The man thus extraordinarily gifted was the son of a Florentine lawyer, born out of wedlock by a peasant mother. The place of his birth was Vinci, a “castle” or fortified village in the Florentine territory near Empoli, from which his father’s family derived its name. The Christian name of his father was Piero (the son of Antonio the son of Piero the son of Guido, all of whom had been men of law like their descendant). Leonardo’s mother was called Caterina. Her relations with Ser Piero da Vinci seem to have come to an end almost immediately upon the birth of their son. She was soon afterwards married in her own rank of life. Ser Piero on his part was four times married, and had by his last two wives nine sons and two daughters; but the boy Leonardo had from the first been acknowledged by his father, who brought him up in his own house, principally, no doubt, at Florence. In that city Ser Piero followed his profession, and was after a while appointed notary to the signory, or governing council of the state, a post which several of his forefathers had filled before him. The son born to him before marriage grew up into a youth of manifest and shining promise. To signal beauty and activity of person he joined a winning charm of temper and manners, a tact for all societies, and an aptitude for all accomplishments. An inexhaustible energy lay beneath this amiable surface. Among the multifarious pursuits to which he set his hand, the favourite were modelling and drawing. His father, perceiving this, sought the advice of an acquaintance, Andrea del Verrocchio, who at once recognized the boy’s vocation, and was selected by Ser Piero to be his master.

Verrocchio, as is well known, although not one of the great creative or inventive forces in the art of this age at Florence, was a thoroughly capable and spirited craftsman alike as goldsmith, sculptor, and painter, while in teaching he was particularly distinguished. In his studio Leonardo worked for several years in the company of Lorenzo di Credi and other less celebrated pupils. He had soon learnt all that his master had to teach—more than all, if we are to believe the oft-told tale of the figure, or figures, executed by the pupil in the picture of Christ’s Baptism designed by the master for the monks of Vallombrosa. The work in question is now in the Academy at Florence. According to Vasari the angel kneeling on the left, with a drapery over its right arm, was put in by Leonardo, and when Verrocchio saw it his sense of its superiority to his own work caused him to forswear painting for ever after. The latter part of the story is certainly false. Moreover, a closer examination seems to detect the hand of Leonardo, not only in the figure of the angel, but also in that of Christ and in the landscape background, which are designed with extreme refinement, and painted in the new medium of oil, while the remainder of the picture has been executed by Verrocchio in his accustomed vehicle of tempera. The work was probably produced between 1480 and 1482, when Leonardo was from eighteen to twenty years of age. By the latter date we find him enrolled in the lists of the painters’ guild at Florence. Here he continued to live and work probably for eight or nine years longer. Up till 1477 he is still spoken of as a pupil or apprentice of Verrocchio; but in 1478 he receives an independent commission from the signory, and in 1480 another from the monks of San Donato in Scopeto. He had in the meanwhile been taken into special favour by Lorenzo the Magnificent. The only memorials now existing of Leonardo’s industry during this, period consist of a number of scattered drawings and studies, most of them physiognomical, in chalk, pen, and silver point, besides two painted panels. One of these is a large and richly composed picture, or rather a finished preparation in monochrome for such a picture, of the Adoration of the Kings; this may have been done for the monks of San Donato, and is now in the Uffizi; the other is a similar preparation for a St Jerome, now in the Vatican gallery at Rome. We possess, however, the record of an abundance of other work which has perished. Leonardo was not one of those artists who sought in the imitation of antique models the means of restoring art to its perfection. He hardly regarded the antique at all, and was an exclusive student of nature. From his earliest days he had flung, himself upon that study with an unprecedented passion of delight and curiosity. In drawing from life he had found the way to unite precision with freedom, the subtlest accuracy of definition with vital movement and flow of line, as no draughtsman had been able to unite them before. He was the first painter to recognize light and shade as among the most significant and attractive of the world’s appearances, and as elements of the utmost importance in his art, the earlier schools having with ono consent neglected the elements of light and shade in favour of the elements of colour and line. But Leonardo was not a student of the broad, regular, patent appearances only of the world; its fugitive, fantastic, unaccustomed appearances attracted him most of all. Strange shapes of hills and rocks, rare plants and animals, unusual faces and figures of men, questionable smiles and expressions, whether beautiful or grotesque,, far-fetched objects and curiosities, these were the things which he most loved to pore upon and keep in memory. Neither did he stop at mere appearances of any kind, but, having stamped the image of things upon his brain, went on indefatigably to probe their hidden laws and causes. The laws of light and shade, the laws of “perspective,” including optics and the physiology of the eye, the laws of human and animal anatomy and muscular movement, and of the growth and structure of plants, all these and much more furnished food almost from the beginning to his insatiable spirit of inquiry. The evidence of his preferences and preoccupations is contained in the list of the lost works which he produced during this period. One of these was a painting of Adam and Eve in opaque water-colours; and in this, besides the beauty of the figures, the infinite truth and elaboration of the foliage and animals in the background are celebrated in terms which bring to mind the treatment of the subject by Albert Dürer, in his famous engraving done thirty years later. Again, a peasant of Vinci having in his simplicity asked Ser Piero to get a picture painted for him on a wooden shield, the father is said to have laughingly handed on the commission to his son, who thereupon shut himself up with all the noxious insects and grotesque reptiles he could find, observed and drew and dissected them assiduously, and produced at last a picture of a dragon compounded of their various shapes and aspects, which was so fierce and so life-like as to terrify all who saw it. With equal research and no less effect he painted on another occasion the head of a snaky-haired Medusa. Lastly, Leonardo is related to have modelled in clay and cast in plaster, about this time, several heads of smiling women and children. In addition to these labours and researches, he was full of new ideas concerning both the laws and the applications of mechanical forces. His architectural and engineering projects were of a daring which amazed even the fellow-citizens of Alberti and Brunelleschi. History presents few figures more attractive to the mind’s eye than that of Leonardo during this period of his all-capable and dazzling youth. There was nothing about him, as there was afterwards about Michelangelo, dark-tempered, secret, or morose; he was open and genial with all men. From time to time, indeed, he might shut himself up for a season in complete intellectual absorption, as when he toiled among his bats and wasps and lizards, forgetful of rest and food, and insensible to the noisomeness of their corruption; but anon we have to picture him as coming out and gathering about him a tatterdemalion company, and jesting with them until they were in fits of laughter, for the sake of observing their burlesque physiognomies ; or anon as standing radiant in his rose-coloured cloak and his rich gold hair among the throng of young and old on the piazza, and holding them spell-bound while he expatiated on his plan for lifting the venerable baptistery of St John, the bel San Giovanni of Dante, up bodily from its foundations, and planting it anew on a stately basement of marble. Unluckily it is to the written biographies and to imagination that we have to trust exclusively for our picture. No portrait of Leonardo as he appeared during this period of his life has come down to us.

The interval between 1480 and 1487 is one during which the movements of our master are obscure, and can only be told conjecturally. Up to the former date we know with certainty that he was working at Florence, under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici. By the latter date he had definitively passed into the service of Duke Ludovico Sforza, called il Moro, at Milan. The main determining cause of his removal would seem to have been his selection by Ludovico for the task of erecting a great memorial statue in bronze to the honour of his victorious father, the condottiere Francesco Sforza. The project of such a monument had been already entertained by the last duke, Ludovico’s elder brother. After Ludovico had possessed himself of the regency in 1480, he appears to have revived the scheme, and to have invited various artists to compete for its execution. One who complied with the invitation was the Florentine Antonio del Pollaiuolo, by whom a sketch for the monument is still preserved at Munich. It would seem as if the competition had been won by Leonardo, but a considerable time had been allowed to elapse before the work was actually put in hand. The question then arises, Was it during this period of postponement that Leonardo went on his mysterious travels to the East! The earlier biographers know nothing of these travels; recent investigation of Leonardo’s MSS. has brought them to light. It has been not inaptly conjectured that the speculations of transcendental Platonism, which absorbed at this time the thoughts and the conversation of the Medic≡an circle, were uncongenial to the essentially experimental cast of Leonardo’s mind, and that he was not sorry to escape from the atmosphere of Florence. At any rate his devouring curiosity would have made welcome the opportunity of enlarging his knowledge of men and countries by Eastern travel, even at the cost, which to one of his freethinking habits would not have been great, of a temporary compliance with Islamite observances. Certain it is that he took service as engineer with the sultan of “Babylon,” which in the geographical nomenclature of those days meant Cairo, and in the course of his mission visited Egypt, Cyprus, Constantinople, the coasts of Asia Minor, especially the Cilician region about Mount Taurus, and Armenia. This biographical discovery adds to the career of Leonardo a characteristic touch of adventurous and far-sought experience. Perhaps it was his acquaintance with the Levant which made him adopt the Oriental mode of writing from right to left, a habit which some of his biographers have put down to his love of mystification, and others explain more simply by the fact (to which his friend Luca Pacioli bears explicit testimony) that he was left-handed. The probable date of Leonardo’s Eastern travels falls between 1480 and 1483-84. By the last-named year, if not sooner, he was certainly back in Florence, whence lie wrote to Ludovico il Moro at Milan a letter making him the formal offer of his services. The draught of this letter is still extant. It does not altogether tally with the statements of the earliest biographers, that Leonardo was recommended by Lorenzo de Medici to the duke regent particularly for his accomplishments in music. Vasari indeed says expressly that Leonardo was the bearer to Ludovico of a lyre of his invention, ingeniously fashioned of silver in the form of a horse’s head. In the autograph draft of the letter, to which we have referred, Leonardo rests his own title to patronage chiefly on his capabilities in military engineering. After explaining these under nine different heads, he speaks under a tenth of his proficiency as a civil engineer and architect, and adds a brief paragraph with reference to what he can do in painting and sculpture, undertaking in particular to carry out in a fitting manner the monument to Francesco Sforza. We shall probably be safe in fixing between the years 1484 and 1485 as the date of his definitive removal to Milan.

From this time for the next fourteen or fifteen years (until the summer of 1499) Leonardo continued, with very brief intervals of absence, to reside in high favour and continual employment at the court of Ludovico il Moro. His occupations were as manifold as his capacities. He superintended the construction of military engines, and seems to have been occasionally present at sieges and on campaigns. He devised and carried out works of irrigation and other engineering schemes in the territory of the duchy. He designed a cupola for the cathedral of Milan, and was consulted on the works of Certosa of Pavia. He managed with ingenuity and splendour the masques, pageants, and ceremonial shows and festivals of the court. Withal he continued incessantly to accumulate observations and speculations in natural philosophy, working especially at anatomy with Marcantonio della Torre, and at geometry and optics with Fra Luca Pacioli, for whose book De Divina Proportione he designed the figures. He made excursions into the Alps, and studied and drew with minute fidelity the distribution and formation of the mountain masses. He was placed at the head of a school or “Academy” of arts and sciences, where he gathered about him a number of distinguished colleagues and eager disciples. His pupils in painting included the sons of several noble families of the city and territory.

Among the more immediate scholars of Leonardo may he mentioned Antonio Boltraffio, Marco d’Oggionno, Gian Petrino, and the master’s special friend and favourite, Salai or Salaino. But by far the most important painter formed under Leonardo’s influence at Milan was the admirable Bernardino Luini. Other disciples or adherents of his school were Bazzi of Siena, called II Sodoma, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Andrea Solario, Bernardino dei Conti, and Ambrogio Breda or de Bredis. Several of the pupils or adherents here mentioned belong, however, to a later period of the master’s life than that with which we are now concerned.

Leonardo’s own chief undertakings in art during his residence at the court of Ludovico il Moro were two in number, namely, the equestrian monument of Francesco Sforza and the mural painting of the Last Supper. For the former he had probably made some preparatory sketches and models before he left Florence. After his arrival at Milan the work seems to have proceeded with many interruptions, and according to a MS. note of his own to have been finally and actively resumed in 1490. In the Royal Library at Windsor are preserved a whole series of small experimental studies for the monument. Leonardo was a great lover and student of horses, and would never be without some of the noble race in his stable. It is difficult to retrace the stages of development marked by the several sketches in question, or their relations to the final design. But it seems as if Leonardo had first proposed to represent his hero as mounted on a charger violently prancing or rearing above a fallen enemy, and had in the end decided to adopt a quieter action, more nearly resembling that of the work upon which Verrocchio was simultaneously engaged at Venice. Some difficulties must have been encountered in the casting, or there would have been no meaning in the words of Michelangelo when twelve years afterwards he is said to have taunted Leonardo with incapacity on that account. But contemporary writings are explicit to the effect that the group of horse and rider, 26 feet in height, was actually cast in bronze, and set up to the admiration and delight of the people, under a triumphal arch constructed for the purpose, during the festivities held at Milan in 1493 on the occasion of the marriage of the emperor Maximilian to a bride of the house of Sforza. Within ten years the glory of that house had departed. Ludovico, twice overthrown by the invaders whom he had himself called into Italy, lay languishing in a French prison, and his father’s statue had served as a butt to the Gascon archers of the army of Louis XII. In 1501 the duke Ercole d’Este sought leave from the French governor of Milan to have the statue removed to his own city; but nothing seems to have come of the project; and within a few years Leonardo’s master-work in sculpture had between mischief and neglect been irretrievably destroyed.

Only a little less disastrous is the fate which has overtaken the second great enterprise of Leonardo’s life at Milan, his painting of the Last Supper. This, with the Madonna di San Sisto and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, is the third most celebrated picture of the world. It was painted, twenty years the earliest of the three, on the refectory wall of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie at Milan, where its defaced remains are still an object of pilgrimage and wonder. The commission for the work came partly from the duke and partly from the monks of the convent. Leonardo is said to have consumed upwards of ten years upon his task, a circumstance which is not surprising when we consider his fastidious spirit and the multiplicity of other calls upon his time. But the monks were impatient, and could not make allowance for the intervals of apparent idleness, intervals really of brooding and searching and meditation, which were incidental to Leonardo’s way of work. On one occasion it became...