1920] on Leonardo da Vinci 117 



There was much study of anatomy with Marc Antonio della 

 Torre at this period, and his intercourse with French artists is shown 

 by a note to enquire from Jean de Paris the method of painting in 

 tempera, but he did not engage in any great artistic work. 



In the year 1512 the French lost Milan, and after the re-entry of 

 the Sf orzas in the person of the young Maximilian, there is no record 

 of Leonardo's further employment. 



On September 24 in the following year, as a note in one of his 

 manuscripts states, he set out from Milan to Rome with his assistants 

 and was there lodged in the Belvedere of the Vatican. Giovanni de' 

 Medici, youngest son of Lorenzo, had been elected to the Papal 

 throne in the earlier part of the year, but whatever hope of employ- 

 ment Leonardo may have cherished was soon frustrated. According 

 to Vasari, the Pope gave him a commission and then was indignant 

 because he began by experimenting with the varnish. The practice 

 of painting, however, had no more than a secondary interest for him. 

 His manuscripts reveal him as engaged in studies in optics, acoustics 

 and geometry, studying geology in the Campagna, improving the 

 method of coining at the Mint at Rome, busy with engineering work 

 at Civita Yecchia, and in studying anatomy at the hospital, for which 

 last-named pursuit he was denounced to the Pope by one of his 

 apprentices. 



He seems to have gone with the Papal army to Bologna, where 

 in December, 1515, the Concordat was held between the Pope and 

 Francis I., and a month later he accompanied the king on his return 

 to France with the office of " his painter and engineer," being given 

 as a residence the chateau of Cloux, near Amboise, where he died on 

 the 2nd of May, 1519. 



A record of a visit paid to him at Cloux by the Cardinal of 

 Aragon on the 10th of October, 1517, in a journal kept by the 

 Cardinal's secretary, tells how Leonardo showed them three of his 

 pictures, the portrait of a Florentine lady painted for Giuliano de' 

 Medici, a St. John the Baptist as a youth/and a Madonna and Child 

 in the lap of St. Anne, and how he was then suffering from paralysis 

 of the right hand, but could still make drawings and teach others. 

 The visitors seem to have been particularly impressed by the ana- 

 tomical drawings, and Leonardo told them that in preparation for 

 these he had dissected more than thirty bodies. They saw also his 

 treatise on the nature of water, and others on various machines, there 

 being as it appeared u an endless number of volumes, all in the 

 vulgar tongue, which if they be published will be profitable and very 

 delectable." 



The activities of his mind fall naturally into such as found ex- 

 pression either mainly or in part in constructive work and those 

 revealed only in his writings. The first category comprises painting, 

 sculpture, architecture and engineering. In painting it is enough 

 to instance the fresco of the Last Supper and the portrait of Mona 

 Lisa, each of its type unique among all works of the Renaissance and 



