He Drew Like An Angel

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART/AP
da Vinci's Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View Facing Right

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Prose had no frame for this, so Leonardo had to content himself with his "Deluge" drawings, tiny visions of infinite destruction, matter hurled and distended into its components through the vortexes that were his signs for primordial energy.

Throughout the show one sees an absolute mastery of the processes of drawing: the making of marks but also the making of the instruments with which to make them. In the 15th century one did not walk into a shop and buy a pencil. One had to make the silverpoint or the twig of charcoal. One had to cut the pen and shape its nib from a quill. All of this was wound in with the technique of drawing and helped to determine its intensity. That is one of the reasons why small drawings (and most of Leonardo's drawings were small, in some cases hardly more than thumbnail sketches) can be so involuntarily revealing, just like handwriting.

There are some amazingly ugly subjects, like the imaginary Bust of Grotesque Man in Profile Facing to the Right. Leonardo delighted in these. The pleasure that he took in human ugliness was almost as intense as the delight afforded him by the spectacle of beauty. Granted, cosmetic considerations were less to the fore in 16th century Europe than they would be four centuries later. Granted, social attitudes toward the repellent aspects of old age were different. And yet it is difficult to look at his numerous drawings of horribly, freakishly ugly old people which would be assiduously copied by other artists (As comic emblems? As homages? Who knows?) and would make a final appearance during the Victorian age in the triumphantly hideous image of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland without sensing that Leonardo's peculiar and sadistic imagination is at a big remove from ours.

He is saying, Idealize as much as you want, but shun denial. The necessary other side of the ideal beauty of Leonardo's Mona Lisa or Cecilia Gallerani was the ugliness of his grotesqueries an ugliness that disintegrates all possibility of desire and has something mockingly demonic, not just medical, about it. To see his grotesques as the mere play of a mind tinged with sadism is to misunderstand them. They are an essential part of the impulse that turned Leonardo toward an attachment to beauty as a kind of saving principle.