the relentless progress of our day it would be mad to regret the bloody and barbaric age of the Renaissance. In the streets of Florence, cluttered with cabs and bicycles, one can no longer spin a quiet syllogism, one can no longer enjoy in silence the red glow of sunset on the noble dark-browed palaces. The Leonardo of the fifteenth century, with his fine raiment and his great dreams, would not now be at home in that Milan to which he gave so many gentle images. And Milan would be too busy with municipal elections and the exportation of rubber to take any interest in him.
If Leonardo is to live on as something more than a subject for theses and for lantern slides, he must be transformed, must be given a spiritual existence. This transformation is what I have sought to achieve.
II
In the real Leonardo, as revealed by his writings and by other records, there are some elements that I do not find sympathetic. He had too much of a mania for science. His disheveled books are too full of observations and of tiny facts. It seems as though this man, whose father and grandfather had been notaries, were possessed by an atavistic desire to undertake an in-
