1920] on Leonardo da Vinci 113 



youth, and which are naturally to be connected with the period of 

 his apprenticeship to Yerrocchio. Leonardo, in a passage in the 

 " Trattato della Pittura," claims to have practised the art of sculpture 

 no less than that of painting, and to do " both the one and the other 

 in the same degree." Making all possible allowance for what may 

 have been lost, the sum total of his complete work in art is yet 

 astonishingly small as covering this period from his apprenticeship 

 to his thirty-second year. 



Already in his few pictures the detailed treatment of the herbage, 

 the gradation of the light, the presentment of muscle and tendon, 

 all reveal the scientific study of the laws which defined their structure. 

 The inference is irresistible that already while at Florence he had 

 commenced those studies of natural and applied science the rumour 

 of which, superimposed upon the fame of his artistic work, caused 

 his name to be endowed among his contemporaries with a half 

 legendary universality. Some of the forms of this nascent activity 

 are enumerated by Vasari. I quote from the translation by Mr. 

 Herbert Home : — 



" In architecture he made many drawings, both of plans as of 

 other projections of buildings ; and he was the first, although a mere 

 youth, that put forward the project of reducing the river Arno to a 

 navigable channel, from Pisa to Florence. He made designs for 

 flour-mills, fulling-mills, and machines which might be driven by the 

 force of water. . . . 



' ; And he was for ever making models and designs to enable men 

 to remove mountains with facility, and to bore them in order to pass 

 from one level to another ; and by means of levers, and cranes, and 

 screws, he showed how great weights could be lifted and drawn ; 

 together with methods of emptying harbours, and pumps for drawing 

 up water from low places, all which his brain never ceased from 

 inventing - ." 



According to the statement by one of his earliest biographers, the 

 Anonimo Gaddiano, he was famous as a player of the lyre, and was 

 the instructor of Atalante Migliorotte, who accompanied him when, 

 at the age of thirty, he was sent to the Duke of Milan, bearing a 

 lyre as a present from Lorenzo de' Medici. Yasari, who had access to 

 the MSS. of the Anonimo Gaddiano, mentions his having been sent 

 to Milan with a lyre of silver in the form of a horse's skull, made 

 with his own hands, but places the event twelve years later, when 

 after the death of his nephew, Gian Galeazzo, Ludovic had become 

 by natural succession reigning Duke of Milan. The story of the lyre 

 — common to both narratives — may be accepted as affording proof 

 of his proficiency in yet another of the arts. 



In the famous draft of a letter to Ludovic Sforza, in the Codice 

 Atiantico, written presumably immediately on his arrival in Milan, 

 Leonardo offers his services in the capacity of military or naval 

 engineer, detailing the various inventions of which he possesses the 



Yol. XXIII. (Xo. 114) i 



