Lionardo. One asks in vain how such enormous knowledge was acquired, and
because there is no answer, one falls back upon wild theories about
untaught genius. But whatever may be said of painting and sculpture,
neither architecture nor engineering, and least of all the mathematics
so necessary to both, can be evolved from the inner consciousness.

Men worked harder then than now, and their teachers and their tools
helped them less, so that they learned more thoroughly what they learned
at all. And there was much less to distract a man then, when he had
discovered his own talent, while there was everything to spur him.
Amusements were few, and mostly the monopoly of rich nobles; but success
was quick and generous, and itself ennobled the men who attained to
it--that is, it instantly made him the companion, and often the friend,
of the most cultivated men and women of the day. Then, as now, success
meant an entrance into 'society' for those whose birth had placed them
outside of it. But 'society' was different then. It consisted chiefly of
men who had fought their own way to power, and had won it by a
superiority both intellectual and physical, and of women who often
realized and carried out the unsatisfied intellectual aspirations of
their husbands and fathers. For wherever men have had much to do, and
have done it successfully, what we call culture has been more or less
the property of the women. In those times, the men were mostly occupied
in fighting and plotting, but the beautiful things produced by newly
discovered art appealed to them strongly. Women, on the other hand, had
nothing to do. With the end of the Middle Age, the old-fashioned
occupations of women, such as spinning, weaving and embroidering with
their maids, went out of existence, and the mechanical work was absorbed
and better done by the guilds. Fighting was then a large part of life,
but there was something less of the petty squabbling and killing between
small barons, which kept their women constant prisoners in remote
castles, for the sake of safety; and there was war on a larger scale
between Guelph and Ghibelline, Emperor and Pope, State and State. The
women had more liberty and more time. There were many women students in
the universities, as there are now, in Italy, and almost always have
been, and there were famous women professors, whose lectures were
attended by grown men. No one was surprised at that, and there was no
loud talk about women's