our. But
since His Excellency is anxious to have something superlatively fine,
he desires me to write and beg you to send him another master, for
although he has given the work to Leonardo, he does not feel satisfied
that he is equal to the task."

Probably Lodovico's confidence had been shaken by Leonardo's endless
delays and hesitation, but a few months later the master was at work
again, this time it appears on a completely new model of the great
statue. On April, 1490, we find the following memorandum in Leonardo's
writing:--

"To-day I commenced this book, and began the horse again."

But soon another interruption came to interfere with the progress of the
great work. There was the visit to Pavia, and the decoration of the
ball-room in the Castello, and the wedding _fetes_, and the tournaments
in which Messer Galeazzo sought his help. And in this year--1492--we
find Leonardo at Vigevano with the Moro in March, making designs for a
new staircase for the Sforzesca, and studying vine-culture, and later in
the summer drawing plans of a bath-room for Duchess Beatrice, and of a
pavilion with a round cupola for the duke's labyrinth in the gardens of
the Castello. It was in this same year, according to Amoretti, that he
finished the beautiful painting of the Holy Family, upon which he had
long been engaged. This may have been the picture ordered by Lodovico as
a gift for the art-loving King of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, when his
niece Bianca Maria was betrothed to that monarch's son.

"Since we hear that His Majesty delights in pictures," wrote Lodovico to
Maffeo di Treviglio, the ambassador whom he was sending to Hungary in
1485, "and we have here a most excellent painter, with whose genius we
are well acquainted, and who, we are sure, has no equal, we have ordered
this master to paint a figure of Our Lady, as beautiful and perfect and
holy as he can imagine, without sparing pains or expense. He has already
set to work, and will undertake nothing else until this picture is
finished, and we are able to send it as a gift to his said Majesty."

The painter who had no equal could be none other than Leonardo; but it
would be interesting to know if this picture, originally destined for
Matthias Corvinus, was the Nativity eventually given by Lodovico in 1493
to Bianca Maria's future husband, the Emperor Maximilian. All traces of
this altar-piece, however, as well as of the Bacchus and other subjects
which Leonardo painted