half his, or the work of his pupils. But a lover of strange souls may
still analyse for himself the impression made on him by those works, and
try to reach through it a definition of the chief elements of Leonardo's
genius. The legend, corrected and enlarged by its critics, may now and
then intervene to support the results of this analysis.

His life has three divisions--thirty years at Florence, nearly twenty
years at Milan, then nineteen years of wandering, till he sinks to rest
under the protection of Francis the First at the Chateau de Clou. The
dishonour of illegitimacy hangs over his birth. Piero Antonio, his
father, was of a noble Florentine house, of Vinci in the Val d'Arno, and
Leonardo, brought up delicately among the true children of that house,
was the love-child of his youth, with the keen, puissant nature such
children often have. We see him in his youth fascinating all men by his
beauty, improvising music and songs, buying the caged birds and setting
them free, as he walked the streets of Florence, fond of odd bright
dresses and spirited horses.

From his earliest years he designed many objects, and constructed models
in relief, of which Vasari mentions some of women smiling. His father,
pondering over this promise in the child, took him to the workshop of
Andrea del Verrocchio, then the most famous artist in Florence.
Beautiful objects lay about there--reliquaries, pyxes, silver images for
the pope's chapel at Rome, strange fancy-work of the middle age, keeping
odd company with fragments of antiquity, then but lately discovered.
Another student Leonardo may have seen there--a boy into whose soul the
level light and aerial illusions of Italian sunsets had passed, in after
days famous as Perugino. Verrocchio was an artist of the earlier
Florentine type, carver, painter, and worker in metals, in one;
designer, not of pictures only, but of all things for sacred or
household use, drinking-vessels, ambries, instruments of music, making
them all fair to look upon, filling the common ways of life with the
reflexion of some far-off brightness; and years of patience had refined
his hand till his work was now sought after from distant places.

It happened that Verrocchio was employed by the brethren of Vallombrosa
to paint the Baptism of Christ, and Leonardo was allowed to finish an
angel in the left hand corner. It was one of those moments in which the
progress of a great thing--here, that of the art of Italy--