one
before him, and he was to model a colossal statue of Francesco, the
first duke. As for Leonardo himself he came not as an artist at all, or
careful of the fame of one; but as a player on the harp, a strange harp
of silver of his own construction, shaped in some curious likeness to a
horse's skull. The capricious spirit of Ludovico was susceptible to the
charm of music, and Leonardo's nature had a kind of spell in it.
Fascination is always the word descriptive of him. No portrait of his
youth remains; but all tends to make us believe that up to this time
some charm of voice and aspect, strong enough to balance the
disadvantage of his birth, had played about him. His physical strength
was great; it was said that he could bend a horseshoe like a coil of
lead.

The Duomo, the work of artists from beyond the Alps, so fantastic to a
Florentine used to the mellow unbroken surfaces of Giotto and Arnolfo,
was then in all its freshness; and below, in the streets of Milan, moved
a people as fantastic, changeful, and dreamlike. To Leonardo least of
all men could there be anything poisonous in the exotic flowers of
sentiment which grew there. It was a life of exquisite amusements,
(Leonardo became a celebrated designer of pageants,) and brilliant sins;
and it suited the quality of his genius, composed in almost equal parts
of curiosity and the desire of beauty, to take things as they came.

Curiosity and the desire of beauty--these are the two elementary forces
in Leonardo's genius; curiosity often in conflict with the desire of
beauty, but generating, in union with it, a type of subtle and curious
grace.

The movement of the Fifteenth Century was two-fold: partly the
Renaissance, partly also the coming of what is called the "modern
spirit," with its realism, its appeal to experience; it comprehended a
return to antiquity, and a return to nature. Raffaelle represents the
return to antiquity, and Leonardo the return to nature. In this return
to nature he was seeking to satisfy a boundless curiosity by her
perpetual surprises, a microscopic sense of finish by her finesse, or
delicacy of operation, that _subtilitas naturae_ which Bacon notices. So
we find him often in intimate relations with men of science, with Fra
Luca Paccioli the mathematician, and the anatomist Marc Antonio della
Torre. His observations and experiments fill thirteen volumes of
manuscript; and those who can judge describe him as anticipating long
before, by