(2 of 3)
Discoveries like this are recurrent mysteries in the art world. Often enough they end in disappointment. What made Carlo Noya's picture sensational is that, although there are many Leonardo drawings, experts concede only 13 (some only four) da Vinci paintings to exist. The British Museum has one of the best of numerous pen studies for a Madonna with the Cat. In Britain, too, is the one man whom Italian scholars need to consult before pronouncing their find authentic, Sir Kenneth McKenzie Clark, director of the National Gallery since 1934.
When the librarian of Windsor Castle in 1930 dropped in the hands of 27-year-old Kenneth Clark the job of cataloguing the King's collection of Leonardo da Vinci drawings, a rich artistic province was bestowed on an obscure subaltern. Clark's qualifications consisted mainly in the esteem of Critic Bernard Berenson (TIME, April 10) and two years of work with him in Florence. But with the job went a sure succession of official honors for tall, personable, athletic Kenneth Clark, and publication of the catalogue made him in due time the foremost modern authority on Leonardo da Vinci. Fortnight ago in London and Manhattan appeared the full harvest gathered from Subaltern Clark's wide province: a fresh appraisal of Leonardo* and his growth as an artist, based on evidence uncovered in the drawings. As truly as the new Madonna in Milan, it constitutes a rediscovery of Leonardo.
A large part of the work discussed as Leonardo's by such 19th-Century critics as Walter Pater was not done by Leonard at all, but by his followers. "But after 50 years of research and stylistic analysis," writes Kenneth Clark, "we have at last reached some sort of general agreement as to which pictures and drawings are really by Leonardo. We must [now again] look at pictures as creations not simply of the human hand, but of the human spirit. . . ."
Looking thus at da Vinci's art, Kenneth Clark finds himself most attracted to certain works of precisely the same period as the Madonna with the Cat, done in Leonardo's late twenties. The drawings for the Madonna with the Cat "show, as nothing else in his work, a direct and happy approach to life " As Leonardo's intellectual wrestle with painting went on even his drawings became less spontaneous and his paintings took on a cold quality of mystery.
Kenneth Clark does not press profoundly into the conflicts of da Vinci's character. But he is often suggestive, as when he says that Leonardo's restless versatility, which in later life kept him busy experimenting with grandiose and unpractical engineering projects when he should have been painting, was "a disease of the will similar to that which ruined the magnificent intellect of Coleridge." Like Coleridge da Vinci had a turbulent romantic imagination. In his unfinished Adoration of the Kings he painted what Clark calls "the most revolutionary and anticlassical picture of the 15th Century," extraordinary for an El Grecoesque swirl of uncountable figures. But Leonardo's passion for scientific precision and classical finish, in Kenneth Clark's opinion, checked, delayed and exhausted him.