latter painted black (an allusion to Il Moro's dark complexion again); now as Fortune, or as victor over Poverty, covering with a corner of his ducal mantle a youth pursued by the hideous hag, and protecting him with a wand.1

Despite the many affinities between the artist and his patron, there is nothing to prove that Leonardo was among Il Moro's intimates. Το begin with, where did he lodge? In the castle? I doubt it, as he took pupils to live with him. We must picture him as living an independent life, except at such times as he mingled with the crowd of courtiers who accompanied Sforza on his incessant peregrinations to Pavia, to Vigevano, to the Sforzesca.

It would even appear, judging from the rough draft of a letter published by Amoretti, that Leonardo was sometimes whole months without

seeing his patron. "I

- take the liberty"-such

(Windsor Library.)

is the gist of the letter, which is unfortunately incomplete-"to remind your Grace of my humble affairs. humble affairs. You have forgotten me,

1 "Il Moro cogl' occhiali e la Invidia colla falsa Infamia dipinta, e la Giustitia nera pel Moro. Il Moro in figura di Ventura colli cappelli e panni e mani inanzi, e Messer Gualtieri con riverente atto lo piglia per li panni da basso, venendoli dalla parte dinanzi. Ancora la Povertà in figura spaventevole corra dietro a un giovinetto, e'l Moro lo copra col lembo della veste, e colla verga dorata minacia cotale mostro." (Amoretti, pp. 50-51. Richter, vol. i. p. 350.)

R

affirming that my silence is the cause of your displeasure But my life is at your service; I am continually ready to obey," etc.

Assuredly these Italian courts of the fifteenth century had more regard for talent than for birth; it would, indeed, have been absurd in upstarts like the Sforzi to have laid great stress on length of lineage. Still, it was essential, if talent was to shine, and command the attention of the ruler, that it should be supplemented by polished manners, fluent speech, and a ready wit; herein it was that the caustic Bramante excelled, and we learn from the Cortigiano of Baldassare Castiglione that another artist at Lodovico's court, Gian Cristoforo Romano, was not less brilliant in conversation.

Leonardo did not possess the gift of putting his ideas into concrete form to the same extent; he had more fancy than imagination; his creations, with a few rare exceptions, were remarkable rather for subtlety than vigour. Rabelais, who may quite possibly have come across him in some of his wanderings, would have dubbed him “a distiller of quintessences." For this handsome youth and accomplished cavalier-he was a first-rate horseman-was before all things a dreamer, more given to delving deep into an idea, and resolving it into its elements, than to catching the attention of the crowd by some lively and vigorous evidence of his Florentine blood. In short, his love of analysis destroyed his synthetic faculty: I do not think there is a single bon mot of his to be recorded. We cannot expect epigrams from such a character. Leonardo had too much respect for the demands of science to amuse himself with brilliant generalisations; he never quite lost sight of earth in his flights, and this very reserve gave to his thoughts-and who deserves the title of thinker more than he ?-an indescribable savour of reality, a tincture of profoundly human quality. With him we never fall into the purely abstract.

It is not without a certain approval that we recognise an indifferent courtier in the great artist and thinker. Though he had to reproach himself with many weaknesses, Leonardo never owed success to an astutely woven intrigue.

It would be hopeless to attempt to disentangle any exact conclusions as to Leonardo's financial situation while in Lodovico's

service from the complicated public accounts of the period. Besides a fixed salary, he probably received sums in proportion to the importance of his work (according to Bandello, he had 2,000 ducats per annum—about £4,000-during the execution of the Last Supper). He himself valued his time at 5 lire a day for "invention.” Profanity to estimate in pence the value of time like his, the price of a day of intellectual labour which was to bring forth a masterpiece destined to dazzle mankind throughout the ages. He should have said—nothing for the conception, but so much for the painting. But if we would avoid misjudgments, we must adapt ourselves to the point of view of a time which confounded the artist with the artisan (the word artista still has this double meaning in Italian), a fusion or confusion, whichever one likes to call it, on which, deplorable as it is when we have to do with a Leonardo da Vinci, the greatness of the industrial arts in Italy, nay, perhaps, the vitality of art itself at that epoch, was in fact based. For no part of it was looked upon as an abstract conception or an isolated activity. Leonardo's own ideas as to the respective value of the different arts were summed up, according to Lomazzo, in this maxim: the more an art involves of physical fatigue, the baser it is.

The liberality of Lodovico Sforza has sometimes been called in question, Leonardo himself furnishing grounds for accusations against his patron. In a letter addressed to the duke, he complains bitterly of not having received his salary for two years, and of having consequently been compelled to advance nearly 15,000 lire on works connected with the equestrian statue of Duke Francesco Sforza, &c.1 Two other protégés of Lodovico's, the poet Bellincioni 2 and the architect Bramante, were also loud in lamentations over their poverty. But who is unfamiliar with these jeremiads, so characteristic of the humanists and artists of the Renaissance! From Leonardo, in particular, reflections on the parsimony of his patron came very badly. Do we not know that he lived in lordly style, and kept half-a-dozen horses in his stables! His complaint refers in all probability to arrears imputable to the controllers of the Milanese finances, after the dowry

1 Amoretti, p. 75.

2 Rime, Bolognese ed., vol. ii, pp. 14, 19, 20, 39, 53-54, 79, 80, 81.

for Bianca Maria Sforza had drained the coffers of the state. Lodovico was, however, admittedly somewhat capricious in his display of generosity; one day, after exhibiting to the envoys of Charles VIII. of France, the priceless treasures of the Visconti and the Sforzi, he bestowed a very meagre present upon them, thereby running the risk of alienating personages of great importance at a critical moment of his career. Still, there is nothing to justify us in thinking that he was niggardly towards Leonardo. In April, 1499, only a few months before the catastrophe which cost him his throne, he made the artist a present of a vineyard of sixteen perches, in a suburb of Milan near the Vercelli gate, with powers to build upon it. Also, when Leonardo left Milan he was in a position to deposit 600 ducats (about £1,200) at the Monte di Pietà of Florence, and we know that he had lived at Milan in very lordly fashion.1

Whatever ideas intercourse with so cultured an amateur as Lodovico may have suggested to Leonardo, it was not in the power of any patron to influence the style of an artist of his calibre; it was the sight of a new country, its ambient air, the indirect and latent teachings to be gathered from it, which brought about his evolution. It is time to attack this problem. Having described the social aspect of the city in which da Vinci was called upon to show his powers, let us let us now see what the special art conditions of Milan were; let us see if, among his new fellow-citizens, there were any who, in the presence of such a master, had the right to call themselves initiators.

The history of the Milanese School during the second half of the fifteenth century has yet to be written.2 Failing more definitive and deeper researches, we may, at least, call attention to some of its most essential features. In striking contrast to

1 Leonardo, Vasari tells us, was liberality itself; he received and entertained all his friends, whether rich or poor, provided they had talent or merit. His presence alone sufficed to adorn and improve the most miserable and barest of houses. . . . Though possessing, in a certain sense, nothing of his own, and working but little, he had constantly about him servants and horses, of which he was passionately fond, as he was of all animals.

2 An interesting essay in this direction has been made by Herr v. Seidlitz: Springer Studien. See also Dr. Bode's article in the Jahrbuch der kg. Preuss. Kunstsammlungen, 1886, p. 238 et seq., and my Histoire de l'Art pendant la Renaissance, vol. ii, p. 787 et. seq.

Tuscany, which for more than two centuries had served as an art nursery to the rest of the peninsula, Lombardy had been constantly obliged to call in foreign masters in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Giotto, Giovanni of Pisa, and Balduccio of Pisa, the somewhat mediocre sculptor of the famous reredos of Saint Peter Martyr in the church of S. Eustorgio; in the fifteenth century, Brunellesco, Masolino, Fra Filippo Lippi, Paolo Uccello; the architect Michelozzo, the most distinguished among the pupils of

Brunellesco, and his fellow-students and compatriots, Benedetto of Florence, and Filarete. More even than these masters, Donatello had extended Florentine influence by establishing an advance post of Tuscany, at Padua. Roughly speaking, in the early Renaissance, just as in the time of Giotto, every reform introduced, every progress accomplished in Milan, received its impulse from Florence. Concurrently with Leonardo, architects of repute like Giuliano da San Gallo, Luca Fancelli, and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, arrived at the Lombard capital to confirm the prestige of the Tuscan school.