legs will start when the enemy appears, giving a formidable impetus to the beautiful frame. “Cave, adsum”—well does the old device apply to him. He is dressed in very light armour, evidently inlaid by a most accomplished workman, and his hands are bare; pale, sensitive hands, yet with something tyrannical, almost homicidal, about their clear outlines: the left hand is resting on the Gorgon’s head on his sword-hilt, the right on the corner of a table covered with dark velvet, of which a fold is visible. Lying on the table beside the gauntlets and helmet are a statuette of Pallas and a pomegranate, whose pointed leaf and brilliant flower are growing on the same stalk as the fruit. Through the opening of a window behind his head is seen a bare landscape ending in a group of hills, over which rises a peak,standing solitary as a proud thought; and on a scroll beneath is this verse—
“Frons viridis ramo antiquo et flos igneus uno tempore (prodigium) fructus et uber inest.”
“Frons viridis ramo antiquo et flos igneus uno tempore (prodigium) fructus et uber inest.”
Where and by what chance did Alessandro first meet with the Florentine master, who was at that time attaining the supreme splendour of his manhood? Perhaps at one of Ludovico’s feasts, full of the marvels created by the occult arts of the Magician? Or perhaps rather at the palace of Cecilia Gallerani, where military men discussed the science of war, musicians sang, architects and painters drew, philosophers argued about natural science, and poets recited compositions of their own and of others “in the presence of this heroine,” as Bandello relates. It is here that I like to imagine their first meeting, about the time when the favourite of the Moor was already beginning to love Alessandro secretly.
What a fire of audacious intelligence and of masterful will must have been apparent in the youth, for Leonardo to be so taken with him from that very day! Perhaps Alessandro discussed with him, apart from the others, “the methods of destroying any rock or fortress not founded on stone,” and grew eager to know the formidable secrets of this fascinating creator of Madonnas, who surpassed all masters and makers of instruments of war in the novelty of his ideas. Perhaps in the course of the argument Leonardo may have uttered one of those deep sayingsof his about the art of life; and looking into the eyes of the youth on whom silence had fallen, recognised in him a spirit determined to take everything that can be got out of life, an ambitious man disposed, instead of following his fate blindly, to attain the mastery for himself with the help of that science which multiplies the energies of him who possesses it and concentrates them on the attainment of his aim. And perhaps the man who was a few years later to become Cæsar Borgia’s military architect, who was invoking and waiting for some magnanimous prince to offer him unlimited means of carrying out his innumerable designs, may have perceived in this curly-headed patrician the future founder of a royal dynasty, and loved him and placed his proudest hopes in him.
I like to think that a brief entry in the commentaries of Da Vinci (who was then busy with studies for the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza) refers to the evening of this first meeting: “The penultimate day of April 1492. Messer Alessandro Cantelmo’s fine jennet: has a good neck and a very beautiful head.”
After leaving Cecilia’s palace together, they both paused for awhile in the street, still arguing; and when Leonardo noticed the jennet, he went up to look at it. As he stroked the beautiful neck, some involuntary expression escaped him regarding the terrible labour his insatiable spirit underwent in researches for the monument which the Moor desired to erect in honour of the fame of his father, the conquerorof the duchy and the vanquisher of Genoa. With a wide sweep the creative hand of the artist traced the outline of the Colossus in the air, making it visible to the youth’s inner vision. The day was sinking; the hour of spring twilight was trembling on the pinnacles of the glorious city; a company of musicians passed by singing; and the horse neighed with impatience. Then the soul of Alessandro swelled with an heroic sentiment which made him seem like a phantom of the great captain. “Ah, to set out on my conquests!” he thought, as he vaulted into the saddle. And then seeing that in reality he was only setting out on some common affair of daily life, he said suddenly, with a bitter impulse: “Seemeth it to you, Master Leonardo, that life can be of any worth to a man of my station?” And Leonardo, who did not marvel at these unexpected words: “It is everything that the eagle should take his first flight.” And perhaps the beardless horseman riding away among his men-at-arms may have seemed to him destined to be a king, “like him who in the bee-hive is born leader of the bees.”
The following morning a servant brought the jennet to the sculptor as a gift, with compliments from his master.
Thus do I imagine the beginning of their mutual liberality. The master rewarded his disciple with the true riches, since “that cannot be called riches which it is possible to lose.” Like Socrates, he preferred to have for his disciples those who had beautiful hair and were richly clothed. LikeSocrates, he excelled in the art of elevating the human soul to its supreme degree of vigour. Certainly Alessandro was for a time the chosen one in thatAcademia Leonardo Vincii, where a noble spiritual lineage was developed little by little under teaching which drew its warmth from the central truth as from a sun which cannot be darkened. “Nothing can be loved or hated, unless first there be knowledge of that thing. The love of anything is child to the knowledge of it. The more certain the knowledge, the more fervent the love.”
Here and there in Leonardo’s interrupted memoirs one comes across signs of the passionate curiosity with which the indefatigable experimentalist used to watch over the precious soul of his young friend. He had no secrets from him, for he desired to contribute by all the means in his power towards increasing the accumulated forces of his soul so as to render its future action in a wider field more efficacious. He noted down for remembrance: “Speak to Volturara about a certain way of shooting a dart.” And again: “Show Volturara ways of raising and letting down bridges, ways of burning and destroying those of the enemy, and the ways of placing mortar pieces by day and by night.” Or: “Messer Alessandro wishes to give me Valturio’sDe re militari, and theDécades, and Lucretius’Delle cose naturali.”
He used to be struck by the terse, proud sayingsof the young man, and noted down some of them: “Messer Alessandro says one must grasp fortune firmly from the front, since behind she is bald.” And again: “As I was working at the book on dividing rivers into numerous branches, and making them fordable, Volturara said boldly: Truly, Cyrus son of Cambyses understood all that when he chastised a river in that very way for carrying away a white horse of his.”
One day—so I imagine—they had both been invited to the magnificent house of Cecilia Gallerani; and Leonardo had transported the souls of all present by his performance on a new lyre of his own manufacture, made almost entirely of silver, in the shape of a horse’s skull. During the pause which followed the applause, the second Sappho ordered a beautiful little casket, richly inlaid with enamel and gems, the Duke’s gift, to be brought to her; and she showed it to those present, and asked them what object was, in their opinion, sufficiently precious to deserve to be kept in it. Every one expressed a different opinion. “And you, Messer Alessandro?” asked Madonna Cecilia, with a soft glance. And he replied audaciously: “Alexander of old chose the most precious casket among all the treasures of Darius, that which was richer than aught that eyes had ever beheld, as a shrine for Homer’sIliad.”
Da Vinci immediately noted down this answer in his memoirs, and added: “One can see that he feeds on the marrow and nerves of lions.”
Another day they had both been invited by thesame hostess to her garden; and Alessandro, after an argument with some of those “famous spirits,” drew apart, to follow out some new thought which the heat of the discussion had generated in that pregnant intellect. The beautiful Bergamese Countess called him several times, but it was long ere he turned round, for it was long ere he heard the call. Met by a gracious reproof, or perhaps a stinging remark, he answered, smiling: “He who is fixed to a star does not look round.”
In the evening Da Vinci noted down this answer also in his memoirs, and to it added his prophecy: “Soon he will take his first flight, fill the universe with wonder, fill all writings with his renown, and confer eternal glory on the place of his birth.”
Perhaps it was that very evening, as he meditated on the intensity and versatility of that youthful temperament, that his mind, ever inclined to the mysterious significations of emblems and allegories, hit upon that beautiful symbol of the pomegranate, including and bearing upon one stalk the fruit, the pointed leaf, and the flaming flower.
But on the 9th of July in the year 1495, three days after the battle of Fornovo, he noted down: “Volturara died on the field, as was meet for one like him. Never did blind steel cut off a brighter hope for the world.”
Thus lived and died the young hero in whom the purest essence of my warlike race had seemed to be concentrated. Thus fully was he revealed to me in the faithful likeness handed down to his distant heir by an artist who might be called Prometheus.
“O thou,” he seemed to say to me, as with his magnetic glance he took possession of my soul, “be what thou oughtest to be.”
“For thy sake,” I used to say to him, “for thy sake I will be what I ought to be; because I love thee, O brilliant flower of my race; because I desire to place all my pride in obeying thy law, O master. Thou didst bear within thyself strength sufficient to subjugate the earth, but thy royal destiny was not to be fulfilled in the age wherein thou didst first appear. In that age thou wast but the herald and forerunner of thyself, for thou wast destined to reappear higher up thy ancient stem in the maturity of future ages, on the threshold of a world not explored by the warriors, but promised by the wise men: to reappear as the messenger, the interpreter, and the lord of a new life. Therefore didst thou suddenly disappear like a demi-god by the banks of a swollen river, amid the roar of battle and storm, just as the sun was entering the sign of the Lion. Death did not cut off thy great promise, but fate willed to alter its marvellous fulfilment. Thy virtue, which could not then be manifested to the earth by triumphant actions, must necessarily revive some day in thy still surviving lineage. And may it be to-morrow! May thy equal be begotten by me! I invoke and await and prepare the renewal of thy genius with unfailing faith, the while adoring thy living image, O conqueror and sage, thou who didst lay the blade of thy beautiful naked sword as a mark in the books of wisdom.”
Thus I used to address him. And under hisglance and inspired by him, not only were my actual energies multiplied, but my task lay clear before me in definite outlines. “Thou, therefore, shalt labour to carry out thy own destiny and that of thy race. Thou shalt have before thy eyes at the same time the premeditated plan of thy existence and the vision of an existence superior to thine own. Thou shalt live in the idea that each life being the sumtotal of past lives is the condition of future lives. Thou shalt not, therefore, look upon thyself only as the beginning, aim, and end of thy own destiny, but thou shalt feel the whole value and the whole weight of the inheritance received from thy ancestors, which thou must transmit to thy descendant countersigned with the stamp of thy most vigorous characteristics. Let the supreme conception of thy dignity be founded on the certainty, so sure in thee, that thou art the preserving link of a multifold energy which to-morrow, or after the lapse of a century, or at some indefinite time, may reassert itself in a sublime manifestation. But hope that it may be to-morrow! Triple, therefore, is thy task, for thou dost possess the gift of poetry, and must study to acquire the science of words. Triple is thy task:—by direct methods to conduct thy being to attain the perfect integrity of the Latin type; to concentrate the purest essence of thy spirit, and to reproduce in a single and supreme work of art thy deepest vision of the universe; to preserve the ideal riches of thy race and thine own individual conquests in a son, who, under paternal instruction, shall recogniseand co-ordinate them in himself, and shall thus feel worthy of aspiring to the realisation of ever higher possibilities.”
Then, with the tables of my laws thus clearly set before me, there came over me not only the sadness of doubt, but an anxiety akin to fear—a new and horrible anxiety. “If some blind, unforeseen violence from exterior forces were to shake, or deform, or crush my work! If I should have to bend and submit to some brutal injury of chance. If one of those destructive gusts which burst suddenly out of the darkness should cause the fall of my edifice before its completion.” This fear came over me during a strange hour of agitation and depression, and I felt my faith failing me. But soon after I felt ashamed when my monitor said to me: “Judging from the quality of thy thoughts, thou seemest to me like one contaminated by the crowd, or in the power of a woman. See, even passing through the crowd which was gazing at thee has lessened thee in thine own eyes. Seest thou not that those men who frequent it become unfruitful as mules? The gaze of the crowd is worse than a splash of mud; the breath of it is poisonous. Go afar off while the sewer discharges itself. Go afar off and ponder on that which thou hast gathered up. Thy hour will come. What fearest thou? Of what worth would be all this discipline, did it not make thee stronger than circumstances?Even by this it is sometimes possible to create by force of will. Therefore go afar off while the sewer discharges itself. Delay not; let not thyself be contaminated by the crowd, or fall into the power of a woman. It is true thou wilt have to form an alliance in order to accomplish one part of the task thou hast assigned to thyself. But better is it for thee to wait and remain alone; better even to slay thy hope than to submit body and spirit to unworthy fetters. If the thing loved is contemptible, the lover is contemptible. Thou must never forget this saying of thy Leonardo, that, like Castruccio, thou mayest always be able proudly to reply: 'I have chosen her; she did not choose me.’”
Justly did this admonition come to me at that time. And without delay I made ready to depart from the tainted city.
It was a time when the active zeal of destroyers and builders was raging feverishly over the soil of Rome. With the clouds of dust a species of madness for lucre seemed to spread like a poisonous whirlwind, taking hold not only of the men of the labouring classes, the familiar spirits of lime and bricks, but also of the proudest heirs of papal families, who till then had looked scornfully at all intruders from the windows of travertine palaces, which stood obdurately firm under the crust of ages. One by one these magnificent families—founded, carried on, strengthened by nepotism and civil wars—sank lower, slid down into the new mire, went under and disappeared. Famous fortunes accumulated by centuries of successfulrapine and Mæcenatic luxury were exposed to the risks of the Stock Exchange.
The laurels and roses of the Villa Sciarra, whose praises had been sung by the nightingales for such a long succession of nights, were being cut down to the ground, or survived in a humble position inside the gates of little gardens surrounding new villas built for grocers. The gigantic Ludovisi cypresses, those of the Aurora, the very same which had once spread the solemnity of their ancient mystery over the Olympian head of Goethe, lay on the ground (I see them always in imagination as my eyes saw them one November afternoon) side by side in a row, with the smoke from their naked roots rising up to the pale heaven above, with their black roots all laid bare, and seeming still to hold prisoner within their vast intricacies the phantom of omnipotent life. And those lordly meadows all round, where only one spring ago violets more numerous than the blades of grass were springing up for the last time, were now ghastly with white lime-pits, red heaps of bricks, the creaking of cart-wheels loaded with stones; while the shouts of the master builders alternated with the hoarse cries of the carters, and the brutal work which was to occupy places so long sacred to Beauty and Visions went on rapidly.
It seemed as though a blast of barbarism were blowing over Rome, and threatening to tear away that radiant crown of patrician villas, incomparable in the world of memories and poetry. The menace of the barbarians hung over the very box-trees of theVilla Albani, though they had seemed as immortal as the Caryatids and the solitude.
The contagion was spreading rapidly everywhere. In the midst of the incessant current of business, of the ferocious fury of appetites and passions, of the disordered and exclusive exercise of utilitarian activity, all sense of decorum had been lost, all respect for the Past laid aside. The battle for gain was being fought with unbridled, implacable violence. The arms used were the pickaxe, the trowel, and bad faith. And from week to week, with almost chimerical rapidity, enormous empty cages, pierced with rectangular holes, their artificial cornices coated with shameful stucco, were rising on foundations filled with heaps of ruins. A species of huge whitish tumour was rising out of the side of the ancient city and sucking away its life.
And then day after day at sunset—as the quarrelsome bands of workmen were dispersing to fill the taverns of the Via Salaria and Via Nomentana—down the princely avenues of the Villa Borghese they drove in shining carriages, these new favourites of fortune, the stamp of whose ignoble origin neither hairdresser, nor tailor, nor bootmaker had been able to remove. One saw them passing to and fro, to the resounding trot of their bay or their black horses, easily recognisable by the insolent awkwardness of their attitudes, the embarrassed look of their rapacious hands imprisoned in gloves always either too large or too small for them. And they seemed to be saying: “We are the new masters of Rome. Bow down to us!”
Such, indeed, were the masters of that Rome which seers and prophets, drunk with the burning fumes of all the Latin blood that has been shed, have compared to the bow of Ulysses—“One must bend it or die.” But these very seers, who for so long had shone as stars in the heroic heaven of their country, before her liberation, had now become “sordid charcoal, only fit to trace an ugly figure or an unseemly word upon the wall,” according to the atrocious simile of an indignant rhetorician. They, too, gave themselves up to selling and bartering, to legal quibbling and setting of snares, and no one alluded any more to the destroying bow. And there seemed in truth no prospect of the cry suddenly arising to terrify them: “O suitors, devourers of other men’s substance, beware! Ulysses is at hand in Ithaca!”
The best thing to do was to withdraw from the scene for a while. And I left with my horses and my household gods without taking farewell of anybody.
For my dwelling-place I had chosen Rebursa, my favourite among my hereditary estates, as it had been my father’s favourite before me; it was a suitable retreat for a healthy soul, a country with a rocky backbone, peculiarly sober in outline and vigorous in style; fit to welcome and nurse the lordly dream of my ambition, as it had welcomed and nursed my father’s lofty melancholy after the fall of his king, and the death of him who, when living, had seemed to be the light of our house, our surest possession.
Besides, not far from there—at Trigento—I had friends, not forgotten although not seen for many years, friends to whom I was bound by grateful memories of childhood and youth. And the thought of seeing them again cheered my spirit.
At Trigento, in the old baronial palace, surrounded by a garden almost as vast as a park, lived the Capea Montaga, one of the most illustrious and magnificent families in the two Sicilies, a family ruined by ten years’ devotion to the fortunes of their exiled king, and obliged now to live a retired life on the only estate left to them, in the heart of the silent province. The old Prince of Castromitrano—who had enjoyed the highest honours at the Courts of Ferdinand and Francis, and who had faithfully followed the exile to Rome and across the Alps without ever renouncing the pomp of happier times—had been dreaming in the shade for years, and for years waiting in vain for the Restoration; he was now sinking into the grave with premature old age, while his children were fading away in the lifeless monotony of their existence. The madness of the Princess Aldoina alone disturbed this long agony by throwing over it gleams of the fantastic splendour of the Past. And nothing could equal the desolation of the contrast between the miserable reality and the pompous phantoms which issued from the brain of the mad woman.
This great and dying race added a kind of funereal beauty to the rocky country for my soul, which was already seeking to absorb all the soul enclosed withinthat stony cloister. Already a mysterious presentiment had arisen from the depths of my being that my destiny was approaching and mingling with that lonely destiny. And the names of the three maiden princesses resounded in my memory with a faint magical music: Massimilla, Anatolia, Violante—names in which there seemed to me to be something vaguely visible, like a pale portrait behind a clouded glass; names expressive as faces full of light and shade, in which an infinity of grace, passion, and sorrow was already apparent to me.