The Life of Leonardo , Florentine Painter and Sculptor [1452-1519]

The greatest gifts often rain down upon human bodies through celestial influences as a natural process, and sometimes in a supernatural fashion a single body is lavishly supplied with such beauty, grace, and ability that wherever the individual turns, each of his actions is so divine that he leaves behind all other men and clearly makes himself known as a genius endowed by God (which he is) rather than created by human artifice. Men saw this in , who displayed great physical beauty ('which has never been sufficiently praised), a more than infinite grace in every action, and an ability so fit and so vast that wherever his mind turned to diffi- cult tasks, he resolved them completely with ease. His great personal strength was joined to dexterity, and his spirit and courage were always regal and magnanimous. And the fame of his name spread so widely that not only was he held in high esteem in his own times, but his fame increased even more after his death.* Truly wondrous and divine was Leonardo, the son of Piero da Vinci,* and he •would have made great progress in his early studies of literature if he had not been so unpredictable and unstable. For he set about learning many things and, once begun, he would then abandon them. Thus, in the few months he applied himself to arithmetic, Leonardo made such progress that he raised continuous doubts and difficulties for the master who taught him and often confounded him. He turned to music for a while, and soon he decided to learn to play the lyre, like one to whom nature had given a naturally elevated and highly refined spirit, and accompanying himself on this instrument, he sang divinely without any preparation. LEONARDO DA VINCI 285 Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that he worked at so many different things, he never gave up drawing and working in relief, pursuits which appealed to him more than any others. When Ser Piero saw this and considered the level of his son's intelligence, he one day took some of Leonardo's drawings and brought them to Andrea del Verrocchio, who was a very good friend of his, and urgently begged him to say whether Leonardo would profit from studying design.* Andrea was amazed when he saw Leonardo's extraordinary beginnings, and he urged Ser Piero to make Leonardo study this subject; and so Piero arranged for Leonardo to go to Andrea's workshop, something Leonardo did very willingly. And Leonardo practised not only this profession but all those in which design played a role. Possessing so divine and wondrous an intelligence, and being a very fine geometrician, Leonardo not only worked in sculpture but in architecture. In his youth, he made in clay the heads of some women laughing, created through the craft of plaster-casting, as -well as the heads of some children, which seemed to have issued forth from the hand of a master; in architecture, he made many drawings of both ground-plans and other structures, and he was the first, even though a young man, to discuss making the River Arno a canal from Pisa to Florence.* He drew plans for mills, fulling machines, and implements that could be driven by water-power; and since painting was to be his profession, he carefully studied his craft by drawing from life, and sometimes by fashioning models or clay figures, which he covered with soft rags dipped in plaster and then patiently sketched upon very thin canvases of Rheims linen or used linen, working in black and white with the tip of his brush—marvellous things indeed, as is demonstrated by some of the examples I have from his own hand in our book of drawings. Besides this, he drew so care- fully and so well on paper that no one has ever matched the delicacy of his style, and I have a head from these sketches in chiaroscuro which is divine. There was infused in this genius so much divine grace, so formidable and harmonious a com- bination of intellect and memory to serve it, as well as so great an ability to express his ideas through the designs of his hands, 286 LEONARDO DA VINCI that he won over with arguments and confounded with reasonings the boldest minds. And every day he constructed models and designs showing how to excavate and bore through mountains with ease in order to pass from one level to the next, and with the use of levers, winches, and hoists, he showed how to lift and pull heavy weights, as well as methods for emptying out harbours and pumps for removing water from great depths; his brain never stopped imagining such things, and many sketches for these ideas and projects can be found scattered about among our profession, a good number of which I myself have seen.* Besides this, he wasted time in designing a series of knots in a cord which can be followed from one end to the other, with the entire cord forming a circular field containing a very diffi- cult and beautiful engraving with these words in the middle: Leonardm Vinci Accademia* Among all these models and de- signs there was one which on numerous occasions he showed to the many intelligent citizens then ruling Florence to demon- strate how he wanted to raise and place steps under the church of San Giovanni without destroying it, and he persuaded them with such sound arguments that they thought it possible, even though when each one of them left Leonardo's company, each would realize by himself the impossibility of such an enterprise. Leonardo was so pleasing in his conversation that he won everyone's heart. And although we might say that he owned nothing and worked very little, he always kept servants and horses; he took special pleasure in horses as he did in all other animals, which he treated with the greatest love and patience. For example, when passing by places where birds were being sold, he would often take them out of their cages with his own hands, and after paying the seller the price that was asked of him, he would set them free in the air, restoring to them the liberty they had lost. As a result, Nature so favoured him that, wherever he turned his thought, his mind, and his heart, he demonstrated such divine inspiration that no one else was ever equal to him in the perfection, liveliness, vitality, excellence, and grace of his works. It is clearly evident that because of Leonardo's understand- LEONARDO DA VINCI 287 ing of art, he began many projects but never finished any of them, feeling that his hand could not reach artistic perfection in the •works he conceived, since he envisioned such subtle, marvellous, and difficult problems that his hands, while ex- tremely skilful, were incapable of ever realizing them. And his special interests were so numerous that his enquiries into na- tural phenomena led him to understand the properties of herbs and to continue his observations of the motions of the heavens, the course of the moon, and the movements of the sun.* As mentioned earlier, Leonardo was placed in this pro- fession by Ser Piero during his youth in the shop of Andrea del Verrocchio. At the time, Andrea was completing a panel showing Saint John baptizing Christ in which Leonardo worked on an angel holding some garments, and although he was a young boy, he completed the angel in such a way that Leonardo's angel was much better than the figures by Andrea.* This was the reason why Andrea would never touch colours again, angered that a young boy understood them better than he did. Leonardo was then commissioned to do a cartoon of Adam and Eve as they sinned in the Earthly Paradise for a door-curtain that was to be made in Flanders of gold and silken fabric and sent to the King of Portugal; for this he drew with his brush in chiaroscuro illuminated with -white lead a lush meadow with a number of animals, and it can truthfully be said that genius could not create anything in the divine realm equal in precision and naturalness. There is a fig tree, which besides the foreshortening of its leaves and the appearance of its branches, is drawn with such love that the mind is dazzled by the thought that a man could possess such patience. And there is a date palm the circular crown of which is worked with a great and marvellous artistry that would be impossible to achieve without Leonardo's patience and genius. The work was carried no further and so, today, the cartoon is in Florence in the fortunate house of the Magnificent Ottaviano de' Medici, to whom it was presented not long ago by Leonardo's uncle.* It is said that when Ser Piero da Vinci was at his country villa, he was sought out at home by one of his peasants, who had with his own hand made a small round shield from the 288 LEONARDO DA VINCI •wood of a fig tree on the farm which he had cut down, and who wanted Ser Piero to have it painted in Florence; he was delighted to do this, since the peasant •was very experienced in catching birds and fish and Ser Piero made great use of him in these activities. And so he had it taken to Florence, and with- out saying anything else to Leonardo about whose it was, he asked him to paint something on it. One day when Leonardo picked up the shield and saw that it was crooked, badly worked, and crude, he straightened it over the fire and gave it—as rough and crude as it was—to a turner who made it smoother and even. And after he had covered it with gesso and prepared it in his own manner, he began to think about what he could paint on it that -would terrify anyone who encountered it and produce the same effect as the head of the . Thus, for this purpose, Leonardo carried into a room of his own, which no one but he himself entered, crawling reptiles, green lizards, crickets, snakes, butterflies, locusts, bats, and other strange species of this kind, and by adapting vari- ous parts of this multitude, he created a most horrible and frightening monster with poisonous breath that set the air on fire. And he depicted the monster emerging from a dark and broken rock, spewing forth poison from its open mouth, fire from its eyes, and smoke from its nostrils so strangely that it seemed a monstrous and dreadful thing indeed. And Leonardo took such pains in creating it that out of the great love he felt for his profession, he did not smell the overpowering stench that arose from the dead animals. When the -work was finally completed, it was no longer sought after by either the peasant or his father, to whom Leonardo announced that as far as he was concerned, the work was complete, and he could come to pick it up at his convenience. Therefore, one morning Ser Piero went to his room for the shield, and when he knocked at the door, Leonardo opened it to him, asking him to wait for a moment; and returning inside the room, he arranged the shield on his easel in the light and shaded the window to dim the light, and then he had Ser Piero come inside to see it. At first glance Ser Piero, who was not thinking about it, was immediately shaken, not realizing that this was the shield, nor that what he saw drawn there was a painting. And as he LEONARDO DA VINCI 289 turned and stepped back, Leonardo stopped him and said: 'This work has served the purpose for which it was made. Take it away, then, and carry it home with you, for this was the intended effect.' Ser Piero thought the work was more than miraculous, and he lavishly praised Leonardo's fanciful invention; later, after quietly purchasing from a pedlar another shield with a heart pierced by a arrow, he gave that one to the peasant, who remained grateful to Scr Piero for the rest of his life. Ser Piero then secretly sold Leonardo's shield to some merchants in Florence for one hundred ducats. And in a short time the shield fell into the hands of the Duke of Milan, sold to him by those same merchants for three hundred ducats... .* When Giovan Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, happened to die and Lodovico Sforza assumed that title, all in the year 1494,* Leonardo was brought with great ceremony to Milan to play the lyre for the duke who was very fond of the sound of that instrument. Leonardo brought with him an instrument he had made with his own hands largely from silver and shaped in the form of a horse's head (a strange and unusual thing) so that the sound would be more full and resonant, and he thus surpassed all the other musicians who had gathered there to play. Besides this, he was the best declaimer of improvised poetry in his day. When the duke had listened to the admirable argu- ments of Leonardo, he became so enamoured of his abilities that it was incredible to behold. And he begged Leonardo to paint for him an altarpiece containing a Nativity, which was sent by the duke to the emperor.* Leonardo then did a Last Supper in Milan for the Dominican friars at Santa Maria delle Grazie, a most beautiful and wondrous work in which he depicted the heads of the Apostles with such majesty and beauty that he left the head of Christ unfinished, believing that he was incapable of achieving the celestial divinity the image of Christ required. This work, left as it was, has always been held in the greatest veneration by the Milanese and by foreigners as well, for Leonardo had imagined and succeeded in expressing the suspicion the Apostles experienced when they sought to discover who would betray their master. As a result, all their faces show their love, fear, and indignation, or, rather, sorrow, over being unable to 29O LEONARDO DA VINCI grasp Christ's meaning. And this is no less a source of -wonder than the recognition of the contrasting stubbornness, hatred, and treachery in Judas, without even mentioning the fact that every small detail in the work reflects incredible care and dili- gence. Even the fabric of the tablecloth is reproduced so well that Rheims linen itself would not appear more real. It is said that the prior of the church entreated Leonardo •with tiresome persistence to complete the work, since it seemed strange to him to see how Leonardo sometimes passed half a day at a time lost in thought, and he would have pre- ferred Leonardo, just like the labourers hoeing in the garden, never to have laid down his brush.* And as if this was not enough, he complained to the duke and made such a disturb- ance that the duke was forced to send for Leonardo and to question him skilfully about his work, showing with great civility that he was doing so because of the prior's insistence. Leonardo, who knew that the prince possessed a sharp and dis- cerning intellect, was willing to discuss his work at length with the duke (something he had never done with the prior); he talked to him extensively about art and persuaded him that the greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they •work less, since they are searching for inventions in their minds, and forming those perfect ideas which their hands then express and reproduce from what they previously conceived with their intellect. And he added that he still had two heads to complete: that of Christ, for which he was unwilling to seek a model on earth and unable to presume that his ima- gination could conceive of the beauty and celestial grace required of divinity incarnate. The head of Judas, which caused him much thought, was also missing, for he did not believe himself capable of imagining a form to depict the face of a man who, after receiving so many favours, could have pos- sessed a mind so wicked that he could have resolved to betray his Lord and the Creator of the World. None the less, he would search for a model for this second face, but if in the end he could not find anything better, there was always the head of the prior, who was so insistent and indiscreet. This moved the duke to laughter, and the duke declared that Leonardo was quite right. And so, the poor confused prior returned to press LEONARDO DA VINCI 29! on with the work in the garden and left Leonardo in peace. He skilfully completed the head of Judas, who seemed the very image of treachery and inhumanity. That of Christ remained, as was said, unfinished. The nobility of this painting, both for its composition and for the incomparable care with which it was completed, caused the King of France* to wish to take it back to his king- dom. As a result, he tried every method to find architects who might be able to protect it with beams of wood and iron so that it could safely be carried away, never considering the expense he might incur, so intensely did he wish to have it. But since the painting was done on a wall, His Majesty had to endure his longing for the work, and it was left to the Milanese. While working on the Last Supper, Leonardo drew/ the portrait of Lodovico with his first-born son Massimiliano on an end wall in the same refectory where there is a Passion done in the older style, and on the other side, he drew the Duchess Beatrice with Francesco, his other son (both later becoming dukes of Milan), and all these portraits are sublime. While he was attending to this work, Leonardo proposed to the duke that he should make a bronze horse of astonishing size to commemorate the image of the duke, his father.* And Leonardo began the work and carried it out on such a scale that he could never complete it. There are those who hold the opinion (human judgements being so various and, often enough, enviously malicious) that Leonardo (as with some of his other works) began this project without any intention of completing it, because its size was so great that casting it all in one piece obviously involved incredible difficulties, and it is possible to believe that many people have formed such a judgement based on the results, since so many of his other works remained unfinished. But the truth is that Leonardo's splendid and exceptional mind was hindered by the fact that he was too eager and that his constant search to add excellence to excellence and perfection to perfection was the reason why his -work was slowed by his desire, as our Petrarch declares.* And to tell the truth, those who saw the large model that Leonardo fashioned in clay thought they had never seen any- thing more beautiful or superb, and it lasted until the French, 292 LEONARDO DA VINCI who smashed it to pieces, came to Milan with King Louis of France. Also lost was a small wax model of it which -was held to be perfect, along with a book on the anatomy of horses drawn by Leonardo for his preparations.* Leonardo then applied himself, but with even greater care, to the study of hu- man anatomy, working together with Messer Marc'Antonio della Torre,* an excellent philosopher, who was then lecturing in Pavia and writing on the subject; he was one of the first (as I have heard it said) who, with Galen's teachings, began to bring honour to medical studies and to shed real light upon anatomy, which had until that time been shrouded in the deepest shadows of ignorance. In this work, he was marvel- lously served by the genius, labour, and hand of Leonardo, who created a book with red crayon drawings outlined in pen in which he sketched cadavers he had dissected with his own hand, depicting them with the greatest care. He drew all the bony structures, joining them in order to all the nerves and covering them with the muscles: the first group is attached to the skeleton, the second holds it firm, and the third makes it move, and in these drawings he wrote notes in various places in ugly characters -written with the left hand from right to left, which cannot be understood by anyone who is not used to reading them, since they cannot be read without a mirror.* Many of these papers on human anatomy are in the pos- session of Messer , a Milanese gentleman who in Leonardo's day was a very handsome boy and much beloved by him, just as today he is a handsome and courteous old man who treasures these papers and conserves them along with a portrait of Leonardo to honour his happy memory.* And anyone who reads these writings will be amazed by how clearly this divine spirit discussed art, muscles, nerves, and veins, taking the greatest pains with every detail. There are also other writings by Leonardo in the possession of a Milanese painter,* also written with the left hand from right to left, which treat painting and methods of drawing and using colour. Not long ago this man, wishing to print this work, came to Florence to see me, and he then took it on to Rome to do so, but I do not know what happened afterwards. But to return to Leonardo's works. During his lifetime the LEONARDO DA VINCI 293 king of France came to Milan, and he begged Leonardo to make something unusual, and so Leonardo made a lion which walked a few steps before its chest opened, revealing it to be filled with lilies. In Milan, Leonardo took on as his servant Salai,* a pleasingly graceful and handsome boy from that city with beautiful, thick, curly hair which greatly pleased Leonardo, who taught him many things about painting, and some of the works attributed to Salai in Milan were retouched by Leonardo. After returning to Florence, Leonardo discovered that the Servite friars had commissioned Filippino to paint the altar- piece for the high altar in the Nunziata; this caused Leonardo to declare that he would have gladly painted a similar work. Upon hearing this, Filippino, like the gentle-hearted person he was, withdrew, and so that Leonardo might paint it, the friars took him into their household, paying the expenses for him and all his family. And as was his custom, Leonardo kept them waiting for a long time without ever beginning anything. Finally he did a cartoon showing Our Lady and Saint Anne with the figure of Christ, which not only amazed all the artisans but, once completed and set up in a room, brought men, women, young and old to see it for two days as if they were going to a solemn festival in order to gaze upon the marvels of Leonardo which stupefied the entire populace. For in the face of this Madonna all the simplicity and beauty which can properly shed grace upon Christ's mother can be seen, since Leonardo wished to show the modesty and humility of a virgin delighted to witness the beauty of Her child, who holds Him tenderly in Her lap, while with a modest glance downward She notices Saint John as a little boy who is playing with a lamb, not without a smile from Saint Anne, overjoyed to see Her earthly progeny become divine.* Such considerations had their origin in Leonardo's intellect and genius. This cartoon, as will be explained, was subsequently taken to France. Leonardo made a portrait of Ginevra, the wife of Amerigo Benci, an extremely beautiful painting, and he abandoned the work he was doing for the friars, who went back to Filippino, but Filippino, overcome by death, was unable to complete it. 294 LEONARDO DA VINCI For Francesco del Giocondo, Leonardo undertook the por- trait of , his wife, and after working on it for four years, he left the work unfinished, and it may be found at Fontainebleau today in the possession of King Francis.* Any- one wishing to see the degree to which art can imitate Nature can easily understand this from the head, for here Leonardo reproduced all the details that can be painted with subtlety. The eyes have the lustre and moisture always seen in living people, while around them are the lashes and all the reddish tones which cannot be produced without the greatest care. The eyebrows could not be more natural, for they represent the way the hair grows in the skin—thicker in some places and thinner in others, following the pores of the skin. The nose seems lifelike with its beautiful pink and tender nostrils. The mouth, with its opening joining the red of the lips to the flesh of the face, seemed to be real flesh rather than paint. Anyone who looked very attentively at the hollow of her throat would see her pulse beating: to tell the truth, it can be said that portrait was painted in a way that would cause every brave artist to tremble and fear, whoever he might be. Since Mona Lisa was very beautiful, Leonardo employed this technique: while he was painting her portrait, he had musicians who played or sang and clowns who would always make her merry in order to drive away her melancholy, which painting often brings to portraits. And in this portrait by Leonardo, there is a smile so pleasing that it seems more divine than human, and it was considered a wondrous thing that it was as lively as the smile of the living original. Because of the excellence of his works, the fame of this divine artisan grew so great that everyone who loved art, indeed the entire city, wanted him to leave behind some mem- orial, and they all discussed how to have him do some notable and great work which would decorate and honour the public with all the genius, grace, and judgement recognized in Leonardo's works. The Gonfaloniere and the most important citizens carried out the plan, while the Grand Hall of the Council was being renovated, and its architecture was being planned with the advice and counsel of Giuliano San Gallo, Simone Pollaiuolo (called Cronaca), Michelangelo Buonarroti, LEONARDO DA VINCI 295 and Baccio d'Agnolo (as -will be related in detail in the proper place).* When this •was completed, it was quickly decided by public decree that Leonardo would be given some beautiful work to paint, and Leonardo was thus commissioned to do the hall by Piero Soderini, then Gonfaloniere of Justice.* Wishing to carry out this task, Leonardo began work on a cartoon in the Hall of the Pope, a place in Santa Maria Novella, treating the story of Niccolo Piccinino, a com- mander of Duke Filippo of Milan, in which he drew a group of horsemen fighting for a standard, a drawing held to be most excellent and masterful for its marvellous treatment of figures in flight. In it, anger, disdain, and vindictiveness are displayed no less by the horsemen than by their horses, two of which with forelegs intertwined are battling with their teeth no less fiercely than their riders are fighting for the standard, which one of the soldiers has seized. While urging his horse to flight, using the power of his shoulders, he has turned around and grasped the staff of the standard, trying to wrench it by brute force from the hands of four men, while two soldiers defend it with one hand and try with the other to cut off the staff with their swords in the air; at the same time, an old soldier with a red beret, crying out, holds on to the staff with one hand, and brandishing a curved sword high with the other, delivers a furious blow to cut off the hands of the two men who are forcefully gnashing their teeth, attempting to defend their standard with the most ferocious expressions; besides all this, there are two foreshortened figures fighting each other on the ground between the horses' legs, -while a man lying prone upon the ground has another soldier on top of him who is raising his arm as high as he can, so that with even greater force he can plunge his dagger into the throat of his opponent and end his life, while the man on the ground, his legs and arms helpless, does everything he can to avoid death. It would be impossible to express the inventiveness of Leonardo's design for the soldiers' uniforms, which he sketched in all their variety, or the crests of the helmets and other ornaments, not to mention the incredible skill he de- monstrated in the shapes and features of the horses, which Leonardo, better than any other master, created with their 296 LEONARDO DA VINCI boldness, muscles, and graceful beauty. It is said that to draw the cartoon Leonardo created a most ingenious scaffolding which rose higher when drawn together and lower when extended. And imagining that he could paint the walls in oil, he created a composition so thick for the coating of the walls that -while he continued to paint in the hall, it began to run, so that he soon abandoned the work, seeing that it was ruined. Leonardo possessed great courage and was most generous in every deed. It is said that when he went to the bank for his salary, which he used to receive every month from Piero Soderini, the cashier wanted to give him certain rolls of pennies, and, being unwilling to take them, he remarked: 'I am no penny painter!' When he was accused of cheating Piero Soderini, there arose murmurs about him, and so, with the assistance of his friends, Leonardo collected the money and carried it to Piero to pay him back, but Piero did not wish to accept it. Leonardo went to Rome with Duke Giuliano de' Medici upon the election of Pope Leo X,* who was a great student of philosophy and most especially of alchemy. In Rome, he developed a paste out of a certain type of wax and, while he walked, he made inflatable animals which he blew air into, making them fly through the air; but when the air ran out, they fell to the ground. To a very strange lizard, found by the gardener of the Belvedere, he fastened some wings with a mixture of quicksilver made from scales scraped from other lizards, which quivered as it moved by crawling about. After he had fashioned eyes, a horn, and a beard for it, he tamed the lizard and kept it in a box, and all the friends to whom he showed it fled in terror. Often he had the guts of a steer purged of fat, and they came out so small that they could be held in the palm of one hand. And he had placed in another room a pair of smith's bellows to which he attached one end of these guts so that by blowing them up he filled the entire room, which was enormous, so that anyone standing there would have to move to one corner. Pointing to these trans- parent forms full of air, Leonardo compared them to talent, since at first they occupy little space but later come to occupy a great deal. He created an infinite number of these mad LEONARDO DA VINCI 297 inventions and also experiments with mirrors, and he tried out the strangest methods of discovering oils for painting and varnishes for preserving the finished works. At this time, for Messer Baldassarri Turini da Pescia, Leo's datary, he painted a small picture of the Madonna with Her child in Her arms that was done with infinite care and skill. But either because of a mistake made by whoever prepared the panel with gesso or because of his many capricious mixtures of paints and colours, it is now in very bad con- dition. In another small painting, he did the portrait of a little boy \vho is wonderfully beautiful and graceful. And both of these paintings are now in the hands of Messer Giulio Turini. It is said of Leonardo that when the pope commissioned a work from him, he would immediately begin to distil oils and herbs for the varnish; as a result, the pope exclaimed: 'Alas, this man is never going to do anything, for he starts to think about finishing the work before it is even begun!' There was great animosity between Leonardo and Michelangelo, and as a result, Michelangelo left Florence on account of this rivalry, with Duke Giuliano giving him leave when he was sum- moned by the pope to discuss the fafade of San Lorenzo. Hearing of this, Leonardo left Rome and went to France, where the king, who owned several of his works, was very fond of him and wanted Leonardo to paint the cartoon of Saint Anne, but, in his habitual manner, Leonardo put the king off with promises.* When Leonardo finally became old, he lay ill for many months; and seeing himself near death, he wished to be care- fully informed about the Catholic faith and about the path of goodness and the holy Christian religion, and then, with much lamenting, having confessed and repented, he devoutly desired to take the most Holy Sacrament out of bed, even though he could not stand upon his feet and had to be supported by his friends and servants. The king, who was in the habit of paying him frequent and affectionate visits, arrived, and, out of re- spect, Leonardo sat up in bed to tell him about his illness and its symptoms, declaring, all the same, how much he had offended God and the men of the world by not having worked at his art as he should have.* He was then seized by a 298 LEONARDO DA VINCI paroxysm, the harbinger of death. Because of this, the king arose and held his head to help him and to show him favour, so as to ease his pain, and Leonardo's most divine spirit, aware that he could receive no greater honour, expired in the arms of that king at the age of seventy-five. The loss of Leonardo saddened beyond all measure every- one who had known him, for no one ever lived who had brought such honour to painting. His splendidly handsome appearance could bring calm to every troubled soul, and his words could sway the most hardened mind to cither side of a question. His great physical strength could check any violent outburst; with his right hand he could bend the iron ring of a door-knocker or a horseshoe as if it were made of lead. His generosity was so great that he sheltered and fed all his friends, rich and poor alike, provided they possessed talent and ability. By his every action Leonardo adorned and honoured the meanest and humblest dwelling-place; and with his birth, Florence truly received the greatest of all gifts, and at his death, the loss was incalculable. To the art of painting, he added a kind of shadowing to the method of colouring with oils which has enabled the moderns to endow their figures with great energy and relief. He proved himself in sculpture with the three bronze figures over the north door of San Giovanni which were executed by Giovan Francesco Rustici but finished with Leonardo's advice; they are the most beauti- ful casts both for their design and for their perfection that have yet been seen in the modern age. From Leonardo we have a more perfect understanding of the anatomy of horses and of men. And because of his many divine qualities, even though he accomplished more by words than by deeds, his name and fame will never be extinguished. For this reason, Messer Giovanbatista Strozzi wrote the following words in his praise: Alone he vanquished All others; he vanquished Phidias and Apelles, And all their victorious band.*

THE END OF THE LIFE OF LEONARDO DA VINCI, FLORENTINE PAINTER AND SCULPTOR