LEON, an episcopal see and the capital of the Spanish province of Leon,

situated on a hill 2631 ft. above sea-level, in the angle made by the

Torio and Bernesga, streams which unite on the south, and form the river

Leon, a tributary of the Esla. Pop. (1900) 15,580. Leon is on the main

railway from Madrid to Oviedo, and is connected with Astorga by a branch

line. The older quarters of the city, which contain the cathedral and

other medieval buildings, are surrounded by walls, and have lost little

of their beauty and interest from the restoration carried out in the

second half of the 19th century. During the same period new suburbs grew

up outside the walls to house the industrial population which was

attracted by the development of iron-founding and the manufacture of

machinery, railway-plant, chemicals and leather. Leon thus comprises two

towns--the old, which is mainly ecclesiastical in its character, and the

new, which is industrial. The cathedral, founded in 1199 and only

finished at the close of the 14th century, is built of a warm

cream-coloured stone, and is remarkable for simplicity, lightness and

strength. It is one of the finest examples of Spanish Gothic, smaller,

indeed, than the cathedrals of Burgos and Toledo, but exquisite in

design and workmanship. The chapter library contains some valuable

manuscripts. The collegiate church of San Isidoro was founded by

Ferdinand I. of Castile in 1063 and consecrated in 1149. Its

architecture is Romanesque. The church contains some fine plate,

including the silver reliquary in which the bones of St Isidore of

Seville are preserved, and a silver processional cross dating from the

16th century, which is one of the most beautiful in the country. The

convent and church of San Marcos, planned in 1514 by Ferdinand the

Catholic, founded by Charles V. in 1537, and consecrated in 1541, are

Renaissance in style. They are built on the site of a hostel used by

pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela. The provincial museum

occupies the chapterhouse and contains some interesting Roman monuments.

The lower part of the city walls consists of Roman masonry dating from

the 3rd century. Other buildings are the high school, ecclesiastical

seminaries, hospital, episcopal palace and municipal and provincial

halls.

Leon (Arab. _Liyun_) owes its name to the Legio Septima Gemina of Galba,

which, under the later emperors, had its headquarters here. About 540

Leon fell into the hands of the Gothic king Leovigild, and in 717 it

capitulated to the Moors. Retaken about 742, it ultimately, in the

beginning of the 10th century, became the capital of the kingdom of Leon

(see SPAIN: _History_). About 996 it was taken by Almansur, but on his

death soon afterwards it reverted to the Spaniards. It was the seat of

several ecclesiastical councils, the first of which was held under

Alphonso V. in 1012 and the last in 1288.

LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452-1519), the great Italian painter, sculptor,

architect, musician, mechanician, engineer and natural philosopher, was

the son of a Florentine lawyer, born out of wedlock by a mother in a

humble station, variously described as a peasant and as of gentle birth.

The place of his birth was Vinci, a _castello_ or fortified hill village

in the Florentine territory near Empoli, from which his father's family

derived its name. The Christian name of the father was Piero (the son of

Antonio the son of Piero the son of Guido, all of whom had been men of

law like their descendant). Leonardo's mother was called Catarina. Her

relations with Ser Piero da Vinci seem to have come to an end almost

immediately upon the birth of their son. She was soon afterwards married

to one Accattabriga di Piero del Vacca, of Vinci. Ser Piero on his part

was four times married, and had by his last two wives nine sons and two

daughters; but he had from the first acknowledged the boy Leonardo and

brought him up in his own house, principally, no doubt, at Florence. In

that city Ser Piero followed his profession with success, as notary to

many of the chief families in the city, including the Medici, and

afterwards to the signory or governing council of the state. The son

born to him before marriage grew up into a youth of shining promise. To

splendid beauty and activity of person he joined a winning charm of

temper and manners, a tact for all societies, and an aptitude for all

accomplishments. An inexhaustible intellectual energy and curiosity lay

beneath this amiable surface. Among the multifarious pursuits to which

the young Leonardo set his hand, the favourites at first were music,

drawing and modelling. His father showed some of his drawings to an

acquaintance, Andrea del Verrocchio, who at once recognized the boy's

artistic vocation, and was selected by Ser Piero to be his master.

Verrocchio, although hardly one of the great creative or inventive

forces in the art of his age at Florence, was a first-rate craftsman

alike as goldsmith, sculptor and painter, and particularly distinguished

as a teacher. In his studio Leonardo worked for several years (about

1470-1477) in the company of Lorenzo di Credi and other less celebrated

pupils. Among his contemporaries he formed special ties of friendship

with the painters Sandro Botticelli and Pietro Perugino. He had soon

learnt all that Verrocchio had to teach--more than all, if we are to

believe the oft-told tale of the figure, or figures, executed by the

pupil in the picture of Christ's Baptism designed by the master for the

monks of Vallombrosa. The work in question is now in the Academy at

Florence. According to Vasari the angel kneeling on the left, with a

drapery over the right arm, was put in by Leonardo, and when Verrocchio

saw it his sense of its superiority to his own work caused him to

forswear painting for ever after. The latter part of the story is

certainly false. The picture, originally painted in tempera, has

suffered much from later repaints in oil, rendering exact judgment

difficult. The most competent opinion inclines to acknowledge the hand

of Leonardo, not only in the face of the angel, but also in parts of the

drapery and of the landscape background. The work was probably done in

or about 1470, when Leonardo was eighteen years old. By 1472 we find him

enrolled in the lists of the painters' gild at Florence. Here he

continued to live and work for ten or eleven years longer. Up till 1477

he is still spoken of as a pupil or apprentice of Verrocchio; but in

that year he seems to have been taken into special favour by Lorenzo the

Magnificent, and to have worked as an independent artist under his

patronage until 1482-1483. In 1478 we find him receiving an important

commission from the signory, and in 1480 another from the monks of San

Donato in Scopeto.

Leonardo was not one of those artists of the Renaissance who sought the

means of reviving the ancient glories of art mainly in the imitation of

ancient models. The antiques of the Medici gardens seem to have had

little influence on him beyond that of generally stimulating his passion

for perfection. By his own instincts he was an exclusive student of

nature. From his earliest days he had flung himself upon that study

with an unprecedented ardour of delight and curiosity. In drawing from

life he had early found the way to unite precision with freedom and

fire--the subtlest accuracy of expressive definition with vital movement

and rhythm of line--as no draughtsman had been able to unite them

before. He was the first painter to recognize the play of light and

shade as among the most significant and attractive of the world's

appearances, the earlier schools having with one consent subordinated

light and shade to colour and outline. Nor was he a student of the

broad, usual, patent appearances only of the world; its fugitive,

fantastic, unaccustomed appearances attracted him most of all. Strange

shapes of hills and rocks, rare plants and animals, unusual faces and

figures of men, questionable smiles and expressions, whether beautiful

or grotesque, far-fetched objects and curiosities, were things he loved

to pore upon and keep in memory. Neither did he stop at mere appearances

of any kind, but, having stamped the image of things upon his brain,

went on indefatigably to probe their hidden laws and causes. He soon

satisfied himself that the artist who was content to reproduce the

external aspects of things without searching into the hidden workings of

nature behind them, was one but half equipped for his calling. Every

fresh artistic problem immediately became for him a far-reaching

scientific problem as well. The laws of light and shade, the laws of

"perspective," including optics and the physiology of the eye, the laws

of human and animal anatomy and muscular movement, those of the growth

and structure of plants and of the powers and properties of water, all

these and much more furnished food almost from the beginning to his

insatiable spirit of inquiry.

The evidence of the young man's predilections and curiosities is

contained in the legends which tell of lost works produced by him in

youth. One of these was a cartoon or monochrome painting of Adam and Eve

in tempera, and in this, besides the beauty of the figures, the infinite

truth and elaboration of the foliage and animals in the background are

celebrated in terms which bring to mind the treatment of the subject by

Albrecht Dürer in his famous engraving done thirty years later. Again, a

peasant of Vinci having in his simplicity asked Ser Piero to get a

picture painted for him on a wooden shield, the father is said to have

laughingly handed on the commission to his son, who thereupon shut

himself up with all the noxious insects and grotesque reptiles he could

find, observed and drew and dissected them assiduously, and produced at

last a picture of a dragon compounded of their various shapes and

aspects, which was so fierce and so life-like as to terrify all who saw

it. With equal research and no less effect he painted on another

occasion the head of a snaky-haired Medusa. (A picture of this subject

which long did duty at the Uffizi for Leonardo's work is in all

likelihood merely the production of some later artist to whom the

descriptions of that work have given the cue.) Lastly, Leonardo is

related to have begun work in sculpture about this time by modelling

several heads of smiling women and children.

Of certified and accepted paintings produced by the young genius,

whether during his apprentice or his independent years at Florence

(about 1470-1482), very few are extant, and the two most important are

incomplete. A small and charming strip of an oblong "Annunciation" at

the Louvre is generally accepted as his work, done soon after 1470; a

very highly wrought drawing at the Uffizi, corresponding on a larger

scale to the head of the Virgin in the same picture, seems rather to be

a copy by a later hand. This little Louvre "Annunciation" is not very

compatible in style with another and larger, much-debated "Annunciation"

at the Uffizi, which manifestly came from the workshop of Verrocchio

about 1473-1474, and which many critics claim confidently for the young

Leonardo. It may have been joint studio-work of Verrocchio and his

pupils including Leonardo, who certainly was concerned in it, since a

study for the sleeve of the angel, preserved at Christ Church, Oxford,

is unquestionably by his hand. The landscape, with its mysterious spiry

mountains and winding waters, is very Leonardesque both in this picture

and in another contemporary product of the workshop, or as some think

of Leonardo's hand, namely a very highly and coldly finished small

"Madonna with a Pink" at Munich. The likeness he is recorded to have

painted of Ginevra de' Benci used to be traditionally identified with

the fine portrait of a matron at the Pitti absurdly known as _La

Monaca_: more lately it has been recognized in a rather dull,

expressionless Verrocchiesque portrait of a young woman with a fanciful

background of pine-sprays in the Liechtenstein gallery at Vienna.

Neither attribution can be counted convincing. Several works of

sculpture, including a bas-relief at Pistoia and a small terra-cotta

model of a St John at the Victoria and Albert Museum, have also been

claimed, but without general consent, as the young master's handiwork.

Of many brilliant early drawings by him, the first that can be dated is

a study of landscape done in 1473. A magnificent silver-point head of a

Roman warrior at the British Museum was clearly done, from or for a

bas-relief, under the immediate influence of Verrocchio. A number of

studies of heads in pen or silver point, with some sketches for

Madonnas, including a charming series in the British Museum for a

"Madonna with the Cat," may belong to the same years or the first years

of his independence. A sheet with two studies of heads bears a MS. note

of 1478, saying that in one of the last months of that year he began

painting the "Two Maries." One of the two may have been a picture of the

Virgin appearing to St Bernard, which we know he was commissioned to

paint in that year for a chapel in the Palace of the Signory, but never

finished: the commission was afterwards transferred to Filippino Lippi,

whose performance is now in the Badia. One of the two heads on this

dated sheet may probably have been a study for the same St Bernard; it

was used afterwards by some follower for a St Leonard in a stiff and

vapid "Ascension of Christ," wrongly attributed to the master himself in

the Berlin Museum. A pen-drawing representing a ringleader of the Pazzi

conspiracy, Bernardo Baroncelli, hung out of a window of the Bargello

after his surrender by the sultan at Constantinople to the emissaries of

Florence, can be dated from its subject as done in December 1479. A

number of his best drawings of the next following years are preparatory

pen-studies for an altar-piece of the "Adoration of the Magi,"

undertaken early in 1481 on the commission of the monks of S. Donato at

Scopeto. The preparation in monochrome for this picture, a work of

extraordinary power both of design and physiognomical expression, is

preserved at the Uffizi, but the painting itself was never carried out,

and after Leonardo's failure to fulfil his contract Filippino Lippi had

once more to be employed in his place. Of equal or even more intense

power, though of narrower scope, is an unfinished monochrome preparation

for a St Jerome, found accidentally at Rome by Cardinal Fesch and now in

the Vatican gallery; this also seems to belong to the first Florentine

period, but is not mentioned in documents.

The tale of completed work for these twelve or fourteen years (1470-1483

or thereabouts) is thus very scanty. But it must be remembered that

Leonardo was already full of projects in mechanics, hydraulics,

architecture, and military and civil engineering, ardently feeling his

way in the work of experimental study and observation in every branch of

theoretical or applied science in which any beginning had been made in

his age, as well as in some in which he was himself the first pioneer.

He was full of new ideas concerning both the laws and the applications

of mechanical forces. His architectural and engineering projects were of

a daring which amazed even the fellow-citizens of Alberti and

Brunelleschi. History presents few figures more attractive to the mind's

eye than that of Leonardo during this period of his all-capable and

dazzling youth. He did not indeed escape calumny, and was even denounced

on a charge of immoral practices, but fully and honourably acquitted.

There was nothing about him, as there was afterwards about Michelangelo,

dark-tempered, secret or morose; he was open and genial with all men. He

has indeed praised "the self-sufficing power of solitude" in almost the

same phrase as Wordsworth, and from time to time would even in youth

seclude himself for a season in complete intellectual absorption, as

when he toiled among his bats and wasps and lizards, forgetful of rest

and food, and insensible to the noisomeness of their corruption. But we

have to picture him as anon coming out and gathering about him a

tatterdemalion company, and jesting with them until they were in fits of

laughter, for the sake of observing their burlesque physiognomies; anon

as eagerly frequenting the society of men of science and learning of an

older generation like the mathematician Benedetto Aritmetico, the

physician, geographer and astronomer Paolo Toscanelli, the famous Greek

Aristotelian Giovanni Argiropoulo; or as out-rivalling all the youth of

the city now by charm of recitation, now by skill in music and now by

feats of strength and horsemanship; or as stopping to buy caged birds in

the market that he might set them free and watch them rejoicing in their

flight; or again as standing radiant in his rose-coloured cloak and his

rich gold hair among the throng of young and old on the piazza, and

holding them spellbound while he expatiated on the great projects in art

and mechanics that were teeming in his mind. Unluckily it is to written

records and to imagination that we have to trust exclusively for our

picture. No portrait of Leonardo as he appeared during this period of

his life has come down to us.

But his far-reaching schemes and studies brought him no immediate gain,

and diverted him from the tasks by which he should have supported

himself. For all his shining power and promise he remained poor.

Probably also his exclusive belief in experimental methods, and slight

regard for mere authority whether in science or art made the

intellectual atmosphere of the Medicean circle, with its passionate

mixed cult of the classic past and of a Christianity mystically blended

and reconciled with Platonism, uncongenial to him. At any rate he was

ready to leave Florence when the chance was offered him of fixed service

at the court of Ludovico Sforza (il Moro) at Milan. Soon after that

prince had firmly established his power as nominal guardian and

protector of his nephew Gian Galeazzo but really as usurping ruler of

the state, he revived a project previously mooted for the erection of an

equestrian monument in honour of the founder of his house's greatness,

Francesco Sforza, and consulted Lorenzo dei Medici on the choice of an

artist. Lorenzo recommended the young Leonardo, who went to Milan

accordingly (at some uncertain date in or about 1483), taking as a gift

from Lorenzo and a token of his own skill a silver lute of wondrous

sweetness fashioned in the likeness of a horse's head. Hostilities were

at the moment imminent between Milan and Venice; it was doubtless on

that account that in the letter commending himself to the duke, and

setting forth his own capacities, Leonardo rests his title to patronage

chiefly on his attainments and inventions in military engineering. After

asserting these in detail under nine different heads, he speaks under a

tenth of his proficiency as a civil engineer and architect, and adds

lastly a brief paragraph with reference to what he can do in painting

and sculpture, undertaking in particular to carry out in a fitting

manner the monument to Francesco Sforza.

The first definite documentary evidence of Leonardo's employments at

Milan dates from 1487. Some biographers have supposed that the interval,

or part of it, between 1483 and that date was occupied by travels in the

East. The grounds of the supposition are some drafts occurring among his

MSS. of a letter addressed to the _diodario_ or _diwâdar_ of Syria,

lieutenant of the sultan of Babylon (Babylon meaning according to a

usage of that time Cairo). In these drafts Leonardo describes in the

first person, with sketches, a traveller's strange experiences in Egypt,

Cyprus, Constantinople, the Cilician coasts about Mount Taurus and

Armenia. He relates the rise and persecution of a prophet and preacher,

the catastrophe of a falling mountain and submergence of a great city,

followed by a general inundation, and the claim of the prophet to have

foretold these disasters; adding physical descriptions of the Euphrates

river and the marvellous effects of sunset light on the Taurus range. No

contemporary gives the least hint of Leonardo's having travelled in the

East; to the places he mentions he gives their classical and not their

current Oriental names; the catastrophes he describes are unattested

from any other source; he confuses the Taurus and the Caucasus; some of

the phenomena he mentions are repeated from Aristotle and Ptolemy; and

there seems little reason to doubt that these passages in his MSS. are

merely his drafts of a projected geographical treatise or perhaps

romance. He had a passion for geography and travellers' tales, for

descriptions of natural wonders and ruined cities, and was himself a

practised fictitious narrator and fabulist, as other passages in his

MSS. prove. Neither is the gap in the account of his doings after he

first went to the court of Milan really so complete as has been

represented. Ludovico was vehemently denounced and attacked during the

earlier years of his usurpation, especially by the partisans of his

sister-in-law Bona of Savoy, the mother of the rightful duke, young Gian

Galeazzo. To repel these attacks he employed the talents of a number of

court poets and artists, who in public recitation and pageant, in

emblematic picture and banner and device, proclaimed the wisdom and

kindness of his guardianship and the wickedness of his assailants. That

Leonardo was among the artists thus employed is proved both by notes and

projects among his MSS. and by allegoric sketches still extant. Several

such sketches are at Christ Church, Oxford: one shows a horned hag or

she-fiend urging her hounds to an attack on the state of Milan, and

baffled by the Prudence and Justice of Il Moro (all this made clear by

easily recognizable emblems). The allusion must almost certainly be to

the attempted assassination of Ludovico by agents of the duchess Bona in

1484. Again, it must have been the pestilence decimating Milan in

1484-1485 which gave occasion to the projects submitted by Leonardo to

Ludovico for breaking up the city and reconstructing it on improved

sanitary principles. To 1485-1486 also appears to belong the inception

of his elaborate though unfulfilled architectural plans for beautifying

and strengthening the _Castello_, the great stronghold of the ruling

power in the state. Very soon afterwards he must have begun work upon

his plans and models, undertaken during an acute phase of the

competition which the task had called forth between German and Italian

architects, for another momentous enterprise, the completion of Milan

cathedral. Extant records of payments made to him in connexion with

these architectural plans extend from August 1487 to May 1490: in the

upshot none of them was carried out. From the beginning of his residence

with Ludovico his combination of unprecedented mechanical ingenuity with

apt allegoric invention and courtly charm and eloquence had made him the

directing spirit in all court ceremonies and festivities. On the

occasion of the marriage of the young duke Gian Galeazzo with Isabella

of Aragon in 1487, we find Leonardo devising all the mechanical and

spectacular part of a masque of Paradise; and presently afterwards

designing a bathing pavilion of unheard-of beauty and ingenuity for the

young duchess. Meanwhile he was filling his note-books as busily as ever

with the results of his studies in statics and dynamics, in human

anatomy, geometry and the phenomena of light and shade. It is probable

that from the first he had not forgotten his great task of the Sforza

monument, with its attendant researches in equine movement and anatomy,

and in the science and art of bronze casting on a great scale. The many

existing sketches for the work (of which the chief collection is at

Windsor) cannot be distinctly dated. In 1490, the seventh year of his

residence at Milan, after some expressions of impatience on the part of

his patron, he had all but got his model ready for display on the

occasion of the marriage of Ludovico with Beatrice d'Este, but at the

last moment was dissatisfied with what he had done and determined to

begin all over again.

In the same year, 1490, Leonardo enjoyed some months of uninterrupted

mathematical and physical research in the libraries and among the

learned men of Pavia, whither he had been called to advise on some

architectural difficulties concerning the cathedral. Here also the study

of an ancient equestrian monument (the so-called _Regisole_, destroyed

in 1796) gave him fresh ideas for his Francesco Sforza. In January 1491

a double Sforza-Este marriage (Ludovico Sforza himself with Beatrice

d'Este, Alfonso d'Este with Anna Sforza the sister of Gian Galeazzo)

again called forth his powers as a masque and pageant-master. For the

next following years the ever-increasing gaiety and splendour of the

Milanese court gave him continual employment in similar kinds, including

the composition and recitation of jests, tales, fables and "prophecies"

(i.e. moral and social satires and allegories cast in the future tense);

among his MSS. occur the drafts of many such, some of them both profound

and pungent. Meanwhile he was again at work upon the monument to

Francesco Sforza, and this time to practical purpose. When ambassadors

from Austria came to Milan towards the close of 1493 to escort the

betrothed bride of their emperor Maximilian, Bianca Maria Sforza, away

on her nuptial journey, the finished colossal model, 26 ft. high, was at

last in its place for all to see in the courtyard of the Castello.

Contemporary accounts attest the magnificence of the work and the

enthusiasm it excited, but are not precise enough to enable us to judge

to which of the two main groups of extant sketches its design

corresponded. One of these groups shows the horse and rider in

relatively tranquil march, in the manner of the Gattemalata monument put

up fifty years before by Donatello at Padua and the Colleoni monument on

which Verocchio was now engaged at Venice. Another group of sketches

shows the horse galloping or rearing in violent action, in some

instances in the act of trampling a fallen enemy. Neither is it possible

to discriminate with certainty the sketches intended for the Sforza

monument from others which Leonardo may have done in view of another and

later commission for an equestrian statue, namely, that in honour of

Ludovico's great enemy, Gian Giacomo Trivulzio.

The year 1494 is a momentous one in the history of Italian politics. In

that year the long ousted and secluded prince, Gian Galeazzo, died under

circumstances more than suspicious. In that year Ludovico, now duke of

Milan in his own right, for the strengthening of his power against

Naples, first entered into those intrigues with Charles VIII. of France

which later brought upon Italy successive floods of invasion, revolution

and calamity. The same year was one of special importance in the

prodigiously versatile activities of Leonardo da Vinci. Documents show

him, among other things, planning during an absence of several months

from the city vast new engineering works for improving the irrigation

and water-ways of the Lomellina and adjacent regions of the Lombard

plain; ardently studying phenomena of storm and lightning, of river

action and of mountain structure; co-operating with his friend, Donato

Bramante, the great architect, in fresh designs for the improvement and

embellishment of the Castello at Milan; and petitioning the duke to

secure him proper payment for a Madonna lately executed with the help of

his pupil, Ambrogio de Predis, for the brotherhood of the Conception of

St Francis at Milan. (This is almost certainly the fine, slightly

altered second version of the "Virgin of the Rocks," now in the National

Gallery, London. The original and earlier version is one of the glories

of the Louvre, and shows far more of a Florentine and less of a Milanese

character than the London picture.) In the same year, 1494, or early in

the next, Leonardo, if Vasari is to be trusted, paid a visit to Florence

to take part in deliberations concerning the projected new council-hall

to be constructed in the palace of the Signory. Lastly, recent research

has proved that it was in 1494 that Leonardo got to work in earnest on

what was to prove not only by far his greatest but by far his most

expeditiously and steadily executed work in painting. This was the "Last

Supper" undertaken for the refectory of the convent church of Sta Maria

delle Grazie at Milan on the joint commission (as it would appear) of

Ludovico and of the monks themselves.

This picture, the world-famous "Cenacolo" of Leonardo, has been the

subject of much erroneous legend and much misdirected experiment. Having

through centuries undergone cruel injury, from technical imperfections

at the outset, from disastrous atmospheric conditions, from vandalism

and neglect, and most of all from unskilled repair, its remains have at

last (1904-1908) been treated with a mastery of scientific resource and

a tenderness of conscientious skill that have revived for ourselves and

for posterity a great part of its power. At the same time its true

history has been investigated and re-established. The intensity of

intellectual and manual application which Leonardo threw into the work

is proved by the fact that he finished it within four years, in spite of

all his other avocations and of those prolonged pauses of concentrated

imaginative effort and intense self-critical brooding to which we have

direct contemporary witness. He painted the picture on the wall in

tempera, not, according to the legend which sprung up within twenty

years of its completion, in oil. The tempera vehicle, perhaps including

new experimental ingredients, did not long hold firmly to its plaster

ground, nor that to the wall. Flaking and scaling set in; hard crusts of

mildew formed, dissolved and re-formed with changes of weather over both

the loosened parts and those that remained firm. Decade after decade

these processes went on, a rain of minute scales and grains falling,

according to one witness, continually from the surface, till the picture

seemed to be perishing altogether. In the 18th century attempts were

first made at restoration. They all proceeded on the false assumption,

dating from the early years of the 16th century, that the work had been

executed in oil. With oil it was accordingly at one time saturated in

hopes of reviving the colours. Other experimenters tried various

"secrets," which for the most part meant deleterious glues and

varnishes. Fortunately not very much of actual repainting was

accomplished except on some parts of the garments. The chief operations

were carried on by Bellotti in 1726, by Mazza in 1770, and by Barezzi in

1819 and the following years. None of them arrested, some actually

accelerated, the natural agencies of damp and disintegration, decay and

mildew. Yet this mere ghost of a picture, this evocation, half vanished

as it was, by a great world-genius of a mighty spiritual world-event,

remained a thing indescribably impressive. The ghost has now been

brought back to much of true life again by the skill of the most

scrupulous of all restorers, Cavaliere Cavenaghi, who, acting under the

authority of a competent commission, and after long and patient

experiment, found it possible to secure to the wall the innumerable

blistered, mildewed and half-detached flakes and scales of the original

work that yet remained, to clear the surface thus obtained of much of

the obliterating accretions due to decay and mishandling, and to bring

the whole to unity by touching tenderly in with tempera the spots and

spaces actually left bare. A further gain obtained through these

operations has been the uncovering, immediately above the main subject,

of a beautiful scheme of painted lunettes and vaultings, the lunettes

filled by Leonardo's hand with inscribed scutcheons and interlaced plait

or knot ornaments (_intrecciamenti_), the vaultings with stars on a blue

ground. The total result, if adequate steps can be taken to counteract

the effects of atmospheric change in future, will remain a splendid gain

for posterity and a happy refutation of D'Annunzio's despairing poem,

the _Death of a Masterpiece_.

Leonardo's "Last Supper," for all its injuries, became from the first,

and has ever since remained, for all Christendom the typical

representation of the scene. Goethe in his famous criticism has said all

that needs to be said of it. The painter has departed from precedent in

grouping the disciples, with their Master in the midst, along the far

side and the two ends of a long, narrow table, and in leaving the near

or service side of the table towards the spectator free. The chamber is

seen in a perfectly symmetrical perspective, its rear wall pierced by

three plain openings which admit the sense of quiet distance and mystery

from the open landscape beyond; by the central of these openings, which

is the widest of the three, the head and shoulders of the Saviour are

framed in. On His right and left are ranged the disciples in equal

numbers. The furniture and accessories of the chamber, very simply

conceived, have been rendered with scrupulous exactness and

distinctness; yet they leave to the human and dramatic elements the

absolute mastery of the scene. The serenity of the holy company has

within a moment been broken by the words of their Master, "One of you

shall betray Me." In the agitation of their consciences and affections,

the disciples have started into groups or clusters along the table,

some standing, some still remaining seated. There are four of these

groups, of three disciples each, and each group is harmoniously

interlinked by some natural connecting action with the next. Leonardo,

though no special student of the Greeks, has perfectly carried out the

Greek principle of expressive variety in particulars subordinated to

general symmetry. He has used all his acquired science of linear and

aerial perspective to create an almost complete illusion to the eye, but

an illusion that has in it nothing trivial, and in heightening our sense

of the material reality of the scene only heightens its profound

spiritual impressiveness and gravity. The results of his intensest

meditations on the psychology and the human and divine significance of

the event (on which he has left some pregnant hints in written words of

his own) are perfectly fused with those of his subtlest technical

calculations on the rhythmical balancing of groups and arrangement of

figures in space.

Of authentic preparatory studies for this work there remain but few.

There is a sheet at the Louvre of much earlier date than the first idea

or commission for this particular picture, containing some nude sketches

for the arrangement of the subject; another later and farther advanced,

but still probably anterior to the practical commission, at Venice, and

a MS. sheet of great interest at the Victoria and Albert Museum, on

which the painter has noted in writing the dramatic motives appropriate

to the several disciples. At Windsor and Milan are a few finished

studies in red chalk for the heads. A highly-reputed series of

life-sized chalk drawings of the same heads, of which the greater

portion is at Weimar, consists of early copies, and is interesting

though having no just claim to originality. Scarcely less doubtful is

the celebrated unfinished and injured study of the head of Christ at the

Brera, Milan.

Leonardo's triumph with his "Last Supper" encouraged him in the hope of

proceeding now to the casting of the Sforza monument or "Great Horse,"

the model of which had stood for the last three years the admiration of

all beholders, in the Corte Vecchio of the Castello. He had formed a new

and close friendship with Luca Pacioli of Borgo San Sepolcro, the great

mathematician, whose _Summa de aritmetica_, _geometrica_, &c., he had

eagerly bought at Pavia on its first appearance, and who arrived at the

Court of Milan about the moment of the completion of the "Cenacolo."

Pacioli was equally amazed and delighted at Leonardo's two great

achievements in sculpture and painting, and still more at the genius for

mathematical, physical and anatomical research shown in the collections

of MS. notes which the master laid before him. The two began working

together on the materials for Pacioli's next book, _De divina

proportione_. Leonardo obtained Pacioli's help in calculations and

measurements for the great task of casting the bronze horse and man. But

he was soon called away by Ludovico to a different undertaking, the

completion of the interior decorations, already begun by another hand

and interrupted, of certain chambers of the Castello called the _Saletta

Negra_ and the _Sala Grande dell' Asse_, or _Sala della Torre_. When, in

the last decade of the 19th century, works of thorough architectural

investigation and repair were undertaken in that building under the

superintendence of Professor Luca Beltrami, a devoted foreign student,

Dr Paul Müller-Walde, obtained leave to scrape for traces of Leonardo's

handiwork beneath the replastered and white-washed walls and ceilings of

chambers that might be identified with these. In one small chamber there

was cleared a frieze of cupids intermingled with foliage; but in this,

after the first moments of illusion, it was only possible to acknowledge

the hand of some unknown late and lax decorator of the school,

influenced as much by Raphael as by Leonardo. In another room (_Sala del

Tesoro_) was recovered a gigantic headless figure, in all probability of

Mercury, also wrongly claimed at first for Leonardo, and afterwards, to

all appearance rightly, for Bramante. But in the great _Sala dell' Asse_

(or _della Torre_) abundant traces of Leonardo's own hand were found, in

the shape of a decoration of intricate geometrical knot or plait work

combined with natural leafage; the abstract puzzle-pattern, of a kind

in which Leonardo took peculiar pleasure, intermingling in cunning play

and contrast with a pattern of living boughs and leaves exquisitely

drawn in free and vital growth. Sufficient portions of this design were

found in good preservation to enable the whole to be accurately

restored--a process as legitimate in such a case as censurable in the

case of a figure-painting. For these and other artistic labours Leonardo

was rewarded in 1498 (ready money being with difficulty forthcoming and

his salary being long in arrears) by the gift of a suburban garden

outside the Porta Vercelli.

But again he could not get leave to complete the task in hand. He was

called away on duty as chief military engineer (_ingegnere camerale_)

with the special charge of inspecting and maintaining all the canals and

waterways of the duchy. Dangers were accumulating upon Ludovico and the

state of Milan. France had become Ludovico's enemy; and Louis XII., the

pope and Venice had formed a league to divide his principality among

them. He counted on baffling them by forming a counter league of the

principalities of northern Italy, and by raising the Turks against

Venice, and the Germans and Swiss against France. Germans and Swiss,

however, inopportunely fell to war against each other. Ludovico

travelled to Innsbruck, the better to push his interests (September

1499). In his absence Louis XII. invaded the Milanese, and the officers

left in charge of the city surrendered it without striking a blow. The

invading sovereign, going to Sta Maria delle Grazie with his retinue to

admire the renowned painting of the "Last Supper," asked if it could not

be detached from the wall and transported to France. The French

lieutenant in Milan, Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, the embittered enemy of

Ludovico, began exercising a vindictive tyranny over the city which had

so long accepted the sway of the usurper. Great artists were usually

exempt from the consequences of political revolutions, and Trivulzio,

now or later, commissioned Leonardo to design an equestrian monument to

himself. Leonardo, having remained unmolested at Milan for two months

under the new régime, but knowing that Ludovico was preparing a great

stroke for the re-establishment of his power, and that fresh convulsions

must ensue, thought it best to provide for his own security. In December

he left Milan with his friend Luca Pacioli, having first sent some of

his modest savings to Florence for investment. His intention was to

watch events. They took a turn which made him a stranger to Milan for

the next seven years. Ludovico, at the head of an army of Swiss

mercenaries, returned victoriously in February 1500, and was welcomed by

a population disgusted with the oppression of the invaders. But in April

he was once more overthrown by the French in a battle fought at Novara,

his Swiss clamouring at the last moment for their overdue pay, and

treacherously refusing to fight against a force of their own countrymen

led by La Trémouille. Ludovico was taken prisoner and carried to France;

the city, which had been strictly spared on the first entry of Louis

XII., was entered and sacked; and the model of Leonardo's great statue

made a butt (as eye witnesses tell) for Gascon archers. Two years later

we find the duke Ercole of Ferrara begging the French king's lieutenant

in Milan to let him have the model, injured as it was, for the adornment

of his own city; but nothing came of the petition, and within a short

time it seems to have been totally broken up.

Thus, of Leonardo's sixteen years' work at Milan (1483-1499) the results

actually remaining are as follows: The Louvre "Virgin of the Rocks"

possibly, i.e. as to its execution; the conception and style are

essentially Florentine, carried out by Leonardo to a point of intense

and almost glittering finish, of quintessential, almost overstrained,

refinement in design and expression, and invested with a new element of

romance by the landscape in which the scene is set--a strange watered

country of basaltic caves and arches, with the lights and shadows

striking sharply and yet mysteriously among rocks, some upright, some

jutting, some pendent, all tufted here and there with exquisite growths

of shrub and flower. The National Gallery "Virgin of the Rocks"

certainly, with help from Ambrogio de Predis; in this the Florentine

character of the original is modified by an admixture of Milanese

elements, the tendency to harshness and over-elaboration of detail

softened, the strained action of the angel's pointing hand altogether

dropped, while in many places pupils' work seems recognizable beside

that of the master. The "Last Supper" of Sta Maria delle Grazie, his

masterpiece; as to its history and present condition enough has been

said. The decorations of the ceiling of the Sala della Torre in the

Castello. Other paintings done by him at Milan are mentioned, and

attempts have been made to identify them with works still existing. He

is known to have painted portraits of two of the king's mistresses,

Cecilia Gallerani and Lucrezia Crivelli. Cecilia Gallerani used to be

identified as a lady with ringlets and a lute, depicted in a portrait at

Milan, now rightly assigned to Bartolommeo Veneto. More lately she has

by some been conjecturally recognized in a doubtful, though

Leonardesque, portrait of a lady with a weasel in the Czartoryski

collection at Prague. Lucrezia Crivelli has, with no better reason, been

identified with the famous "Belle Ferronnière" (a mere misnomer, caught

from the true name of another portrait which used to hang near it) at

the Louvre; this last is either a genuine Milanese portrait by Leonardo

himself or an extraordinarily fine work of his pupil Boltraffio. Strong

claims have also been made on behalf of a fine profile portrait

resembling Beatrice d'Este in the Ambrosiana; but this the best judges

are agreed in regarding as a work, done in a lucky hour, of Ambrogio de

Predis. A portrait of a musician in the same gallery is in like manner

contested between the master and the pupil. Mention is made of a

"Nativity" painted for and sent to the emperor Maximilian, and also

apparently of some picture painted for Matthias Corvinus, king of

Hungary; both are lost or at least unidentified. The painters especially

recorded as Leonardo's immediate pupils during this part of his life at

Milan are the two before mentioned, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and

Ambrogio Preda or de Predis, with Marco d'Oggionno and Andrea Salai, the

last apparently less a fully-trained painter than a studio assistant and

personal attendant, devotedly attached and faithful in both capacities.

Leonardo's own native Florentine manner had at first been not a little

modified by that of the Milanese school as he found it represented in

the works of such men as Bramantino, Borgognone and Zenale; but his

genius had in its turn reacted far more strongly upon the younger

members of the school, and exercised, now or later, a transforming and

dominating influence not only upon his immediate pupils, but upon men

like Luini, Giampetrino, Bazzi, Cesare da Sesto and indeed the whole

Lombard school in the early 15th century. Of sculpture done by him

during this period we have no remains, only the tragically tantalizing

history of the Sforza monument. Of drawings there are very many,

including few only for the "Last Supper," many for the Sforza monument,

as well as the multitude of sketches, scientific and other, which we

find intermingled among the vast body of his miscellaneous MSS., notes

and records. In mechanical, scientific and theoretical studies of all

kinds it was a period, as these MSS. attest, of extraordinary activity

and self-development. At Pavia in 1494 we find him taking up literary

and grammatical studies, both in Latin and the vernacular; the former,

no doubt, in order the more easily to read those among the ancients who

had laboured in the fields that were his own, as Euclid, Galen, Celsus,

Ptolemy, Pliny, Vitruvius and, above all, Archimedes; the latter with a

growing hope of some day getting into proper form and order the mass of

materials he was daily accumulating for treatises on all his manifold

subjects of enquiry. He had been much helped by his opportunities of

intercourse with the great architects, engineers and mathematicians who

frequented the court of Milan--Bramante, Alberghetti, Andrea di Ferrara,

Pietro Monti, Fazio Cardano and, above all, Luca Pacioli. The knowledge

of Leonardo's position among and familiarity with such men early helped

to spread the idea that he had been at the head of a regularly

constituted academy of arts and sciences at Milan. The occurrence of the

words "Achademia Leonardi Vinci" on certain engravings, done after his

drawings, of geometric "knots" or puzzle-patterns (things for which we

have already learned his partiality), helped to give currency to this

impression not only in Italy but in the North, where the same

engravings were copied by Albrecht Dürer. The whole notion has been

proved mistaken. There existed no such academy at Milan, with Leonardo

as president. The academies of the day represented the prevailing

intellectual tendency of Renaissance humanism, namely, an absorbing

enthusiasm for classic letters and for the transcendental speculations

of Platonic and neo-Platonic mysticism, not unmixed with the traditions

and practice of medieval alchemy, astrology and necromantics. For these

last pursuits Leonardo had nothing but contempt. His many-sided and

far-reaching studies in experimental science were mainly his own,

conceived and carried out long in advance of his time, and in communion

with only such more or less isolated spirits as were advancing along one

or another of the same paths of knowledge. He learnt indeed on these

lines eagerly wherever he could, and in learning imparted knowledge to

others. But he had no school in any proper sense except his studio, and

his only scholars were those who painted there. Of these one or two, as

we have evidence, tried their hands at engraving; among their engravings

were these "knots," which, being things of use for decorative craftsmen

to copy, were inscribed for identification, and perhaps for protection,

as coming from the Achademia Leonardi Vinci; a trifling matter

altogether, and quite unfit to sustain the elaborate structure of

conjecture which has been built on it.

To return to the master: when he and Luca Pacioli left Milan in December

1499, their destination was Venice. They made a brief stay at Mantua,

where Leonardo was graciously received by the duchess Isabella Gonzaga,

the most cultured of the many cultured great ladies of her time, whose

portrait he promised to paint on a future day; meantime he made the fine

chalk drawing of her now at the Louvre. Arrived at Venice, he seems to

have occupied himself chiefly with studies in mathematics and

cosmography. In April the friends heard of the second and final

overthrow of Ludovico il Moro, and at that news, giving up all idea of a

return to Milan, moved on to Florence, which they found depressed both

by internal troubles and by the protraction of the indecisive and

inglorious war with Pisa. Here Leonardo undertook to paint an

altar-piece for the Church of the Annunziata, Filippino Lippi, who had

already received the commission, courteously retiring from it in his

favour. A year passed by, and no progress had been made with the

painting. Questions of physical geography and engineering engrossed him

as much as ever. He writes to correspondents making enquiries about the

tides in the Euxine and Caspian Seas. He reports for the information of

the _Arte de' Mercanti_ on the precautions to be taken against a

threatening landslip on the hill of S. Salvatore dell' Osservanza. He

submits drawings and models for the canalization and control of the

waters of the Arno, and propounds, with compulsive eloquence and

conviction, a scheme for transporting the Baptistery of St John, the

"bel San Giovanni" of Dante, to another part of the city, and elevating

it on a stately basement of marble. Meantime the Servite brothers of the

Annunziata were growing impatient for the completion of their

altar-piece. In April 1501 Leonardo had only finished the cartoon, and

this all Florence flocked to see and admire. Isabella Gonzaga, who

cherished the hope that he might be induced permanently to attach

himself to the court of Mantua, wrote about this time to ask news of

him, and to beg for a painting from him for her study, already adorned

with masterpieces by the first hands of Italy, or at least for a "small

Madonna, devout and sweet as is natural to him." In reply her

correspondent says that the master is wholly taken up with geometry and

very impatient of the brush, but at the same time tells her all about

his just completed cartoon for the Annunziata. The subject was the

Virgin seated in the lap of St Anne, bending forward to hold her child

who had half escaped from her embrace to play with a lamb upon the

ground. The description answers exactly to the composition of the

celebrated picture of the Virgin and St Anne at the Louvre. A cartoon of

this composition in the Esterhazy collection at Vienna is held to be

only a copy, and the original cartoon must be regarded as lost. But

another of kindred though not identical motive has come down to us and

is preserved in the Diploma Gallery at the Royal Academy. In this

incomparable work St Anne, pointing upward with her left hand, smiles

with an intense look of wondering, questioning, inward sweetness into

the face of the Virgin, who in her turn smiles down upon her child as He

leans from her lap to give the blessing to the little St John standing

beside her. Evidently two different though nearly related designs had

been maturing in Leonardo's mind. A rough first sketch for the motive of

the Academy cartoon is in the British Museum; one for the motive of the

lost cartoon and of the Louvre picture is at Venice. No painting by

Leonardo from the Academy cartoon exists, but in the Ambrosiana at Milan

there is one by Luini, with the figure of St Joseph added. It remains a

matter of debate whether the Academy cartoon or that shown by Leonardo

at the Annunziata in 1501 was the earlier. The probabilities seem in

favour of the Academy cartoon. This, whether done at Milan or at

Florence, is in any case a typically perfect and harmonious example of

the master's Milanese manner; while in the other composition with the

lamb the action and attitude of the Virgin are somewhat strained, and

the original relation between her head and her mother's, lovely both in

design and expression, is lost.

In spite of the universal praise of his cartoon, Leonardo did not

persevere with the picture, and the monks of the Annunziata had to give

back the commission to Filippino Lippi, at whose death the task was

completed by Perugino. It remains uncertain whether a small Madonna with

distaff and spindle, which the correspondent of Isabella Gonzaga reports

Leonardo as having begun for one Robertet, a favourite of the king of

France, was ever finished. He painted one portrait, it is said, at this

time, that of Ginevra Benci, a kinswoman, perhaps sister, of a youth

Giovanni di Amerigo Benci, who shared his passion for cosmographical

studies; and probably began another, the famous "La Gioconda," which was

only finished four years afterwards. The gonfalionere Soderini offered

him in vain, to do with it what he would, the huge half-spoiled block of

marble out of which Michelangelo three years later wrought his "David."

Isabella Gonzaga again begged, in an autograph letter, that she might

have a painting by his hand, but her request was put off; he did her,

however, one small service by examining and reporting on some jewelled

vases, formerly the property of Lorenzo de' Medici, which had been

offered her. The importunate expectations of a masterpiece or

masterpieces in painting or sculpture, which beset him on all hands in

Florence, inclined him to take service again with some princely patron,

if possible of a genius commensurate with his own, who would give him

scope to carry out engineering schemes on a vast scale. Accordingly he

suddenly took service, in the spring of 1502, with Cesare Borgia, duke

of Valentinois, then almost within sight of the realization of his huge

ambitions, and meanwhile occupied in consolidating his recent conquests

in the Romagna. Between May 1502 and March 1503 Leonardo travelled as

chief engineer to Duke Caesar over a great part of central Italy.

Starting with a visit to Piombino, on the coast opposite Elba, he went

by way of Siena to Urbino, where he made drawings and began works; was

thence hastily summoned by way of Pesaro and Rimini to Cesena; spent two

months between there and Cesenatico, projecting and directing canal and

harbour works, and planning the restoration of the palace of Frederic

II.; thence hurriedly joined his master, momentarily besieged by enemies

at Imola; followed him probably to Sinigaglia and Perugia, through the

whirl of storms and surprises, vengeances and treasons, which marked his

course that winter, and finally, by way of Chiusi and Acquapendente, as

far as Orvieto and probably to Rome, where Caesar arrived on the 14th of

February 1503. The pope's death and Caesar's own downfall were not

destined to be long delayed. But Leonardo apparently had already had

enough of that service, and was back at Florence in March. He has left

dated notes and drawings made at most of the stations we have named,

besides a set of six large-scale maps drawn minutely with his own hand,

and including nearly the whole territory of the Maremma, Tuscany and

Umbria between the Apennines and the Tyrrhene Sea.

At Florence he was at last persuaded, on the initiative of Piero

Soderini, to undertake for his native city a work of painting as great

as that with which he had adorned Milan. This was a battle-piece to

decorate one of the walls of the new council-hall in the palace of the

signory. He chose an episode in the victory won by the generals of the

republic in 1440 over Niccolo Piccinino near a bridge at Anghiari, in

the upper valley of the Tiber. To the young Michelangelo was presently

entrusted a rival battle-piece to be painted on another wall of the same

apartment; he chose, as is well known, a surprise of the Florentine

forces in the act of bathing near Pisa. About the same time Leonardo

took part in the debate on the proper site for Michelangelo's newly

finished colossal "David," and voted in favour of the Loggia dei Lanzi,

against a majority which included Michelangelo himself. Neither

Leonardo's genius nor his noble manners could soften the rude and

taunting temper of the younger man, whose style as an artist,

nevertheless, in subjects both of tenderness and terror, underwent at

this time a profound modification from Leonardo's example.

In one of the sections of his projected _Treatise on Painting_, Leonardo

has detailed at length, and obviously from his own observation, the

pictorial aspects of a battle. His choice of subject in this instance

was certainly not made from any love of warfare or indifference to its

horrors. In his MSS. there occur almost as many trenchant sayings on

life and human affairs as on art and natural law; and of war he has

disposed in two words as a "bestial frenzy" (_pazzia bestialissima_). In

his design for the Hall of Council he set himself to depict this frenzy

at its fiercest. He chose the moment of a terrific struggle for the

colours between the opposing sides; hence the work became commonly known

as the "Battle of the Standard." Judging by the accounts of those who

saw it, and the fragmentary evidences which remain, the tumultuous

medley of men and horses, and the expressions of martial fury and

despair, must have been conceived and rendered with a mastery not less

commanding than had been the looks and gestures of bodeful sorrow and

soul's perplexity among the quiet company on the convent wall at Milan.

The place assigned to Leonardo for the preparation of his cartoon was

the Sala del Papa at Santa Maria Novella. He for once worked steadily

and unremittingly at his task. His accounts with the signory enable us

to follow its progress step by step. He had finished the cartoon in less

than two years (1504-1505), and when it was exhibited along with that of

Michelangelo, the two rival works seemed to all men a new revelation of

the powers of art, and served as a model and example of the students of

that generation, as the frescoes of Masaccio in the Carmine had served

to those of two generations earlier. The young Raphael, whose

incomparable instinct for rhythmical design had been trained hitherto on

subjects of holy quietude and rapt contemplation according to the

traditions of Umbrian art, learnt from Leonardo's example to apply the

same instinct to themes of violent action and strife. From the same

example Fra Bartolommeo and a crowd of other Florentine painters of the

rising or risen generation took in like manner a new impulse. The master

lost no time in proceeding to the execution of his design upon the mural

surface; this time he had devised a technical method of which, after a

preliminary trial in the Sala del Papa, he regarded the success as

certain; the colours, whether tempera or other remains in doubt, were to

be laid on a specially prepared ground, and then both colours and ground

made secure upon the wall by the application of heat. When the central

group was done the heat was applied, but it was found to take effect

unequally; the colours in the upper part ran or scaled from the wall,

and the result was a failure more or less complete. The unfinished and

decayed painting remained for some fifty years on the wall, but after

1560 was covered over with new frescoes by Vasari. The cartoon did not

last so long. After doing its work as the most inspiring of all examples

for students it seems to have been cut up. When Leonardo left Italy for

good in 1516 he is recorded to have left "the greater part of it" in

deposit at the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, where he was accustomed also

to deposit his moneys, and whence it seems before long to have

disappeared. Our only existing memorials of the great work are a number

of small pen-studies of fighting men and horses, three splendid studies

in red chalk at Budapest for heads in the principal group, one head at

Oxford copied by a contemporary of the size of the original cartoon

(above life); a tiny sketch, also at Oxford, by Raphael after the

principal group; an engraving done by Zacchia of Lucca in 1558 not after

the original but after a copy; a 16th-century Flemish drawing of the

principal group, and another, splendidly spirited, by Rubens, both

copies of copies; with Edelinck's fine engraving after the Rubens

drawing.

During these years, 1503-1506, Leonardo also resumed (if it is true that

he had already begun it before his travels with Cesare Borgia) the

portrait of Madonna Lisa, the Neapolitan wife of Zanobi del Giocondo,

and finished it to the last pitch of his powers. In this lady he had

found a sitter whose face and smile possessed in a singular degree the

haunting, enigmatic charm in which he delighted. He worked, it is said,

at her portrait during some portion of four successive years, causing

music to be played during the sittings that the rapt expression might

not fade from off her countenance. The picture was bought afterwards by

Francis I. for four thousand gold florins, and is now one of the glories

of the Louvre. The richness of colouring on which Vasari expatiates has

indeed flown, partly from injury, partly because in striving for effects

of light and shade the painter was accustomed to model his figures on a

dark ground, and in this as in his other oil-pictures the ground has to

a large extent come through. Nevertheless, in its dimmed and blackened

state, the portrait casts an irresistible spell alike by subtlety of

expression, by refinement and precision of drawing, and by the romantic

invention of its background. It has been the theme of endless critical

rhapsodies, among which that of Pater is perhaps the most imaginative as

it is the best known.

In the spring of 1506 Leonardo, moved perhaps by chagrin at the failure

of his work in the Hall of Council, accepted a pressing invitation to

Milan, from Charles d'Amboise, Maréchal de Chaumont, the lieutenant of

the French king in Lombardy. The leave of absence granted to him by the

signory on the request of the French viceroy was for three months only.

The period was several times extended, at first grudgingly, Soderini

complaining that Leonardo had treated the republic ill in the matter of

the battle picture; whereupon the painter honourably offered to refund

the money paid, an offer which the signory as honourably refused. Louis

XII. sent messages urgently desiring that Leonardo should await his own

arrival in Milan, having seen a small Madonna by him in France (probably

that painted for Robertet) and hoping to obtain from him works of the

same class and perhaps a portrait. The king arrived in May 1507, and

soon afterwards Leonardo's services were formally and amicably

transferred from the signory of Florence to Louis, who gave him the

title of painter and engineer in ordinary. In September of the same year

troublesome private affairs called him to Florence. His father had died

in 1504, apparently intestate. After his death Leonardo experienced

unkindness from his seven half-brothers, Ser Piero's legitimate sons.

They were all much younger than himself. One of them, who followed his

father's profession, made himself the champion of the others in

disputing Leonardo's claim to his share, first in the paternal

inheritance, and then in that which had been left to be divided between

the brothers and sisters by an uncle. The litigation that ensued dragged

on for several years, and forced upon Leonardo frequent visits to

Florence and interruptions of his work at Milan, in spite of pressing

letters to the authorities of the republic from Charles d'Amboise, from

the French king himself, and from others of his powerful friends and

patrons, begging that the proceedings might be accelerated. There are

traces of work done during these intervals of compulsory residence at

Florence. A sheet of sketches drawn there in 1508 shows the beginning of

a Madonna now lost except in the form of copies, one of which (known as

the "Madonna Litta") is at St Petersburg, another in the Poldi-Pezzoli

Museum at Milan. A letter from Leonardo to Charles d'Amboise in 1511,

announcing the end of his law troubles, speaks of two Madonnas of

different sizes that he means to bring with him to Milan. One was no

doubt that just mentioned; can the other have been the Louvre "Virgin

with St Anne and St John," now at last completed from the cartoon

exhibited in 1501? Meantime the master's main home and business were at

Milan. Few works of painting and none of sculpture (unless the

unfulfilled commission for the Trivulzio monument belongs to this time)

are recorded as occupying him during the seven years of his second

residence in that city (1506-1513). He had attached to himself a new and

devoted young friend and pupil of noble birth, Francesco Melzi. At the

villa of the Melzi family at Vaprio, where Leonardo was a frequent

visitor, a colossal Madonna on one of the walls is traditionally

ascribed to him, but is rather the work of Sodoma or of Melzi himself

working under the master's eye. Another painter in the service of the

French king, Jehan Perréal or Jehan de Paris, visited Milan, and

consultations on technical points were held between him and Leonardo.

But Leonardo's chief practical employments were evidently on the

continuation of his great hydraulic and irrigation works in Lombardy.

His old trivial office of pageant-master and inventor of scientific toys

was revived on the occasion of Louis XII.'s triumphal entry after the

victory of Agnadello in 1509, and gave intense delight to the French

retinue of the king. He was consulted on the construction of new

choir-stalls for the cathedral. He laboured in the natural sciences as

ardently as ever, especially at anatomy in company with the famous

professor of Pavia, Marcantonio della Torre. To about this time, when he

was approaching his sixtieth year, may belong the noble portrait-drawing

of himself in red chalk at Turin. He looks too old for his years, but

quite unbroken; the character of a veteran sage has fully imprinted

itself on his countenance; the features are grand, clear and deeply

lined, the mouth firmly set and almost stern, the eyes strong and intent

beneath their bushy eyebrows, the hair flows untrimmed over his

shoulders and commingles with a majestic beard.

Returning to Milan with his law-suits ended in 1511, Leonardo might have

looked forward to an old age of contented labour, the chief task of

which, had he had his will, would undoubtedly have been to put in order

the vast mass of observations and speculations accumulated in his

note-books, and to prepare some of them for publication. But as his star

seemed rising that of his royal protector declined. The hold of the

French on Lombardy was rudely shaken by hostile political powers, then

confirmed again for a while by the victories of Gaston de Foix, and

finally destroyed by the battle in which that hero fell under the walls

of Ravenna. In June 1512 a coalition between Spain, Venice and the pope

re-established the Sforza dynasty in power at Milan in the person of

Ludovico's son Massimiliano. This prince must have been familiar with

Leonardo as a child, but perhaps resented the ready transfer of his

allegiance to the French, and at any rate gave him no employment. Within

a few months the ageing master uprooted himself from Milan, and moved

with his chattels and retinue of pupils to Rome, into the service of the

house that first befriended him, the Medici. The vast enterprises of

Pope Julius II. had already made Rome the chief seat and centre of

Italian art. The accession of Giulio de' Medici in 1513 under the title

of Leo X. raised on all hands hopes of still ampler and more sympathetic

patronage. Leonardo's special friend at the papal court was the pope's

youngest brother, Giuliano de' Medici, a youth who combined dissipated

habits with thoughtful culture and a genuine interest in arts and

sciences. By his influence Leonardo and his train were accommodated with

apartments in the Belvedere of the Vatican. But the conditions of the

time and place proved adverse. The young generation held the field.

Michelangelo and Raphael, who had both, as we have seen, risen to

greatness partly on Leonardo's shoulders, were fresh from the glory of

their great achievements in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze. Their

rival factions hated each other, but both, especially the faction of

Michelangelo, turned bitterly against the veteran newcomer. The pope,

indeed, is said to have been delighted with Leonardo's minor experiments

and ingenuities in science, and especially by a kind of zoological toys

which he had invented by way of pastime, as well as mechanical tricks

played upon living animals. But for the master's graver researches and

projects he cared little, and was far more interested in the dreams of

astrologers and alchemists. When Leonardo, having received a commission

for a picture, was found distilling for himself a new medium of oils and

herbs before he had begun the design, the pope was convinced, not quite

unreasonably, that nothing serious would come of it. The only paintings

positively recorded as done by him at Rome are two small panels for an

official of the papal court, one of a child, the other of a Madonna,

both now lost or unrecognized. To this time may also belong a lost Leda,

standing upright with the god in swan's guise at her side and the four

children near their feet. This picture was at Fontainebleau in the 16th

century and is known from several copies, the finest of them at the

Borghese gallery, as well as from one or two preliminary sketches by the

master himself and a small sketch copy by Raphael. A portrait of a

Florentine lady, said to have been painted for Giuliano de' Medici and

seen afterwards in France, may also have been done at Rome; or may what

we learn of this be only a confused account of the Monna Lisa? Tradition

ascribes to Leonardo an attractive fresco of a Madonna with a donor in

the convent of St Onofrio, but this seems to be clearly the work of

Boltraffio. The only engineering works we hear of at this time are some

on the harbour and defences of Cività Vecchia. On the whole the master

in these Roman days found himself slighted for the first and only time

in his life. He was, moreover, plagued by insubordination and malignity

on the part of two German assistant craftsmen lodged in his apartments.

Charges of impiety and body-snatching laid by these men in connexion

with his anatomical studies caused the favour of the pope to be for a

time withdrawn. After a stay of less than two years, Leonardo left Rome

under the following circumstances. Louis XII. of France had died in the

last days of 1514. His young and brilliant successor, Francis I.,

surprised Europe by making a sudden dash at the head of an army across

the Alps to vindicate his rights in Italy. After much hesitation Leo X.

in the summer of 1515 ordered Giuliano de' Medici, as gonfalonier of the

Church, to lead a papal force into the Emilia and watch the movements of

the invader. Leonardo accompanied his protector on the march, and

remained with the headquarters of the papal army at Piacenza when

Giuliano fell ill and retired to Florence. After the battle of Marignano

it was arranged that Francis and the pope should meet in December at

Bologna. The pope, travelling by way of Florence and discussing there

the great new scheme of the Laurentian library, entertained the idea of

giving the commission to Leonardo; but Michelangelo came in hot haste

from Rome and succeeded in securing it for himself. As the time for the

meeting of the potentates at Bologna drew near, Leonardo proceeded

thither from Piacenza, and in due course was presented to the king.

Between the brilliant young sovereign and the grand old sage an

immediate and strong sympathy sprang up; Leonardo accompanied Francis on

his homeward march as far as Milan, and there determined to accept the

royal invitation to France, where a new home was offered him with every

assurance of honour and regard.

The remaining two and a half years of Leonardo's life were spent at the

Castle of Cloux near Amboise, which was assigned, with a handsome

pension, to his use. The court came often to Amboise, and the king

delighted in his company, declaring his knowledge both of the fine arts

and of philosophy to be beyond those of all mortal men. In the spring of

1518 Leonardo had occasion to exercise his old talents as a

festival-master when the dauphin was christened and a Medici-Bourbon

marriage celebrated. He drew the designs for a new palace at Amboise,

and was much engaged with the project of a great canal to connect the

Loire and Saône. An ingenious attempt has been made to prove, in the

absence of records, that the famous spiral staircase at Blois was also

of his designing.

Among his visitors was a fellow-countryman, Cardinal Louis of Aragon,

whose secretary has left an account of the day. Leonardo, it seems, was

suffering from some form of slight paralysis which impaired his power of

hand. But he showed the cardinal three pictures, the portrait of a

Florentine lady done for Giuliano de' Medici (the Gioconda?), the Virgin

in the lap of St Anne (the Louvre picture; finished at Florence or Milan

1507-1513?), and a youthful John the Baptist. The last, which may have

been done since he settled in France, is the darkened and partly

repainted, but still powerful and haunting half-length figure in the

Louvre, with the smile of inward ravishment and the prophetic finger

beckoning skyward like that of St Anne in the Academy cartoon. Of the

"Pomona" mentioned by Lomazzo as a work of the Amboise time his visitor

says nothing, nor yet of the Louvre "Bacchus," which tradition ascribes

to Leonardo but which is clearly pupil's work. Besides pictures, the

master seems also to have shown and explained to his visitors some of

his vast store of notes and observations on anatomy and physics. He kept

hoping to get some order among his papers, the accumulation of more than

forty years, and perhaps to give the world some portion of the studies

they contained. But his strength was nearly exhausted. On Easter Eve

1519, feeling that the end was near, he made his will. It made

provision, as became a great servant of the most Christian king, for

masses to be said and candles to be offered in three different churches

of Amboise, first among them that of St Florentin, where he desired to

be buried, as well as for sixty poor men to serve as torch-bearers at

his funeral. Vasari babbles of a death-bed conversion and repentance.

But Leonardo had never been either a friend or an enemy of the Church.

Sometimes, indeed, he denounces fiercely enough the arts and pretensions

of priests; but no one has embodied with such profound spiritual insight

some of the most vital moments of the Christian story. His insatiable

researches into natural fact brought upon him among the vulgar some

suspicion of practising those magic arts which of all things he scouted

and despised. The bent of his mind was all towards the teachings of

experience and against those of authority, and laws of nature certainly

occupied far more of his thoughts than dogmas of religion; but when he

mentions these it is with respect as throwing light on the truth of

things from a side which was not his own. His conformity at the end had

in it nothing contradictory of his past. He received the sacraments of

the Church and died on the 2nd of May 1519. King Francis, then at his

court of St Germain-en-Laye, is said to have wept for the loss of such a

servant; that he was present beside the death-bed and held the dying

painter in his arms is a familiar but an untrue tale. After a temporary

sepulture elsewhere his remains were transported on the 12th of August

to the cloister of St Florentin according to his wish. He left all his

MSS. and apparently all the contents of his studio, with other gifts, to

the devoted Melzi, whom he named executor; to Salai and to his servant

Battista Villanis a half each of his vineyard outside Milan; gifts of

money and clothes to his maid Maturina; one of money to the poor of the

hospital in Amboise; and to his unbrotherly half-brothers a sum of four

hundred ducats lying to his credit at Florence.

History tells of no man gifted in the same degree as Leonardo was at

once for art and science. In art he was an inheritor and perfecter, born

in a day of great and many-sided endeavours on which he put the crown,

surpassing both predecessors and contemporaries. In science, on the

other hand, he was a pioneer, working wholly for the future, and in

great part alone. That the two stupendous gifts should in some degree

neutralize each other was inevitable. No imaginable strength of any

single man would have sufficed to carry out a hundredth part of what

Leonardo essayed. The mere attempt to conquer the kingdom of light and

shade for the art of painting was destined to tax the skill of

generations, and is perhaps not wholly and finally accomplished yet.

Leonardo sought to achieve that conquest and at the same time to carry

the old Florentine excellences of linear drawing and psychological

expression to a perfection of which other men had not dreamed. The

result, though marvellous in quality, is in quantity lamentably meagre.

Knowing and doing allured him equally, and in art, which consists in

doing, his efforts were often paralysed by his strained desire to know.

The thirst for knowledge had first been aroused in him by the desire of

perfecting the images of beauty and power which it was his business to

create.

Thence there grew upon him the passion of knowledge for its own sake. In

the splendid balance of his nature the Virgilian longing, _rerum

cognoscere causas_, could never indeed wholly silence the call to

exercise his active powers. But the powers he cared most to exercise

ceased by degree to be those of imaginative creation, and came to be

those of turning to practical human use the mastery which his studies

had taught him over the forces of nature. In science he was the first

among modern men to set himself most of those problems which unnumbered

searchers of later generations have laboured severally or in concert to

solve. Florence had had other sons of comprehensive genius, artistic and

mechanical, Leon Battista Alberti perhaps the chief. But the more the

range and character of Leonardo's studies becomes ascertained the more

his greatness dwarfs them all. A hundred years before Bacon, say those

who can judge best, he showed a firmer grasp of the principles of

experimental science than Bacon showed, fortified by a far wider range

of actual experiment and observation. Not in his actual conclusions,

though many of these point with surprising accuracy in the direction of

truths established by later generations, but in the soundness, the

wisdom, the tenacity of his methods lies his great title to glory. Had

the Catholic reaction not fatally discouraged the pursuit of the natural

sciences in Italy, had Leonardo even left behind him any one with zeal

and knowledge enough to extract from the mass of his MSS. some portion

of his labours in those sciences and give them to the world, an

incalculable impulse would have been given to all those enquiries by

which mankind has since been striving to understand the laws of its

being and control the conditions of its environment,--to mathematics and

astronomy, to mechanics, hydraulics, and physics generally, to geology,

geography, and cosmology, to anatomy and the sciences of life. As it

was, these studies of Leonardo--"studies intense of strong and stern

delight"--seemed to his trivial followers and biographers merely his

whims and fancies, _ghiribizzi_, things to be spoken of slightingly and

with apology. The MSS., with the single exception of some of those

relating to painting, lay unheeded and undivulged until the present

generation; and it is only now that the true range of Leonardo's powers

is beginning to be fully discerned.

So much for the intellectual side of Leonardo's character and career. As

a moral being we are less able to discern what he was like. The man who

carried in his brain so many images of subtle beauty, as well as so much

of the hidden science of the future, must have lived spiritually, in the

main, alone. Of things communicable he was at the same time, as we have

said, communicative--a genial companion, a generous and loyal friend,

ready and eloquent of discourse, impressing all with whom he was brought

in contact by the power and the charm of genius, and inspiring fervent

devotion and attachment in friends and pupils. We see him living on

terms of constant affection with his father, and in disputes with his

brothers not the aggressor but the sufferer from aggression. We see him

full of tenderness to animals, a virtue not common in Italy in spite of

the example of St Francis; open-handed in giving, not eager in

getting--"poor," he says, "is the man of many wants"; not prone to

resentment--"the best shield against injustice is to double the cloak of

long-suffering"; zealous in labour above all men--"as a day well spent

gives joyful sleep, so does a life well spent give joyful death." With

these instincts and maxims, and with his strength, granting it almost

more than human, spent ever tunnelling in abstruse mines of knowledge,

his moral experience is not likely to have been deeply troubled. In

religion, he regarded the faith of his age and country at least with

imaginative sympathy and intellectual acquiescence, if no more. On the

political storms which shook his country and drove him from one

employment to another, he seems to have looked not with the passionate

participation of a Dante or a Michelangelo but rather with the serene

detachment of a Goethe. In matters of the heart, if any consoling or any

disturbing passion played a great part in his life, we do not know it;

we know only (apart from a few passing shadows cast by calumny and envy)

of affectionate and dignified relations with friends, patrons and

pupils, of public and private regard mixed in the days of his youth with

dazzled admiration, and in those of his age with something of

reverential awe.

_The Drawings of Leonardo._--These are among the greatest treasures

ever given to the world by the human spirit expressing itself in pen

and pencil. Apart from the many hundreds of illustrative pen-sketches

scattered through his autobiographic and scientific MSS., the

principal collection is at Windsor Castle (partly derived from the

Arundel collection); others of importance are in the British Museum;

at Christ Church, Oxford; in the Louvre, at Chantilly, in the Uffizi,

the Venice Academy, the Royal Library at Turin, the Museum of

Budapest, and in the collections of M. Bonnat, Mrs Mond, and Captain

Holford. Leonardo's chief implements were pen, silver-point, and red

and black chalk (red chalk especially). In silver-point there are many

beautiful drawings of his earlier time, and some of his later; but of

the charming heads of women and young men in this material attributed

to him in various collections, comparatively few are his own work, the

majority being drawings in his spirit by his pupils Ambrogio Preda or

Boltraffio. Leonardo appears to have been left-handed. There is some

doubt on the point; but a contemporary and intimate friend, Luca

Pacioli, speaks of his "ineffable left hand"; all the best of his

drawings are shaded downward from left to right, which would be the

readiest way for a left-handed man; and his habitual eccentric

practice of writing from right to left is much more likely to have

been due to natural left-handedness than to any desire of mystery or

concealment. A full critical discussion and catalogue of the extant

drawings of Leonardo are to be found in Berenson's _Drawings of the

Florentine Painters_.

_The Writings of Leonardo._--The only printed book bearing Leonardo's

name until the recent issues of transcripts from his MSS. was the

celebrated _Treatise on Painting_ (_Trattato della pittura, Traité de

la peinture_). This consists of brief didactic chapters, or more

properly paragraphs, of practical direction or critical remark on all

the branches and conditions of a painter's practice. The original MS.

draft of Leonardo has been lost, though a great number of notes for it

are scattered through the various extant volumes of his MSS. The work

has been printed in two different forms; one of these is an abridged

version consisting of 365 sections; the first edition of it was

published in Paris in 1551, by Raphael Dufresne, from a MS. which he

found in the Barberini library; the last, translated into English by

J. F. Rigaud, in London, 1877. The other is a more extended version,

in 912 sections, divided into eight books; this was printed in 1817 by

Guglielmo Manzi at Rome, from two MSS. which he had discovered in the

Vatican library; a German translation from the same MS. has been

edited by G. H. Ludwig in Eitelberger's series of _Quellenschriften

für Kunstgeschichte_ (Vienna, 1882; Stuttgart, 1885). On the history

of the book in general see Max Jordan, _Das Malerbuch des Leonardo da

Vinci_ (Leipzig, 1873). The unknown compilers of the Vatican MSS. must

have had before them much more of Leonardo's original text than is now

extant. Only about a quarter of the total number of paragraphs are

identical with passages to be found in the master's existing autograph

note-books. It is indeed doubtful whether Leonardo himself ever

completed the MS. treatise (or treatises) on painting and kindred

subjects mentioned by Fra Luca Pacioli and by Vasari, and probable

that the form and order, and perhaps some of the substance, of the

_Trattato_ as we have it was due to compilers and not to the master

himself.

In recent years a whole body of scholars and editors have been engaged

in giving to the world the texts of Leonardo's existing MSS. The

history of these is too complicated to be told here in any detail.

Francesco Melzi (d. 1570) kept the greater part of his master's

bequest together as a sacred trust as long as he lived, though even in

his time some MSS. on the art of painting seem to have passed into

other hands. But his descendants suffered the treasure to be

recklessly dispersed. The chief agents in their dispersal were the

Doctor Orazio Melzi who possessed them in the last quarter of the 16th

century; the members of a Milanese family called Mazzenta, into whose

hands they passed in Orazio Melzi's lifetime; and the sculptor Pompeo

Leoni, who at one time entertained the design of procuring their

presentation to Philip II. of Spain, and who cut up a number of the

note-books to form the great miscellaneous single volume called the

_Codice Atlantico_, now at Milan. This volume, with a large proportion

of the total number of other Leonardo MSS. then existing, passed into

the hands of a Count Arconati, who presented them to the Ambrosian

library at Milan in 1636. In the meantime the earl of Arundel had made

a vain attempt to purchase one of these volumes (the _Codice

Atlantico_?) at a great price for the king of England. Some stray

parts of the collection, including the MSS. now at Windsor, did

evidently come into Lord Arundel's possession, and the history of some

other parts can be followed; while much, it is evident, was lost for

good. In 1796 Napoleon swept away to Paris, along with the other art

treasures of Italy, the whole of the Leonardo MSS. at the Ambrosiana:

only the _Codice Atlantico_ was afterwards restored, the other volumes

remaining the property of the Institut de France. These also have had

their adventures, two of them having been stolen by Count Libri and

passed temporarily into the collection of Lord Ashburnham, whence they

were in recent years made over again to the Institute. The first

important step towards a better knowledge of the MSS. was made by the

beginning, in 1880, of the great series of publications from the MSS.

of the Institut de France undertaken by C. Ravaisson-Mollien; the next

by the publication in 1883 of Dr J. P. Richter's _Literary Works of

Leonardo da Vinci_ (see Bibliography): this work included, besides a

history and analytical index of the MSS., facsimiles of a number of

selected pages containing matter of autobiographical, artistic, or

literary interest, with transcripts and translations of their MS.

contexts. Since then much progress has been made in the publication of

the complete MSS., scientific and other, whether with adequate

critical apparatus or in the form of mere facsimile without

transliteration or comment.

A brief statement follows of the present distribution of the several

MSS. and of the form in which they are severally published:--

England.--_Windsor_: Nine MSS., chiefly on anatomy, published entire

in simple facsimile by Rouveyre (Paris, 1901); partially, with

transliterations and introduction by Piumati and Sabachnikoff (Paris,

1898, foll.); _British Museum_: one MS., miscellaneous, unpublished;

_Victoria and Albert Museum_: ten note-books bound in 3 vols.;

facsimile by Rouveyre, _Holkham_ (collection of Lord Leicester), 1

vol., on hydraulics and the action of water; published in facsimile

with transliteration and notes by Gerolamo Calvi. France.--_Institut

de France_: seventeen MSS., all published with transliteration and

notes by C. Ravaisson-Mollien (6 vols., Paris, 1880-1891).

Italy.--_Milan_, _Ambrosiana_: the _Codice Atlantico_, the huge

miscellany, of vital importance for the study of the master, put

together by Pompeo Leoni; published in facsimile, with

transliteration, by the Accademia dei Lincei (1894, foll.); _Milan_:

collection of Count Trivulzio; 1 vol., miscellaneous; published and

edited by L. Beltrami (1892); _Rome_: collection of Count Marszolini;

_Treatise on the Flight of Birds_, published and edited by Piumati and

Sabachnikoff (Paris, 1492).

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--The principal authorities are:--"Il libro di Antonio

Billi," edited from MS. by G. de Fabriazy in _Archivio Storico Ital._

ser. v. vol. 7; "Breve vita di Leonardo da Vinci, scritto da un

adnonimo del 1500" (known as the Anonimo Gaddiano), printed by G.

Milanesi in _Archivio Storico Ital._ t. xvi. (1872), translated with

notes by H. P. Horne in series published by the Unicorn Library

(1903); Paolo Giovio, "Leonardi Vincii vita," in his _Elogia_, printed

in Tiraboschi, _Storia della Lett. Ital._ t. vii. pt. 4, and in

_Classici Italiani_, vol. 314; Vasari, in his celebrated _Lives of the

Painters_ (1st ed., Florence, 1550; 2nd ed. ibid. 1568; ed. Milanesi,

with notes and supplements, 1878-1885); Sabba da Castiglione,

_Ricordi_ (Venice, 1565); G. P. Lomazzo, _Trattato dell' arte della

pittura_, &c. (Milan, 1584-1585); _Id., Idea del tempio della pittura_

(Milan, 1591); Le Père Dan, _Le Trésor ... de Fontainebleau_ (1642);

J. B. Venturi, _Essai sur les ouvrages physico-mathématiques de L. da

V._ (Paris, 1797); C. Amoretti, _Memorie storiche sulla vita, &c. di

L. da V._ (Milan, 1804), a work which laid the foundation of all

future researches; Giuseppe Bossi, _Del Cenacolo di L. da V._ (Milan,

1810); C. Fumagalli, _Scuola di Leonardo da Vinci_ (1811); Gaye,

_Carteggia d'artisti_ (1839-1841); G. Uzielli, _Ricerche intorno a L.

da V._, series 1, 2 (Florence, 1872; Rome, 1884; series 1 revised,

Turin, 1896), documentary researches of the first importance for the

study; C. L. Calvi, _Notizie dei principali professori di belle arti_

(Milan, 1869); Arsène Houssaye, _Histoire de L. de V._ (Paris, 1869

and 1876, an agreeable literary biography of the pre-critical kind);

Mrs Heaton, _Life of L. da V._ (London, 1872), a work also made

obsolete by recent research; Hermann Grothe, _L. da V. als Ingenieur

und Philosoph_ (Berlin, 1874); A. Marks, the _S. Anne of L. da V._

(London, 1882); J. P. Richter, _The Literary Works of L. da V._ (2

vols., London, 1883), this is the very important and valuable history

of and selection from the texts mentioned above under MSS.; Ch.

Ravaisson-Mollien, _Les Écrits de L. da V._ (Paris, 1881); Paul Müller

Walde, _L. da V., Lebensskizze und Forschungen_ (Munich, 1889-1890);

_Id._, "Beiträge zur Kenntniss des L. da V.," _in Jahrbuch der k.

Preussischen Kunstsammlungen_ (1897-1899), the first immature and

incomplete, the second of high value: the whole life of this writer

has been devoted to the study of L. da V., but it is uncertain whether

the vast mass of material collected by him will ever take shape or see

the light; G. Gronau, _L. da V._ (London, 1902); Bernhard Berenson,

_The Drawings of the Florentine Painters_ (London, 1903); Edmondo

Solmi, _Studi sulla filosofia naturale di L. da V._ (Modena, 1898);

_Id., Leonardo_ (Florence, 1st ed. 1900, 2nd ed. 1907; this last

edition of Solmi's work is by far the most complete and satisfactory

critical biography of the master which yet exists); A. Rosenberg, _L.

da V._, in Knackfuss's series of art biographies (Leipzig, 1898);

Gabriel Séailles, _L. da V. l'artiste et le savant_ (1st ed. 1892, 2nd

ed. 1906), a lucid and careful general estimate of great value,

especially in reference to Leonardo's relations to modern science;

Edward McCurdy, _L. da V._, in Bell's "Great Masters" series (1904 and

1907), a very sound and trustworthy summary of the master's career as

an artist; _Id., L. da V.'s Note-Books_ (1908), a selection from the

passages of chief general interest in the master's MSS., very well

chosen, arranged, and translated, with a useful history of the MSS.

prefixed, _Le Vicende del Cenacolo di L. da V. nel secolo XIX._

(Milan, 1906), an official account of the later history and

vicissitudes of the "Last Supper" previous to its final repair; Luca

Beltrami, _Il Castello di Milano_ (1894); _Id., L. da V. et la Sala

dell' Asse_ (1902); Id., "Il Cenacolo di Leonardo," in _Raccolta

Vinciana_ (Milan, 1908), the official account of the successful work

of repair carried out by Signor Cavenaghi in the preceding years;

Woldemar von Seidlitz, _Leonardo da Vinci, der Wendepunkt der

Renaissance_ (2 vols., 1909), a comprehensive and careful work by an

accomplished and veteran critic, inclined to give perhaps an excessive

share in the reputed works of Leonardo to a single pupil, Ambrogio

Preda. It seems needless to give references to the voluminous

discussion in newspapers and periodicals concerning the authenticity

of a wax bust of Flora acquired in 1909 for the Berlin Museum and

unfortunately ascribed to Leonardo da Vinci, its real author having

been proved by external and internal evidence to be the Englishman

Richard Cockle Lucas, and its date 1846. (S. C.)

LEONARDO OF PISA (LEONARDUS PISANUS or FIBONACCI), Italian mathematician

of the 13th century. Of his personal history few particulars are known.

His father was called Bonaccio, most probably a nickname with the

ironical meaning of "a good, stupid fellow," while to Leonardo himself

another nickname, Bigollone (dunce, blockhead), seems to have been

given. The father was secretary in one of the numerous factories erected

on the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean by the warlike

and enterprising merchants of Pisa. Leonardo was educated at Bugia, and

afterwards toured the Mediterranean. In 1202 he was again in Italy and

published his great work, _Liber abaci_, which probably procured him

access to the learned and refined court of the emperor Frederick II.

Leonardo certainly was in relation with some persons belonging to that

circle when he published in 1220 another more extensive work, _De

practica geometriae_, which he dedicated to the imperial astronomer

Dominicus Hispanus. Some years afterwards (perhaps in 1228) Leonardo

dedicated to the well-known astrologer Michael Scott the second edition

of his _Liber abaci_, which was printed with Leonardo's other works by

Prince Bald. Boncompagni (Rome, 1857-1862, 2 vols.). The other works

consist of the _Practica geometriae_ and some most striking papers of

the greatest scientific importance, amongst which the _Liber

quadratorum_ may be specially signalized. It bears the notice that the

author wrote it in 1225, and in the introduction Leonardo tells us the

occasion of its being written. Dominicus had presented Leonardo to

Frederick II. The presentation was accompanied by a kind of mathematical

performance, in which Leonardo solved several hard problems proposed to

him by John of Palermo, an imperial notary, whose name is met with in

several documents dated between 1221 and 1240. The methods which

Leonardo made use of in solving those problems fill the _Liber

quadratorum_, the _Flos_, and a _Letter to Magister Theodore_. All these

treatises seem to have been written nearly at the same period, and

certainly before the publication of the second edition of the _Liber

abaci_, in which the _Liber quadratorum_ is expressly mentioned. We know

nothing of Leonardo's fate after he issued that second edition.

Leonardo's works are mainly developments of the results obtained by

his predecessors; the influences of Greek, Arabian, and Indian

mathematicians may be clearly discerned in his methods. In his

_Practica geometriae_ plain traces of the use of the Roman

_agrimensores_ are met with; in his _Liber abaci_ old Egyptian

problems reveal their origin by the reappearance of the very numbers

in which the problem is given, though one cannot guess through what

channel they came to Leonardo's knowledge. Leonardo cannot be regarded

as the inventor of that very great variety of truths for which he

mentions no earlier source.

The _Liber abaci_, which fills 459 printed pages, contains the most

perfect methods of calculating with whole numbers and with fractions,

practice, extraction of the square and cube roots, proportion, chain

rule, finding of proportional parts, averages, progressions, even

compound interest, just as in the completest mercantile arithmetics of

our days. They teach further the solution of problems leading to

equations of the first and second degree, to determinate and

indeterminate equations, not by single and double position only, but

by real algebra, proved by means of geometric constructions, and

including the use of letters as symbols for known numbers, the unknown

quantity being called _res_ and its square _census_.

The second work of Leonardo, his _Practica geometriae_ (1220) requires

readers already acquainted with Euclid's planimetry, who are able to

follow rigorous demonstrations and feel the necessity for them. Among

the contents of this book we simply mention a trigonometrical chapter,

in which the words _sinus versus arcus_ occur, the approximate

extraction of cube roots shown more at large than in the _Liber

abaci_, and a very curious problem, which nobody would search for in a

geometrical work, viz.--To find a square number remaining so after the

addition of 5. This problem evidently suggested the first question,

viz.--To find a square number which remains a square after the

addition and subtraction of 5, put to our mathematician in presence of

the emperor by John of Palermo, who, perhaps, was quite enough

Leonardo's friend to set him such problems only as he had himself

asked for. Leonardo gave as solution the numbers 11(97/144),

16(97/144), and 6(97/144),--the squares of 3(5/12), 4(1/12) and

2(7/12); and the method of finding them is given in the _Liber

quadratorum_. We observe, however, that this kind of problem was not

new. Arabian authors already had found three square numbers of equal

difference, but the difference itself had not been assigned in

proposing the question. Leonardo's method, therefore, when the

difference was a fixed condition of the problem, was necessarily very

different from the Arabian, and, in all probability, was his own

discovery. The _Flos_ of Leonardo turns on the second question set by

John of Palermo, which required the solution of the cubic equation x³

+ 2x² + 10x = 20. Leonardo, making use of fractions of the sexagesimal

scale, gives x = 1^0 22^i 7^ii 42^iii 33^iv 4^v 40^vi, after having

demonstrated, by a discussion founded on the 10th book of Euclid, that

a solution by square roots is impossible. It is much to be deplored

that Leonardo does not give the least intimation how he found his

approximative value, outrunning by this result more than three

centuries. Genocchi believes Leonardo to have been in possession of a

certain method called _regula aurea_ by H. Cardan in the 16th century,

but this is a mere hypothesis without solid foundation. In the _Flos_

equations with negative values of the unknown quantity are also to be

met with, and Leonardo perfectly understands the meaning of these

negative solutions. In the _Letter to Magister Theodore_ indeterminate

problems are chiefly worked, and Leonardo hints at his being able to

solve by a general method any problem of this kind not exceeding the

first degree.

As for the influence he exercised on posterity, it is enough to say

that Luca Pacioli, about 1500, in his celebrated _Summa_, leans so

exclusively to Leonardo's works (at that time known in manuscript

only) that he frankly acknowledges his dependence on them, and states

that wherever no other author is quoted all belongs to Leonardus

Pisanus.

_Fibonacci's series_ is a sequence of numbers such that any term is

the sum of the two preceding terms; also known as _Lamé's series_.

(M. Ca.)

LEONCAVALLO, RUGGIERO (1858- ), Italian operatic composer, was born at

Naples and educated for music at the conservatoire. After some years

spent in teaching and in ineffectual attempts to obtain the production

of more than one opera, his _Pagliacci_ was performed at Milan in 1892

with immediate success; and next year his _Medici_ was also produced

there. But neither the latter nor _Chatterton_ (1896)--both early

works--obtained any favour; and it was not till _La Bohème_ was

performed in 1897 at Venice that his talent obtained public

confirmation. Subsequent operas by Leoncavallo were _Zaza_ (1900), and

_Der Roland_ (1904). In all these operas he was his own librettist.

LEONIDAS, king of Sparta, the seventeenth of the Agiad line. He

succeeded, probably in 489 or 488 B.C., his half-brother Cleomenes,

whose daughter Gorgo he married. In 480 he was sent with about 7000 men

to hold the pass of Thermopylae against the army of Xerxes. The

smallness of the force was, according to a current story, due to the

fact that he was deliberately going to his doom, an oracle having

foretold that Sparta could be saved only by the death of one of its

kings: in reality it seems rather that the ephors supported the scheme

half-heartedly, their policy being to concentrate the Greek forces at

the Isthmus. Leonidas repulsed the frontal attacks of the Persians, but

when the Malian Ephialtes led the Persian general Hydarnes by a mountain

track to the rear of the Greeks he divided his army, himself remaining

in the pass with 300 Spartiates, 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans. Perhaps

he hoped to surround Hydarnes' force: if so, the movement failed, and

the little Greek army, attacked from both sides, was cut down to a man

save the Thebans, who are said to have surrendered. Leonidas fell in the

thickest of the fight; his head was afterwards cut off by Xerxes' order

and his body crucified. Our knowledge of the circumstances is too slight

to enable us to judge of Leonidas's strategy, but his heroism and

devotion secured him an almost unique place in the imagination not only

of his own but also of succeeding times.

See Herodotus v. 39-41, vii. 202-225, 238, ix. 10; Diodorus xi. 4-11;

Plutarch, _Apophthegm. Lacon.; de malignitate Herodoti_, 28-33;

Pausanias i. 13, iii. 3, 4; Isocrates, _Paneg._ 92; Lycurgus, _c._

_Leocr._ 110, 111; Strabo i. 10, ix. 429; Aelian, _Var. hist._ iii.

25; Cicero, _Tusc. disput._ i. 42, 49; _de Finibus_, ii. 30; Cornelius

Nepos, _Themistocles_, 3; Valerius Maximus iii. 2; Justin ii. 11. For

modern criticism on the battle of Thermopylae see G. B. Grundy, _The

Great Persian War_ (1901); G. Grote, _History of Greece_, part ii., c.

40; E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Altertums_, iii., §§ 219, 220; G.

Busolt, _Griechische Geschichte_, 2nd ed., ii. 666-688; J. B. Bury,

"The Campaign of Artemisium and Thermopylae," in _British School

Annual_, ii. 83 seq.; J. A. R. Munro, "Some Observations on the

Persian Wars, II.," in _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, xxii. 294-332.

(M. N. T.)

LEONTIASIS OSSEA, a rare disease characterized by an overgrowth of the

facial and cranial bones. The common form is that in which one or other

maxilla is affected, its size progressively increasing both regularly

and irregularly, and thus encroaching on the cavities of the orbit, the

mouth, the nose and its accessory sinuses. Exophthalmos gradually

develops, going on later to a complete loss of sight due to compression

of the optic nerve by the overgrowth of bone. There may also be

interference with the nasal respiration and with the taking of food. In

the somewhat less common form of this rare disease the overgrowth of

bone affects all the cranial bones as well as those of the face, the

senses being lost one by one and death finally resulting from cerebral

pressure. There is no treatment other than exposing the overgrown bone,

and chipping away pieces, or excising entirely where possible.

LEONTINI (mod. _Lentini_), an ancient town in the south-east of Sicily,

22 m. N.N.W. of Syracuse direct, founded by Chalcidians from Naxos in

729 B.C. It is almost the only Greek settlement not on the coast, from

which it is 6 m. distant. The site, originally held by the Sicels, was

seized by the Greeks owing to its command of the fertile plain on the

north. It was reduced to subjection in 498 B.C. by Hippocrates of Gela,

and in 476 Hieron of Syracuse established here the inhabitants of Catana

and Naxos. Later on Leontini regained its independence, but in its

efforts to retain it, the intervention of Athens was more than once

invoked. It was mainly the eloquence of Gorgias (q.v.) of Leontini which

led to the abortive Athenian expedition of 427. In 422 Syracuse

supported the oligarchs against the people and received them as

citizens, Leontini itself being forsaken. This led to renewed Athenian

intervention, at first mainly diplomatic; but the exiles of Leontini

joined the envoys of Segesta in persuading Athens to undertake the great

expedition of 415. After its failure, Leontini became subject to

Syracuse once more (see Strabo vi. 272). Its independence was guaranteed

by the treaty of 405 between Dionysius and the Carthaginians, but it

very soon lost it again. It was finally stormed by M. Claudius Marcellus

in 214 B.C. In Roman times it seems to have been of small importance. It

was destroyed by the Saracens A.D. 848, and almost totally ruined by the

earthquake of 1698. The ancient city is described by Polybius (vii. 6)

as lying in a bottom between two hills, and facing north. On the western

side of this bottom ran a river with a row of houses on its western bank

under the hill. At each end was a gate, the northern leading to the

plain, the southern, at the upper end, to Syracuse. There was an

acropolis on each side of the valley, which lies between precipitous

hills with flat tops, over which buildings had extended. The eastern

hill[1] still has considerable remains of a strongly fortified medieval

castle, in which some writers are inclined (though wrongly) to recognize

portions of Greek masonry. See G. M. Columba, in _Archeologia di

Leontinoi_ (Palermo, 1891), reprinted from _Archivio Storico Siciliano_,

xi.; P. Orsi in _Römische Mitteilungen_ (1900), 61 seq. Excavations were

made in 1899 in one of the ravines in a Sicel necropolis of the third

period; explorations in the various Greek cemeteries resulted in the

discovery of some fine bronzes, notably a fine bronze _lebes_, now in

the Berlin museum. (T. As.)

FOOTNOTE:

[1] As a fact there are two flat valleys, up both of which the modern

Lentini extends; and hence there is difficulty in fitting Polybius's

account to the site.

LEONTIUS, theological writer, born at Byzantium, flourished during the

6th century. He is variously styled BYZANTINUS, HIEROSOLYMITANUS (as an

inmate of the monastery of St Saba near Jerusalem) and SCHOLASTICUS (the

first "schoolman," as the introducer of the Aristotelian definitions

into theology; according to others, he had been an advocate, a special

meaning of the word _scholasticus_). He himself states that in his early

years he belonged to a Nestorian community. Nothing else is known of his

life; he is frequently confused with others of the same name, and it is

uncertain which of the works bearing the name Leontius are really by

him. Most scholars regard as genuine the polemical treatises _Contra

Nestorianos et Eutychianos_, _Contra Nestorianos_, _Contra

Monophysitas_, _Contra Severum_ (patriarch of Antioch); and the [Greek:

Scholia], generally called _De Sectis_. An essay _Adversus fraudes

Apollinaristarum_ and two homilies are referred to other hands, the

homilies to a Leontius, presbyter of Constantinople.

Collected works in J. P. Migne, _Patrologia Graeca_, lxxxvi.; for the

various questions connected with Leontius see F. Loops, _Das Leben und

die polemischen Werke des Leontios von Byzanz_ (Leipzig, 1887); W.

Rügamer, _Leontius von Byzanz_ (1894); V. Ermoni, _De Leontio

Byzantino_ (Paris, 1895); C. Krumbacher, _Geschichte der

byzantinischen Litteratur_ (1897); J. P. Junglas, _Leontius von

Byzanz_ (1908). For other persons of the name see Fabricius,

_Bibliotheca Graeca_ (ed. Harles), viii. 323.

LEOPARD,[1] PARD or PANTHER (_Felis pardus_), the largest spotted true

cat of the Old World, with the exception of the snow-leopard, which is,

however, inferior in point of size to the largest leopard. (See

CARNIVORA and SNOW-LEOPARD.) Leopards, known in India as _cheeta_

(_chita_), are characterized by the rosette-like form of the black spots

on the greater part of the body, and the absence of a central spot from

each rosette. Towards the head and on the limbs the spots tend to become

solid, but there is great local variation in regard to their form and

arrangement. In the Indian leopard, the true _Felis pardus_, the spots

are large and rosette-like, and the same is the case with the

long-haired Persian leopard (_F. pardus tulliana_). On the other hand

the heavily built and thick-haired Manchurian _F. p. villosa_ has more

consolidated spots. African leopards, again, to one of which the name

_F. p. leopardus_ is applicable, show a decided tendency to a

breaking-up of the spots; West African animals being much

darker-coloured than those from the east side of the continent.

Both as regards structure and habits, the leopard may be reckoned as one

of the more typical representatives of the genus _Felis_, belonging to

that section in which the hyoid bone is loosely connected with the

skull, owing to imperfect ossification of its anterior arch, and the

pupil of the eye when contracted under the influence of light is

circular, not linear as in the smaller cats.

The size of leopards varies greatly, the head and body usually measuring

from 3½ to 4½ ft. in length, and the tail from 2½ to 3 ft., but some

specimens exceed these limits, while the Somali leopard (_F. p.

nanopardus_) falls considerably short of them. The ground-colour of the

fur varies from a pale fawn to a rufous buff, graduating in the Indian

race into pure white on the under-parts and inside of the limbs.

Generally speaking, the spots on the under parts and limbs are simple

and blacker than those on the other parts of the body. The bases of the

ears behind are black, the tips buff. The upper side of the tail is

buff, spotted with broken rings like the back, its under surface white

with simple spots. The hair of the cubs is longer than that of the

adults, its ground-colour less bright, and its spots less distinct.

Perfectly black leopards, which in certain lights show the

characteristic markings on the fur, are not uncommon, and are examples

of _melanism_, occurring as individual variations, sometimes in one cub

out of a litter of which the rest are normally coloured, and therefore

not indicating a distinct race, much less a species. These are met with

chiefly in southern Asia; melanism among African leopards taking the

form of an excessive breaking-up of the spots, which finally show a

tendency to coalesce.

[Illustration: The Leopard (_Felis pardus_).]

In habits the leopard resembles the other large cat-like animals,

yielding to none in the ferocity of its disposition. It is exceedingly

quick in its movements, but seizes its prey by waiting in ambush or

stealthily approaching to within springing distance, when it suddenly

rushes upon it and tears it to ground with its powerful claws and teeth.

It preys upon almost any animal it can overcome, such as antelopes,

deer, sheep, goats, monkeys, peafowl, and has a special liking for dogs.

It not unfrequently attacks human beings in India, chiefly children and

old women, but instances have been known of a leopard becoming a regular

"man-eater." When favourable opportunities occur, it often kills many

more victims than it can devour at once, either to gratify its

propensity for killing or for the sake of their fresh blood. It

generally inhabits woody districts, and can climb trees with facility

when hunted, but usually lives on or near the ground, among rocks,

bushes and roots and low branches of large trees.

The geographical range of the leopard embraces practically all Africa,

and Asia from Palestine to China and Manchuria, inclusive of Ceylon and

the great Malay Islands as far as Java. Fossil bones and teeth,

indistinguishable from those of existing leopards, have been found in

cave-deposits of Pleistocene age in Spain, France, Germany and England.

(R. L.*; W. H. F.)

FOOTNOTE:

[1] The name (Late Lat. _leopardus_, Late Gr. [Greek: leopardos]) was

given by the ancients to an animal supposed to have been a cross

between a lion (Lat. _leo_, Gr. [Greek: leôn]) and a pard (Gr.

[Greek: pardos], Pers. _pars_) or panther. Medieval heralds made no

distinction in shape between a lion and a leopard, but marked the

difference by drawing the leopard showing the full face (see

HERALDRY: § _Beasts and Birds_).

LEOPARDI, GIACOMO, COUNT (1798-1837), Italian poet, was born at Recanati

in the March of Ancona, on the 29th of June 1798. All the circumstances

of his parentage and education conspired to foster his precocious and

sensitive genius at the expense of his physical and mental health. His

family was ancient and patrician, but so deeply embarrassed as to be

only rescued from ruin by the energy of his mother, who had taken the

control of business matters entirely into her own hands, and whose

engrossing devotion to her undertaking seems to have almost dried up the

springs of maternal tenderness. Count Monaldo Leopardi, the father, a

mere nullity in his own household, secluded himself in his extensive

library, to which his nervous, sickly and deformed son had free access,

and which absorbed him exclusively in the absence of any intelligent

sympathy from his parents, any companionship except that of his brothers

and sister, or any recreation in the dullest of Italian towns. The lad

spent his days over grammars and dictionaries, learning Latin with

little assistance, and Greek and the principal modern languages with

none at all. Any ordinarily clever boy would have emerged from this

discipline a mere pedant and bookworm. Leopardi came forth a Hellene,

not merely a consummate Greek scholar, but penetrated with the classical

conception of life, and a master of antique form and style. At sixteen

he composed a Latin treatise on the Roman rhetoricians of the 2nd

century, a commentary on Porphyry's life of Plotinus and a history of

astronomy; at seventeen he wrote on the popular errors of the ancients,

citing more than four hundred authors. A little later he imposed upon

the first scholars of Italy by two odes in the manner of Anacreon. At

eighteen he produced a poem of considerable length, the _Appressamento

alla Morte_, which, after being lost for many years, was discovered and

published by Zanino Volta. It is a vision of the omnipotence of death,

modelled upon Petrarch, but more truly inspired by Dante, and in its

conception, machinery and general tone offering a remarkable resemblance

to Shelley's _Triumph of Life_ (1822), of which Leopardi probably never

heard. This juvenile work was succeeded (1819) by two lyrical

compositions which at once placed the author upon the height which he

maintained ever afterwards. The ode to Italy, and that on the monument

to Dante erected at Florence, gave voice to the dismay and affliction

with which Italy, aroused by the French Revolution from the torpor of

the 17th and 18th centuries, contemplated her forlorn and degraded

condition, her political impotence, her degeneracy in arts and arms and

the frivolity or stagnation of her intellectual life. They were the

outcry of a student who had found an ideal of national existence in his

books, and to whose disappointment everything in his own circumstances

lent additional poignancy. But there is nothing unmanly or morbid in the

expression of these sentiments, and the odes are surprisingly exempt

from the failings characteristic of young poets. They are remarkably

chaste in diction, close and nervous in style, sparing in fancy and

almost destitute of simile and metaphor, antique in spirit, yet pervaded

by modern ideas, combining Landor's dignity with a considerable infusion

of the passion of Byron. These qualities continued to characterize

Leopardi's poetical writings throughout his life. A third ode, on

Cardinal Mai's discoveries of ancient MSS., lamented in the same spirit

of indignant sorrow the decadence of Italian literature. The publication

of these pieces widened the breach between Leopardi and his father, a

well-meaning but apparently dull and apathetic man, who had lived into

the 19th century without imbibing any of its spirit, and who provoked

his son's contempt by a superstition unpardonable in a scholar of real

learning. Very probably from a mistaken idea of duty to his son, very

probably, too, from his own entire dependence in pecuniary matters upon

his wife, he for a long time obstinately refused Leopardi funds,

recreation, change of scene, everything that could have contributed to

combat the growing pessimism which eventually became nothing less than

monomaniacal. The affection of his brothers and sister afforded him some

consolation, and he found intellectual sympathy in the eminent scholar

and patriot Pietro Giordani, with whom he assiduously corresponded at

this period, partly on the ways and means of escaping from "this

hermitage, or rather seraglio, where the delights of civil society and

the advantages of solitary life are alike wanting." This forms the

keynote of numerous letters of complaint and lamentation, as touching

but as effeminate in their pathos as those of the banished Ovid. It must

be remembered in fairness that the weakness of Leopardi's eyesight

frequently deprived him for months together of the resource of study. At

length (1822) his father allowed him to repair to Rome, where, though

cheered by the encouragement of C. C. J. Bunsen and Niebuhr, he found

little satisfaction in the trifling pedantry that passed for philology

and archaeology, while his sceptical opinions prevented his taking

orders, the indispensable condition of public employment in the Papal

States. Dispirited and with exhausted means, he returned to Recanati,

where he spent three miserable years, brightened only by the production

of several lyrical masterpieces, which appeared in 1824. The most

remarkable is perhaps the _Bruto Minore_, the condensation of his

philosophy of despair. In 1825 he accepted an engagement to edit Cicero

and Petrarch for the publisher Stella at Milan, and took up his

residence at Bologna, where his life was for a time made almost

cheerful by the friendship of the countess Malvezzi. In 1827 appeared

the _Operette Morali_, consisting principally of dialogues and his

imaginary biography of Filippo Ottonieri, which have given Leopardi a

fame as a prose writer hardly inferior to his celebrity as a poet.

Modern literature has few productions so eminently classical in form and

spirit, so symmetrical in construction and faultless in style. Lucian is

evidently the model; but the wit and irony which were playthings to

Lucian are terribly earnest with Leopardi. Leopardi's invention is equal

to Lucian's and his only drawback in comparison with his exemplar is

that, while the latter's campaign against pretence and imposture

commands hearty sympathy, Leopardi's philosophical creed is a repulsive

hedonism in the disguise of austere stoicism. The chief interlocutors in

his dialogues all profess the same unmitigated pessimism, claim

emancipation from every illusion that renders life tolerable to the

vulgar, and assert or imply a vast moral and intellectual superiority

over unenlightened mankind. When, however, we come to inquire what

renders them miserable, we find it is nothing but the privation of

pleasurable sensation, fame, fortune or some other external thing which

a lofty code of ethics would deny to be either indefeasibly due to man

or essential to his felicity. A page of _Sartor Resartus_ scatters

Leopardi's sophistry to the winds, and leaves nothing of his dialogues

but the consummate literary skill that would render the least fragment

precious. As works of art they are a possession for ever, as

contributions to moral philosophy they are worthless, and apart from

their literary qualities can only escape condemnation if regarded as

lyrical expressions of emotion, the wail extorted from a diseased mind

by a diseased body. _Filippo Ottonieri_ is a portrait of an imaginary

philosopher, imitated from the biography of a real sage in Lucian's

_Demonax_. Lucian has shown us the philosopher he wished to copy,

Leopardi has truly depicted the philosopher he was. Nothing can be more

striking or more tragical than the picture of the man superior to his

fellows in every quality of head and heart, and yet condemned to

sterility and impotence because he has, as he imagines, gone a step too

far on the road to truth, and illusions exist for him no more. The

little tract is full of remarks on life and character of surprising

depth and justice, manifesting what powers of observation as well as

reflection were possessed by the sickly youth who had seen so little of

the world.

Want of means soon drove Leopardi back to Recanati, where, deaf,

half-blind, sleepless, tortured by incessant pain, at war with himself

and every one around him except his sister, he spent the two most

unhappy years of his unhappy life. In May 1831 he escaped to Florence,

where he formed the acquaintance of a young Swiss philologist, M. de

Sinner. To him he confided his unpublished philological writings, with a

view to their appearance in Germany. A selection appeared under the

title _Excerpta ex schedis criticis J. Leopardi_ (Bonn, 1834). The

remaining MSS. were purchased after Sinner's death by the Italian

government, and, together with Leopardi's correspondence with the Swiss

philologist, were partially edited by Aulard. In 1831 appeared a new

edition of Leopardi's poems, comprising several new pieces of the

highest merit. These are in general less austerely classical than his

earlier compositions, and evince a greater tendency to description, and

a keener interest in the works and ways of ordinary mankind. _The

Resurrection_, composed on occasion of his unexpected recovery, is a

model of concentrated energy of diction, and _The Song of the Wandering

Shepherd in Asia_ is one of the highest flights of modern lyric poetry.

The range of the author's ideas is still restricted, but his style and

melody are unsurpassable. Shortly after the publication of these pieces

(October 1831) Leopardi was driven from Florence to Rome by an unhappy

attachment. His feelings are powerfully expressed in two poems, _To

Himself_ and _Aspasia_, which seem to breathe wounded pride at least as

much as wounded love. In 1832 Leopardi returned to Florence, and there

formed acquaintance with a young Neapolitan, Antonio Ranieri, himself an

author of merit, and destined to enact towards him the part performed by

Severn towards Keats, an enviable title to renown if Ranieri had not in

his old age tarnished it by assuming the relation of Trelawny to the

dead Byron. Leopardi accompanied Ranieri and his sister to Naples, and

under their care enjoyed four years of comparative tranquillity. He made

the acquaintance of the German poet Platen, his sole modern rival in the

classical perfection of form, and composed _La Ginestra_, the most

consummate of all his lyrical masterpieces, strongly resembling

Shelley's _Mont Blanc_, but more perfect in expression. He also wrote at

Naples _The Sequel to the Battle of the Frogs and Mice_, a satire in

_ottava rima_ on the abortive Neapolitan revolution of 1820, clever and

humorous, but obscure from the local character of the allusions. The

more painful details of his Neapolitan residence may be found by those

who care to seek for them in the deplorable publication of Ranieri's

peevish old age (_Sette anni di sodalizio_). The decay of Leopardi's

constitution continued; he became dropsical; and a sudden crisis of his

malady, unanticipated by himself alone, put an end to his life-long

sufferings on the 15th of June 1837.