The Sun.
London, England, 1856-05-15 00:00:00

BE LEONARDO DA VINCI.

A remarkable picture is now "on view " at
No. 31, Regent-street, Waterloo-place, a picture
publicly exhibited in London twenty years ago as
a " Descent from the Cross, or Preparation for the
Entombment, painted by Leonardo da Vinci,"
and then as now, in 1835 as in 1856, very gene-
rally admitted by most of the competent judges of
art in our metropolis to be a veritable master-
piece
from the hand of the great Florentine. It
was accepted, moreover, as a genuine Leonardo a
score of years ago solely upon the strength of
its artistic merits. Excellences of so very re-
markable a character, in truth, that those con-
noisseurs who were most familiar with the style
of the earliest of the great masters among the
Italian painters (the leader of the Dii Majores o
the Atelier in the Roman Peninsula) at once
pronounced it to be an emanation from the
genius of Leonardo, and an emanation from the
genius of no other than Leonardo. Tile
reasons for this very prevalent and very
positive opinion in 1835, remaining of course
twenty-one years afterwards, in this year of grace
1856, precisely the same, may be at once very
readily explained. To afford which explanation
the most effectually and perspicuously, it is re-
quisite merely to enumerate a few among the chief
peculiarities of this extraordinary composition.
Wherefore let it be premised at once that the
painting appears to have been produced originally
upon the oak pannelling of a building—probably
as an altar-piece--the picture having been after-
wards cut out of the wall and framed as an ordi-
nary easle-picture. Restricted, doubtless, in his
design by the narrow dimensions of the original
pannelling, the artist nevertheless contrived to
obviate the difficulties inseparable from that very
restriction in regard to space, by grouping the six
figures introduced into his composition with a
consummate ability, of itself sufficiently indicative
of the master-hand ! Six figures they are, as we
have said, in number—six figures, about half the
size of life, the Pieta, or dead Christ, being, as a
matter of course, the central form about which are
clustered the Blessed Virgin, the Beloved Disciple,
Mary Magdalene, Joseph of Arimathea, and the ir-
resolute but ardent Nicodemus. Clustered, these
five attendant figures are, too, so reverently, so
sorrowfully, so characteristically about the inani-
mate shape of the Redeemer l Joseph of Arima-
thea geeing upon the dead body of his crucified
Lord with a look of awe, visible in every line of
that noble and benevolent countenance, which
even through the look of awe seems to be smiling
with a serene trust and implicit confidence in the
glorious triumph of the inevitable Resurrection !
The Blessed Virgin with her holy visage sod-
, dened as it were with a grief, supreme, unutter-
able, and inconsolable. The beloved St. John
leaning his head towards her's in tenderest sym-
pathy, mingling together the tears of those who
were thenceforth to be, relatively each to each,
as mother and as son, according to the Saviour's
lovely and dying admonition. The Magdalene
weeping with the others, but weeping with them,
it almost seems, partly in bitterest woe, and
partly in agonised indignation. And Nicode-
mus kneeling in sorrow and humility among
his companions upon Golgotha, bearing up
the feet of the Redeemer reverently in
his arms, while the Sacred Head is supported in
those of Joseph of Arimathea. By a wonderful
stroke of the artist's sense of the sanctity of the
corpse of the Incarnate God, not one of the hands
of the attendant mourners and worshippers, not
even those of the two who are actually sustaining
in their embrace the lifeless body of Jesus, touch-
ing it ! The sanctified cerements, the " linen
cloths" mentioned in holy writ, interposing ex-
quisitely between the body of the Lord and the
hands of such faithful Disciples as Joseph and
Nicodemus ! Besides these tokens of the genius
of Leonardo—there were others, recognised easily
enough in 1835—tokens visible now in 1856, at
31, Regent-street, where the painting is again
happily 46nn view"..-..tokene unnxiaLattastbly thoe*
of a great master, and to such as are the best ac-
quainted with his distinguishing characteristics
those of no other great master than the immortal
Florentine. The pathos in the face of the Virgin
Mother, the passion in that of Mary Magdalene,
the amenity in that of Joseph of Arimathea, the
grief in that of St. John, the fervour in that of
Nicodemus, are all surpassed, we might almost say
immeasurably, by the awful and divine majesty
expressed in the Pieta, shadowing forth so terribly
and wondrously the vastness of the ineffable sacri-
fice. From the lance wound in the side scarcely
more than a drop or two of blood and lymph have
oozed—the ichor of the expiring Divinity ! From
the nail-holes in the sacred hands of the Redeemer,
the blood almost seems unaccountably to have
trickled up to the elbow—but you remember on
the instant that those sacred hands have been
raised during the crucifixion, and that the blood
has there coagulated. In the form of the " Man
of Sorrows"—what expressive attenuation ! In the
face—what infinite and Divine resignation! Leo-
nardo, and no other than Leonardo, at so early a
date as 1506, could by possibility, we feel, have
produced a picture such as this of the " Prepara-
tion for the Entombment." Although two cen-
turies had then passed away since the date when
[Giovanni Cimabue had revived the art of paint-
ing ; although Cimabue had been succeeded
by a pupil no less gifted than Giotto ;
although the career of Masaccio had been
completed a hundred years after that
of Giotto had reached the period of its consum-
mation ; although Domenico Ghillandaio and
Andrea Verocchio, Filippo Lippi and Pietro
Perugino, Francesco Francia, and Luca Signo-
relli had then followed each other in rather more
rapid succession—the art of painting had not in
1506 so far developed under the hands of its
votaries, as to enable any other than Leonardo
da Vinci to produce a work combining within
itself so many rare excellences, excellences of
perspective, grouping, design, anatomy, colour,
expression, pathos, grace, drawing, drapery, &c.,
discernible in this very remarkable picture of the
" Preparation for the Entombment." And this
date-1506—brings us at once to the new, and,
as it appears to us, conclusive testimony that the
painting is from the head of Leonardo da Vinci,
with which, twenty-one years after its exhibition
in London iu 1835, the picture is again submit-
ted to the examination of the lovers of art in our
metropolis. Since the occasion when it was
formerly "on view," it has (very recently) been
discovered, curious to relate, that the picture
bears upon itself the date (" 1506") of
its production, and the initials (" L.D.V.")
of the master hand that produced it—the master
hand of Leonardo da Vinci. Initials and date
have both been detected, minutely but distinctly
defined, upon the sword-nut of Joseph of Arima-
thea—while the artist's well-known monogram is
discernible upon a precious stone set in the sword-
hilt. Probably the cause why these signs manual
have not been discovered earlier is the circum-
stance that the lines of the initials of the date
and of the monogram constitute actually some of
the high lights both in the sword-nut and in the
precious• stone, a circumstance accounting readily
enough for their having been hitherto overlooked.
It is especially observable, moreover, that in each
of these newly-discovered evidences the initials,
the date, the monogram, are written inversely
from right to left, according to the invariable wont
of Leonardo, who never wrote otherwise than
after the fashion of the Persian caligraphers.
Besides all which—as a sort of crowning or sup-
plementary testimony illustrative of one portion of
the foregoing, explanatory, that is to say, of the
date " 1506"—it has also recently been disco-
vered (strange to tell) that the Portrait of the
Artist himself, Leonardo, is discoverable in Nico-
demus, that that of King Louis XII. of France
is traceable in Joseph of Arimathea, and
that of his Queen, Anne of Brittany, in Mary
Magdalene ! Illustrative facts perfectly re-
concileable with the date and with contem-

porary incidents in his career recorded by
the biographers of Leonardo. In 1506 the great

IFlorentine was in the fifty-fourth year of his age,
Lin the Winos of his renown, in the ripened og