| LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452-1519) |
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Leonardo da Vinci was, by any measurement, an extraordinary man. He was a painter, sculptor, architect, natural scientist, military inventor — the epitome of the Renaissance man. He had an enormous influence on his time. He invented the mortar which is used so extensively in warfare today, and a very nasty catapult. He was engaged by the authorities of Florence to design the fortifications and ensure the freedom of the city state. Needless to say, he had travelled a little way along the initiatory path and was the most advanced of all the painters we know — 4.4 degrees initiate. Five degrees makes you a Master, and so he was all but a Master.
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What we are seeing in Leonardo is the detachment of the fourth-degree initiate, who is really totally detached from the world, who is dissecting cadavers to see the formation of the inside of the body for science. He spent hundreds of hours in his cellar cutting up bodies and drawing the results — early anatomical studies are the result of Leonardo’s drawings; a horrible pastime, but he liked it.
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Actually, he did not come out of our evolution at all. He came from the planet Mercury. He was really a human Avatar and is now no longer in our solar system, but in the system of Sirius. He is now in our terms an eighth-degree initiate, like the Buddha. His ray structure is extraordinary, especially if one remembers that the combination of 4th and 7th rays makes for the highest type of artist:
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| Soul | Personality | Mental | Astral | Physical |
| Rays | 4 | 7 | 7 | 4 | 7 |
| Sub-rays | | 4 | 3 | 4 | 7 |
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He could be nothing other than the highest type of artist in whose work both colour and form are perfectly realized at the highest level.
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Leonardo does not use bright or obvious colours. What one senses in his work is that the pictures are whole, complete. It is not possible to say more than he is saying in each painting. It is as if each one communicates an almost cosmic meaning which is only able to be represented through the radiance of that painting. They take hold of our imagination and impose their extraordinary sensuous but abstract beauty on our minds.
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There has to be a reason why The Mona Lisa has such a hold on the imagination of countless millions of people in the world, most of whom have seen only reproductions. Why is this so? I suggest that it is our response to the fact that Leonardo is 4.4 degrees initiate, almost a Master. One senses that he is no longer working in the three worlds, physical, astral and mental, in which average humanity lives. His painting represents the beauty of Reality in a spiritual or even a cosmic sense which finds expression through the activity of the 4th and 7th rays — that is, through the relationship between colour and form.
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In The Virgin of the Rocks, in London and Paris, there is an extraordinary complexity of composition expressing Leonardo’s abundance of 7th ray. Only someone with strong 7th-ray influence in his make-up would feel impelled, or have the ability, to carry to such an extent the structure and rhythms creating the forms in space in his painting. It is the 7th-ray ability to design and organize the material which creates such a unity throughout the whole, intricate composition. But Leonardo has too much 4th ray to compose in a hard or dry manner. It is done by chiaroscuro — the relationship of light to dark — and by the manipulation of the edges of each form to overlap, allowing the eye to flow easily from one to another. It creates the sense of totality, of completeness, which is so characteristic of his expression. (from Maitreya’s Mission, Volume Three, pgs 394-5)
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