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Updated: June 12, 2025
The last may be the greatest, but the first will always have been the first, the daring, the romantic, who did what no man had done before them. And so it is also in the peaceful ways of art. Giotto, Beato Angelico, Lippo Lippi, Botticelli, never attained to the greatness of Lionardo or Michelangelo or Raphael.
His chalk drawings of the "Bersaglieri," the "Infant Bacchanals," the "Fall of Phaëthon," and the "Punishment of Tityos," now in the Royal Collection at Windsor, prove that even in old age Michael Angelo carried delicacy of execution as a draughtsman to a point not surpassed even by Lionardo.
In 1504 he visited Florence, remaining only for a short time, but making the acquaintance of Fra Bartolommeo and Ghirlandajo, seeing the cartoons of Lionardo and Michael Angelo, and from that time displaying a marked improvement in drawing.
There is a painting of the Madonna and Child Christ said to be by Lionardo, and probably, at least, by one of his school, and which belongs, I think, to the Duke of Buccleuch, and was exhibited lately among the works of the old masters. The group has at once something touching and exalted in its treatment.
The whole of this rich legacy of masterpieces, projected, but not executed, was characterised by a feeling for beauty which has fallen to no other painter. When we examine the sketches in the Royal Collection at Windsor, we perceive that the exceeding sense of loveliness possessed by Lionardo could not have failed to animate his pupils with a high spirit of art.
It would seem as if skill and polish, with the amount of attention which they appropriate, with their elevation of manner over matter, and thence their lowered standard, are apt to rob from or blur in men these highest qualifications of genius, for it is true that judges miss even in the Lionardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael of a later and much more accomplished generation, and, to a far greater extent, in the Rubens of another and still later day, the perfect simplicity, the unalloyed fervour, the purity of tenderness in Giotto, Orcagna, Fra Angelico, and in their Flemish brethren, the Van Eycks and Mabuse.
He describes it to Lionardo di Compago, the saddle-maker, as an excellent workshop, where twenty statues can be set up together. Meanwhile he went on working at Pietra Santa for the façade. In August 1518, he writes:— "The place of quarrying is very rugged, and the workmen are very ignorant of this sort of work.
Realistic hansom cabs, and babies in strange raiment, and schoolgirls of the last century, and Masters of Hounds, are scarcely of so much permanent value as the favourite types and characters which Lionardo and Carpaccio repeat again and again. We no more think Claude monotonous than we think "the quiet coloured end of evening" flat and stale.
First, he had already come to be regarded as a man of unique ability, from whom everything could be demanded. Next, it was usual for the masters of the Renaissance, from Leo Battista Alberti down to Raffaello da Urbino and Lionardo da Vinci, to undertake all kinds of technical work intrusted to their care by patrons.
The mere fact that he numbered Lionardo da Vinci, Lorenzo di Credi, and Pietro Perugino among his scholars, proves the esteem of his contemporaries; and when we have observed that the type of face selected by Lionardo and transmitted to his followers, appears also in the pictures of Lorenzo di Credi and is first found in the "David" of Verocchio, we have a right to affirm that the master of these men was an artist of creative genius as well as a careful workman.
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