403 



VINCI, LIONARDO DA. 



VINER, CHARLES. 



4f.4 



wa s the cartoon of St Anne, for the church of the Annun/iata, a work 

 w hich created an extraordinary sensation, but Lionardo never executed 

 i fc in colours. He mado also about the same time the celebrated 

 portrait of the Madonna Lisa, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a 

 work that has been praised perhaps more than it deserves; it is 

 infinitely inferior in style and execution to his own portrait at Flo- 

 rence. Francis I. of France gave 4000 gold crowns for it, and it is 

 now in the Louvre at Paris. 



In 1502 he was appointed his architect and chief-engineer by Cesare 

 Borgia, captain-general of the pope's army, and he visited in that year 

 many parts of the Roman states in his official capacity; but in 1503, 

 after the death of Tope Alexander VI., he was again in Florence, and 

 was employed by Sodcrini to paint one end of the council-hall of the 

 Palazzo Vecchio. Da Vinci selected for this purpose the battle in 

 which the Milanese general, Nicolo Picinino, was defeated by the 

 Florentines at Anghiari, near Borgo San Sepulchro. This compo- 

 sition, of which Lionardi made only the cartoon of a part, was called 

 the ' Battle of the Standard : ' it represents a group of horsemen con- 

 tending for a standard, with various accessories. Vasari praises the 

 beauty and anatomical correctness of the horses, and the costume of 

 the soldiers. Da Vinci is said to have left this work unfinished, on 

 account of jealousy of the more masterly and interesting design of the 

 rival cartoon of the young Michel Angelo for the same place. In 1507 

 Lionnrdo again visited Milan, and painted in that year, in an apart- 

 ment in the palace of the Melzi at Vaprio, a Large Madonna and Child, 

 which is in part still extant. He painted about the same time also 

 the portrait of the general of Louis XII. in Italy, Qiangiacbpo Triulzio, 

 which is now in the Dresden Gallery. He visited it again in 1512, 

 and painted two portraits of the young Duke Maximilian, the son of 

 Ludovico il Moro. He again left it in 1514, with several of his com- 

 panions, and set out, by Florence, for Rome, on the 24th of September 

 of that year. He arrived at Rome in the train of the Duke Giuliano 

 de' Medici, the brother of Leo X., by whom he was introduced to the 

 pope. Leo at first took little notice of Lionardo, but upon seeing a 

 picture of the Holy Family which he had painted for Baldassare Turini 

 da Pescia, the pope's almoner, he gave him a commission to execute 

 some works for him. Seeing however a great apparatus, and hearing 

 that the painter was about to make varnishes, Leo said, " Dear me, 

 this man will never do anything, for he begins to think of the finishing 

 of his work before the commencement." This want of courtesy in the 

 pope, and the circumstance of his sending for Michel Angelo to Rome, 

 offended Da Vinci, and he left Rome in disgust, and set out for Pavia, 

 to enter into the service of Francis I. of France, known to be a great 

 patron of the arts, and to have a great esteem for Da Vinci, some of 

 whose works he possessed. .Francis received him with the greatest 

 kindness, and took him into his service, with an annual salary of 700 

 crowns. Da Vinci accompanied him to Bologna, where he went to 

 meet Leo X., and afterwards, in the beginning of 1516, he went with 

 him to France, whither, if it had been possible, Francis would have 

 also taken the famed picture of the ' Last Supper,' but it could not be 

 removed from the wall, upon which it was directly painted. 



Da Vinci's health after he left Italy was so enfeebled that he exe- 

 cuted little or nothing more. Francis could not prevail upon him to 

 colour his cartoon of St. Anne, which he had brought with him ; nor 

 did he show himself at all disposed to commence any new work which 

 would require the exertion of his energies. His health gradually grew 

 worse, and he died at Fontainebleau on the 2nd of May 1519, aged 

 sixty-seven, not seventy-five, as Vasari and others after him have 

 stated. Vasari relates, that he died in the arms of Francis I., who 

 happened to be on a visit to him in his chamber when he was seized 

 with a paroxysm which ended in his death. Amoretti, in his Life of 

 Lionardo, has endeavoured to show that this story of Vasari's is a fiction, 

 but the reasons he gives for his opinion do not in any way tend to 

 prove it such. Lionardo's will and many other documents concerning 

 him are still extant in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, where his 

 manuscripts are likewise preserved. Lionardo was a man of proud 

 disposition, of very sumptuous habits, and of a remarkably handsome 

 person, which he always took great care to adorn with the most costly 

 attire ; in his youth also he was a great horseman. From the manner 

 in which he always lived, his means must have been great, yet the rate 

 of payment he received upon some occasions was very small, his salary 

 when employed by the gonfaloniere Soderini was fifteen gold florins 

 per month ; but he was possessed of some property which he inherited 

 from his family from his father and an uncle ; the estate also which 

 was given to him by Ludovico il Moro, though small, may still have 

 been of considerable benefit to him ; he had likewise an estate at 

 Fiesole. Half of the former he left to his servant Da Vilanis, and the 

 other half, with the house, to Salai, his favourite assistant ; the latter 

 to his brothers. His library manuscripts, his wardrobe at Cloux, and 

 all things relating to his art, he bequeathed to his scholar and executor, 

 Francesco Melzi. The furniture of his house at Cloux, near Amboise, 

 he bequeathed to Da Vilanis. 



This great painter had three different styles of execution. His first 

 was much in the dry manner of Verrocchio, but with a greater round- 

 ness of form. His second was that style which particularly charac- 

 terises what is termed the school of Da Vinci ; it consists in an 

 extreme softness of execution, combined with great roundness and 

 depth of chiar'oscuro, together with a fulness of design : in this style 



are the works which he executed in Milan. His third differed little 

 in essentials from his second, but was characterised by a greater free- 

 dom of execution and less formality of composition : of this style the 

 best specimen is his own portrait in the Florentine gallery, a work 

 equal in every respect to the finest portraits of Titian. 



No man borrowed less from other men than Lionardo Da Vinci; he 

 might almost be called the inventor of chiar'oscuro, in which, and in 

 design, he was, in the earlier part of his career, without a rival. Both 

 Fra Bartolomeo in his tone and mellowness, and Michel Angelo in his 

 grandeur of design, were anticipated by Vinci. Previous to Kra 

 Bartolomeo, Michel Angelo, and Itaffaclle, with the exception perhaps 

 of those of Masaccio, no works had appeared that could in any respect 

 ba compared with those of Da ViucL Lionardo's works are not 

 numerous ; his occupations were too various to allow him to paint 

 many pictures. There can be no doubt that many of the works attri- 

 buted to him in various galleries are the productions of his scholars 

 or imitator-", as Bernardino Luino, Francesco Melzi, and Andrea SaUii, 

 or Marco Oggioni, Gian Antonio Bpltrafno, Cesare da Sesto, Pietro 

 Ricci, Lorenzo Lotto, Niccolo Appiano, and others. The picture in 

 the National Gallery, of Christ Disputing with the Doctors, is one of 

 these doubtful works, or perhaps undoubtedly not the work of 

 Liouardo. 



Of Lionardo's numerous treatises few have been published. The 

 best known is that on painting, ' Tratato della Pittura,' of which 

 several editions have been published ; it has been twice translated 

 into English. In 1651 a very splendid edition was published at Paris 

 by Du Fresne, with engravings from drawings by Nicholas Pous.sin. 

 The work is divided into 365 short chapters, and contains such a mass 

 of instruction that subsequent writers have had to do little more than 

 reiterate in different words the precepts of Da Vinci. Lionardo's 

 greatest literary distinction however is derived, says Mr. Hallam, 

 "from those short fragments of his unpublished writings that appeared 

 not many years since, and which, according at least to our common 

 estimate of the age in which he lived, are more like revelations of 

 physical truths vouchsafed to a single mind, than the superstructure 

 of its reasoning upon any established basis. The discoveries which 

 made Galileo, and Kepler, and Maestlin, and Maurolicus, and Castelli, 

 and other names illustrious, the system of Copernicus, the very theories 

 of recent geologers, are anticipated by Da Vinci within the compass of 

 a few pages, not perhaps in the most precise language, or on the most 

 conclusive reasoning, but so as to strike us with something like the 

 awe of prseternatural knowledge. In an age of so much dogmatism, 

 he first laid down the grand principle of Bacon, that experiment and 

 observation must be the guides to just theory in the investigation of 

 nature. If any doubt could be harboured, not as to the right of 

 Lionardo da Vinci to stand as the first name of the loth century, 

 which is beyond all doubt, but as to his originality in so many dis- 

 coveries, which probably no one man, especially in such circumstances, 

 has ever made, it must be on an hypothesis, not very untenable, that 

 some parts of physical science had already attained a height which 

 mere books do not record." The extracts alluded to above were pub- 

 lished at Paris in 1797, by Venturi, in an essay entitled 'Essai sur les 

 Ouvrages Physico-Mathe'matiques de Leonard da Vinci, avec des Frag- 

 mens tires de ses Manuscrits apportes d'ltalie.' These manuscripts 

 were afterwards restored to Milan, where they are still preserved 

 under the name of the ' Codice Atlantico.' It is said that Napoleon I. 

 carried these and Petrarch's 'Virgil* to his hotel himself, not allowing 

 any one to touch them, exclaiming with delight, " Questi sono rniei " 

 (these are mine). They were collected together by the Cavalicro 

 Pompeo Leoni, who procured most of them from Mazzenta, who had 

 them from the heirs of Francesco Melzi, to whom Lionardo bequeathed 

 them. They came eventually into the hands of Count Oaleazzo 

 Arconauti, to whom James I. of England is said to have offered 

 3000 Spanish doubloons for them (nearly 10,000?.), but this patriotic 

 nobleman refused the money, and presented them to the Ambrosiau 

 Library. 



(Vasari, Vite de' Pittori, <tc. ; Lomazzo, Idea del Tempio delta 

 Pittura, &c. ; Amoretti, Memorie Storichc su la Rita, gli Studi, e le 

 Opere di Lionardo da Vinci ; Lauzi, Storia Pittorica, Ac. ; Gaye, 

 Carteggio inedito d'Artisti; Brown, Life of Leonardo da Vinci, <kc. ; 

 Hallam, Introduction to the Literature of Europe, <kc.) 



VINER, CHARLES, is known as the compiler of 'A General and 

 Complete Abridgment of Law and Equity,' 24 vols. folio, 1741-51, and 

 as the founder of the Vinerian Professorship of Common Law in the 

 University of Oxford. When or where he was born has not been 

 recorded. The 'Abridgment' was printed at his owu house, at Alder- 

 shott. The 24th volume is an Index, by a Gentleman of Lincoln's 

 Inn. It appears to have occupied only ten years in printing, but 

 Viner was probably occupied many years previously in preparation. 

 Blackstone says he was half a century about it. This stupendous 

 work was reprinted hi 24 vols. roy. 8vo, 1792-94, and was followed by 

 6 supplemental volumes, roy. Svo, 1799-1806, the compilers of which 

 were James Edward Watson, Samuel Comyn, James Sedgwick, Henry 

 Alcock, John Wyatt, James Humphreys, Alexander Anstruther, and 

 Michael Nolan. Viner died on the 5th of June 1756, at his house, 

 Aldershott, Hampshire. 



Viner having resolved to dedicate the bulk of his property, as he 

 himself states, " to the benefit of posterity and the perpetual service 



