FILIPPO LIPPI TO BRONZING 



useful and true ; and better is a small and certain thing 

 than a great falsehood." ^ 



The horse was the object of his constant and enthu- 

 siastic study. He used to buy the caged birds in the 

 market-place for the pleasure of letting them loose. 

 This, however, may not have been an impulse of kind- 

 ness and sympathy only, as he was intensely interested 

 in the problems of flight. He wrote a codice sul volo 

 degli uccelli, in which he differentiated the methods of 

 flight of the magpie, kite, thrush, swallow, and rook, and 

 his sketches include suggestions for flying-machines. 



His sketch-books are full of notes of animal life. 

 There are in the Royal Library at Windsor drawings 

 of horses and cats in many different attitudes. 



The lamb hugged by the little St. John Baptist in 

 the St. Anne (Louvre) will be remembered. The group 

 is reproduced exactly in a picture of the Lombard school 

 in the Milan Gallery, in another in the Leuchtenberg 

 Gallery, St. Petersburg, and also by Cesare da Sesto 

 in the Poldi Pezzoli collection, and by Salaino in the 

 Earl of Yarborough's collection. To produce the head 

 of Medusa, " he carried to one of his rooms, into which 

 none but himself ever entered, a number of lizards, hedge- 

 hogs, newts, serpents, dragon-flies, locusts, bats, glow- 



^ MS. in library of Institut de France, in Leo7iardo da VincVs Note-books, 

 E. M'Curdy, 1906, p. 66. 



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