He was in the immediate vicinity of the Court, and few great personages passed through Amboise without paying him a visit. On October 10, 1516, the Cardinal of Aragon, natural son of Ferdinand I., King of Naples, visited Leonardo, attended by his suite. His secretary, Antonio di Beatis of Amalfi (all honour to him!), carefully noted down the details of this interview. He tells us that the master showed the prelate three pictures: a female portrait, ordered from him by the late Giuliano de' Medici, a S. John the Baptist as a Youth, and a Madonna with the Child on the Lap of S. Anne, all three of them very perfect. narrator, "a sort of paralysis which has affected his right hand, forbids our expecting more good work from him. It is true that he has formed a Milanese pupil of his, who works exceedingly well; and although the said master, Leonardo, cannot paint with the delicacy which was customary with him, he still busies himself in making drawings, and instructing others in his art."1

Unfortunately," adds the

The wonderful little S. John the Baptist in the Louvre is certainly one of Leonardo's last works. It is a proof that his noble intelligence was constantly rising higher, and that the flame burnt brightest just before it was finally quenched.

A vision a dream-a kind of impalpable image of a head and arm, rising out of a mysterious penumbra-such is this enchanting

1 Uzielli, Richerche intorno a Leonardo da Vinci, 1st edition, vol. ii. p. 460. I here reprint this invaluable document: "Alli 10 de ottobre (1516) da Tursa. . .. se andò ad Amboys. . . . In uno de li borghi il Signore (the Cardinal of Aragon) con noi altri andò ad vedere Messer Lunardo Vinci, fiorentino vecchio di più de LXX. anni pictore in la età nostra excelentissimo quale mostrò ad sua S. Illma (the Cardinal) tre quatri. Uno di certa donna fiorentina, facta di naturale ad istantia del quondam Magnifico Juliano de Medici. L'altro di San Joanne Baptista giovane, ed uno de la Madonna et del figliolo che stan posti in gremmo di Sancta Anna, tucti perfectissimi. Ben vero che da lui per esserli venuta certa paralesi nella dextra non se ne può exspectare più cosa Buona, ha ben facto un creato milanese che lavora assai bene, et benche il predecto Messer Lunardo non possa colorire con quella dulcezza che solea pur serve ad fare disegni ed insignare ad altri. Questo gentilhuomo ha composto di notomia tanto particolarmente con la demostrazione di la pictura si de membri come de muscoli nervi vene giunture d'intestini et di quanto si può ragionare tanto di corpi de huomini come di donne, de modo non è stato mai ancora facto da altra persona. Il che habbiamo visto oculatamente et già lui disse haver facta notomia de più de xxx. corpi tra mascoli et femmine de ogni età. Ha anche composto de la natura de l'acque. De diverse machine et altre cose, secundo ha referito lui infinità di volumi, e tucti in lingua vulgare quale se vengono in luce saranno profiqui e molto. delectevoli."

picture. So delicate and tender are the features that the artist must certainly have taken them from a female model, imitating, in this particular, several of his Florentine predecessors, and, notably, Donatello, and Agostino di Duccio, the sculptor of the church of S. Francis, at Rimini. These two artists seem to have taken delight in modelling androgynous figures. On representations of S. John, the patron Saint of Florence, the Primitives, from Donatello downwards, lavished every seduction of their art, every skilful caress, as it were, of brush or chisel. For the ascetic type of him who lived on locusts and wild honey, they substituted a beautiful beardless youth, starting out on his desert journey, full of hope and pleasurable expectation. The delicate modelling of the arm and raised hand, in the Louvre picture, defy all description. The expression of the face, with its exquisite smile and airy grace, is ineffable, to say nothing of the miraculous execution of the picture, and the knowledge of chiaroscuro, so profound that Rembrandt seems to have borrowed its secrets from Leonardo. Compare the two painters' methods. They are identical to bring a figure into relief against the penumbra of the background, and make it participate in the mysterious illumination. In this particular, the S. John the Baptist and the Night-Watch are twin works, in so far as idealism and realism can resemble one another.

Of all the painters who came after Leonardo, Rembrandt is, in fact, the one who approaches nearest to him, both in his indecision. as regards literary painting and really plastic formulæ, and his magic treatment of chiaroscuro.

Some short time after this visit, the masterpiece passed into the collection of King Francis I; Louis XIII. presented it to Charles I. of England, in exchange for Holbein's Erasmus, and a Holy Family by Titian. It was bought by Jabach at the sale of Charles I.'s pictures, for the ridiculously small sum of £140, and was made over to Louis XIV. by the famous banker. Since that time it has remained in the national collection.

The aged artist had to face more than one disappointment. The first of these was owing to the unprepared condition of his foreign hosts and neighbours. Why should we hesitate to admit the fact? France

was not ripe for the teaching, artistic or scientific, of this pre-eminent representative of the new school of thought, and the influence which the gifted leader should have exercised on French art in general, and the artists of Touraine in particular, was reduced to little or nothing. The time was past when the valiant chief of the School of Tours, Jehan Foucquet, had gone to Italy, to assimilate the conquests of the Renaissance. Flemish influence, and still more a kind of inertia, had laid a paralysing hand on our French painters. Leonardo

was too worn out to re

sume, among insufficiently prepared pupils, a work of initiation which, in his hands, would have been crowned with very different success from that it earned in those of such decadent artists as Il Rosso, Primaticcio, and Niccolo dell' Abbate. But we have no proof, indeed, that the French painters felt themselves at all attracted by a style which was far too transcendent for their com

monplace natures.

Not that the master's reputation had failed to reach the banks of the Seine, the Loire, and the Rhone. So early as 1509, Jean Lemaire had done homage in La Plainte du Désiré to "Léonard qui a grâces supernes." But the very superiority of his genius discouraged his new fellow-citizens, and divided them from him.

Among the few French artists who were influenced more or less directly by Leonardo, the place of honour must be allotted to the engraver Geoffroy Tory, of Bourges. In his Champ Fleury (1529), he speaks of the Italian artist in terms of high praise.

A collection of drawings by a French artist who lived about the middle of the sixteenth century, which has recently passed with M. Lesoufaché's collection into the Library of the École des Beaux Arts, also shows traces of Leonardo's influence. Some studies of horses, in spirited attitudes, were certainly inspired by the Battle of Anghiari.' On the other hand, a reproduction of the drawing, now in the Windsor Library (a replica in the Louvre), of a man defending himself against wild animals by means of a burning glass (p. 57), has been wrongly attributed to the engraver Jean Duvet. Passavant claims this work for Cesare da Sesto, and Galichon ascribes it to an unknown Milanese engraver, probably a goldsmith.2

Francis I., as we know by Leonardo's certificate of burial, had engaged his services, not as his painter only, but as his engineer, architect, and mechanician.

As an engineer, Leonardo was soon at work. One of his most important undertakings was the plan for digging a canal near Romorantin, at the confluence of the Sauldre and the Morantin. This canal, which was to be partly fed by the waters of the Cher, was to be used both for irrigation and navigation. The impounding locks, which he introduced into this plan, and on which he had lavished all his care, were then, according to M. Kucharzewski,3 a great novelty in France, where navigable canals did not come into vogue until the reign of Henri IV. "Nowadays," adds M. Kucharzewski, "there are more than two thousand of these locks on the network of canals. that covers the country, and their invention has long been ascribed to Leonardo da Vinci."

Leonardo was much interested, on the occasion of an excursion to Blois, in the canal and irrigation works carried out there, some twenty or five-and-twenty years previously, by his fellow-countryman Fra Giocondo, the learned Veronese monk.4

1 See Chronique des Arts, June 15, 1895.

2 Gazette des Beaux Arts, 1865, vol. i., p. 547-550. M. Julien de la Boullaye (Etude sur la Vie et sur l'Euvre de Jean Duvet dit le Maître à la Licorne; Paris, 1876, p. 124-125) does not give an opinion on this point.

3 Revue scientifique, August 22, 1885, p. 244.-Cf. Ravaisson-Mollien, and Richter, vol. ii., p. 251–255.

4 A plan published by Richter (vol. ii., p. 250) bears the following note: "C. D. Giardino di Blès, A. B. è il condotto di Blès, fatto in Francia da Fra Giocondo."

In connection with this residence in Touraine, we have a sketch which is evidently the plan for a house to be built beside the road leading to Amboise, with a huge hollowed out space near it, surrounded by tiers of seats for spectators.1

Leonardo also seems to have collected information as conditions of the tide at Bordeaux.2

*

to the

Did woman claim any share in the latest thoughts of the aged artist? A passage in his will would almost lead us to think so. Amongst his legatees is a poor woman of the humblest sort, a servant, old and ugly, in all probability. Item, I leave my servant Mathurine a gown of good black cloth, trimmed with fur, a cloth cloak, and two ducats, to be paid her once only, and this also to reward the faithful service of the said Mathurine, until this day."

Had the illustrious painter, natural child as he was, unmarried, unencumbered by family ties, ensured himself the possession of some obscure and absolute devotion, like the devotion of a watch-dog? Had some fellow-countrywoman of his own carried her self-sacrifice to the point of following him into a foreign land? For a moment I had hoped and almost believed it. But, alas! the name of Mathurine has a terribly French ring about it! The clause in the will refers, no doubt, to some prosaic housekeeper, belonging to the province, whom Leonardo had taken into his service when he settled at Amboise. Thus, to his latest hour, the artist who created so many and such matchless female types-virgins, mothers, matrons, prophetesses and sibyls-seems, by some strange contradiction, to have banished the sex from his own inmost existence, and denied it all communion with the sublime secrets of his thoughtful and poetic soul.

This independence of all female affection explains the ease with which the master moved from one home to another, leaving Florence for Milan, and Milan for Florence, following the fortunes of Cæsar Borgia, of the Maréchal d'Amboise, of Giuliano de' Medici, of Francis I. of France, and venturing, at last, when over sixty years of age, to try his fortune beyond the mountains.

But Leonardo's health had been declining for some considerable

1 Richter, pl. lxxxi., fig. 2.-De Geymüller, Les derniers Travaux sur Léonard de Vinci, p. 43. As to the design for Marshal Trivulzio's monument, said to have been made at this period by Leonardo, see vol. i., p. 156.

2 Richter, vol. ii., p. 250.