LEONARDO AND MODERN SCIENCE 69 



found himself less and less at home in Florence. The city had con- 

 siderably changed in the last ten years. Savonarola had ruled it, 

 and many of the artists had been deeply swayed by his passionate 

 appeals, and even more by his death. For once, fair Florence had 

 lost her head. And then also, young Michael Angelo had appeared, 

 heroic but intolerant and immoderate: he and Leonardo were 

 equally great but so different that they could not possibly get on 

 together. 



In 1513-15 Leonardo went to the papal court, but there, for the 

 first time in his life, the old man was snubbed. Having left Rome, 

 his prospects were getting darker, when fortunately he met in 

 Bologna the young King of France, Francis I, who persuaded him 

 to accept his patronage. The King offered him a little castle in 

 Touraine, with a princely income, and there Leonardo spent in 

 comparative quietness, the last three years of his life. It must be 

 said to the credit of Francis I that he seems to have understood his 

 guest, or at least to have divined his sterling worth. France, how- 

 ever, did not appreciate Leonardo, and was not faithful to her 

 trust. The cloister of Saint-Florentin at Amboise, where the great 

 artist had been buried, was destroyed by a fire in 1808, and his 

 very ashes are lost. 



He was apparently an old man when he died, much older than 

 his years, exhausted by his relentless mind and by the vicissitudes 

 and the miseries of his strange career. Only those who have known 

 suffering and anxiety can fully understand the drama and the 

 beauty of his life. 



Throughout his existence Leonardo had carried on simultane- 

 ously, and almost without a break, his work as an artist, as a 

 scientist, as an engineer. Such a diversity of gifts was not as un- 

 usual in his day as it would be now. Paolo Uccello, Leo B. Alberti, 

 Piero dei Franceschi, even Verrocchio himself, had shown more 

 than a casual interest in scientific matters such as perspective and 

 anatomy, but Leonardo towers far above them. The excellence of 

 his endowment is far more amazing than its complexity. His 



