460 LEONARDO
His favourite assistant Salai had, we know, accompanied him from Milan, and remained with him.
Leonardo lost no time in proceeding to the execution of his design upon the mural surface; this time he had devised a technical method of which he regarded the success as certain; the colours were to be laid on a specially prepared ground, and then fixed by heat, in some way analogous to the processes of encaustic or enamel. When portions of the work were done the heat was applied, by means of fires lighted on platforms, but it was found to take effect unequally, and the result was a failure more or less complete. Leonardo abandoned the work in chagrin, and presently betook himself to Milan. Payments for his great battle-picture had been made to him in advance, and the gonfaliere Piero Soderini complained on behalf of the signory that Leonardo had treated them ill. When, however, he soon afterwards honourably offered to refund the amount, the offer was not less honourably declined. The unfinished painting before long disappeared from the wall. The cartoon also, no less than the competing cartoon of Michelangelo, has perished. Our only memorials of the work are a few preliminary sketches, an engraving executed by Lucensi in 1558, not from the original but from a copy, and the far more celebrated engraving of Edelinck after a study made by Rubens, in his own essentially personal, obstreperous, un-Italian manner, of a portion only of the composition. During the years between 1500 and 1505 Leonardo was also engaged at intervals upon the portraits of two ladies of the city – Ginevra Benci, and Lisa di Antonio Maria di Noldo Gherardina, the wife of Zanobi del Giocondo, commonly called Mona (i.e., Madonna) Lisa or la Gioconda. The first of these portraits is lost; the second was bought by Francis I. for four thousand gold florins, and is now one of the glories of the Louvre. In Madonna Lisa Leonardo seems to have found a sitter whose features possessed in a singular degree the intellectual charm in which he delighted, and in whose smile was realized that inward, haunting, mysterious expression which had always been his ideal. He worked, it is said, at her portrait during some portion of four successive years, causing music to be played during the sittings that the rapt expression might not fade from off her countenance, and labouring by all the means of which he was master to bring his work to perfection. It remains perhaps the most striking example of his powers. The richness of colouring on which Vasari expatiates has indeed flown, partly from injury, partly because in his preference for effects of light and shade the painter was accustomed to model his figures on a dark ground, and that in this picture the ground has to a large extent come through. Nevertheless, in its brown and faded state, the portrait is pre-eminent alike for fascination of expression, for refinement and precision of drawing, and for the romantic invention of its background, wherein a far-seen champaign with bridged rivers and winding roads is bounded by a fantastic coast of islands and rock-bound estuaries.
During these years of work at Florence, Leonardo's father died at a good old age in that city. Some stray notes, in which the painter mentions a visit to "Caterina" in the hospital, and inscribes the amount of expenses paid "for the funeral of Caterina," though they are of uncertain date, prove too that when Leonardo's peasant mother drew near her end her illustrious son was there to tend her. From his half brothers, the legitimate children of Ser Piero, Leonardo after their father's death experienced unkindness. They were all much younger than himself. One of them, who followed his father's profession, made himself the champion of the others in disputing Leonardo's claim to his share, first in the paternal inheritance, and then in that which had been left to be divided between the brothers and sisters by an uncle. The litigation thus set on foot lasted for several years, and the annoyances attending it, with his disappointment at the failure of his great wall-painting, may have been among the causes which determined Leonardo to go back to Milan. Return thither he at all events did, with leave obtained from the signory, and attended by his faithful Salai, in the summer of 1506. For nearly nine years after that he seems to have made the Lombard city his principal home, residing sometimes on his own vineyard and sometimes in the villa of a wealthy young friend and disciple, Francesco Melzi. The French remained in occupation at Milan until 1513, and Leonardo held the title of court painter and engineer to the French king, Louis XII., the transfer of his services having been formally requested by that monarch from the Florentine signory. The record of his occupations and performances during this period is meagre. He was several times, and for considerable periods at a time, in Florence, on business connected with the litigation above mentioned. From thence he writes at the beginning of 1511 to the French governor of Milan, asking about the payment of his salary, and saying that he means to bring with him on his return two pictures of the Madonna, of different sizes. But there can be no doubt that his thoughts became with his advancing years ever more and more engrossed in the problems of natural science. To this time belong a large proportion of the vast collections in which are accumulated the results of his observation and research.
There are only three extant pictures which we can with probability assign to this, the second Milanese period of Leonardo's career, and to what points within the period it is hard to say. Two of these are replicas or rather variations of the same theme, the Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist and an angel, in a landscape of fantastic rocks and flowery grottoes by the sea-shore. The composition is known as the Vierge aux Rochers. The most celebrated version of it is that formerly in the collection of Francis I., and now in the Louvre. The other version was painted, according to Lomazzo, for the Cappella della Concezione at Milan, where it was purchased in 1796 by Gavin Hamilton, and by him sold to the earl of Suffolk, from the hands of whose descendant it has lately passed into the National Gallery. Both of these paintings seem to betray signs of the handiwork of the master himself, assisted probably in each case by pupils. Both have suffered, the French example most from repainting, the English most from blackening. On the whole, of these two admirable and fascinating pictures, the English example may be pronounced to be both of the higher authenticity and the greater beauty, having the advantage of the French especially in the difference of position in the right hand of the kneeling angel. The third picture conjecturally referred to about this date is also at the Louvre, and again represents a holy family. Leonardo has recurred to the motive on which he had founded his design for the Church of the Servites at Florence, in so far as he has seated the Virgin in the lap of St Anne, whom he depicts smiling at the happy intercourse of her mystic grandchild and his mother. But this time the Virgin stoops across as she sits, to lift the child from the ground on which he stands fondling a lamb. John the Baptist is absent, and the background is a pastoral landscape bounded towards the horizon by lagoons and mountains. The picture is unequally finished – minutely in some parts, and in others carelessly enough.
A great change took place in the affairs of Milan at the close of the year 1512. The French supremacy came to an end, and Maximilian Sforza, the son of Ludovico, returned for a few years to rule over the reduced dominions of his father. All affairs were thrown into confusion, and Milan ceased to be a desirable place of abode for Leonardo and his scholars. In the meantime Giovanni de' Medici, the son of the painter's ancient patron Lorenzo, was elected pope under the title of Leo X., and continued with still greater magnificence the encouragement of art and artists of which his warlike predecessor Julius had set the example. On the 24th September 1514 Leonardo too set out for Rome from Milan with a company of his pupils. The youngest brother of the pope, Giuliano de' Medici, was his friend, but it is not true that Leonardo, as
