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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Results of Spiritual Research
GA 62

13 February 1913, Berlin

Translated by Peter Stebbing

11. Leonardo's Spiritual Stature at the Turning Point of Modern Times

As a result of the distribution of what is perhaps the most widely known picture of all, the famous “Last Supper,” Leonardo's name is continually brought to the attention of countless human souls. Who does not know it, this Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci? And who, knowing it, has not marvelled at the tremendous idea that comes to expression in this picture! Vividly personified, we see a significant moment, a moment felt by many people as being one of the most significant in world history: The Christ figure in the middle, the twelve apostles of Christ Jesus arranged on either side. We see these twelve apostles with profoundly expressive movements and gestures. With each of the twelve figures their gestures and bearing are so individualized that we have the impression: every possible human soul characteristic comes to expression in these figures, every manner in which an individual of whatever temperament or character might respond to what the picture represents.

In his discourse on “Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper,” Goethe refers strikingly to the moment in which Christ Jesus spoke the words, “There is one among you who will betray me!”

After these words have been uttered we see what goes on in each of the twelve—so intimately associated with the speaker, who look up to Him so reverently—we see all this in the numerous reproductions of this work distributed throughout the world.

There are depictions of the Last Supper event deriving from an earlier time. Going no further back than the period from Giotto to Leonardo da Vinci, we find that, in depicting the Last Supper, Leonardo introduced what can be called the dramatic element. Indeed, a wonderfully dramatic moment presents itself in his picture. Earlier, calmer representations seem to express as it were no more than the coming together of the apostles. With dramatic power, in his “Last Supper” Leonardo graphically conjures before us for the first time an expression of the most significant soul configuration. However, having received this impression of the underlying idea of the picture in heart and mind from the world-famous reproductions, arriving in Milan, in that old Dominican church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, one sees on the wall—it cannot be described otherwise—only more or less indistinct damp patches of colour merging into each other. This is all that remains of the original painting that has become world famous through reproductions. Looking further back, one has the impression that for quite some time already it has not been possible to see much of what people witnessed after the picture had been painted by Leonardo and once spoke of in such enthusiastic, exhilarating and captivating words. What must indeed at one time have spoken to human beings from this wall as something of an artistic miracle, not only in terms of the idea that has just been haltingly enunciated, but also by virtue of Leonardo's expressive colour! In these colours the inherent nature of each soul, indeed the very heartbeat of the twelve figures must have come to expression. Yet, for a considerable time this has no longer been evident on the wall.—What has this picture not suffered in the course of time! [It should be noted that from 1978 to 1999, financed by the Olivetti Company, modern techniques of restoration have made it possible to reveal what Leonardo certifiably painted onto the wall, in so far as this remains.—And to extraordinary effect!]

Leonardo felt compelled to turn aside from the kind of technique previously employed in painting such walls. He found the painting method made use of earlier [fresco] insufficiently expressive. He wanted to conjure the subtlest emotions onto the wall. He therefore attempted to use oil-based colours, something that had not been done before in painting murals. A series of hindrances came to light. The location of the wall as well as the entire space itself was such that comparatively soon these oil colours were undermined by dampness, the moisture coming out of the wall itself. The whole room, a refectory of the Dominicans, was completely under water on one occasion as the result of flooding. Many other factors contributed to the overall problem: the billeting of troops in wartime and so forth. All these things took their toll on the picture.

There was a time in which the monks of the cloister also did not exactly conduct themselves with special piety in regard to the picture. They found the door too low that led underneath the dining hall of the cloister and one day had it made higher. In this way part of the picture was devastated. [The feet of the Saviour were eliminated.]

Then again, a heraldic shield was once placed immediately over the head of Christ: in short, the picture was treated in the most barbaric manner. And then there were charlatans—they have to be called such—who painted over the picture so that hardly anything is to be seen of the original colour it once had. Even so, standing in front of this wall painting, an indescribable magic emanates from it. In spite of all barbarity, all over-painting, all soddenness, the magic that radiates from the picture could not be entirely destroyed. Today it is only a shadow of what it once was, and yet a magical quality still proceeds from it. One can say, it is only partly the painting as such; it is also the idea that exerts an effect on the soul, yet this works powerfully.

We can acquaint ourselves with other works of Leonardo, by means of reproductions, or by means of the works attributed to him in various European galleries—still preserved much as he painted them. In thus getting to know Leonardo's creations, what he wrote, as well as the course of his life from 1452 to 1519, we nonetheless stand before the mural in the dining hall of the Dominicans in Milan with quite particular feelings. For, just as little remains to us of this magical creation once painted by Leonardo, little remains also for the general consciousness of humanity of the colossal stature, the power and significance of Leonardo's comprehensive personality. What can be experienced of Leonardo today barely relates otherwise to what he placed into the world than these patches of colour that merge into each other in comparison to what he once conjured onto the wall. One stands with a certain wistful melancholy before this picture in Milan; and so it is in contemplating the figure of Leonardo himself.

Goethe points out with reference to earlier biographies that one has the impression, in Leonardo a personality appeared working with fresh life forces, viewing life with joyful expectation and enthusiasm, with an enormous urge for knowledge—fresh in mind and body. Turning to the picture that counts as a self-portrait in Turin, we see a portrait of the old Leonardo, the countenance with expressive furrows—expressive of pain and suffering, with the embittered mouth and features that betray much of what Leonardo must have felt in his conflicted relation to the world, in all he experienced. Strangely indeed does this personality of Leonardo stand before us at the turn of modern times.

Directing our attention once again to the picture in the Santa Maria delle Grazie we may attempt as it were with the “eye of the spirit,” to use Goethe's expression, to look at this “shadow” on the wall of the refectory, comparing it with the oldest engravings, the oldest reproductions. Letting the picture re-arise for us in this way, a question can emerge for us: Did the one who once painted this picture, in making the final brush-stroke, depart from it satisfied? Did he say to himself: You have achieved what lived in your soul?

It seems to me, one arrives at this question, as a matter of course. Such a question arises of its own accord in contemplating the life of Leonardo as a whole. We see him born a natural child, the son of an average individual, Ser Pietro, in Vinci and a peasant woman who disappears from view, while the father then marries in a civil wedding and has the son fostered out. Seeing the child grow up in isolation, communing only with nature and itself, one says to oneself: a tremendous sum total of life forces must have belonged to this human being for him to remain fresh and in good health, as he did in the first place. Since he showed talent in drawing early on, he was accepted into the school of Verrocchio (1435-1488). His father had brought him there, believing his talent in drawing could be exploited. The young Leonardo was now made use of in collaborating on the master's pictures. An anecdote is told from this period, that Leonardo was to paint a figure on one occasion, and that the master decided on seeing it to cease painting altogether, since he saw himself outdone by his pupil. This counts as more than an anecdote, in considering Leonardo as a complete individual.

We see him growing up in Florence, his talent in painting increasing by leaps and bounds. But we find something else. In following his painting ability, one has the feeling: Year by year he went about with the greatest artistic intentions, with continual new plans. He had commissions from people who recognized his great gifts and wanted something from him. Leonardo would first of all let the idea arise of whatever he wanted to create and then begin making studies. But how was it with these studies?

These studies proceeded from going into every conceivable detail that came into consideration—in a decidedly characteristic fashion. If he had, for example, to paint a picture in which three or four figures were to appear, he went to work in such a way that he did not merely study a single model but went about the city observing hundreds of people. He frequently followed a person for a whole day when a particular feature interested him. He would invite all kinds of people of the most varied standing to his abode, telling them all manner of things that amused or alarmed them. For, he wanted to study their features in connection with the most diverse emotional states. Once, when a rabble-rouser had been taken into custody and was to be hanged, Leonardo betook himself to the place of execution.—The drawing still exists in which he attempted to capture the facial expression and the whole gesture of the one hanged. In a lower corner of the page a head is drawn, recording the exact impression.

There are caricatures by Leonardo, incredible figures from which we can see what he actually intended. He would, for example, draw a countenance and see what would result in making the chin larger and larger. To find out what significance single parts of the human figure have, he enlarged a single member so as to discover how this fits into the whole human organism in its natural size. Grotesque figures with the most varied distortions—we find all this with Leonardo. Drawings by him exist in which he sketched a particular feature again and again—drawings he then wanted to use for corresponding works. Even if some of these derive from his students, there are still a great number from his own hand.

Letting all this work on us, we get the impression that things proceeded in such a way that he would have some commission or other for a picture; he was to depict this or that. He studied the details as described. Then something in particular began to interest him—and he then no longer studied with the aim of completing the picture, but rather to get to know specific features of an animal or of the human being. If a battle scene was to be painted, he went to the riding school to make studies—or to where the horses are left to themselves. In this way he digressed from the actual purpose for which he had intended to use the study. Studies thus pile one upon the other, till it is no longer a question of his returning to the commissioned work at all.

Among the more significant pictures in his first Florentine period—though today these have all been over-painted, their original state no longer fully recognizable—we have the “Saint Jerome” and the “Adoration of the Magi.” There are studies for these as well, of the kind already indicated. One has the sense moreover that here a human being lived within the abundance of cosmic secrets. He sought to penetrate world secrets and to reproduce these secrets of Nature in an original manner by means of drawing—though never actually arriving at the kind of creating of which he could say, it had in some way been brought to realization. One has to transpose oneself into such a soul, too richly endowed to be able to fully conclude what it undertook—a soul upon which the cosmic secrets work in such a way that, in beginning somewhere, it necessarily went from secret to secret and never finished. One has to understand this Leonardo soul, too great in itself ever to be able to manifest its own greatness.

Pursuing Leonardo further in Milan, we see two tasks entrusted to him by Duke Lodovici il Moro, who takes him into his court. One task is the “Last Supper” and the other the creation of an equestrian statue of the duke's father. We see Leonardo at work on these projects for a period of fifteen to sixteen years. Yet much else transpired besides. To further characterize Leonardo and to comprehend him completely, it should be mentioned that the duke had not only appointed him as a painter. Leonardo was also an excellent musician, in fact perhaps one of the most distinguished musicians of his time. The duke was especially fond of his musical ability. But the duke also retained Leonardo because he was one of the most important war-engineers, a distinguished canal engineer and one of the most significant mechanics of his time, and because he was able to promise the duke entirely new war-machines, machines utilizing water power, also bridges that could easily be built and taken down again. At the same time, he worked on constructing a flying machine. In developing it, he occupied himself in observing how bird flight comes about. The studies of bird flight that have been preserved count among the most original in this field. With the writings of Leonardo, it has to be borne in mind that it is partly a matter of copies containing much that is inexact. These therefore correspond in nature to what is still to be seen today of the “Last Supper.” But, shining through everywhere is the comprehensive spirit of Leonardo himself.

sketch of horse
Drawing of a Horse, Study for the Sforza monument
Silverpoint on prepared paper, 25 x 18,7 cm

We see Leonardo supporting the court in Milan in every conceivable way with this or that painting project or theatrical event, but also working out all manner of war plans and other plans, as also assisting in the building of the cathedral with advice and practical help. In addition, he is known to have trained numerous pupils who then worked on the various projects in Milan. Today, people hardly have any notion of all that Leonardo contributed to the city of Milan and its surroundings.

There are Leonardo's endless studies for the equestrian statue of the duke's father, Francesco Sforza. He studied every part of the animal hundreds of times in hundreds of positions, and over a period of many years he completed the model for the horse. It was destroyed when the French invaded Milan in the year 1499; soldiers shot at the model as though for target practice. Nothing of it remains—nothing is preserved of the enormous amount of work of a personality who, it may be said, sought to investigate world secrets in creating a work in which dead matter gives expression to life—just as life manifests itself with its secrets in Nature.

It is known how Leonardo worked on the “Last Supper.” He often went there, sat on the scaffold and brooded for hours in front of the wall. Then he took the brush, made a few brushstrokes and went away again. When he wanted to paint on the Christ figure, his hand trembled. And, considering all that is known, it has to be said: both outwardly and inwardly Leonardo was not pleased as a result of painting this world-famous picture. There were people at the time in Milan who did not much like the slow pace with which the picture was painted. There was for instance the prior of the cloister who could not see why a painter should not be able to paint such a picture onto the wall quite quickly. He complained to the duke. For the duke, the whole matter also went on rather too long, and he took the artist to task. Leonardo replied that Christ Jesus and Judas were to be represented in the picture: two of the greatest imaginable contrasts. These could not be painted in just one year, there being no model for either in the whole world, not for Judas, nor for Christ Jesus. He also did not know, he said, having painted on the picture for many years already, whether he would be able to finish it at all. And then he added: In the end, if no model were found for Judas, he could always take the prior! Thus, it was extraordinarily difficult to bring the picture to a conclusion. But Leonardo was also not pleased in the end with the outcome. For, with this picture the full discrepancy became apparent between what lived in his soul and what he was able to bring onto the wall.

Here I am obliged to put forward a kind of spiritual-scientific hypothesis to which anyone can come on familiarizing themselves gradually with all that can be known about the picture. This hypothesis resulted for me in attempting to answer the question previously raised. In following the life of Leonardo, one says to oneself: Such an enormous amount lived in this man that he was unable to reveal outwardly to humanity—for which the external means were wholly inadequate. Should he in fact have been able, without further ado, to paint to his satisfaction the greatest conceivable work he undoubtedly intended with the “Last Supper?” One comes to such a question as a matter of course, seeing how he strove again and again by means of studies, to investigate one secret after another—attempting to bring something to realization that did not finally come about. And the answer then results almost of itself. For, if Leonardo had wanted on the one hand to make an equestrian statue, a miraculous work of sculpture, bringing it no further than the model that was lost, never reaching the point of casting it after sixteen years' work—having to forsake it completely without achieving anything—how must he have taken leave of the “Last Supper?” One has the sense that he went away from it dissatisfied! And today we have only a ruin of the picture before us; only damp patches of colour merging into each other, while for a long time hardly anything is left of what Leonardo once painted onto the wall. Thus, it is perhaps permissible to assert that what he painted onto the wall did not remotely represent what lived in his soul.

To arrive at such an impression, however, one has to bear in mind various things in regard to the picture. There are further reasons. Among the various writings of Leonardo that have survived there is a wonderful Treatise on Painting. [See Dover Publications edition, 2005.] Here the essential nature of painting as an art is set forth—how perspective and colour composition are to be approached. It is shown that one needs to proceed from a certain viewpoint. Despite the fact that we have it only in a truncated form, this book by Leonardo on painting is a wonderful work, like nothing else that has been written on painting otherwise. The principles of the art of painting are presented as only the greatest genius could have presented them. It is marvellous, for instance, to read how Leonardo describes in what manner horses are to be depicted in a battle scene, how altogether brutal, but also grandiose impressions are to come to light in rendering a battle scene. In short, this work shows Leonardo in his greatness and, it may be said, also in a certain powerlessness, which we shall refer to later. But above all, it betrays how he was careful everywhere in his own painting to study how reality presents itself to the human eye; how light-and-dark and colouration are to be utilized—all this is set forth in genial fashion in this work of Leonardo on painting. And it confirms the yearning for conscience in Leonard's soul, the desire, never even in the slightest detail, to go against what, as we shall see, he valued so highly: the search for truth. The extent to which this lived in his soul becomes apparent everywhere in the Treatise on Painting; in that one should never violate the truth of the impression with respect to the inner secrets of Nature.

Letting his “Last Supper” work on us, there are two things we cannot reconcile immediately with Leonardo's requirements with regard to painting. One concerns the figure of Judas. In the reproductions and to an extant in the shadowy picture in Milan, one has the impression, Judas is completely covered in shadow and is quite dark. Looking at how the light falls from various sides, with the eleven other disciples we see the relationships of light everywhere represented in the most wonderful way in conformity with the truth. Nothing properly explains the darkness on the countenance of Judas! On the basis of the external relationships of light we do not have a satisfying answer as to the “why” of this darkness. And in coming to the Christ-Jesus figure, if one does not proceed on the basis of spiritual science, only something like a premonition can actually result for external perception. For just as little as the blackness, the darkness, is outwardly justified, as little does the sun-like quality of the Christ figure, its emergence from the other figures, seem justified in the sense indicated. All the other countenances can be understood on the basis of the existing lighting, but not the Judas and not the Christ-Jesus countenance. Proceeding in accordance with spiritual science, however, the thought arises as though of itself: here the painter strove to make evident, in the contrast of “Jesus” and “Judas,” how light and darkness are to be accounted for inwardly. He wanted to make clear that this Christ countenance stands before us, such that we find it unaccounted for in regard to the external light, but that we are able to believe: the soul behind this countenance grants it luminosity of itself, so that it becomes permissible for it to shine in contradiction to the prevailing light conditions. And in the same way, one has the impression with regard to Judas, this figure conjures a shadow onto itself justified by nothing in the surroundings.

As already stated, this is a spiritual-scientific hypothesis, but one that has emerged for me over many years, a hypothesis of which one can believe that it will confirm itself still further, the more one goes into the whole matter. On the basis of this hypothesis, one understands that in striving everywhere in his work for the truth of Nature, Leonardo worked with a brush that trembled in his hand in attempting to present what could have its justification only in the Christ figure. It becomes comprehensible that Leonardo would unquestionably have been bitterly disappointed, since it was impossible, with the art of representation as it was at the time, to bring this to expression in all truthfulness. Thus, he could not do what he intended, and finally despaired of the possibility of carrying it out, having to bequeath a picture which did not ultimately satisfy him.

Thus, in conformity with the entire spiritual stature of Leonardo, we arrive at an answer to the above question. Leonardo must have gone from this picture with the bitter feeling that with his most significant work, he had set himself a task the execution of which could not bring him satisfaction, given the means available. Though in later centuries no human eye was in fact to see what Leonardo had actually conjured onto the wall in Milan, even in his own time the picture did not correspond with what had lived in his soul. Hence, considering him in relation to his most important creation, we are inclined to ask: what really is the underlying secret of this figure of Leonardo?

In contemplating the personality of Raphael fourteen days ago, the attempt was made to show that, based on a spiritual-scientific view, such a unique individual can be understood quite differently than otherwise. We can make clear to ourselves that the human soul returns again and again in the course of many earth-lives. Born into a particular age, a soul does not live this one life only, but, with its whole disposition, brings qualities over from earlier earth-lives. With what it carries over into the present from earlier lives, the soul interacts with what the spiritual environment has to offer. Viewing the human soul in this way, we recognize that it enters into existence with an inner spiritual estate deriving from repeated earth-lives. The whole of evolution appears meaningful and imbued with wisdom in presupposing that things arise in particular epochs, not by chance, but according to law-imbued principles—just as the blossom of the plant follows after the green leaves. Great individualities become explicable only if we assume wise guidance in the historical development of humanity and see the human soul returning again and again from spiritual regions. But what can be studied in the context of a single human life unveils itself quite especially in considering human souls that rise above mediocrity. Contemplating Leonardo in the way we attempted in tentatively summarizing his life, we are inevitably led again and again to the background from which he emerges. This is the age into which he is placed, from the year 1452 to the year 1519.

What sort of age is this? It is the age that precedes the flowering of the natural-scientific worldview—before the arrival of the worldview of Copernicus and before Giordano Bruno, Kepler and Galileo. How is this age to be viewed from a spiritual-scientific standpoint?

We have often drawn attention to the fact that the further we go back in evolution, the more the whole manner in which human beings relate to the world changes. In primeval times we find everywhere a kind of clairvoyance. In certain states between sleeping and waking, human beings looked into the spiritual world. This original clairvoyance was lost as time went on, but even in the fifteenth century a remnant of this clairvoyance remained from older times. It was not then a matter of the actual clairvoyance itself, which had long since been lost. What remained was a feeling of the soul's connection with the spiritual background of the world. What souls had once seen, they continued to feel. Though this feeling had become weak, they nonetheless felt united in the centre of their being with the spiritual element with which the world was permeated and interwoven—much as physical processes in the human body are connected with physical occurrences in the world.

It belongs to the inherent laws of evolution that the old connection of the human soul with the spiritual world had to be lost for a while. Never would modern natural science have been able to blossom, had the old clairvoyance remained. This older way of seeing had to be lost, in order for human beings to orient themselves to what is presented to the senses, to reason bound up with the brain—to what can be ascertained scientifically. Only by virtue of the loss of the old spiritual perception was the natural scientific world conception possible that has evolved from the time of Leonardo up to our own day. In this way human beings turned “objectively,” as it is said, to the external sense world and to what human reason is able to comprehend by means of sense perception.

Today we stand once more at a new turning point, at the turning point of a time in which it is again possible, by means of modern natural science, for human beings to come to a spiritual view of things. For, the development of natural science has a dual significance. On the one hand, it is to bequeath to humanity a certain wealth of natural-scientific knowledge. In the course of the centuries since the appearance of Copernicus, Kepler and so on, natural science has gone from triumph to triumph, influencing in a remarkable way all practical and theoretical life. That is one field that has been conquered by natural science in the centuries since Leonardo's time. The other is something that could not come about all at once and has become possible only in our time. Not only do we owe to natural science what has been learned as a result of the Copernican worldview, by means of the observations and investigations of Kepler and Galileo, as also what has been discovered by means of modern spectral analysis and so forth. We are indebted to it also for a certain education of the human soul.

Human beings directed their attention first of all to the sense world. Natural science evolved in this way. But new ideas, new concepts were formed by means of natural science. And where natural science achieved the most significant advances, it did not do so by means of sense perception, but by virtue of something quite different. This has already been pointed out. In a particular field prior to Copernicus, reliance was placed on sense perception. What was the result? It was believed, the earth stood still in cosmic space and the sun and other planets circled around it. Then came Copernicus, who had the courage not to rely on sense observation. He had the courage to say that no empirical discoveries are made in relying on sense perception alone, but that empirical discoveries are arrived at in combining in a strict manner in one's thinking all that has previously been observed. People then followed in his footsteps; and it misconstrues the actual facts altogether to believe that natural science attained its present height in that humanity placed reliance only on the senses.

But what humanity acquired by means of natural science also imprinted itself on souls. The ideas of natural science live in our souls, exerting an educational effect. Quite apart from their content, the natural sciences have been an educational medium. And today, in that natural scientific ideas are actually not only thought but also lived, human beings have become ready of themselves to feel drawn to spiritual science. Humanity had first to become mature for this. The centuries since the time of Leonardo had to pass for this to come about.

Now let us consider Leonardo. He enters an age having, in an earlier existence, belonged among those initiates who had elevated themselves in the ancient manner to apprehending the secrets of the universe. Born into the fifteenth century, he could not bring this to realization. Though someone may have entered intensely into the cosmic secrets in earlier incarnations, as made possible in those earlier earth-lives, how this is to be brought to consciousness in a new existence depends upon the external corporeality. A physical body of the fifteenth century could not bring to expression what Leonardo had assimilated in an earlier existence of inner thoughts, inner feelings and creative power. What he had brought with him from earlier times took effect only in the form of a certain strength. In the age preceding the flowering of the natural sciences, he felt constrained by a body that placed limits upon him. The times were approaching—the dawn of which had already arrived—when people wanted only to look into the world of sense and to think only by means of reason bound to the instrument of the brain. Leonardo felt drawn everywhere to the spirit, having brought this with him as an impulse from earlier lives. In a grandiose manner, he was impelled to the spirit.

Let us now look at him as an artist in the first place. Art had become quite different in the age in which Leonardo lived from what it was for instance in Greek times. We may attempt to transpose ourselves, for example, into how a Greek artist created a sculptural figure. What kind of feeling do we have in looking even at the statue of Marcus Aurelius [175 A.D.] in Rome? Never would those who created something like this have proceeded in the manner of Michelangelo or Leonardo, making detailed studies from an external model. The wonderful horse of the Marcus Aurelius statue was quite certainly not studied in the way Leonardo went about studying his horse for the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza. How alive are these ancient statues even so! Why is this? It derives from the fact that in Greek times human beings felt themselves the immediate creators of their own bodies, feeling themselves at one with the soul forces of the cosmos. In the times when Greek art arose, one sensed, for example with an arm, all the forces that formed it. One felt one's way into the inner, self-sufficient nature of one's own human form. Things were not viewed from outside, but created from within, while being aware of the actual formative forces. This can even be established quite externally. Taking a look at Greek female figures, we find they are all directly felt. Hence, they are shown at an age when growth is ascendant. Here we sense that the artist created as Nature does, in standing within the spirit of Nature, feeling himself inwardly connected with the spirit of Nature.

This feeling of union with the spirit that lives and weaves through things had been lost in the age of Leonardo. It had to be so, since it would not have been possible otherwise for modern times to arise. This is said not as a critique of the times, but to indicate the underlying facts.

Let us look at how Leonardo went to work in studying say, the movements of the hand, the parts of an animal, or the human physiognomy. He proceeds in having a notion, an inner experience that does not, however, rise to consciousness. This is something that is brought to bear in a living manner in creating these figures, but Leonardo cannot apprehend it from within. He feels as though detached from it, from apprehending it inwardly. And now nothing is sufficient for him. The new natural scientific worldview does not yet exist. He stands there in expectation of this natural scientific worldview, without as yet having it for himself. With his writings, things jump out on every page that are only discovered over the next three hundred years, and in some cases have still not been found even today. Leonardo had the most wonderful ideas that frequently had no effect at all in his own time. We find these ideas both in his written works and in his artistic creations.

Thus, with him we sense the helplessness with which a soul had to appear in an age in which the old way of conceiving things came to an end, and for whom the new world conception had not yet arisen. But this new world conception brought with it that the whole outlook of human beings became splintered, in focussing on details. We see a specialization of the different branches of work. With Leonardo everything still appears unified. He is at the same time fully a painter, fully a musician, fully a philosopher, fully a technician. He united these within himself, having come over from ancient times with great capacities. In the new age he is able everywhere to touch on things, but not to enter into them. And so, in human terms, Leonardo appears as a tragic figure. But, seen from a higher point of view, he is enormously significant, appearing at the turning point of a new age.

One sees this in looking at Leonardo's further achievements. The most significant things were brought by him only up to a certain point; then his students worked on them. And even in the case of such works as the “Saint John” or the “Mona Lisa” in the Louvre in Paris, we see that, in consequence of the technical means by which they were produced, they soon lost their lustre. We also see how Leonardo could never be satisfied. Without having the pictures to hand, it is not possible to speak about Leonardo's paintings in detail. Immersing oneself in them, it becomes evident that as an artist Leonardo continually came up against boundaries that he could not surmount. We see how what lived in his soul could not reach the point where from the state of soul experience, it lit up in his consciousness. In lighting up at a certain moment from the level of soul experience in this way, one could shout for joy, but sinks back in pain, since it does not reach clear consciousness. Even for Leonardo himself, this did not come about.

We actually follow Leonardo with rather bitter feelings in seeing how he is sent for by Francis I [king of France from 1515-1547] and, for the last three years of his life, in the residence Francis I had assigned him, spends these years in spiritual contemplation, immersed in the secrets of existence. We encounter him there as a lonely individual who cannot actually any longer have had anything much in common with the world that surrounded him; who had to sense a tremendous contrast between what he felt to be the primal foundation of existence, capable of taking on form by means of art, and what he had been able to bequeath to the world after all only in fragmentary form.

Recognizing this with regard to Leonardo one says to oneself: This is an individual in whom much takes place; an infinite amount goes on in his soul. The impression made on the observer is shattering—considering what is given over to humanity, what is revealed to humanity externally at Leonardo's death and how slight this is, compared to what lived within him! How does it stand with the economy of existence, if we subscribe to the view that human life exhausts itself in what comes into existence externally? How meaningless and pointless does the soul-life of such an individual as Leonardo appear when we see all that went on within him in relation to what he was able to bequeath to the world? What contradiction would result in asserting: this individual may be viewed only in accordance with how he manifested himself in outer life! No, we cannot view such a soul in this way! We must adopt a different standpoint and say: Whatever Leonardo may have given to the world, what he experienced, what he went through inwardly—all that belongs to another world, a supersensible world as compared to our world. And such human beings are above all evidence that, with his soul, the human being stands within supersensible existence. We can say, such souls achieve something of significance with regard to supersensible existence, while what they leave to the world is only a “by-product” of what they undergo otherwise.

We only arrive at a true impression in adding to the stream of external human events, another, a supersensible stream, saying: Something takes place parallel to the sense-perceptible stream, and souls are in fact embedded in the supersensible realm. They live within this realm so as to be the connecting link between the sensible and the supersensible. The existence of such souls as Leonardo's appears meaningful only when we are able to accept the existence of a supersensible realm in which they are embedded. Thus, we apprehend little of Leonardo in looking only at what results from his creative activity. We arrive at the view that this soul still has something to sort out in supersensible existence. We can then say to ourselves: We understand!—In order to be able to reveal various things to humanity over the course of many earth-lives, this soul had to undergo, in that “Leonardo existence,” the circumstance that only the least of what lived within it could come to outer expression. Thus, individuals such as Leonardo are themselves real life-enigmas, embodying cosmic riddles.

What I wanted to put forward today should not be presented in sharply defined concepts. The intention has been rather to provide indications as to how such souls may be approached. Truly, the task of spiritual science is not to provide theories! In all it is capable of, spiritual science should take hold of the entire feeling life of human beings and become an elixir of life—enabling us to gain a new relationship to the world and to life. Spirits such as Leonardo are quite especially suited to make this possibility clear to us. Contemplating spirits like Leonardo, we can say: They enter existence mysteriously, having something of greater importance to express than their age is capable of supporting. Bringing over treasures from earlier times, individuals such as Leonardo enter life in unprepossessing circumstances. Born of an average father and a mother who soon disappears from one's field of vision altogether, having given birth to a natural child, Leonardo was subsequently brought up by average people. Thus, we see him left to himself, yet bringing to expression what he had carried over from earlier lives. In looking at the unfavourable circumstances of his birth, we recognize that they did not prevent the greatest imaginable content of soul from manifesting itself.

We see Leonardo in good health, so complete in himself that it becomes understandable when Goethe states: “Of regular features, well-formed, he stood before humanity as an exemplary human being. And just as the eye's clarity and power of comprehension belong in reality to reason, to the power of judgement, so clarity and comprehension were integral to this artist.” In making use of these words with reference to Leonardo, and they are applicable to him, we can apply them to the youthful Leonardo. We encounter him, fresh in mind and body, full of creative enthusiasm, of a kind of cosmic yearning—a complete human being, an exemplary human being. He is as though born a conqueror, yet likewise born with humour, which he showed on the most diverse occasions. Turning once again to the drawing that rightly counts as a self-portrait, to the old man in whose countenance so much is engraved of painful experience, leaving deep furrows, we see the features around the mouth indicating disharmony. He is ultimately a lonely man, far from his fatherland, living in asylum, at the behest of the king of France—still struggling with questions of cosmic existence—but alone, forsaken, not understood, though appreciated by loyal friends who accompanied him.

Hence the greatness of this spirit presents itself to us as having undergone much suffering, initially entering into life fully, and then departing from it embittered. We look into this countenance and sense the genius of humanity itself looking out from this human countenance. We begin to understand the age, the evening glow in which Leonardo lived, as also the age in which Copernicus, Kepler, Giordano Bruno and Galileo lived—in which a new dawn breaks. We take note of all the limitations and restrictions Leonardo's great soul had to endure. In comprehending the age, we understand this great artist who could ultimately only work with the means available. Looking into Leonardo's countenance with our full powers of understanding, while immersing ourselves in spiritual scientific viewpoints, it is as though the whole character of the age looks out from this countenance. These embittered facial features express indeed in the first place something of the downward inclination of the human spirit. We need to acquaint ourselves with this aspect of Leonardo in order to become aware of the magnitude of the power that had to be there for a Copernicus, a Kepler, a Galileo, a Giordano Bruno to arise.

Actually, we only acquire the proper reverence with respect to the development of the human spirit in feeling the tragedy of Giordano Bruno's being burned at the stake; and also, in learning to deepen this in viewing the powerlessness felt by Leonardo in the preceding, declining age. Leonardo's greatness only becomes clear to us in having a sense for what he was not able to accomplish. And this is connected with something with which we wish to summarize and conclude today's considerations. It is connected with the fact that the human soul can be satisfied after all, even animated, in viewing imperfections—if not so much in viewing small imperfections, nonetheless in viewing the large imperfections where creative activity, on account of its greatness, “dies” in the execution. For, in such “dying” forces we surmise and finally recognize forces that prepare the future. And in the evening glow there arises for us the premonition and the hope of the coming dawn.

In regard to the evolution of humanity we must at all times feel able to say to ourselves, all development takes its course in such a way that wherever what has been created becomes a ruin, we know that out of the ruins new life will always blossom forth.

Lionardos Geistige Grosse Am Wendepunkt Zur Neueren Zeit

Lionardos Name wird fortwährend an unzählige Menschenseelen herangebracht durch die weite Verbreitung des viel_ leicht allerbekanntesten Bildes, des berühmten «Abendmahles». Wer kennt es nicht, dieses Abendmahl des Lionardo da Vinci, und wer hat nicht, wenn er es kennt, die gewaltige Idee bewundert, welche gerade in diesem Bilde zum Ausdruck kommt! Da sehen wir bildhaft verkörpert einen bedeutungsvollen Augenblick, einen Augenblick, der ja von unzähligen Seelen als einer der bedeutendsten des Erdgeschehens empfunden wird: die Christus-Gestalt in der Mitte, zu beiden Seiten angeordnet die zwölf Gefährten des Christus Jesus. Wir sehen diese zwölf Gefährten in tief ausdrucksvollen Bewegungen und Haltungen. Wir sehen diese Gesten, diese Haltungen bei jeder einzelnen dieser zwölf Gestalten so individualisiert, daß wir wohl den Eindruck bekommen können: jede Art von menschlichem Seelencharakter kommt in diesen zwölf Gestalten zum Ausdruck, jede Art, wie sich irgendeine Seele nach Temperament und Charakter verhalten kann zu dem, was das Bild zum Ausdruck bringt.

Am eindrucksvollsten hat wohl Goethe in seiner Abhandlung über «Leonard da Vincis Abendmahl» den Moment hingestellt, jenen Augenblick, wo der Christus Jesus eben die Worte ausgesprochen hat: Einer ist unter euch, der mich verrät!

Was in jeder der zwölf Seelen, die so innig mit dem Sprechenden verbunden sind und so andächtig zu ihm aufschauen, vorgeht, nachdem diese Worte ausgesprochen sind, wir sehen das alles in den zahlreichen Nachbildungen dieses Werkes, die durch die Welt gehen, aus jeder dieser Seelen heraus ausdrucksvoll an uns herandringen.

Es gibt Darstellungen des «Abendmahl»-Ereignisses, die aus einer früheren Zeit herrühren. Wir können Darstellungen des «Abendmahles» verfolgen zum Beispiel, wenn wir nicht weiter zurückgehen, von Giotto bis Lionardo da Vinci und werden finden, daß Lionardo in die Darstellung des «Abendmahles» das hereingebracht hat, was man nennen kann das dramatische Element; denn es ist ein wunderbar dramatischer Augenblick, der uns in seiner Darstellung entgegentritt. Ruhig, gleichsam nur um das Beisammensein auszudrücken, so erscheinen uns die früheren Darstellungen; einen Ausdruck bedeutsamsten Seelenseins mit voller dramatischer Kraft vor uns hinzaubernd, so erscheint uns das «Abendmahl» bildhaft zuerst bei Lionardo. Aber hat man aus den weltberühmten Nachbildungen diesen Eindruck von der Idee dieses Bildes in seiner Seele, in seinem Herzen aufgenommen und kommt nun nach Mailand in jene alte Dominikanerkirche Santa Maria delle Grazie und sieht dort auf der Wand alle die - man kann es ja nicht anders nennen - ineinander verschwimmenden undeutlichen feuchten Farbenkleckse, das letzte, was von dem Original vorhanden ist, das in seinen Nachbildungen weltberühmt geworden ist, dann forscht man vielleicht zurück und bekommt durch die Forschung den Eindruck, daß man eigentlich ziemlich lange schon an jener Wand der alten Dominikanerkirche nicht mehr viel von dem hat sehen können, wovon einstmals die Menschen, die es gesehen haben, nachdem es von Lionardo gemalt worden ist, in so enthusiastischen, in so überschäumend hinreißenden Worten gesprochen haben. Was einstmals von dieser Wand herunter wie ein künstlerisches Wunder nicht nur durch die Idee, die jetzt eben stammelnd zum Ausdruck gebracht worden ist, zu den Seelen gesprochen haben muß, sondern was durch die ausdrucksvollen Farbenwunder des Lionardo so gesprochen haben muß, daß in diesen Farben zum Ausdruck kam das Intimste der Seelen, ja, der Herzschlag der zwölf Gestalten, das muß lange, lange schon nicht mehr auf dieser Wand zu sehen gewesen sein. Was hat dieses Bild alles im Laufe der Zeiten erdulden müssen!

Lionardo fühlte sich gedrängt, in der Technik von der Art, wie man vor ihm an solchen Wänden gemalt hat, abzugehen. Er fand die Art von Farben, die man vorher verwendet hatte, nicht ausdrucksvoll genug. Er wollte eben die feinsten Seelenregungen dort an die Wand hinzaubern und daher versuchte er, was man früher für Wandgemälde nicht getan hatte, ölartige Farben zu verwenden. Da kam dann eine ganze Summe von Hindernissen zutage. Die Lage der Wand, die Lage des ganzen Ortes war so, daß verhältnismäßig bald diese Farben von der Feuchtigkeit angegriffen werden mußten; aus der Wand selbst kam die Feuchtigkeit heraus. Der ganze Raum, der ein Refektorium der Dominikaner darstellte, wurde einmal durch eine Überschwemmung völlig unter Wasser gesetzt. Viele andere Dinge kamen hinzu, Einquartierung von Soldaten in Kriegszeiten und anderes. Durch alle diese Dinge ist das Bild mitgenommen worden.

Es gab eine Zeit, in welcher die Mönche des Klosters sich auch nicht gerade mit besonderer Pietät gegenüber diesem Bilde benommen haben. So fanden sie, daß die Tür zu niedrig war, die unterhalb des Bildes in diesen Speisesaal des Klosters führte, und haben sie eines Tages höher machen lassen. Dadurch wurde ein Teil des Bildes verwüstet. Dann wurde einmal ein Wappenschild gerade über dem Kopfe des Christus angebracht; kurz, man ist in der barbarischsten Weise gegenüber dem Bilde vorgegangen. Und dann fanden sich — man muß sie so nennen — malerische Scharlatane, die es übermalten, so daß kaum noch viel von der Farbengebung zu sehen ist, die es einst hatte. Dennoch geht, wenn man vor dem Bilde steht, ein unbeschreiblicher Zauber davon aus. Alle Barbarei, alle Übermalung, alle Aufweichung konnte im Grunde genommen nicht ganz den Zauber vernichten, der von dem Bilde ausgeht. Es ist ja heute nur noch ein Schatten, der sich so über die Wand hinzicht, aber es geht ein Zauber von diesem Bilde aus. Es ist zum größten Teil nur noch halb das Malerische, es ist die Idee, die auf die Seele wirkt, aber sie wirkt gewaltig.

Wer sich nun ein wenig mit anderen Arbeiten Lionardos bekannt gemacht hat, wer gesucht hat, durch die Nachbildungen seiner Werke oder auch durch das, was in den verschiedenen Galerien Europas verbreitet ist an Werken, die dem Lionardo zugeschrieben werden und die noch mehr oder weniger so erhalten sind, wie er sie selber gemalt hat, wer also gesucht hat, sich mit Lionardos Schaffen bekannt zu machen und sich auch in das zu vertiefen, was er im Laufe der Zeit geschrieben hat, wer sich bekannt gemacht hat mit seinem Leben, wie es verflossen ist vom Jahre 1452 bis 1519, der steht noch mit ganz besonderen Gefühlen vor diesem Bilde im Speisesaal der Dominikaner in Mailand, im Kloster Santa Maria delle Grazie. Denn im Grunde genommen, so viel uns noch von der Zauberschöpfung erhalten ist, die Lionardo einst an diese Wand hingemalt hat, so viel, fühlt man, ist eigentlich für das allgemeine Menschheitsbewußtsein auch nur noch vorhanden von der gewaltigen Größe, von der Gewalt und dem Inhalt dieser umfassenden Persönlichkeit dieses Lionardo selbst. Was man heute von Lionardo auf seine Seele wirken lassen kann, das verhält sich wohl kaum anders zu dem, was sich einstmals als diese umfassende Persönlichkeit in die Weltentwickelung hineingestellt hat, als diese ineinander verlaufenden Farbenkleckse sich zu dem verhalten, was Lionardo einst an die Wand gezaubert hat. Und wie man mit Wehmut vor diesem Bilde in Mailand steht, so steht man mit Wehmut vor der ganzen Gestalt des Lionardo.

Goethe macht noch darauf aufmerksam, wie man, wenn man die Lebensbeschreibungen früherer Biographen auf sich wirken läßt, den Eindruck bekommt, daß in Lionardo der Menschheit eine Persönlichkeit erschienen ist, mit frischer Lebenskraft überall wirkend, freudig das Leben betrachtend und freudig auf das Leben wirkend, alles ergreifend in Liebe, mit einem ungeheueren Erkenntnisdrange alles erfassen wollend, frisch an Seele und frisch an Leib. Dann wendet man vielleicht auch den Blick hin auf jenes Bild, das als ein Selbstbildnis gilt und in Turin erhalten ist, und sieht dann dieses Selbstbildnis des alten Lionardo, dieses Gesicht mit den ausdrucksvollen, aber durch den Schmerz ausdrucksvoll gewordenen Furchen, mit dem verbitterten Munde und mit den Zügen, die so vieles von dem verraten, was Lionardo fühlen mußte als seinen Gegensatz gegen die Welt und gegen alles, was er erleben mußte. So steht tatsächlich diese Persönlichkeit merkwürdig an der Wende der neueren Zeit vor uns.

Wenn wir uns noch einmal zu dem Bilde in Santa Maria delle Grazie zurückwenden und mit diesem Schatten an der Wand des Refektoriums zusammen zu schauen versuchen die ältesten Stiche, die ältesten Nachbildungen, die von diesem Bilde erhalten sind, und wenn wir ein wenig sozusagen mit den «Augen des Geistes», um dieses Goethesche Wort zu gebrauchen, versuchen, in uns dieses Bild wiedererstehen zu lassen, dann kann vielleicht ein Gefühl, eine Empfindung in uns auftauchen: der, der dieses Bild einst gemalt hat, ging er, als er den letzten Pinselstrich getan, befriedigt von diesem Bilde fort? Sagte er sich: du hast hier geleistet, was in deiner Seele lebte?

Es scheint mir, daß man auf ganz naturgemäße Weise zu diesem Gefühle, zu dieser Frage kommen kann. Warum? Wenn man das ganze Leben Lionardos betrachtet, so muß man sagen: es flößt einem dieses Leben die eben charakterisierte Empfindung ein. Wenn man beginnt, Lionardo auf sich wirken zu lassen, wie er als ein natürliches Kind geboren wird, als der Sohn eines mittelmäßigen Kopfes, des Ser Pietro in Vinci, und einer Bäuerin, welche einem dann ganz aus dem Blick entschwindet, während der Vater standesgemäß heiratet und den Sohn in Pflege gibt; wenn man das Kind dann einsam aufwachsen sieht, nur Umgang pflegend mit der Natur und der eigenen Seele, so sagt man sich: eine ungeheuere Summe von Lebenskraft mußte in diesem Menschen sein, daß er frisch blieb! Und er blieb es zunächst. Dann kam er, da er früh Zeichentalent zeigte, in die Schule des Verrocchio. Der Vater hatte ihn dorthin gegeben, weil er glaubte, daß sich sein Zeichentalent ausnutzen ließe. Der junge Lionardo wird nun dazu verwendet, um an den Bildern des Meisters mitzumalen. Es wird als eine Anekdote aus dieser Zeit erzählt, daß Lionardo einmal eine Figur zu malen hatte, und daß der Meister, als er sie sah, sich entschloß, überhaupt nicht mehr zu malen, weil er sich von seinem Schüler überflügelt sah, eine Anekdote, die mehr ist als eine solche, wenn man den ganzen Lionardo betrachtet.

Wir finden ihn dann in Florenz heranwachsend, sein malerisches Talent sich immer mehr und mehr erhöhend. . Aber wir finden noch etwas anderes. Wenn man das malerische Talent verfolgt, so bekommt man den Eindruck: er ging Jahr auf Jahr mit den größten künstlerischen Plänen um, mit fortwährend neuen Plänen. Er hatte auch Aufträge von Leuten, die seine große Begabung erkannten und etwas von ihm haben wollten. Lionardo ließ zunächst die Idee zu dem auftreten, was er schaffen wollte, und fing dann mit dem Studium an. Aber wie war dieses Studium?

Dieses Studium ging in einer ungeheuer charakteristischen Weise ein auf alle Einzelheiten, die in Betracht kamen. Hatte er zum Beispiel ein Bild zu malen, bei dem drei bis vier Gestalten vorkamen, so ging er so zu Werke, daß er nicht nur an einem einzelnen Modell studierte, sondern er ging herum in der Stadt und betrachtete Hunderte und Hunderte von Menschen. Er konnte oft einen ganzen Tag einer Person nachgehen, wenn ihn ein Zug an ihr interessierte. Er konnte zuweilen alle möglichen Menschen der allerverschiedensten Stände zu sich einladen und konnte ihnen alle möglichen Dinge erzählen, die sie belustigten oder die sie erschreckten, denn daran wollte er die Gesichtszüge für die mannigfaltigsten Seelenerlebnisse studieren. Als einmal ein Aufrührer eingefangen worden war und gehenkt wurde, da begab sich Lionardo zur Richtstätte, und es ist die Zeichnung erhalten, wie er den Gehenkten im Gesichtsausdruck und mit der ganzen Geste festzuhalten suchte; unten in der Ecke des Blattes ist noch besonders ein Kopf gezeichnet, um den genauen Eindruck festzuhalten.

Wir besitzen von Lionardo erhalten gebliebene Karikaturen, unglaubliche Gestalten, und können daran sehen, was er eigentlich damit wollte. Er hatte zum Beispiel ein Antlitz gezeichnet und probierte nun, was sich ergibt, wenn man das Kinn größer und größer macht. Um zu sehen, welche Bedeutung die einzelnen Teile der menschlichen Gestalt haben, vergrößerte er ein einzelnes Glied, um darauf zu kommen, wie sich in seiner natürlichen Größe dieses Glied dem ganzen menschlichen Organismus einfügt. Fratzenhafte Gestalten in den verschiedensten Verzerrungen, das alles finden wir bei Lionardo. Zeichnungen sind von ihm erhalten, in denen er immer wieder und wieder das einzelne skizziert hat, Zeichnungen, die er dann verwenden wollte für entsprechende Werke. Wenn auch manches von seinen Schülern herstammt, so ist doch auch viel von ihm selbst vorhanden.

Wenn man das alles auf sich wirken läßt, so bekommt man den Eindruck, daß es ihm oft in folgender Weise geht. Er hat irgendeinen Bildauftrag; er soll dieses oder jenes darstellen. Da studiert er in der eben geschilderten Weise die Einzelheiten. Dann beginnt ihn irgend etwas Besonderes zu interessieren, und nun studiert er nicht mehr zum Zwecke des Bildes, sondern um die Einzelheiten eines Tieres oder des Menschen kennenzulernen. Hater eineSchlacht zu malen, so geht er, um die Einzelheiten zu studieren, in die Reitschule, oder er geht irgendwohin, wo die Pferde sich selbst überlassen sind, und dadurch kommt er dann ab von der eigentlichen Idee, zu der er das Studium hat verwenden wollen. So häufen sich Studien auf Studien, und es ist ihm zuletzt gar nicht mehr darum zu tun, zu dem Bilde wieder zurückzukommen.

So sehen wir denn von bedeutungsvolleren Bildern in seiner ersten Florentiner Zeit, obwohl alle diese Bilder heute übermalt sind und die ursprüngliche Gestalt nicht mehr ganz zu erkennen ist, den «Heiligen Hieronymus» und die «Anbetung der Könige» entstehen, zu denen ja auch Studien vorhanden sind, wie sie eben charakterisiert worden sind, und man hat im übrigen das Gefühl, dieser Mensch lebte in der Fülle der Weltengeheimnisse. Er suchte die Weltengeheimnisse zu durchdringen, suchte in origineller Art gleichsam nachzuzeichnen diese Naturgeheimnisse, und kam doch eigentlich nie zu einem solchen Schaffen, von dem er sich hätte sagen können, es sei in irgendeiner Weise zu Ende gebracht. Man muß sich in eine solche Seele hineinversetzen, die zu reich ist, um in irgendeiner Weise abschließen zu können, was sie in Angriff nahm, in eine solche Seele, auf welche die Weltengeheimnisse so wirken, daß sie, wenn sie irgendwo anfängt, von Geheimnis zu Geheimnis schreiten muß und nirgends fertig wird. Man muß diese Lionardo-Seele verstehen, die zu groß in sich war, um ihre eigene Größe je offenbaren zu können.

Dann verfolgen wir Lionardo weiter, wie ihm von dem Herzoge Lodovico il Moro in Mailand, der ihn dort an seinem Hofe aufgenommen hat, zwei Aufgaben übertragen werden, wovon die eine das «Abendmahl» ist, und die andere die war, ein Reiterstandbild für den Vater des Herzogs zu schaffen. Wir sehen nun, wie Lionardo fünfzehn bis sechzehn Jahre an diesen beiden Werken arbeitete. Allerdings ging vieles andere nebenher. Denn wenn wir Lionardo charakterisieren wollen, wie wir es eben getan haben, so müssen wir, um ihn völlig zu verstehen, hinzufügen, daß ihn der Herzog nicht nur als Maler berufen hatte. Lionardo war auch ein ausgezeichneter Musiker, vielleicht einer der ausgezeichnetsten Musiker seiner Zeit, und an seiner musikalischen Begabung hatte der Herzog besonderen Gefallen gefunden. Aber der Herzog behielt ihn auch deshalb, weil Lionardo einer der bedeutendsten Kriegsingenieure, einer der bedeutendsten Wasserbauingenieure und einer der bedeutendsten Mechaniker seiner Zeit war, und weil er dem Herzog versprechen konnte, ihm Kriegsmaschinen zu liefern, die etwas ganz Neues waren, ferner Maschinen, die die Wasserkraft verwerten sollten, ferner fliegende Brücken, die leicht aufgebaut und schnell wieder weggenommen werden könnten. Und gleichzeitig arbeitete er daran, eine Flugmaschine zu konstruieren. Um diese herzustellen, beschäftigte er sich damit, zu beobachten, wie der Vogelflug zustande kommt. Was an Studien Lionardos erhalten ist über den Vogelflug, gehört wohl zu dem Originellsten, was darüber erforscht worden ist. Dabei muß man immer gewärtig sein, wenn man heute Schriften von Lionardo in die Hand bekommt, daß es zum Teil Kopien sind, die vieles ungenau enthalten und so auch in ihrer Gestalt dem entsprechen, was man heute noch von dem «Abendmahl» sieht. Aber überall leuchtet durch, was für einen umfassenden Geist man in Lionardo vor sich hat.

Nun aber sehen wir, wie Lionardo den Hof in Mailand nicht nur bei allen möglichen Gelegenheiten unterstützt, wie er dieses oder jenes Malerische oder Theatralische zustande bringt, sondern wir sehen ihn auch alle möglichen Kriegsund andere Pläne ausarbeiten und auch beim Dombau den Ausführungen mit Rat und Tat beistehen. Dazu wissen wir auch, wie er unzählige Schüler ausgebildet hat, die dann an den verschiedensten Werken in Mailand arbeiteten, so daß man heute kaum mehr ahnt, wieviel Arbeit Lionardos in den ganzen Bestand der Stadt Mailand und ihrer Umgebung eingeflossen ist.

Neben alledem her laufen nun unendliche Studien Lionardos zu dem Reiterstandbilde des Vaters des Herzogs, Francesco Sforza. Es gab für ihn kein Glied des Pferdes, das er nicht hundertfach, in hundertfältigen Stellungen studierte, und im Laufe von vielen Jahren brachte er das Modell des Pferdes zustande. Es ging dann zugrunde, als die Franzosen im Jahre 1499 in Mailand einfielen, und die Soldaten wie auf eine Zielscheibe nach diesem Modell schossen und es eben zerschossen. Es ist nichts davon erhalten, nichts erhalten von der Riesenarbeit einer Persönlichkeit, welche, man darf so sagen, Weltengeheimnis nach Weltengeheimnis zu erforschen suchte, um ein Werk zustandezubringen, in dessen totem Materiale Leben sich so offenbarte, wie sich Leben gemäß seinen Geheimnissen in der Natur selber offenbart.

Von dem «Abendmahl» können wir wissen, wieLionardo daran gearbeitet hat. Oftmals ging er hin, setzte sich auf das Gerüst und brütete stundenlang vor der Wand. Dann nahm er den Pinsel, machte einige Pinselstriche und ging wieder fort. Zuweilen ging er hin, starrte auf das Bild, ging wieder fort. Wenn er an der Christus-Gestalt malen will, zittert seine Hand. Und wenn man alles zusammennimmt, was man davon wissen kann, dann muß man sagen: äußerlich und innerlich wurde Lionardo nicht froh, als er dieses heute weltberühmte Bild malte. Zunächst gab es damals in Mailand Leute, denen das langsame Fortschreiten des Bildes nicht recht gefiel. Da war zum Beispiel der Prior des Klosters, der nicht einsehen konnte, weshalb ein Maler ein solches Bild nicht schnell sollte heruntermalen können, und er beschwerte sich deshalb beim Herzog. Dem Herzog dauerte die Sache eigentlich auch schon zu lange, und er stellte den Künstler zur Rede. Da antwortete Lionardo, daß auf dem Bilde dargestellt werden sollten der Christus Jesus und der Judas, also die zwei allergrößten Gegensätze; die könne man nicht in einem Jahre malen, und es gäbe keine Modelle für diese beiden in der Welt, weder für den Judas noch für den Christus Jesus. Er wisse auch noch nicht — das sagte er, nachdem er jahrelang an dem Bilde gemalt hatte —, ob er es überhaupt fertigbringen werde. Und dann fügte er hinzu: wenn sich schließlich gar kein Modell fände für den Judas, so könne er ja noch immer den Prior dafür nehmen! So war also das Bild außerordentlich schwer zu Ende zu führen. Aber Lionardo wurde auch innerlich nicht froh. Denn gerade an diesem Bilde zeigte es sich, was in seiner Seele lebte gegenüber dem, was er auf die Wand hinbringen konnte.

Und hier bin ich genötigt, eine geisteswissenschaftliche Hypothese vorzubringen, zu welcher derjenige kommen kann, der sich in alles vertieft, was man nach und nach über das Bild wissen kann. Diese Hypothese ergab sich mir, als ich Antwort zu gewinnen versuchte auf die vorhin aufgestellte Frage. Wenn man nämlich so das Leben des Lionardo verfolgt, dann sagt man sich: in diesem Manne lebte so ungeheuer vieles, was er nicht äußerlich der Menschheit offenbaren konnte, wofür die äußeren Mittel viel zu ohnmächtig waren, um es darzustellen; sollte er ein Größtes, wie er es im Abendmahl zweifellos wollte, wirklich so ohne weiteres zu seiner Befriedigung in diesem Werke haben hinmalen können? Diese Frage ergibt sich ganz selbstverständlich. Wenn man sieht, wie er immer wieder und wieder Geheimnis nach Geheimnis durch seine Studien zu erforschen gesucht hat, um irgend etwas zustandezubringen und es schließlich doch nicht zustandebrachte, dann kommt man zu einer solchen Frage. Dann ergibt sich fast von selbst die Antwort: wenn Lionardo auf der einen Seite das Reiterstandbild, das er zu einem Wunderwerke der plastischen Kunst hat machen wollen, nur bis zum Modell gebracht hat, das verlorengegangen ist, und er den Guß des Reiterstandbildes selbst überhaupt niemals in Angriff nahm, wenn er also nach sechzehnjähriger Arbeit unverrichteter Dinge von diesem Reiterstandbilde vollständig Abschied genommen hat, wie ging er dann wohl von diesem «Abendmahl» weg? Man hat das Gefühl, er ging unbefriedigt von diesem Abendmahl weg! Wenn man auch heute von diesem Bilde nur noch eine Ruine, nur noch ineinanderfließende feuchte Farbenflecke vor sich hat, und wenn man auch schon seit langem nichts mehr sah von dem, was Lionardo einst dort auf die Wand gemalt hat, so darf man vielleicht doch behaupten, was er auf die Wand gemalt hat, konnte nicht im entferntesten das darstellen, was davon in seiner Seele gelebt hat.

Um einen solchen Eindruck zu bekommen, muß man allerdings das Verschiedenste zusammenhalten, was man an Eindrücken gegenüber dem Bilde bekommen kann. Aber es gibt auch einige äußere Gründe. Unter all den Schriften, die von Lionardo erhalten sind, gibt es auch einen wunderbaren «’Traktat über die Malerei». Die Malerei wird ihrem Wesen nach als Kunst dargestellt, wie sie zu arbeiten hat entsprechend der Perspektive und aus der Farbengebung heraus; es wird dargestellt, wie sie der Auffassung nach zu arbeiten hat. Dieses Buch von Lionardo über die Malerei ist, trotzdem wir es auch nur wie einen Torso vor uns haben, ein wunderbares Werk, wie ein gleiches wohl nie in der Welt verfaßt worden ist. Die Prinzipien der malerischen Kunst sind darin so dargestellt, wie sie nur der höchste Genius darstellen konnte. Wunderbar ist zum Beispiel zu lesen, wie Lionardo zeigt, in welcher Weise man bei einer Schlacht die Pferde darzustellen hat, überhaupt den bestialischen Eindruck und doch das Grandiose, das durch die Schilderung einer Schlacht zur Anschauung kommen soll. Kurz, dieses Werk zeigt uns alle Größe Lionardos und, wir dürfen sagen, auch alle Ohnmacht Lionardos. Davon wird noch zu sprechen sein. Aber vor allen Dingen verrät es, wie er überall darauf bedacht war, für seine malerische Darstellung die Art zu studieren, wie sich die Wirklichkeit dem menschlichen Auge darbietet. Das Hell-Dunkel, die Farbengebung, das alles ist in diesem Werke Lionardos über die Malerei genial dargestellt, wie es in der Malerei zu verwerten ist. Und wenn wir in Lionardos Seele die Gewissenssehnsucht zu bestätigen hätten, niemals, auch nicht in der geringsten Kleinigkeit gegen das zu verstoßen, was er — wie wir an anderer Stelle noch sehen werden - so hoch schätzt wie die Wahrheit, wenn wir zeigen wollten, wie das in seiner Seele gelebt hat, dann könnten wir sagen, es tritt das in dem Traktat von der Malerei überall hervor, niemals gegen die Wahrheit des Eindruckes zu verstoßen, aber so niemals zu verstoßen, daß dieser Eindruck überall gerechtfertigt ist gegenüber den inneren Geheimnissen der Natur.

Wenn wir sein «Abendmahl» auf uns wirken lassen, so gibt es zwei Dinge, gegenüber denen man sich sagt, man kommt mit ihnen nicht zurecht im Hinblick auf die Forderungen Lionardos gegenüber der Malerei. Das eine ist die Judasfigur. An den Nachbildungen und auch gewissermaßen noch an dem schattenhaften Bild der Malerei in Mailand hat man den Eindruck: der Judas ist ja ganz mit Schatten bedeckt, ist ganz dunkel. Nun studiere man, wie das Licht von den verschiedenen Seiten einfällt, und wie überall bei den elf anderen Jüngern die Beleuchtungsverhältnisse in der wunderbarsten Weise der Wahrheit gemäß dargestellt sind. Nichts erklärt uns recht das Dunkel auf dem Gesichte des Judas! Wir bekommen nach den äußeren Lichtverhältnissen keine befriedigende Antwort auf das Warum dieser Dunkelheit. Und wenn man an die Christus- Jesus-Gestalt herankommt, so kann sich für das äußere Anschauen, wenn man nicht geisteswissenschaftlich vorgeht, eigentlich nur etwas wie eine Ahnung ergeben. Denn ebensowenig wie die Schwärze, das Dunkel bei der Judasfigur berechtigt ist, ebensowenig scheint das Sonnenhafte der Christus-Gestalt, das Heraustreten aus den anderen Figuren im angedeuteten Sinne berechtigt zu sein. Alle anderen Antlitze verstehen wir aus den Beleuchtungen, nicht das des Judas und nicht das Christus- Jesus-Antlitz.

Geht man aber geisteswissenschaftlich vor, dann baut sich wie von selbst in unserer Seele der Gedanke auf: der Maler hat wohl dahin gestrebt, wahrmachen zu können, daß in diesen beiden Gegensätzen « Jesus» und «Judas» Licht und Finsternis nicht von außen, sondern innerlich motiviert uns entgegentreten. Er hat vielleicht wahrmachen wollen, daß dieses Christus-Antlitz so vor uns steht, daß wir es durch die äußeren Lichtverhältnisse wohl unmotiviert finden in äußerer Art, daß wir aber dennoch glauben können: diese Seele, die hinter diesem Antlitze ist, verleiht durch sich diesem Antlitze eine Leuchtkraft, und dieses Antlitz darf leuchten im Widerspruche mit den Lichtverhältnissen. Und ebenso kann man dem Judas gegenüber den Eindruck bekommen: diese Gestalt darf gewissermaßen auf sich selber einen Schatten hinzaubern, der durch nichts gerechtfertigt ist, was von ringsherum an Schatten geworfen wird.

Es ist, wie gesagt, eine geisteswissenschaftliche Hypothese, aber eine solche, die sich mir in vielen Jahren herausgearbeitet hat, eine Hypothese, von der man glauben kann, daß sie sich um so mehr bestätigen wird, je weiter man sich in das ganze Problem hineinleben wird. Man kann es nach dieser Hypothese verstehen, wie Lionardo, der überall in seinen Werken und Studien die Naturwahrheit anstrebte, mit zitterndem Pinsel arbeitete, um ein Problem darzustellen, das jeweils nur an dieser einzelnen Gestalt gerechtfertigt sein konnte. Und dann kann man verstehen, daß Lionardo wohl bitter enttäuscht sein mochte, ganz unzweifelhaft, weil es durch die Mittel der damaligen Darstellungskunst unmöglich war, mit voller Wahrhaftigkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit dieses Problem zum Ausdruck zu bringen, weil er noch nicht konnte, was er wollte und schließlich an der Möglichkeit der Ausführung verzweifelte und so ein Bild hinterlassen mußte, welches ihn doch nicht befriedigte.

Dann beantwortet man sich so ganz im Einklange mit der ganzen Gestalt und mit der ganzen geistigen Größe des Lionardo die aufgeworfene Empfindungsfrage: Ja, mit dem bitteren Gefühl, daß er sich an seinem bedeutendsten Werke eine Aufgabe gesetzt hatte, deren Ausführung ihn nach den den Menschen zugänglichen Mitteln nicht befriedigen konnte, ging wohl Lionardo von diesem Bilde hinweg; und wenn auch kein Auge in späteren Jahrhunderten das sehen wird, was Lionardo in Mailand an die Wand gezaubert hatte, so war es doch auch seinerzeit ganz gewiß nicht das, was in seiner Seele gelebt hat. Ja, wenn man ihn so gegenüber seiner bedeutendsten Schöpfung ansieht, dann ist man erst recht versucht, sich zu fragen: Welches Geheimnis verbirgt sich eigentlich hinter dieser Gestalt?

Als hier vor vierzehn Tagen die Persönlichkeit Raffaels betrachtet worden ist, da wurde zu zeigen versucht, wie man eine solche Persönlichkeit ganz anders verstehen kann, wenn man sich auf geisteswissenschaftliche Untergründe stützt, wenn man sich darüber klar ist, daß die Menschenseele etwas ist, was in vielen Erdenleben immer wiederkehrt, so daß eine Seele, die in ein gewisses Zeitalter hineingeboren ist, eben nicht dieses eine Leben nur lebt, sondern in der ganzen Anlage und in der ganzen Art der Entwicklung sich die Anlagen aus früheren Erdenleben mitbringt und nun mit dem, was sie als Anlage aus früheren Erdenleben in das jetzige hereinträgt, sich demjenigen gegenübergestellt findet, was die geistige Umgebung hergibt. Wenn man so die Seele betrachtet, erkennend, daß sie mit einem inneren geistigen Gut ins Dasein tritt, das aus wiederholten Erdenleben stammt, und wenn man dazunimmt, daß die ganze Entwicklung sinnvoll und weisheitsvoll erscheint, wenn man voraussetzt, daß nicht zufällig etwas in gewissen Epochen auftritt, sondern regelmäßig und gesetzmäßig, wie die Blüte der Pflanze nach den grünen Blättern erscheint, wenn man also weisheitsvolle Gestaltung im geschichtlichen Werden der Menschheit annimmt und dann die Menschenseele immer wieder und wieder zurückkehren sieht aus geistigen Regionen, dann erst werden die einzelnen Gestalten erklärbar. Aber was an dem einzelnen Menschenleben zu studieren ist, das enthüllt sich ganz besonders, wenn man solche aus der Mittelmäßigkeit herausfallende Menschenseelen ins Auge faßt. Wenn man Lionardo so betrachtet, wie wir die einzelnen Momente seines Lebens nur skizzenmäßig zusammenzufassen versuchten, dann kann man immer wieder und wieder hingeführt werden zu dem Hintergrunde, von dem diese Seele sich abhebt. Und dieser Hintergrund ist die Zeit, in welche diese Seele hineingestellt ist vom Jahre 1452 bis zum Jahre 1519.

Was ist das für eine Zeit? Das ist die Zeit vor dem Aufblühen der neueren naturwissenschaftlichen Weltbetrachtung. Es ist die Zeit, bevor die Weltanschauung des Kopernikus gekommen ist, bevor Giordano Bruno, Kepler, Galilei gewirkt haben. Wie betrachten wir geisteswissenschaftlich diese Zeit?

Wir haben wiederholt darauf aufmerksam gemacht, daß je weiter wir im Laufe der Menschheitsentwickelung zurückkommen, desto anders das ganze menschliche Anschauen und das menschliche Zusammenleben mit der Umgebung wird. In uralten Zeiten der Menschheitsentwickelung finden wir in jeder Seele eine Art von Hellsehen, wodurch die Seelen in gewissen Zwischenzuständen zwischen Schlafen und Wachen in die geistige Welt hineinschauten. Dieses ursprüngliche Hellsehen verliert sich im Laufe der Zeit, aber bis in die Zeiten des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts hinein blieb dennoch aus den älteren Zeiten ein Rest dieses Hellsehens. Nicht das Hellsehen selber, das war schon lange abhanden gekommen; was aber geblieben war, das war ein Gefühl von dem Verbundensein der Menschenseele mit dem geistigen Hintergrunde der Welt. Was einst die Seelen geschaut hatten, das fühlten sie weiter, und obzwar dieses Fühlen schon schwach geworden war, so empfanden die Seelen dennoch, daß sie in ihrem Mittelpunkte zusammenhingen mit dem Geistigen, das die Welt durchlebt und durchwebt, so wie dasjenige was die physischen Vorgänge im Menschenleibe sind, physisch zusammenhängt mit dem physischen Geschehen der Welt.

Es gehört nun zu den Gesetzmäßigkeiten der Entwicklung, daß das alte Zusammengehen der Menschenseele mit der geistigen Welt für eine Weileabhanden kommen mußte. Niemals hätte die neuere Naturwissenschaft erblühen können, wenn das alte Hellsehen geblieben wäre. Es mußte diese ganze alte Art des Anschauens verlorengehen, damit sich die Seelen hinwendeten zu dem, was sich den Sinnen darbietet und was durch den Verstand, der an das Gehirn gebunden ist, wissenschaftlich ergründet werden kann. Nur dadurch war jene naturwissenschaftliche Weltanschauung möglich, die sich seit den Zeiten des Lionardo bis heute herausgebildet hat, daß das alte geistige Anschauen der Menschheit abhanden gekommen war, und daß sich der Mensch «objektiv», wie man sagt, «gegenständlich» zu der äußeren sinnlichen Anschauung hinneigte und zu dem, was der Verstand in der Sinnesanschauung erfassen kann.

Heute stehen wir wieder an einem neuen Wendepunkte, an dem Wendepunkte zu jener Zeit, in welcher es dem Menschen durch die moderne Geisteswissenschaft wieder möglich ist, zu einem geistigen Anschauen der Dinge zu kommen. Denn die naturwissenschaftliche Entwicklung hat eine doppelte Bedeutung. Einmal sollte sie der Menschheit ein gewisses naturwissenschaftliches Gut überliefern. Dieses hat sich im Laufe der Jahrhunderte seit dem Auftreten von Kopernikus, Kepler und so weiter, seit die Naturwissenschaft von Triumph zu Triumph geschritten ist, in wunderbarer Weise in das praktische und theoretische Leben eingelebt. Das ist das eine, was durch die Naturwissenschaft in den letzten Jahrhunderten seit der Zeit Lionardos erobert worden ist. Das andere ist das, was nicht auf einmal kommen konnte, sondern was erst in unserer Zeit möglich geworden ist. Denn nicht nur, daß man der Naturwissenschaft das verdankt, was man durch die kopernikanische Weltanschauung, durch die Beobachtungen und Untersuchungen Keplers und Galileis, was man durch die moderne Spektralanalyse und so weiter erfahren hat, sondern man verdankt ihr auch eine gewisse Erziehung der Menschenseele,

Zunächst richtete die Menschenseele den Blick hinaus auf die Sinneswelt; dadurch bildete sich die Naturwissenschaft aus. Aber durch die Naturwissenschaft bildeten sich neue Ideen, neue Begriffe aus. Und wo die Naturwissenschaft Allergrößtes geleistet hat, da ist sie nicht durch die sinnliche Anschauung groß geworden, sondern durch etwas ganz anderes. Es ist bereits darauf hingewiesen worden. Gerade auf einem bestimmten Gebiete hat man sich in der Zeit vor Kopernikus auf das sinnliche Anschauen verlassen. Was hat es ergeben? Man hatte geglaubt, daß die Erde im Weltenraume stille stehe, und daß sich die Sonne und die übrigen Planeten um sie herumbewegten. Dann kam Kopernikus, der den Mut hatte, sich nicht auf das sinnliche Anschauen zu verlassen. Er hat den Mut gehabt, zu sagen, daß, wenn man sich auf die Sinnesanschauung verläßt, man keine einzige empirische Entdeckung macht, daß man aber zu empirischen Entdeckungen kommt, wenn man in einer strengen Weise alles zusammen denkt, was man vorher beobachtet hat. In seinen Fußtapfen sind dann die Menschen weitergeschritten, und es ist durchaus ein Verkennen der Sachlage, wenn man glauben wollte, die Naturwissenschaft sei dadurch zu ihrer heutigen Höhe gelangt, daß die Menschheit sich nur auf die Sinne verlassen hat.

Aber was durch die Naturwissenschaft in die Menschheit gekommen ist, das hat sich auch den Seelen eingeprägt; die Ideen der Naturwissenschaft leben in unseren Seelen, haben unsere Seelen erzogen. Die Naturwissenschaften sind neben dem, was sie als Inhalt gegeben haben, auch ein Erziehungsmittel für die Seelen gewesen, und heute sind, indem die naturwissenschaftlichen Ideen wirklich in der Seele nicht nur gedacht, sondern gelebt werden, die Seelen dazu reif geworden, ganz von selbst in die Geisteswissenschaft hineingetrieben zu werden. Dazu mußte aber die Menschheit erst reif werden. Dazu mußten die Jahrhunderte seit der Zeit Lionardos verfließen.

Jetzt betrachten wir Lionardo. Er kommt in seine Zeit hinein mit einer Seele, die in einem früheren Dasein zu jenen Eingeweihten gehört hat, die in der alten Art sich zu den Geheimnissen des Weltanschauens erhoben hatten. Das konnte er in der Zeit, als er im fünfzehnten Jahrhundert geboren wurde, nicht ausleben. Denn man kann in früheren Verkörperungen nach der Art, wie es diese früheren Erdenleben möglich machten, sich in großer, gewaltiger Weise in die Weltengeheimnisse eingelebt haben; wie man sie in einem neuen Dasein ins Bewußtsein hereinbringt, das hängt von der äußeren Leiblichkeit ab. Ein Leib des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts konnte nicht das an inneren Gedanken, an inneren Empfindungen und an innerer Gestaltungskraft zum Ausdruck bringen, was Lionardo in früheren Daseinsstufen in sich aufgenommen hatte. Was er von früher hatte, das wirkte nur als Kraft, aber er war unmittelbar in dem Zeitalter vor dem Aufblühen der Naturwissenschaften in einen Leib hineingebannt, fühlte sich überall beengt. Es kam die Zeit heran, ihre Morgenröte war schon da, in der man bloß hinausschauen wollte mit den Sinnen in die Welt des sinnlichen Daseins und nur mit dem Verstande denken wollte, der an das Instrument des Gehirnes gebunden ist. Lionardo drängte es überall nach dem Geiste, denn das hatte er sich aus früheren Leben mitgebracht. Und in grandioser Weise drängte es ihn nach dem Geiste.

Sehen wir ihn jetzt zunächst als Künstler an. Ganz anders ist die Kunst geworden in der Zeit, da Lionardo gelebt hat, als etwa in der Griechenzeit. Versuchen wir einmal, uns in das Schaffen zum Beispiel einer plastischen Gestalt bei einem griechischen Künstler zu versetzen. Was für eine Empfindung bekommen wir, selbst noch dann, wenn wir zum Beispiel die Mark-Aurel-Statue in Rom ansehen? Niemals würden die, welche so etwas geschaffen haben, in der Weise wie etwa Michelangelo oder Lionardo in den Einzelheiten Studien gemacht haben, derartiges in den einzelnen Formen nach einem äußeren Modell nachgebildet haben. Das wunderbare Pferd der Mark-Aurel-Statue ist ganz gewiß nicht so studiert worden, wie Lionardo sein Pferd zu der Reiterstatue des Francesco Sforza hat studieren können. Und dennoch, wie lebendig stehen die alten Statuen vor uns! Woher kommt das? Das kommt daher, weil sich die Menschenseelen in den griechischen Zeiten unmittelbar als Schöpfer ihres Leibes fühlten, weil sie sich mit den Seelenkräften aller Welt eins fühlten. In jenen Zeiten der griechischen Kunst fühlte man zum Beispiel an einem Arme alle die Kräfte, welche den Arm formten. Man fühlte sich hinein in das selbständige Innensein der eigenen Gestalt. Man schaute die Gestalten nicht von außen an, sondern schuf von innen wissend, indem man sich der gestaltbildenden Kraft noch bewußt war. Das kann man selbst noch im Außeren nachweisen. Man sehe sich die griechischen Frauengestalten an: sie sind alle unmittelbar empfunden. Daher sind sie alle in dem Lebensalter dargestellt, in welchem ein aufwärts gehendes Wachstum vorhanden ist. Da fühlen wir überall, daß der Künstler der Natur nachgeschaffen hat, weil er innerhalb des Geistes der Natur stand, sich in seiner Seele mit dem Geiste der Natur verbunden fühlte.

Dieses Sich-verbunden-Fühlen mit dem Geist, der durch die Dinge webt und lebt, sollte in dem Zeitalter Lionardos verlorengehen, und es mußte verlorengehen, weil sonst die ganze neue Zeit nicht hätte kommen können. Das ist nicht eine Kritik der Zeit, sondern eine Darstellung des Sinnes der Tatsachen.

Sehen wir nun, wie Lionardo zu Werke geht, wenn er die Bewegungen der Hand, der einzelnen Teile eines Tieres oder die menschliche Physiognomie studiert! So geht er vor, daß er in der Seele ein inneres Wissen, ein inneres Erleben hat, das aber nicht zum Bewußtsein kommt. Es ist etwas, was da lebendig an diesen Gestalten schafft, aber Lionardo kann es nicht von innen fassen. Er fühlt sich wie abgetrennt davon, von diesem Von-innen-Erfassen. Und nun ist ihm nichts genug. Nun steht er da — denn die neuere naturwissenschaftliche Weltanschauung ist noch nicht vorhanden in Erwartung dieser naturwissenschaftlichen Weltanschauung; aber er kann sie noch nicht selber haben. Nehmen wir seine Schriften: Auf jeder Seite springen Dinge hervor, welche die Menschen im Laufe der nächsten drei Jahrhunderte erst wieder finden und manchmal selbst bis heute noch nicht gefunden haben. Lionardo hatte die wunderbarsten Ideen, die zu seiner Zeit oft gar keine Wirkung gehabt haben. Wir finden sie in seinen Werken, auch in seinem künstlerischen Schaffen.

So empfinden wir bei ihm die Ohnmacht, mit der eine Seele auftreten mußte in einem Zeitalter, das zu Ende ging für die alte Art der Weltauffassung, und dem die neue Weltauffassung noch nicht heraufgekommen war. Diese neue Weltauffassung brachte es allerdings mit sich, daß sie das gesamte menschliche Anschauen in ein Anschauen der Einzelheiten zersplitterte. Wir sehen heraufkommen eine Spezialisierung der einzelnen Wirkenszweige. Bei Lionardo erscheint noch alles vereinigt. Er ist zugleich umfassender Maler, umfassender Musiker, umfassender Philosoph, umfassender Techniker. Er hat dies in sich vereinigt, weil seine Seele aus der alten Zeit mit großen Fähigkeiten herüberkommt und nun in der neuen Zeit überall «tippen» kann an die Dinge, aber nicht hinein kann. Und so erscheint dann, menschlich gesehen, Lionardo wie eine tragische Gestalt, erscheint aber, von einem höheren Gesichtspunkte aus gesehen, ungeheuer bedeutungsvoll am Wendepunkte zu einer neueren Zeit.

Das kann man selbst sehen, wenn man durchgeht, was Lionardo weiter geschaffen hat. Er hat da die bedeutendsten Dinge nur bis zu einem gewissen Punkte gebracht; dann haben seine Schüler daran gearbeitet. Und selbst an solchen Dingen wie dem « Johannes» oder der «Mona Lisa» im Louvre in Paris sehen wir, wie sie durch die technische Behandlungsart so hergestellt waren, daß sie bald ihren Glanz verlieren mußten. Dann sehen wir aber überall auch, wie eigentlich Lionardo sich selber nirgends genugtun konnte. Es ist nicht möglich, ohne die Bilder zur Hand zu haben, über die Einzelheiten von Lionardos Malereien zu sprechen. Vertieft man sich in sie, so zeigt sich überall, wie Lionardo als Künstler an Grenzen kam, über die er nicht hinauskonnte, und wie überall das, was in seiner Seele lebte, überhaupt nicht einmal bis zu dem Punkt kommen konnte, wo es vom seelischen Erleben ins Bewußtsein heraufleuchtet, wie es aus jenem Stadium des seelischen Erlebens in einem Momente so aufleuchtet, daß man aufjauchzt, und wieder in Schmerz versinken möchte, weil es nicht zum deutlichen Bewußtsein kam. Nicht einmal das trat für Lionardo ein.

Wir folgen eigentlich Lionardo mit recht bitteren Gefühlen, wenn wir sehen, wie er zuletzt von Franz I. von Frankreich für die drei letzten Lebensjahre geholt wird und in dem Wohnsitz, den ihm Franz I. angewiesen hat, in geistiger Betrachtung, in die Geheimnisse des Daseins vertieft, diese Jahre verbringt. Denn er tritt uns da entgegen als der einsame Mann, der eigentlich mit der Welt, die ihn umgibt, nichts Rechtes mehr gemeinsam haben kann, und der einen ungeheuern Kontrast empfinden mußte zwischen dem, was er als die Urgründe des Daseins empfand, die durch die Kunst Gestalt annehmen können, und dem, was er doch nur fragmentarisch der Welt hat geben können.

Wenn man die Dinge so nimmt, dann sieht man auf Lionardo hin und sagt sich: Eine Seele ist da, in der geht vieles vor. Vieles, unendlich vieles geht in ihr vor. Erschütternd ist der Eindruck, den sie auf den Betrachter macht, wenn man sich vorstellt, was dem Menschheitsprozesse von dieser Seele übergeben wird. Was sich dem Menschheitsprozesse von dieser Seele auch äußerlich offenbart, sogar schon beim Tode Lionardos, wie ist das geringfügig gegenüber dem, was in dieser Seele lebte! Wie stehen wir da vor der Ökonomie des Daseins, wenn wir der Anschauung huldigen sollten, daß sich das Menschendasein in demjenigen erschöpft, was nur äußerlich zum Dasein kommt? Wie sinn- und zwecklos erscheint das Leben einer solchen Seele wie der Lionardos, wenn wir sehen, was in ihr vor sich gegangen ist, und was sie wegen dieses Vorsichgehens leiden und dulden konnte, und wenn wir es vergleichen mit dem, was sie dann der Welt hat geben können? Welcher Kontrast ergäbe sich, wenn wir sagen wollten, diese Seele dürfe nur nach dem betrachtet werden, wie sie sich im äußeren Leben offenbart hat! Nein, so können wir sie nicht betrachten! Wir müssen uns auf einen anderen Standpunkt stellen und müssen sagen: Was sie auch immer der Welt gegeben hat, was sie erlebt hat, was sie im Innern durchgemacht hat, das gehört einer anderen Welt an, die gegenüber unserer Welt eine übersinnliche ist. Und solche Menschen sind vor allem ein Beweis dafür, daß der Mensch mit seiner Seele im übersinnlichen Dasein steht, und daß solche Seelen mit dem übersinnlichen Dasein etwas auszumachen haben und daß nur ein «Abfallprodukt» das ist, was sie der äußeren Welt übergeben von dem, was sie im ganzen durchzumachen haben.

Erst dann kommen wir zu einem richtigen Eindruck, wenn wir zu dem Strom, der sich im äußeren Menschengeschehen abspielt, einen anderen, übersinnlichen Strom hinzufügen und sagen: Es geschieht etwas parallel mit dem sinnlichen Strome, und in dem Übersinnlichen sind solche Seelen eingebettet. Darin müssen sie leben, damit sie die Verbindungsglieder sind zwischen dem Sinnlichen und dem Übersinnlichen. Sinnvoll erscheint das Dasein solcher Seelen erst, wenn wir ein übersinnliches Dasein annehmen können, in welches sie eingebettet sind. So schauen wir wenig von Lionardo, wenn wir auf sein äußeres Schaffen hinblicken; so bekommen wir eine Anschauung davon, daß diese Seele noch etwas abzumachen hat im übersinnlichen Dasein, und sagen uns dann: wir verstehen! - Damit diese Seele in ihrem Gesamtleben, das durch viele Erdenleben verläuft, immer der Menschheit dieses oder jenes offenbaren kann, mußte sie in jenem «Lionardo-Dasein» das durchmachen, daß nur das wenigste, was in dieser Seele war, zum äußeren Ausdruck hat kommen können. So sind solche Seelen wie die Lionardo-Seele selber rechte Welträtsel und Lebensrätsel, verkörperte Weltenrätsel.

Was ich heute ausführen wollte, sollte nicht in scharf abgezirkelten Begriffen hingestellt werden, sondern es sollte einen Hinweis darauf geben, wie man sich solchen Seelen nähern kann. Denn Geisteswissenschaft soll wahrhaftig nicht Theorien geben! Geisteswissenschaft soll durch alles, was sie vermag, das ganze Gefühls- und Empfindungsleben des Menschen ergreifen und soll selber Lebenselixier werden, soll so Lebenselixier werden, daß wir durch sie ein neues Verhältnis zu Welt und Leben gewinnen. Geister wie Lionardo sind ganz besonders geeignet, dazu anzuleiten, daß dieses neue Verhältnis zu Welt und Leben, das wir durch die Geisteswissenschaft gewinnen können, zur Welt komme. Wenn wir hinschauen auf Geister wie Lionardo, so können wir sagen: Rätselvoll treten sie ins Dasein, weil sie ein Größeres auszuleben haben, als ihnen ihr Zeitalter geben kann. Weil sie Früheres herüberbringen, treten Seelen wie Lionardo nicht nur in unscheinbarem Stande ins Dasein, sondern sogar so, wie Lionardo ins Leben tritt. Von einem mittelmäßigen Vater, und geboren von einer Mutter, die bald überhaupt ganz aus dem Gesichtskreis verschwindet, nachdem sie das natürliche Kind geboren hat, ward Lionardo erzogen unter mittelmäßigen Leuten. So sehen wir ihn ganz auf sich selbst gestellt und das zum Ausdruck bringend, was er aus früheren Leben herübergetragen hat. Gerade wenn wir auf die ungünstigen Verhältnisse seiner Geburt hinsehen, erkennen wir, daß sie nicht verhinderten, den größten Seeleninhalt zur Offenbarung kommen zu lassen.

So sehen wir Lionardos Seele so gesund, so umfassend, daß wir es nachfühlen können, wenn Goethe aus seiner großen Seele heraus sagt: «Regelmäßig, schön gebildet stand er als ein Mustermensch der Menschheit gegenüber, und wie des Auges Fassungskraft und Klarheit dem Verstande eigentlich angehört, so war Klarheit und Verständigkeit unserm Künstler vollkommen zu eigen.» Wenn wir diese Worte auf Lionardo anwenden wollen — und sie sind anwendbar -, dann können wir sie anwenden auf den jugendlichen Lionardo, der uns körperlich und geistig frisch, vollkommen, schaffensfreudig, weltenfreudig, weltensehnsüchtig zugleich entgegentritt — ein vollkommener Mensch, ein Mustermensch, zum Eroberer geboren, ein Mensch, der auch zum Humor geboren ist, denn das hat er bei den verschiedensten Gelegenheiten seines Lebens gezeigt. Und dann wenden wir den Blick zu jener Zeichnung hin, die als ein Selbstbildnis gilt und gelten darf, zu dem alten Manne, in dessen Gesicht vieles Erleben, vieles schwere, schmerzliche Erleben tiefe Furchen eingegraben hat, dessen Züge um den Mund herum uns die ganze Disharmonie andeuten, in der wir endlich den einsamen Mann sehen, fern von seinem Vaterlande, im Asyl bei dem König von Frankreich, noch ringend mit dem Weltendasein, aber einsam, verlassen, unverstanden, wenn auch geliebt von Freunden, die es nicht unterlassen haben, ihn zu begleiten.

So tritt uns die Größe dieses Geistes, die durch viel Leiden hindurchgeht, an Lionardo ganz besonders entgegen, wie sie sich hineinbegibt in diesen Leib, ihn erst vollkommen gestaltend und ihn dann, verbittert, verlassend. Wir schauen hinein in dieses Antlitz und fühlen den Genius der Menschheitselber uns aus diesem Menschenantlitz entgegenschauend. Ja, wir beginnen die Zeit zu begreifen, die Zeit der Abendröte, in der Lionardo gelebt hat, und die Zeit, in der Kopernikus, Kepler, Giordano Bruno, Galilei gelebt haben, mit denen eine neue Morgenröte anbricht, und wir schauen alle die Beschränktheiten und Beengungen, die Lionardos große Seele erleben mußte. Wir verstehen das Zeitalter und verstehen den großen Künstler, der hinter allen menschlichen Mitteln steht, und der schließlich auch nur mit menschlichen Mitteln arbeiten kann. Wir müssen unser ganzes menschliches Verständnis hinzubringen und blicken in Lionardos Antlitz hinein, nachdem wir uns geisteswissenschaftlich dazu vertieft haben — und die ganze Natur des Zeitalters blickt uns aus diesem Antlitz entgegen. Ja, aus diesen verbitterten Gesichtszügen blickt uns entgegen der sich zunächst nach abwärts neigende Menschengeist. Wir müssen ihn so kennenlernen, damit wir wieder die ganze Größe der Kraft kennenlernen, die vorhanden sein mußte, damit ein Kopernikus, ein Kepler, ein Galilei, ein Giordano Bruno haben erstehen können.

Wahrhaftig, dann erst bekommen wir die richtige Ehrfurcht vor dem Gang und der Entwickelung des Menschengeistes, wenn wir jene Tragik, die wir gegenüber Giordano Brunos Scheiterhaufen empfinden, auch noch vertiefen lernen durch den Anblick der an dem vorhergehenden, niedergehenden Zeitalter ohnmächtig sich fühlenden Seele Lionardos. Lionardos Größe wird uns erst klar, wenn wir eine Ahnung von dem bekommen, was er nicht vermochte. Und das hängt mit etwas zusammen, in das wir zum Schluß die heutigen Betrachtungen zusammenfassen wollen. Das hängt damit zusammen, daß die menschliche Seele doch befriedigt, ja, beseligt sein kann beim Anblick der Unvollkommenheit, wenn auch am beseligtsten nicht beim Anblick der kleinen, sondern der großen Unvollkommenheit, beim Anblick jenes Schaffens, das wegen seiner Größe an der Ausführung erstirbt. Denn in den ersterbenden Kräften ahnen, ja schauen wir zuletzt die sich für die Zukunft vorbereitenden Kräfte, und in der Abendröte geht uns auf die Ahnung und die Hoffnung der Morgenröte.

Immerdar muß unsere Seele gegenüber der Menschheitsentwickelung so empfinden, daß wir uns sagen, alles Werden, es verläuft so, daß wir sehen: Da, wo das Geschaffene zur Ruine wird, da wissen wir, daß stets aus den Ruinen neues Leben blühen werde.

Leonardo's Intellectual Greatness at the Turning Point to Modern Times

Leonardo's name is constantly brought to the attention of countless people through the widespread distribution of what is perhaps his most famous painting, the renowned “Last Supper.” Who does not know this Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, and who, knowing it, has not admired the powerful idea expressed in this painting! Here we see a meaningful moment embodied in pictorial form, a moment that is perceived by countless souls as one of the most significant in earthly history: the figure of Christ in the center, flanked on both sides by the twelve companions of Christ Jesus. We see these twelve companions in deeply expressive movements and postures. We see these gestures, these postures, so individualized in each of these twelve figures that we can well get the impression that every type of human soul character is expressed in these twelve figures, every way in which any soul, according to its temperament and character, can relate to what the painting expresses.

Goethe probably most impressively captured this moment in his essay on “Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper,” the moment when Christ Jesus has just uttered the words: “One of you will betray me!”

What goes on in each of the twelve souls who are so intimately connected with the speaker and look up to him so reverently after these words have been spoken, we see all this in the numerous reproductions of this work that are circulating throughout the world, expressively reaching out to us from each of these souls.

There are depictions of the Last Supper event that date from an earlier time. We can trace depictions of the Last Supper, for example, if we go back no further than Giotto to Leonardo da Vinci, and we will find that Leonardo brought what can be called the dramatic element into the depiction of the Last Supper; for it is a wonderfully dramatic moment that confronts us in his depiction. The earlier depictions appear to us to be calm, as if only to express the togetherness; conjuring up before us an expression of the most significant soulfulness with full dramatic power, this is how the “Last Supper” first appears to us pictorially in Leonardo. But if one has absorbed this impression of the idea of this painting in one's soul, in one's heart, from the world-famous reproductions, and now comes to Milan to that old Dominican church of Santa Maria delle Grazie and sees there on the wall all those—one cannot call them anything else—blurred, indistinct, damp blots of color, the last thing that remains of the original, which has become world-famous in its reproductions, then perhaps one researches back and, through research, gets the impression that for quite some time now, not much of what people once saw after it was painted by Leonardo, speaking of it in such enthusiastic, exuberant, rapturous words, has been visible on that wall of the old Dominican church. What must once have spoken to the soul from this wall like an artistic miracle, not only through the idea that has just been stammeringly expressed, but also through the expressive wonders of color created by Leonardo, so that these colors expressed the most intimate feelings of the soul, indeed, the heartbeat of the twelve figures, must have long since disappeared from this wall. What this painting must have endured over the course of time!

Leonardo felt compelled to depart from the technique of painting on such walls that had been used before him. He found the type of colors that had been used previously not expressive enough. He wanted to conjure up the finest stirrings of the soul on the wall, and so he tried something that had not been done before in mural painting: he used oil-based paints. This brought a whole series of obstacles to light. The location of the wall, the location of the entire place, was such that these paints were bound to be affected by moisture relatively quickly; the moisture came from the wall itself. The entire room, which was a Dominican refectory, was once completely flooded. Many other things contributed to this, such as the quartering of soldiers in times of war and other factors. All these things took their toll on the painting.

There was a time when the monks of the monastery did not exactly treat this painting with particular reverence. They found that the door leading to the monastery's dining hall below the painting was too low, so one day they had it raised. This destroyed part of the painting. Then a coat of arms was placed directly above the head of Christ; in short, the painting was treated in the most barbaric manner. And then there were—one must call them that—picturesque charlatans who painted over it, so that hardly any of the colors it once had can be seen anymore. Nevertheless, when one stands in front of the image, it exudes an indescribable magic. All the barbarism, all the overpainting, all the softening could not completely destroy the magic that emanates from the image. Today, it is only a shadow that stretches across the wall, but this image still exudes a certain magic. For the most part, it is only half painterly; it is the idea that affects the soul, but it has a powerful effect.

Anyone who has familiarized themselves a little with Leonardo's other works, who has sought out reproductions of his works or even the works attributed to Leonardo that are scattered throughout various galleries in Europe and are still more or less preserved as he himself painted them, who has sought to familiarize themselves with Leonardo's work and to delve into what he wrote over the course of time, who has familiarized themselves with his life as it unfolded from 1452 to 1519, will stand before this painting in the dining hall of the Dominicans in Milan, in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, with very special feelings. For basically, as much as we still have of the magical creation that Leonardo once painted on this wall, as much, one feels, is actually still available to the general consciousness of humanity of the tremendous greatness, the power, and the content of this comprehensive personality of Leonardo himself. What one can allow to affect one's soul today from Leonardo is hardly any different from what this comprehensive personality once brought to the development of the world, just as these intermingling splashes of color relate to what Leonardo once conjured up on the wall. And just as one stands before this painting in Milan with melancholy, so one stands before the whole figure of Leonardo with melancholy.

Goethe also points out how, when one allows the biographies of earlier biographers to sink in, one gets the impression that in Leonardo, humanity was presented with a personality who radiated fresh vitality everywhere, who viewed life joyfully and acted joyfully on life, embracing everything with love, wanting to grasp everything with an enormous thirst for knowledge, fresh in soul and body. Then one perhaps also turns one's gaze to that painting, which is considered a self-portrait and is preserved in Turin, and then see this self-portrait of the old Leonardo, this face with its expressive furrows, made expressive by pain, with its bitter mouth and features that reveal so much of what Leonardo must have felt as his opposition to the world and to everything he had to experience. Thus, this personality stands before us in a remarkable way at the turn of the modern era.

If we turn once more to the painting in Santa Maria delle Grazie and try to look at this shadow on the wall of the refectory together with the oldest engravings, the oldest reproductions that have been preserved of this painting, and if we try, so to speak, with the “eyes of the mind,” to use Goethe's words, to try to recreate this painting in our minds, then perhaps a feeling, a sensation may arise in us: did the man who once painted this picture walk away satisfied with it when he had made his last brushstroke? Did he say to himself: you have achieved here what lived in your soul?

It seems to me that one can arrive at this feeling, at this question, in a completely natural way. Why? When one considers Leonardo's entire life, one must say: this life instills in us the feeling just described. When one begins to let Leonardo sink in, how he was born a natural child, the son of a mediocre mind, Ser Pietro in Vinci, and a peasant woman who then disappears completely from view, while the father marries according to his station and gives his son into care; when you see the child growing up alone, interacting only with nature and his own soul, you say to yourself: there must have been an enormous amount of vitality in this man for him to remain fresh! And he did remain so at first. Then, as he showed an early talent for drawing, he entered Verrocchio's school. His father had sent him there because he believed that his talent for drawing could be exploited. The young Lionardo is now used to help paint the master's pictures. An anecdote from this period tells that Leonardo once had to paint a figure, and that when the master saw it, he decided to stop painting altogether because he felt surpassed by his pupil—an anecdote that is more than just that when one considers Leonardo as a whole.

We then find him growing up in Florence, his talent for painting increasing more and more. But we find something else as well. If we follow his talent as a painter, we get the impression that year after year he was preoccupied with the greatest artistic plans, with constantly new plans. He also had commissions from people who recognized his great talent and wanted something from him. Leonardo first allowed the idea of what he wanted to create to emerge, and then began his studies. But what were these studies like?

This study focused in a tremendously characteristic way on all the details that came into consideration. For example, if he had a picture to paint in which three or four figures appeared, he went about his work in such a way that he not only studied a single model, but went around the city and observed hundreds and hundreds of people. He would often spend an entire day following a person if he found something interesting about them. He would sometimes invite all kinds of people from all walks of life to his home and tell them all sorts of things that amused or frightened them, because he wanted to study their facial expressions for the most diverse emotional experiences. Once, when a rebel was captured and hanged, Lionardo went to the place of execution, and a drawing has been preserved showing how he tried to capture the expression on the hanged man's face and his entire posture; in the lower corner of the sheet, a head is drawn in particular detail in order to capture the exact impression.

We have caricatures by Leonardo that have survived, incredible figures, and we can see what he actually wanted to achieve with them. For example, he had drawn a face and was now trying to see what would happen if he made the chin bigger and bigger. In order to see the significance of the individual parts of the human form, he enlarged a single limb to determine how this limb fits into the whole human organism in its natural size. We find grotesque figures in all kinds of distortions in Leonardo's work. Drawings have been preserved in which he sketched individual parts over and over again, drawings that he then wanted to use for corresponding works. Although some of them originate from his students, many are his own.

When you let all this sink in, you get the impression that he often feels this way. He has a painting commission; he is supposed to depict this or that. So he studies the details in the manner just described. Then something special begins to interest him, and now he no longer studies for the purpose of the painting, but to learn about the details of an animal or a human being. If he wants to paint a battle, he goes to the riding school to study the details, or he goes somewhere where the horses are left to their own devices, and in doing so he then strays from the actual idea for which he wanted to use his studies. Thus, studies pile up on studies, and in the end he is no longer concerned with returning to the painting.

Thus, we see more meaningful paintings from his early Florentine period, although all of these paintings have been painted over today and the original form is no longer entirely recognizable, the “Saint Jerome” and the “Adoration of the Kings,” for which studies are also available, as they have just been characterized, and one has the feeling that this man lived in the fullness of the secrets of the world. He sought to penetrate the secrets of the world, sought in an original way to trace these secrets of nature, as it were, and yet never actually came to a work of which he could say that it had been completed in any way. One must put oneself in the place of such a soul, which is too rich to be able to complete in any way what it has begun, a soul on which the secrets of the world have such an effect that, once it begins somewhere, it must proceed from mystery to mystery and never reach completion anywhere. One must understand this soul of Lionardo, which was too great within itself to ever be able to reveal its own greatness.

Then we follow Leonardo further as he is given two tasks by Duke Lodovico il Moro in Milan, who has taken him into his court there, one of which is “The Last Supper” and the other is to create an equestrian statue for the Duke's father. We now see how Leonardo worked on these two works for fifteen to sixteen years. However, many other things were going on at the same time. For if we want to characterize Leonardo as we have just done, we must add, in order to understand him completely, that the Duke had not only appointed him as a painter. Leonardo was also an excellent musician, perhaps one of the most outstanding musicians of his time, and the Duke took particular pleasure in his musical talent. But the Duke also kept him because Leonardo was one of the most important military engineers, one of the most important hydraulic engineers, and one of the most important mechanics of his time, and because he could promise the Duke to supply him with war machines that were completely new, as well as machines that would utilize water power, and flying bridges that could be easily constructed and quickly removed. At the same time, he was working on designing a flying machine. In order to build it, he observed how birds fly. Leonardo's surviving studies on bird flight are among the most original research ever conducted on the subject. When reading Leonardo's writings today, it is important to bear in mind that some of them are copies that contain many inaccuracies and thus correspond in their form to what we still see today in “The Last Supper.” But everywhere, the comprehensive mind of Leonardo shines through.

Now, however, we see how Leonardo not only supported the court in Milan on all kinds of occasions, how he brought about this or that picturesque or theatrical event, but we also see him working out all kinds of war and other plans and also assisting with advice and action in the construction of the cathedral. We also know how he trained countless students, who then worked on a wide variety of projects in Milan, so that today it is hard to imagine how much of Leonardo's work has gone into the entire inventory of the city of Milan and its surroundings.

In addition to all this, Leonardo conducted endless studies for the equestrian statue of the duke's father, Francesco Sforza. There was no part of the horse that he did not study a hundred times, in a hundred different positions, and over the course of many years he completed the model of the horse. It was then destroyed when the French invaded Milan in 1499 and the soldiers shot at this model as if it were a target and shot it to pieces. Nothing remains of it, nothing remains of the enormous work of a personality who, one might say, sought to explore world mystery after world mystery in order to create a work in which life was revealed in its dead material as life reveals itself according to its mysteries in nature itself.

We know how Leonardo worked on “The Last Supper.” He often went there, sat on the scaffolding, and brooded for hours in front of the wall. Then he took his brush, made a few strokes, and left again. Sometimes he went there, stared at the painting, and left again. When he wanted to paint the figure of Christ, his hand would tremble. And when you take everything you know about it into account, you have to say that, both outwardly and inwardly, Leonardo was not happy when he painted this now world-famous picture. First of all, there were people in Milan at the time who did not like the slow progress of the painting. For example, there was the prior of the monastery, who could not understand why a painter should not be able to paint such a picture quickly, and he therefore complained to the duke. The duke also felt that the matter had already taken too long, and he confronted the artist. Leonardo replied that the painting was to depict Christ Jesus and Judas, the two greatest opposites; that could not be painted in a year, and that there were no models for these two in the world, neither for Judas nor for Christ Jesus. He also did not yet know—he said this after having painted the picture for years—whether he would ever finish it. And then he added: if no model could be found for Judas, he could always use the prior! So the painting was extremely difficult to complete. But Leonardo was not happy inside either. For it was precisely in this painting that what lived in his soul was revealed in contrast to what he was able to bring to the wall.

And here I am compelled to put forward a spiritual-scientific hypothesis, which anyone who delves deeply into everything that can be known about the painting may arrive at. This hypothesis occurred to me when I was trying to find an answer to the question posed earlier. For when one follows the life of Leonardo, one says to oneself: there was so much living within this man that he could not reveal to humanity externally, for which external means were far too powerless to represent; could he really have painted something as great as he undoubtedly wanted in The Last Supper to his satisfaction in this work? This question arises quite naturally. When you see how he repeatedly sought to explore mystery after mystery through his studies in order to achieve something and ultimately failed to do so, you come to such a question. Then the answer almost comes by itself: if, on the one hand, Leonardo only managed to produce a model of the equestrian statue, which he wanted to make into a marvel of plastic art, and that model was lost, and he never even attempted to cast the equestrian statue itself, if, after sixteen years of work, he completely abandoned this equestrian statue without having achieved anything, how did he feel about leaving this “Last Supper”? One has the feeling that he left this Last Supper unsatisfied! Even though today all that remains of this painting is a ruin, nothing more than intermingling patches of damp color, and even though for a long time now nothing has been visible of what Leonardo once painted on the wall, one can perhaps still claim that what he painted on the wall could not even remotely represent what lived in his soul.

To get such an impression, however, one must hold together the most diverse impressions that one can get from the painting. But there are also some external reasons. Among all the writings that have been preserved by Leonardo, there is also a wonderful “Treatise on Painting.” Painting is presented in its essence as an art, how it must work according to perspective and coloration; it is presented how it should work according to the concept. This book by Leonardo on painting, even though we only have a fragment of it, is a wonderful work, the like of which has probably never been written in the world. The principles of the art of painting are presented in it in a way that only the highest genius could present them. It is wonderful, for example, to read how Leonardo shows how horses should be depicted in a battle, conveying both the beastly impression and yet the grandeur that should be conveyed by the depiction of a battle. In short, this work shows us all of Leonardo's greatness and, we may say, all of Leonardo's powerlessness. More will be said about this later. But above all, it reveals how he was always careful to study the way reality presents itself to the human eye for his pictorial representation. The chiaroscuro, the coloration, all of this is ingeniously depicted in this work by Leonardo on painting, as it can be used in painting. And if we were to confirm in Leonardo's soul the conscientious desire never, even in the slightest detail, to violate what he—as we shall see elsewhere—values so highly as truth, if we wanted to show how this lived in his soul, then we could say it emerges everywhere in the treatise on painting, never to violate the truth of the impression, but never to violate it in such a way that this impression is justified everywhere in relation to the inner secrets of nature.

When we let his “Last Supper” sink in, there are two things that we tell ourselves we cannot come to terms with in view of Leonardo's demands on painting. One is the figure of Judas. In the reproductions and also, to a certain extent, in the shadowy image of the painting in Milan, one has the impression that Judas is completely covered in shadow, completely dark. Now study how the light falls from different sides and how, everywhere among the eleven other disciples, the lighting conditions are depicted in the most wonderful way, in accordance with the truth. Nothing really explains the darkness on Judas' face! Based on the external lighting conditions, we cannot find a satisfactory answer as to why this darkness exists. And when we approach the figure of Christ Jesus, if we do not take a spiritual scientific approach, we can only arrive at something like a vague idea. For just as the blackness, the darkness of the figure of Judas is not justified, so too the sun-like quality of the figure of Christ, his standing out from the other figures in the sense indicated, does not seem to be justified. We understand all the other faces from the lighting, but not that of Judas and not that of Christ Jesus.

But if we take a spiritual scientific approach, the thought arises naturally in our soul: the painter probably strove to make it possible for us to see that in these two opposites, “Jesus” and “Judas,” light and darkness confront us not from without, but from within. He may have wanted to make it clear that this face of Christ stands before us in such a way that we may find it unmotivated in an external sense due to the external lighting conditions, but that we can nevertheless believe that the soul behind this face lends it a luminosity, and that this face may shine in contradiction to the lighting conditions. And in the same way, one can get the impression with Judas: this figure is allowed, in a sense, to conjure up a shadow on himself that is not justified by anything that is cast in shadow around him.

As I said, this is a spiritual-scientific hypothesis, but one that has developed over many years, a hypothesis that can be believed to be confirmed the more one delves into the whole problem. According to this hypothesis, one can understand how Leonardo, who strove for natural truth in all his works and studies, worked with a trembling brush to depict a problem that could only be justified in this single figure. And then one can understand that Leonardo may well have been bitterly disappointed, undoubtedly because it was impossible to express this problem with complete truthfulness and probability using the means of representation available at the time, because he was not yet able to do what he wanted and ultimately despaired of the possibility of execution, thus having to leave behind a picture that did not satisfy him.

Then, in complete harmony with the whole character and spiritual greatness of Leonardo, one answers the question of feeling that has been raised: Yes, with the bitter feeling that he had set himself a task in his most important work, the execution of which could not satisfy him with the means available to man, Leonardo probably walked away from this painting; and even if no eye in later centuries will see what Leonardo conjured up on the wall in Milan, it was certainly not what lived in his soul at the time. Yes, when one looks at him in front of his most significant creation, one is all the more tempted to ask: What secret is actually hidden behind this figure?

When Raphael's personality was considered here two weeks ago, an attempt was made to show how such a personality can be understood quite differently if one relies on spiritual scientific foundations, if one is clear that the human soul is something that returns again and again in many earthly lives, so that a soul born into a certain age does not live only this one life, but brings with it the predispositions from previous earthly lives in its entire constitution and in the entire nature of its development, and now, with what it carries into the present life as predispositions from previous earthly lives, finds itself confronted with what the spiritual environment has to offer. If one views the soul in this way, recognizing that it enters into existence with an inner spiritual asset that comes from repeated earthly lives, and if one adds to this that the whole development appears meaningful and wise, if one assumes that nothing occurs by chance in certain epochs, but regularly and according to law, just as the blossom of a plant appears after the green leaves, if, therefore, one assumes a wise design in the historical development of humanity and then sees the human soul returning again and again from spiritual regions, only then can the individual figures be explained. But what is to be studied in the individual human life is revealed in a very special way when one considers such human souls that stand out from mediocrity. If we look at Leonardo in the way we have tried to sketch the individual moments of his life, then we can be led again and again to the background against which this soul stands out. And this background is the time in which this soul is placed, from 1452 to 1519.

What kind of time is this? It is the time before the blossoming of the newer scientific view of the world. It is the time before the worldview of Copernicus came into being, before Giordano Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo had their impact. How do we view this time from a spiritual scientific perspective?

We have repeatedly pointed out that the further back we go in the course of human development, the more different the whole human view and human coexistence with the environment becomes. In the ancient times of human development, we find in every soul a kind of clairvoyance, through which souls looked into the spiritual world in certain intermediate states between sleeping and waking. This original clairvoyance was lost over time, but a remnant of it remained from earlier times until the fifteenth century. Not clairvoyance itself, which had long since disappeared, but what remained was a feeling of the connection between the human soul and the spiritual background of the world. What souls had once seen, they continued to feel, and although this feeling had already become weak, souls still sensed that they were connected at their core with the spiritual that lives and weaves through the world, just as the physical processes in the human body are physically connected with the physical events of the world.

It is now one of the laws of development that the old connection between the human soul and the spiritual world had to disappear for a while. Modern science could never have flourished if the old clairvoyance had remained. This whole old way of seeing had to be lost so that souls could turn to what presents itself to the senses and what can be scientifically explored by the intellect, which is bound to the brain. Only because the old spiritual way of seeing things was lost to humanity, and because people turned to what is “objective,” as they say, to external sensory perception and to what the intellect can grasp through sensory perception, was the scientific worldview that has developed since the time of Leonardo possible.

Today we are once again at a new turning point, at the turning point to that time when modern spiritual science makes it possible for human beings to arrive at a spiritual view of things. For the development of natural science has a double meaning. First, it was intended to provide humanity with a certain scientific heritage. Over the centuries since the emergence of Copernicus, Kepler, and others, since science has progressed from triumph to triumph, this heritage has become wonderfully integrated into practical and theoretical life. That is one thing that has been achieved by science in the last few centuries since the time of Leonardo. The other is what could not come all at once, but has only become possible in our time. For not only do we owe to natural science what we have learned through the Copernican worldview, through the observations and investigations of Kepler and Galileo, through modern spectral analysis, and so on, but we also owe it a certain education of the human soul.

At first, the human soul directed its gaze outward toward the sensory world; this led to the development of natural science. But through natural science, new ideas and new concepts were formed. And where natural science has achieved its greatest things, it has not become great through sensory perception, but through something quite different. This has already been pointed out. In a certain field, people relied on sensory perception in the time before Copernicus. What was the result? People believed that the Earth stood still in space and that the Sun and the other planets moved around it. Then came Copernicus, who had the courage not to rely on sensory perception. He had the courage to say that if one relies on sensory perception, one will not make a single empirical discovery, but that one will arrive at empirical discoveries if one rigorously thinks through everything one has previously observed. People then followed in his footsteps, and it is a complete misunderstanding of the situation to believe that natural science has reached its current level because humanity has relied solely on the senses.

But what has come to humanity through natural science has also left its mark on our souls; the ideas of natural science live in our souls and have educated our souls. In addition to what they have provided in terms of content, the natural sciences have also been a means of education for the soul, and today, as the ideas of natural science are truly not only thought but lived in the soul, souls have matured to the point where they are drawn quite naturally to spiritual science. But for this to happen, humanity first had to mature. For this to happen, the centuries since Leonardo's time had to pass.

Now let us consider Leonardo. He entered his time with a soul that in a previous existence had belonged to those initiates who, in the old way, had risen to the mysteries of the world view. He could not live this out at the time he was born in the fifteenth century. For in earlier incarnations, in the way that these earlier earthly lives made possible, one could have become deeply and powerfully attuned to the secrets of the world; how one brings them into consciousness in a new existence depends on the outer physical body. A body of the fifteenth century could not express in inner thoughts, inner feelings, and inner creative power what Leonardo had absorbed in earlier stages of existence. What he had from earlier times only worked as a force, but he was immediately confined to a body in the age before the blossoming of the natural sciences and felt constrained everywhere. The time was approaching, its dawn was already there, when people only wanted to look out with their senses into the world of sensory existence and only wanted to think with their intellect, which is bound to the instrument of the brain. Lionardo was driven everywhere by the spirit, for he had brought this with him from earlier lives. And in a grandiose way, he was driven by the spirit.

Let us first look at him as an artist. Art became very different in the time when Leonardo lived than it was in the Greek period, for example. Let us try to put ourselves in the shoes of a Greek artist creating a sculptural figure, for example. What kind of feeling do we get, even when we look at the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, for example? Those who created such works would never have studied the details in the same way as Michelangelo or Leonardo, for example, nor would they have reproduced such works in individual forms based on an external model. The wonderful horse in the statue of Marcus Aurelius was certainly not studied in the same way that Leonardo was able to study his horse for the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza. And yet, how vividly the ancient statues stand before us! Where does this come from? It comes from the fact that in Greek times, people felt themselves to be the direct creators of their bodies, because they felt at one with the soul forces of the whole world. In those days of Greek art, for example, one felt in an arm all the forces that formed the arm. One felt one's way into the independent inner being of one's own form. One did not look at the forms from the outside, but created from within, knowing, because one was still aware of the form-building power. One can still prove this for oneself in the external world. Look at the Greek female figures: they are all felt directly. That is why they are all depicted at an age when upward growth is present. We feel everywhere that the artist has recreated nature because he stood within the spirit of nature and felt connected to the spirit of nature in his soul.

This feeling of being connected to the spirit that weaves and lives through things was to be lost in Leonardo's age, and it had to be lost, because otherwise the whole new era could not have come about. This is not a criticism of the times, but a representation of the meaning of the facts.

Let us now see how Leonardo goes about his work when he studies the movements of the hand, the individual parts of an animal, or human physiognomy! He proceeds in such a way that he has an inner knowledge, an inner experience in his soul, but it does not come to consciousness. It is something that creates these figures in a living way, but Leonardo cannot grasp it from within. He feels separated from it, from this inner grasping. And now nothing is enough for him. Now he stands there — because the newer scientific worldview is not yet available in anticipation of this scientific worldview; but he cannot yet have it himself. Let us take his writings: on every page, things jump out that people will only rediscover over the course of the next three centuries and sometimes have not even found to this day. Leonardo had the most wonderful ideas, which often had no effect at all in his time. We find them in his works, including his artistic creations.

Thus, we sense in him the powerlessness with which a soul had to appear in an age that was coming to an end for the old way of viewing the world, and in which the new worldview had not yet emerged. This new worldview, however, fragmented the entire human view into a view of details. We see the emergence of specialization in individual fields of activity. In Leonardo, everything still appears united. He is at once a comprehensive painter, a comprehensive musician, a comprehensive philosopher, and a comprehensive technician. He has united these things within himself because his soul comes from the old era with great abilities and can now “tap” on things everywhere in the new era, but cannot enter into them. And so, from a human perspective, Leonardo appears as a tragic figure, but from a higher point of view, he appears tremendously significant at the turning point to a new era.

You can see this for yourself if you look at what Leonardo went on to create. He only brought the most important things to a certain point; then his students worked on them. And even in works such as “St. John” or the “Mona Lisa” in the Louvre in Paris, we can see how they were produced using techniques that meant they were bound to lose their luster soon. But then we also see everywhere how Leonardo himself was never satisfied anywhere. It is not possible to talk about the details of Leonardo's paintings without having the pictures at hand. If one delves into them, it becomes apparent everywhere how Leonardo, as an artist, reached limits that he could not transcend, and how everywhere that which lived in his soul could not even reach the point where it shone up from the soul experience into consciousness, as it shines up from that stage of soul experience in a moment so that one exults and sink back into pain because it did not reach clear consciousness. Not even that happened for Leonardo.

We actually follow Lionardo with rather bitter feelings when we see how he is finally brought to France by Francis I for the last three years of his life and spends these years in the residence assigned to him by Francis I, immersed in spiritual contemplation and the mysteries of existence. For he appears to us as a lonely man who can no longer really have anything in common with the world around him and who must have felt an enormous contrast between what he perceived as the fundamental principles of existence, which can take shape through art, and what he was only able to give to the world in fragments.

If one takes things this way, then one looks at Leonardo and says to oneself: there is a soul here, and much is going on within it. Much, infinitely much is going on within it. The impression it makes on the viewer is shocking when one imagines what this soul has handed down to the process of humanity. What this soul reveals to the human process, even at the time of Leonardo's death, is insignificant compared to what lived in this soul! How do we stand before the economy of existence if we were to subscribe to the view that human existence is exhausted in what only comes to existence externally? How meaningless and purposeless does the life of a soul such as Leonardo's appear when we see what went on within it, and what it was able to suffer and endure because of this going on, and when we compare it with what it was then able to give to the world? What a contrast there would be if we were to say that this soul should only be considered in terms of how it revealed itself in its external life! No, we cannot view it in this way! We must take a different standpoint and say: whatever it gave to the world, whatever it experienced, whatever it went through internally, belongs to another world, which is a supersensible world in relation to our world. And such people are above all proof that human beings stand with their souls in the supersensible existence, and that such souls have something to do with the supersensible existence, and that only a “waste product” is what they hand over to the outer world of what they have to go through as a whole.

Only then do we arrive at a correct impression when we add another, supersensible stream to the stream that takes place in external human events and say: something is happening parallel to the sensory stream, and such souls are embedded in the supersensible. They must live in it so that they are the connecting links between the sensory and the supersensible. The existence of such souls only makes sense when we can accept a supersensible existence in which they are embedded. Thus, we see little of Leonardo when we look at his outer work; thus, we gain an insight into the fact that this soul still has something to accomplish in the supersensible existence, and then we say to ourselves: we understand! In order for this soul, in its entire life, which spans many earthly lives, to be able to reveal this or that to humanity, it had to go through that “Leonardo existence” in which only the very little that was in this soul could find external expression. Thus, souls such as the Lionardo soul are themselves true mysteries of the world and mysteries of life, embodied mysteries of the world.

What I wanted to explain today should not be presented in sharply defined terms, but should give an indication of how one can approach such souls. For spiritual science should truly not provide theories! Spiritual science should, through everything it is capable of, grasp the whole emotional and sensory life of human beings and should itself become an elixir of life, should become such an elixir of life that through it we gain a new relationship to the world and to life. Spirits such as Leonardo are particularly suited to guiding us toward bringing into being this new relationship to the world and to life that we can gain through spiritual science. When we look at spirits such as Leonardo, we can say: they enter into existence in a mysterious way because they have something greater to live out than their age can give them. Because they bring something from the past, souls such as Leonardo do not only enter into existence in an inconspicuous state, but even in the way that Leonardo enters into life. Born to a mediocre father and a mother who soon disappeared from view after giving birth to her natural child, Leonardo was raised among mediocre people. So we see him entirely on his own, expressing what he has carried over from previous lives. When we look at the unfavorable circumstances of his birth, we realize that they did not prevent the greatest soul content from coming to light.

Thus we see Leonardo's soul as so healthy, so comprehensive, that we can empathize when Goethe says from his great soul: “Regularly, beautifully formed, he stood before humanity as a model human being, and just as the power of comprehension and clarity of the eye actually belong to the intellect, so clarity and understanding were completely inherent in our artist.” If we want to apply these words to Leonardo—and they are applicable—then we can apply them to the young Leonardo, who appears to us physically and mentally fresh, perfect, creative, joyful, and at the same time longing for the world—a perfect human being, a model human being, born to be a conqueror, a human being who was also born with a sense of humor, for he has demonstrated this on various occasions throughout his life. And then we turn our gaze to that drawing, which is considered and rightly so a self-portrait, to the old man whose face shows many experiences, many difficult, painful experiences have carved deep furrows, whose features around the mouth hint at the whole disharmony in which we finally see the lonely man, far from his homeland, in exile with the King of France, still wrestling with the existence of the world, but lonely, abandoned, misunderstood, even if loved by friends who have not failed to accompany him.

Thus, the greatness of this spirit, which has gone through much suffering, confronts us in Leonardo in a very special way, as it enters this body, first shaping it completely and then, embittered, leaving it. We look into this face and feel the genius of humanity looking back at us from this human face. Yes, we begin to understand the time, the twilight of the evening, in which Leonardo lived, and the time in which Copernicus, Kepler, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo lived, with whom a new dawn was breaking, and we all see the limitations and constraints that Leonardo's great soul had to experience. We understand the age and understand the great artist who stands behind all human means and who, in the end, can only work with human means. We must bring all our human understanding to bear and look into Leonardo's face after we have delved into it spiritually — and the whole nature of the age looks back at us from this face. Yes, from these bitter features, the human spirit, initially inclined downward, looks back at us. We must get to know him in this way so that we can once again recognize the full greatness of the power that must have been present for a Copernicus, a Kepler, a Galileo, and a Giordano Bruno to have come into being.

Truly, we can only gain a proper reverence for the course and development of the human spirit when we learn to deepen the tragedy we feel at Giordano Bruno's stake by looking at the soul of Leonardo, who felt powerless in the preceding, declining age. Leonardo's greatness only becomes clear to us when we get an idea of what he was unable to do. And that has something to do with what we want to summarize at the end of today's reflections. It has to do with the fact that the human soul can be satisfied, even blissful, at the sight of imperfection, though most blissful not at the sight of small imperfection, but of great imperfection, at the sight of that creation which, because of its greatness, dies in its execution. For in the dying forces we sense, indeed we see, the forces preparing for the future, and in the evening glow we have a premonition and hope for the dawn.

Our soul must always feel toward human development in such a way that we say to ourselves, all becoming proceeds in such a way that we see: where the created becomes ruin, we know that new life will always blossom from the ruins.