newcomer. The pope, indeed, is said to have been delighted with Leonardo’s minor experiments and ingenuities in science, and especially by a kind of zoological toys which he had invented by way of pastime, as well as mechanical tricks played upon living animals. But for the master’s graver researches and projects he cared little, and was far more interested in the dreams of astrologers and alchemists. When Leonardo, having received a commission for a picture, was found distilling for himself a new medium of oils and herbs before he had begun the design, the pope was convinced, not quite unreasonably, that nothing serious would come of it. The only paintings positively recorded as done by him at Rome are two small panels for an official of the papal court, one of a child, the other of a Madonna, both now lost or unrecognized. To this time may also belong a lost Leda, standing upright with the god in swan’s guise at her side and the four children near their feet. This picture was at Fontainebleau in the 16th century and is known from several copies, the finest of them at the Borghese gallery, as well as from one or two preliminary sketches by the master himself and a small sketch copy by Raphael. A portrait of a Florentine lady, said to have been painted for Giuliano de’ Medici and seen afterwards in France, may also have been done at Rome; or may what we learn of this be only a confused account of the Monna Lisa? Tradition ascribes to Leonardo an attractive fresco of a Madonna with a donor in the convent of St Onofrio, but this seems to be clearly the work of Boltraffio. The only engineering works we hear of at this time are some on the harbour and defences of Cività Vecchia. On the whole the master in these Roman days found himself slighted for the first and only time in his life. He was, moreover, plagued by insubordination and malignity on the part of two German assistant craftsmen lodged in his apartments. Charges of impiety and body-snatching laid by these men in connexion with his anatomical studies caused the favour of the pope to be for a time withdrawn. After a stay of less than two years, Leonardo left Rome under the following circumstances. Louis XII. of France had died in the last days of 1514. His young and brilliant successor, Francis I., surprised Europe by making a sudden dash at the head of an army across the Alps to vindicate his rights in Italy. After much hesitation Leo X. in the summer of 1515 ordered Giuliano de’ Medici, as gonfalonier of the Church, to lead a papal force into the Emilia and watch the movements of the invader. Leonardo accompanied his protector on the march, and remained with the headquarters of the papal army at Piacenza when Giuliano fell ill and retired to Florence. After the battle of Marignano it was arranged that Francis and the pope should meet in December at Bologna. The pope, travelling by way of Florence and discussing there the great new scheme of the Laurentian library, entertained the idea of giving the commission to Leonardo; but Michelangelo came in hot haste from Rome and succeeded in securing it for himself. As the time for the meeting of the potentates at Bologna drew near, Leonardo proceeded thither from Piacenza, and in due course was presented to the king. Between the brilliant young sovereign and the grand old sage an immediate and strong sympathy sprang up; Leonardo accompanied Francis on his homeward march as far as Milan, and there determined to accept the royal invitation to France, where a new home was offered him with every assurance of honour and regard.
The remaining two and a half years of Leonardo’s life were spent at the Castle of Cloux near Amboise, which was assigned, with a handsome pension, to his use. The court came often to Amboise, and the king delighted in his company, declaring his knowledge both of the fine arts and of philosophy to be beyond those of all mortal men. In the spring of 1518 Leonardo had occasion to exercise his old talents as a festival-master when the dauphin was christened and a Medici-Bourbon marriage celebrated. He drew the designs for a new palace at Amboise, and was much engaged with the project of a great canal to connect the Loire and Saône. An ingenious attempt has been made to prove, in the absence of records, that the famous spiral staircase at Blois was also of his designing.
Among his visitors was a fellow-countryman, Cardinal Louis of Aragon, whose secretary has left an account of the day. Leonardo, it seems, was suffering from some form of slight paralysis which impaired his power of hand. But he showed the cardinal three pictures, the portrait of a Florentine lady done for Giuliano de’ Medici (the Gioconda?), the Virgin in the lap of St Anne (the Louvre picture; finished at Florence or Milan 1507–1513?), and a youthful John the Baptist. The last, which may have been done since he settled in France, is the darkened and partly repainted, but still powerful and haunting half-length figure in the Louvre, with the smile of inward ravishment and the prophetic finger beckoning skyward like that of St Anne in the Academy cartoon. Of the “Pomona” mentioned by Lomazzo as a work of the Amboise time his visitor says nothing, nor yet of the Louvre “Bacchus,” which tradition ascribes to Leonardo but which is clearly pupil’s work. Besides pictures, the master seems also to have shown and explained to his visitors some of his vast store of notes and observations on anatomy and physics. He kept hoping to get some order among his papers, the accumulation of more than forty years, and perhaps to give the world some portion of the studies they contained. But his strength was nearly exhausted. On Easter Eve 1519, feeling that the end was near, he made his will. It made provision, as became a great servant of the most Christian king, for masses to be said and candles to be offered in three different churches of Amboise, first among them that of St Florentin, where he desired to be buried, as well as for sixty poor men to serve as torch-bearers at his funeral. Vasari babbles of a death-bed conversion and repentance. But Leonardo had never been either a friend or an enemy of the Church. Sometimes, indeed, he denounces fiercely enough the arts and pretensions of priests; but no one has embodied with such profound spiritual insight some of the most vital moments of the Christian story. His insatiable researches into natural fact brought upon him among the vulgar some suspicion of practising those magic arts which of all things he scouted and despised. The bent of his mind was all towards the teachings of experience and against those of authority, and laws of nature certainly occupied far more of his thoughts than dogmas of religion; but when he mentions these it is with respect as throwing light on the truth of things from a side which was not his own. His conformity at the end had in it nothing contradictory of his past. He received the sacraments of the Church and died on the 2nd of May 1519. King Francis, then at his court of St Germain-en-Laye, is said to have wept for the loss of such a servant; that he was present beside the death-bed and held the dying painter in his arms is a familiar but an untrue tale. After a temporary sepulture elsewhere his remains were transported on the 12th of August to the cloister of St Florentin according to his wish. He left all his MSS. and apparently all the contents of his studio, with other gifts, to the devoted Melzi, whom he named executor; to Salai and to his servant Battista Villanis a half each of his vineyard outside Milan; gifts of money and clothes to his maid Maturina; one of money to the poor of the hospital in Amboise; and to his unbrotherly half-brothers a sum of four hundred ducats lying to his credit at Florence.
History tells of no man gifted in the same degree as Leonardo was at once for art and science. In art he was an inheritor and perfecter, born in a day of great and many-sided endeavours on which he put the crown, surpassing both predecessors and contemporaries. In science, on the other hand, he was a pioneer, working wholly for the future, and in great part alone. That the two stupendous gifts should in some degree neutralize each other was inevitable. No imaginable strength of any single man would have sufficed to carry out a hundredth part of what Leonardo essayed. The mere attempt to conquer the kingdom of light and shade for the art of painting was destined to tax the skill of generations, and is perhaps not wholly and finally accomplished yet. Leonardo sought to achieve that conquest and at the same time to carry the old Florentine excellences of linear drawing and psychological expression to a perfection of which other men
