ade apparent to the eyes
of men. He was wont, after years of labour, to leave his work still
incomplete, feeling that he could not perfect it as he desired: yet even
his most fragmentary sketches have a finish beyond the scope of lesser
men. "Extraordinary power," says Vasari, "was in his case conjoined with
remarkable facility, a mind of regal boldness and magnanimous daring." Yet
he was constantly accused of indolence and inability to execute.[248]
Often and often he made vast preparations and accomplished nothing. It is
well known how the Prior of S. Maria delle Grazie complained that Lionardo
stood for days looking at his fresco, and for weeks never came near it;
how the monks of the Annunziata at Florence were cheated out of their
painting, for which elaborate designs had yet been made; how Leo X.,
seeing him mix oils with varnish to make a new medium, exclaimed, "Alas!
this man will do nothing; he thinks of the end before he makes a
beginning." A good answer to account for the delay was always ready on the
painter's lips, as that the man of genius works most when his hands are
idlest; Judas, sought in vain through all the thieves' resorts in Milan,
is not found; I cannot hope to see the face of Christ except in Paradise.
Again, when an equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza had been modelled in
all its parts, another model was begun because Da Vinci would fain show
the warrior triumphing over a fallen foe.[249] The first motive seemed to
him tame; the second was unrealisable in bronze. "I can do anything
possible to man," he wrote to Lodovico Sforza, "and as well as any living
artist either in sculpture or painting." But he would do nothing as
taskwork, and his creative brain loved better to invent than to
execute.[250] "Of a truth," continues his biographer, "there is good
reason to believe that the very greatness of his most exalted mind, aiming
at more than could be effected, was itself an impediment; perpetually
seeking to add excellence to excellence and perfection to perfection. This
was without doubt the true hindrance, so that, as our Petrarch has it, the
work was retarded by desire." At the close of that cynical and positive
century, the spirit whereof was so well expressed by Cosimo de'
Medici,[251] Lionardo set before himself aims infinite instead of finite.
His designs of wings to fly with symbolise his whole endeavour. He
believed in solving the insoluble; and nature had so richly dowered him in
the very