presses hard
and sharp on the happiness of an individual, through whose
discouragement and decrease, humanity, in more fortunate persons, comes
a step nearer to its final success.

For beneath the cheerful exterior of the mere well-paid craftsman,
chasing brooches for the copes of Santa Maria Novella, or twisting metal
screens for the tombs of the Medici, lay the ambitious desire of
expanding the destiny of Italian art by a larger knowledge and insight
into things, a purpose in art not unlike Leonardo's still unconscious
purpose; and often, in the modelling of drapery, or of a lifted arm, or
of hair cast back from the face, there came to him something of the
freer manner and richer humanity of a later age. But in this Baptism the
pupil had surpassed the master; and Verrocchio turned away as one
stunned, and as if his sweet earlier work must thereafter be distasteful
to him, from the bright animated angel of Leonardo's hand.

The angel may still be seen in Florence, a space of sunlight in the
cold, laboured old picture; but the legend is true only in sentiment,
for painting had always been the art by which Verrocchio set least
store. And as in a sense he anticipates Leonardo, so to the last
Leonardo recalls the studio of Verrocchio, in the love of beautiful
toys, such as the vessel of water for a mirror, and lovely needle-work
about the implicated hands in the Modesty and Vanity, and of reliefs
like those cameos which in the Virgin of the Balances hang all round the
girdle of Saint Michael, and of bright variegated stones, such as the
agates in the Saint Anne, and in a hieratic preciseness and grace, as of
a sanctuary swept and garnished. Amid all the cunning and intricacy of
his Lombard manner this never left him. Much of it there must have been
in that lost picture of Paradise, which he prepared as a cartoon for
tapestry, to be woven in the looms of Flanders. It was the perfection of
the older Florentine style of miniature-painting, with patient putting
of each leaf upon the trees and each flower in the grass, where the
first man and woman were standing.

And because it was the perfection of that style, it awoke in Leonardo
some seed of discontent which lay in the secret places of his nature.
For the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts; and this
picture--all that he had done so far in his life at Florence--was after
all in the old slight manner. His art, if it was to be something in the
world, must be