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Then suddenly there occurred to him a story he had heard long before from his professor, of a certain portrait by the renowned Leonardo da Vinci, upon which the great master laboured several years, and still regarded as incomplete, but which, according to Vasari, was nevertheless deemed by all the most complete and finished product of his art.

The painter had omitted nothing of her character; all that had happened he read into the picture the restless spiritual eyes, and the large voluptuous mouth, and the small high temples which Leonardo would like to draw. The painting of this picture was as illusive as Evelyn herself, the treatment of the reddish hair and the grey background. And Harding listened, saying, "So this is the end."

As the one took a larger step in the next stage or period, the other stepped forth in a like degree at the same time; so that in Leonardo da Vinci we see the great painter and the great philosopher: his painting most clearly refined in its principles, and enlarged in its powers by his philosophical studies.

For this change the brilliant complex inquiring mind of Leonardo da Vinci was largely responsible, together with the encouragement and example of Lorenzo de' Medici and such of his cultured sceptical friends as Alberti, Pico della Mirandola, and Poliziano. But that is a subject too large for this book.

She cultivated the great and the fashionable in art, letters, and the drama, mixed them tactfully with her titles, attended the banquets of the ruling class in Bohemia attired flatteringly in her best, and founded a society for the study of Leonardo da Vinci.

He told us the written verse was quite different from what the printed poem would be just as the sculptor's clay model differs from the marble. Subtle, wasn't it?" "Perfectly true, too!" cried a man, with a falsetto voice, moving into the circle; "Leonardo himself might have said that."

They throw their mansion open; dicing, betting, intriguing, revellings, maskings, commence. Michiella is courted ardently by Camillo; Camilla trifles with Leonardo and with Count Orso alternately. Jealous again of Camilla, Michiella warns and threatens Leonardo; but she becomes Camillo's dupe, partly from returning love, partly from desire for vengeance on her rival.

Passing over the legends of the time of mythology we find that many-sided genius, Leonardo da Vinci, early in the sixteenth century, not content with being a painter, architect, sculptor, engineer and designer of forts, offering drawings and specifications of wings which, fitted to men, he thought would enable them to fly. The sketches are still preserved in a museum at Paris.

To this intention, not to mention that he was left alone by the death of his mother, Fortune was favourable enough, for a young sister that he had was married to Leonardo Ricoveri, one of the first and richest citizens that there were at that time in Arezzo; and so he went off to Florence.

The following is the order in which Leonardo placed the disciples at the table: Jesus of Nazareth in the centre, Bartholomew the last on the left, after him is James, Andrew, Peter, Judas who holds the money bag and John. On the right, next to Jesus, comes Thomas, the doubting one; James the Greater, Philip, Matthew, Thaddeus, and Simon.