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Leonardo
by
The charm of the child is again revealed in the fact that his stepmother treated him as her own babe, and lavished her love upon him even from her very wedding morn.
Perhaps the compliment should go to her, as well as to the child, for the woman whose heart goes out to another woman’s babe is surely good quality. And this was the only taste of motherhood that this brave woman knew, for she passed out in a few months.
Fate decreed that Leonardo should have successively four stepmothers, and should live with all of them in happiness and harmony, for he always made his father’s house his own.
Leonardo was the idol of his father and all these stepmothers. He had ten half-brothers, who alternately boasted of his kinship and flouted him. Yet nothing could seriously disturb the serenity of his mind. When his father died, without a will, the brothers sought to dispossess Leonardo of his rights, and we hear of a lawsuit, which was finally compromised. Yet note the magnanimity of Leonardo–in his will he leaves bequests to these brothers who had sought to undo him!
Of the life of the mother after her marriage we know nothing. There is a vague reference in Vasari’s book to her “large family and growing cares,” but whether she knew of her son’s career, we can not say. Leonardo never mentions her, yet one writer has attempted to show that the rare beauty of that mysterious face shown in so many of Leonardo’s pictures was modeled from the face of his mother.
No love-story comes to us in Leonardo’s own life–he never married. Ventura suggests that “on account of his birth, he was indifferent to the divine institution of marriage.” But this is pure conjecture. We know that his great contemporaries, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian and Giorgione, never married; and we know further that there was a sentiment in the air at that time, that an artist belonged to the Church, and his life, like that of the priest, was sacred to her service.
Like Sir William Davenant, Leonardo was always proud of the mystery that surrounded his birth–it differentiated him from the mass, and placed him as one set apart. Well might he have used the language put into the mouth of Edmund in “King Lear.” In one of Leonardo’s manuscripts is found an interjected prayer of thankfulness for “the divinity of my birth, and the angels that have guarded my life and guided my feet”
This idea of “divinity” is strong in the mind of every great man. He recognizes his sonship, and claims his divine parentage. The man of masterly mind is perforce an Egotist. When he speaks he says, “Thus saith the Lord.” If he did not believe in himself, how could he make others believe in him? Small men are apologetic and give excuses for being on earth, and reasons for staying here so long, and run and peek about to find themselves dishonorable graves. Not so the Great Souls–the fact that they are here is proof that God sent them. Their actions are regal, their language oracular, their manner affirmative. Leonardo’s mental attitude was sublimely gracious–he had no grievance or quarrel with his Maker–he accepted life, and ever found it good. “We are all sons of God and it doth not yet appear what we shall be.”
Philip Gilbert Hamerton, who wrote “The Intellectual Life,” names Leonardo da Vinci as having lived the richest, fullest and best- rounded life of which we know. Yet while Leonardo lived, there also lived Shakespeare, Loyola, Cervantes, Columbus, Martin Luther, Savonarola, Erasmus, Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael. Titans all– giants in intellect and performance, doing and daring, and working such wonders as men never worked before: writing plays, without thought of posterity, that are today the mine from which men work their poetry; producing comedies that are classic; sailing trackless seas and discovering continents; tacking proclamations of defiance on church-doors; hunted and exiled for the right of honest speech; welcoming fierce flames of fagots; falling upon blocks of marble and liberating angels; painting pictures that have inspired millions! But not one touched life at so many points, or reveled so in existence, or was so captain of his soul as was Leonardo da Vinci.