any things, to
write his great treatise on painting, and to draw the wonderful
interlaced patterns inscribed with the strange words which have puzzled
so many generations of commentators. And he has friends, too, dear to
his heart--Messer Jacopo, and the wise Lorenzo da Pavia, that master of
organs whose hands were as deft in fashioning lyres and viols as in
drawing out sweet sounds, with whom he loved to commune of musical
instruments and eternal harmonies, and the boy Andrea Salai, with the
beautiful curling hair, whom he loved to dress up in green velvet
mantles, and shoes with rose-coloured ribbons and silver buckles.

"Such," he tells us, "was I, Leonardo the Florentine, at the court of
the most Illustrious Prince Signor Lodovic." And what the Moro was to
Leonardo that he showed himself to other artists and men of letters. In
the poet's words, he was the magnet who drew men of genius (_virtuosi_)
from all parts of the world to Milan. He might be an exacting and
critical master, he was certainly never satisfied with any work short of
the best--even Leonardo, we have seen, did not always find him easy to
please--but once he discovered a man who was excellent in any branch of
knowledge, he thought no cost too great to retain him at his court. And
so the foremost scholars and the finest artists, Giorgio Merula and
Lancinus Curtius, Caradosso and Cristoforo Romano, Bramante and
Leonardo, were all drawn to Milan in turn, and, having once entered the
Moro's service, remained there until the end.

"We know, O most illustrious Prince!" wrote Tanzio in his preface to
Bellincioni's Sonnets--"we know that you, the Chief of the Insubrians,
are no less a lover of your country than of your glorious father, in
whose honour you have reared that mighty and immortal work, the great
Colossus, which, like himself, remains without a rival. We see you
equally anxious to glorify both his memory and your own great city. We
see Milan, by your care, not only adorned with peace and wealth, with
noble churches and edifices, but with rare and admirable intellects, who
all turn to you in their hour of need, as the rivers flow into the vast
ocean."

Nor was it only in Milan and Pavia that this revival made itself felt.
The new impulse spread from city to city. The lovely Renaissance facade
of S. Maria dei Miracoli at Brescia was completed in 1487, and the great
Church of the Incoronata at Lodi, begun in 1488, was continued during
the next twen