Chapter XV: Act 1867: every British ship going to other countries where lemon or (6)

LEON, the name of a modern province and of an ancient kingdom, captaincy-general and province in north-western Spain. The modern province, founded in 1833, is bounded on the N. by Oviedo, N.E. by Santander, E. by Palencia, S. by Valladolid and Zamora and W. by Orense and Lugo. Pop. (1900) 386,083. Area, 5986 sq. m. The boundaries of the province on the north and west, formed respectively by the central ridge and southerly offshoots of the Cantabrian Mountains (q.v.), are strongly marked; towards the south-east the surface merges imperceptibly into the Castilian plateau, the line of demarcation being for the most part merely conventional. Leon belongs partly to the river system of the Miño (see SPAIN), partly to that of the Duero or Douro (q.v.), these being separated by the Montañas de Leon, which extend in a continuous wall (with passes at Manzanal and Poncebadon) from north to south-west. To the north-west of the Montañas de Leon is the richly wooded pastoral and highland district known as the Vierzo, which in its lower valleys produces grain, fruit, and wine in abundance. The Tierra del Campo in the west of the province is fairly productive, but in need of irrigation. The whole province is sparsely peopled. Apart from agriculture, stock-raising and mining, its commerce and industries are unimportant. Cattle, mules, butter, leather, coal and iron are exported. The hills of Leon were worked for gold in the time of the Romans; iron is still obtained, and coal-mining developed considerably towards the close of the 19th century. The only towns with more than 5000 inhabitants in 1900 were Leon (15,580) and Astorga (5573) (q.v.). The main railway from Madrid to Corunna passes through the province, and there are branches from the city of Leon to Vierzo, Oviedo, and the Biscayan port of Gijón.

At the time of the Roman conquest, the province was inhabited by the Vettones and Callaici; it afterwards formed part of Hispania Tarraconensis. Among the Christian kingdoms which arose in Spain as the Moorish invasion of the 8th century receded, Leon was one of the oldest. The title of king of Leon was first assumed by Ordoño in 913. Ferdinand I. (the Great) of Castile united the crowns of Castile and Leon in the 11th century; the two were again separated in the 12th, until a final union took place (1230) in the person of St Ferdinand. The limits of the kingdom varied with the vicissitudes of war, but roughly speaking it may be said to have embraced what are now the provinces of Leon, Palencia, Valladolid, Zamora and Salamanca. For a detailed account of this kingdom, see SPAIN: _History_. The captaincy-general of the province of Leon before 1833 included Leon, Zamora and Salamanca. The Leonese, or inhabitants of these three provinces, have less individuality, in character and physique, than the people of Galicia, Catalonia or Andalusia, who are quite distinct from what is usually regarded as the central or national Spanish type, i.e. the Castilian. The Leonese belong partly to the Castilian section of the Spaniards, partly to the north-western section which includes the Galicians and Asturians. They have comparatively few of the Moorish traits which are so marked in the south and east of Spain. Near Astorga there dwells a curious tribe, the Maragatos, sometimes considered to be a remnant of the original Celtiberian inhabitants. As a rule the Maragatos earn their living as muleteers or carriers; they wear a distinctive costume, mix as little as possible with their neighbours and do not marry outside their own tribe.

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.