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In the midst of his best years of painting, Lionardo da Vinci was called off to build canals, and Cæsar Borgia kept him busy for two years in planning and constructing fortifications.
The loss of priceless treasures, such as the manuscript of Virgil which had belonged to Petrarch, and the masterpieces of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, might perhaps have been borne: it concerned only the cultured few, and their effervescence was soon quelled by patrols of French cavalry. Far different was it with the peasants between Milan and Pavia.
The Sforza Castle at Milan had walls enough of tapestry, the pageants of Leonardo da Vinci, organised at royal command of the lovely Beatrice d'Este, displayed the wealth of woven beauty over which Francis had time to deliberate in those bad hours after the battle at Milan's noted neighbour, Pavia. Gobelins, Seventeenth Century. Cartoon after Poussin.
Consider, for example, two moments of a literature or of an art, French tragedy under Corneille and under Voltaire, and Greek drama under Æschylus and under Euripides, Latin poetry under Lucretius and under Claudian, and Italian painting under Da Vinci and under Guido.
Reality may be so definite and so false, just as it may be so fantastic and so true; and, among work which we can apprehend as dealing justly with reality, there may be quite as much difference in all that constitutes outward form and likeness as there is between a Dutch interior by Peter van der Hooch, the portrait of a king by Velasquez, and the image of a woman smiling by Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo da Vinci might have known the art of flying in the air, and might even have practiced it. A statement to this effect, at least, is found in several historians. We have, however, no direct proof of the fact. The Abbe Deforges, of Etampes, announced in the journals in 1772 that he would perform the great feat. On the appointed day multitudes of the curious flocked to Etampes.
Two centuries after the last of these parents of modern literature had nearly elapsed, ere he who has been styled the Dante of the arts, Michael Angelo, and his contemporaries, among whom were Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, appeared upon the stage.
The latter, embodying Sir William Armstrong's modern idea, though in a rude form, had been fished up from the bottom of the Adriatic, where the ship armed with them had been sunk hundreds of years ago. Even Perkins's steam-gun was an old invention revived by Leonardo da Vinci and by him attributed to Archimedes.
Nothing now remains but a few technical studies made by Lionardo da Vinci for his portrait of Francesco Sforza. The two elaborate models he constructed and the majority of his minute designs have been destroyed. He intended, we are told, to represent the first Duke of the Sforza dynasty on his charger, trampling the body of a prostrate and just conquered enemy.
That Borelli was right so far and da Vinci wrong, detracts not at all from the repute of the earlier investigator, who had but the resources of his age to support investigations conducted in the spirit of ages after. His chief practical contributions to the science of flight apart from numerous drawings which have still a value are the helicopter or lifting screw, and the parachute.
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