nted the portraits of
Ludovico's mistresses, Lucretia Crivelli and Cecilia Galerani the
poetess, of Ludovico himself, and the Duchess Beatrice. The portrait of
Cecilia Galerani is lost, but that of Lucretia Crivelli has been
identified with _La Belle Ferronniere_ of the Louvre, and Ludovico's
pale, anxious face still remains in the Ambrosian. Opposite is the
portrait of Beatrice d'Este, in whom Leonardo seems to have caught some
presentiment of early death, painting her precise and grave, full of the
refinement of the dead, in sad earth-coloured raiment, set with pale
stones....

The _Last Supper_ was finished in 1497; in 1498 the French entered
Milan, and whether or not the Gascon bowmen used it as a mark for their
arrows, the model of Francesco Sforza certainly did not survive.
Ludovico became a prisoner, and the remaining years of Leonardo's life
are more or less years of wandering. From his brilliant life at court he
had saved nothing, and he returned to Florence a poor man. Perhaps
necessity kept his spirit excited: the next four years are one prolonged
rapture or ecstasy of invention. He painted the pictures of the Louvre,
his most authentic works, which came there straight from the cabinet of
Francis the First, at Fontainebleau. One picture of his, the _Saint
Anne_--not the _Saint Anne_ of the Louvre, but a mere cartoon now in
London--revived for a moment a sort of appreciation more common in an
earlier time, when good pictures had still seemed miraculous; and for
two days a crowd of people of all qualities passed in naive excitement
through the chamber where it hung, and gave Leonardo a taste of
Cimabue's triumph. But his work was less with the saints than with the
living women of Florence; for he lived still in the polished society
that he loved, and in the houses of Florence, left perhaps a little
subject to light thoughts by the death of Savonarola (the latest gossip
is of an undraped Monna Lisa, found in some out-of-the-way corner of the
late Orleans collection), he saw Ginevra di Benci, and Lisa, the young
third wife of Francesco del Giocondo. As we have seen him using
incidents of the sacred legend, not for their own sake, or as mere
subjects for pictorial realisation, but as a symbolical language for
fancies all his own, so now he found a vent for his thoughts in taking
one of those languid women, and raising her, as Leda or Pomona, Modesty
or Vanity, to the seventh heaven of symbolical expression.

_La