3o8 



NATUR/i 



[May 6, 1920 



harbours and pumps for drawing up water from low 

 places, all which his brain never ceased from 

 inventing." 



In the famous draft of a letter to Ludovic Sforza, 

 in the Codice Atlantico, written presumably imme- 

 diately 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 secret, and offering to make trial of any, either 

 in the ducal park or in whatsoever place might please 

 his Excellency, in case any of the said inventions 

 should seem to be impossible. If natural in- 

 credulity, which the writer of the letter apparently | 

 expected to meet with, by reason of the scope and 

 variety of the inventions, which comprise pontoons, 

 scaling-ladders, cannon or bombards, mines, covered 

 chariots, catapults, mangonels, and smoke-powders, 

 should dispose any to look on the list merely as a 

 piece of rodomontade, it may be observed that the 

 contents of Leonardo's manuscripts at Paris and Milan 

 fully substantiate every claim contained in the letter. 



The position which Leonardo desired to occupy 

 under Ludovic Sforza was not very unlike that of 

 military engineer and inspector of fortresses which he 

 occupied at a later period in the service of Caesar 

 Borgia. 



The concluding paragraphs of the letter to Ludovic 

 Sforza refer to Leonardo's readiness to be employed 

 in the arts of peace — in architecture as a designer 

 of both public and private buildings, in the construc- 

 tion of watercourses, in painting, and in sculpture, 

 whether of marble, bronze, or clay, and especially in 

 the execution of the equestrian statue of Francesco 

 Sforza, upon which he laboured intermittently for 

 sixteen years. The extent and fervency of the re- 

 searches that he considered necessary, which com- 

 prised studies of various antique equestrian statues, 

 and numerous notes on the proportions of particular 

 horses, as well as a treatise on the anatomy of the 

 horse, were such that the very desire of perfection 

 prevented the execution of the work. As Vasari says, 

 quoting Petrarch's line: "L'opera fosse ritardata 

 dal desio." The monk, Sabba da Castiglione, who 

 was present when the French entered Milan in 

 1499, records the fact of the destruction of the 

 clay model under the arrows of the Gascon bow- 

 men. The statue ranked with Donatello's Gatta- 

 melata at Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolommeo Col- 

 leone at Venice as one of the three great examples 

 of equestrian statues of the Italian Renaissance. So 

 far as it is possible to form an opinion from the very 

 numerous studies in the Royal Collection at Windsor, 

 it would seem to have been in advance of both the 

 others in freedom and vigour of movement. The 

 sequence of studies shows a change of purpose from 

 the attitude of the horse galloping to that of \t 

 walking. Leonardo says in a note in one of his 

 manuscripts, "The trot is almost the nature of the 

 free horse." 



Few paintings are now in existence the execution 

 of which can be connected with Leonardo's first 

 period of residence in Milan-. The most im- 

 portant of these is the haunting ruin of the Last 

 Supper. The paucity of the list, even allowing for 

 the inevitable mischances of time, confirms the testi- 

 mony of Sabba da Castiglione, who says that, 

 besides the Last Supper, few other works in painting 

 bv Leonardo were to be seen at Milan in the middle 

 of the sixteenth century, "because when he ought to 

 have attended to painting, in which without doubt he 

 would have proved a new Apelles, he gave himself 

 entirely to geometry, architecture, and anatomy." 



The external history of his life is sharply divided 

 by circumstances into three periods. First the early 

 3'ears at Florence. Then his life at Milan under 

 NO. 2636, VOL. 105] 



Ludovic Sforza. The third period was that of the 

 Odyssey of wanderings commenced on his leaving 

 Milan with Fra Luca Paciolo two months after the 

 flight of Ludovic Sforza, and extended for the 

 remaining twenty years of his life. 



At Venice, as Leonardo's manuscripts show, he 

 studied the tides of the Adriatic, and apparently pre- 

 pared a scheme for flooding part of the Veneto in 

 order to stem the Turkish invasion, and also an 

 apparatus by which it would be possible to approach 

 the Turkish galleys under water. A note in the 

 Codice Atlantico tells of his hurried departure from 

 Florence to travel in the Romagna as architect and 

 military engineer in the service of Caesar Borgia. 

 His manuscripts refer to works planned at Urbino, 

 Cesena, and Porto Cesenatico. But the office ended 

 with the rebellion of the Duchy, and in March, 1503, 

 Leonardo was once more back in Florence. There 

 he was employed to divert the channel of the Arno, 

 in connection with the war with Pisa. He painted at 

 this time the portrait of Madonna Lisa del Giocondo, 

 the world-famous Mona Lisa, and also the cartoon 

 for the Battle of Anghiari. His work on this com- 

 position was interrupted by an invitation to Milan, 

 and this led to his entering the service of the 

 French. Louis XII. refers to him in a letter to the 

 Signoria as "our painter and engineer in ordinary." \ 

 He consulted him as to the conduit in the garden of 

 the Chateau of Blois, and employed him on hydraulic 

 work in Lombardy. It was probably in May, 1509, 

 when Louis XII. made a triumphal entry into Milan 

 after the victory of Agnadello, that Leonardo con- 

 structed as part of the pageant an automatic lion 

 which walked a few paces and then, opening its breast, 

 revealed it full of lilies. 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 inquire from Jean de Paris the method of 

 painting in tempera, but he did not engage in any 

 great artistic work. 



In the year 15 12 the French lost Milan, and after 

 the re-entry of the Sforzas, in the person of the young 

 Maximilian, there is no record of Leonardo's further 

 employment. On September 24 in the following year 

 he set out from Milan to Rome with his assistants, 

 and was there lodged in the Belvedere of the Vatican. 

 According to Vasari, the Pope gave him a commis- 

 sion, 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 Civit^ Vecchia, and in studying 

 anatomy at the hospital, for which last-named pursuit 

 he was denounced to the Pope by one of his appren- 

 tices. 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 May 2, 1519. 



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

 Cardinal of Aragon on October 10, 15 17, makes 

 special mention of the anatomical drawings, and the 

 diarist states that Leonardo told the visitors 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, " an endless number of volumes, all 

 in the vulgar tongue, which if they be published will 

 be profitable and very delectable." 



The activities of Leonardo's mind fall naturallv into 



