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Leonardo was a trader, who had learned the art during his voyages to Barbary, and his treatise and that of Mahommed were the sole literature on the subject up to the year 1494, when Fra Luca Pacioli da Borgo brought out his volume treating of Arithmetic and Algebra as well. This was the first printed work on the subject. After the invention of printing the interest in Algebra grew rapidly.
Thou canst have them all for one silver piece. In a moment Leonardo had paid the money and had turned towards the row of little cages. One by one he opened the doors and set the prisoners free, and those that were too frightened or timid to fly away, he gently drew out with his hand, and sent them gaily whirling up above his head into the blue sky.
Untroubled, apparently, by the storm and stress of the political world about him, he devoted himself with a whole-hearted simplicity to the advancement of his art. Like Leonardo, he early won fame for his skill in music, and Vasari tells us the gifted young lute-player was a welcome guest in distinguished circles.
The great names of the period speak for themselves, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Machiavelli, Benvenuto Cellini, and a host of others. The inspiration of the Renaissance came largely from the later Greek schools of art and literature, Alexandria and Rhodes and the colonies in Sicily and Italy, rather than ancient Greece.
It was not in play that he painted that other Medusa, the one great picture which he left behind him in Florence. The subject has been treated in various ways; Leonardo alone cuts to its centre; he alone realises it as the head of a corpse, exercising its powers through all the circumstances of death.
If this love for colour and line happened to be combined with an interest in mechanics and hydraulics, the result was a Leonardo da Vinci, who painted his pictures, experimented with his balloons and flying machines, drained the marshes of the Lombardian plains and "expressed" his joy and interest in all things between Heaven and Earth in prose, in painting, in sculpture and in curiously conceived engines.
As for Leonardo, he was absorbed in other studies, and had apparently ceased to take any interest in the subject. After allowing his first model to be spoilt, and receiving payment for a second which he never began, he had, as already mentioned, accompanied the Sienese architect, Martini, to Pavia, to give his opinion on the new Duomo in course of erection.
In Shakespeare it is a kind of corruption in the flesh and a conscious revolt from this. A sense of corruption in the flesh makes Hamlet frenzied, for he will never admit that it is his own flesh. Leonardo da Vinci is the same, but Leonardo loves the corruption maliciously. Michelangelo rejects any feeling of corruption, he stands by the flesh, the flesh only.
Such are the aristocratic and charming friends who are the escorts of the great artists and seem to have come to flower in the lives of their mighty souls: Beltraffio, the friend of Leonardo: Cavalliere of Michael Angelo: the gentle Umbrians, the comrades of young Raphael: Aert van Gelder, who remained faithful to Rembrandt in his poor old age.
Dear, dear me, I thought to myself, how these babes and sucklings do give us the go-by surely. Choosing his own epitaph at fifteen as for a man who "had been very sorry for things," and such a strain as that why it might have done for Leonardo da Vinci himself.
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