King's Treasures

To drag out the month-old story of George V's Jubilee, nearly every illustrated magazine in England continued to blaze last week with reproductions of the King's possessions. There were pictures of his horses, racing, hunters and parade, his Clumber hunting spaniels, his late mother's Labradors, his wife's collection of old Chinese jade, his Empire stamp collection, his great houses of Sandringham, Buckingham, Balmoral and, 500 years older than the others, Windsor. To the King's treasures at Windsor, the Connoisseur gave nearly an entire issue.*

But all these royal treasures were entirely eclipsed last week by publication of a two-volume work called A Catalogue of the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle,/- by 32-year-old Kenneth McKenzie Clark, Director of London's National Gallery and Surveyor of the King's Pictures. The King's collection is far & away the biggest and finest collection of Leonardo drawings now known to man. In his first volume of notes, Cataloger Clark makes it tell much of great Leonardo, one of the brightest, blandest and most mysterious men who ever lived. The second volume is given over to 614 Leonardo drawings.

As mysterious as Leonardo is the manner in which most of his surviving drawings turned up in the possession of the: British kings. Leonardo left most of his notes to his pupil Francesco Melzi. All his life he had worked less on particular jobs than on general problems, on the reason for things, on a vast effort to transpose a closely-observed reality into a dream of possible perfection. Could he have found a serviceable fuel, he might have produced an airplane in the 15th Century. All his life he returned again & again to the study of the flight of birds, the flow of water, the wherefore of wind, the movement of horses, the muscles of men. Of this mass of unfinished work, none of his heirs had the wit and industry to make anything.

Melzi's son sold most of the manuscripts to one Pompeo Leoni, sculptor at the Spanish court, who in turn sold at least one volume to a Spaniard named Don Juan de Espina. This volume attracted the notice of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, friend to Anthony Van Dyck. For more than ten years the earl's agents nagged de Espina to sell. When Arundel died in 1646 he owned the book, but by that time Charles I had surrendered to the Scots rebels. Hence, suggests Kenneth Clark, the drawings did not at once pass to the British kings but were, instead, lost to the world for 45 years.

In 1690 a dull-witted secretary to William III, one Constantine Huygens, wrote that he had just bought a book of Leonardo's drawings for 3 1/2 guineas. He was too thrifty to give it to his King and he seems to have forgotten the book entirely. More than 70 years later, early in the reign of George III, a Mr. Dalton reached into a chest at Windsor Castle, pulled out the priceless book of Leonardo drawings.

More than 150 years before, Pompeo Leoni had numbered them. Some time in the 15 years after Mr. Dalton opened the chest, somebody cut out and presumably destroyed about 180 of the 779 drawings. One of these, it is known, was a picture of a handsome young man embracing a hideous crone. The surviving drawings include a superb series of anatomical studies of men, not one of a woman. Kenneth Clark indicates, does not say, that someone in the prudish, provincial court of George III found the 180 in bad taste.

Leonardo's book was forgotten again from 1810 until 1879 when the drawings, which Albert, the Prince Consort, had had mounted, were exhibited. A few scholars began to study them. One of the first. Dr. P. Muller-Walde, went mad. Another, Theodore Sabachnikoff, was so broken by his publisher's issuing his photographs of the collection without text or preparation, that he died of dismay. In 1930 the Windsor librarian gave Kenneth Clark the job of cataloging the entire collection. In the first of the two volumes published last week he includes some 30,000 of Leonardo's hitherto unpublished words, translated from the margins and backs of the drawings.

On his new evidence, Clark methodically contradicts much of the Leonardo legend. He redates work wholesale, disqualifies many supposed Leonardos, includes some new ones. Made hypercautious by the fact that Leonardo kept returning to the same subjects and types from beginning to end of his career, Clark sets up a few known facts:

Left-handed Leonardo put in his shading diagonally from left to right.

When absentmindedly scrawling, he was capable of making a drawing that was definitely bad as well as careless. He never developed a pat technique, always forced his style to follow his understanding of the facts. From first to last the two pictures that his hand absentmindedly formed first were of a pretty boy and of an old soldier with a nutcracker profile.

Leonardo's writing slowly changed from a spidery Gothic script in youth to a quick, blunt hand in middle age.

With these and other clues Clark was able to fix at least one dated drawing for every five years of Leonardo's career. The drawings begin vigorously and experimentally, turn precise and dry, explore and finish the possibilities of silverpoint, then drop silverpoint entirely, solve the problems of shading in concave spaces to define forms, turn to red chalk in a bold, open style, then to pen & ink and black chalk, once again with exquisite neatness but with a new heavy deliberation and economy. Finally, as the paralysis began to clamp on the heavy-bearded, 60-year-old man, Leonardo was finishing his appalling Deluge series of calamity and death, done in pen & ink, emphasized with black chalk.

*Windsor is full of old masters and old armor. Holbein and Van Dyck painted the kings. The kings wore the armor. The Windsor collection is notably deficient in both pictures and armor of Britain's most picturesque and warlike kings, the Plantagenets.

/-Macmillan, $25.

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