Page:Masters in art. Leonardo da Vinci.djvu/30

 sent for a notary and dictated his will. Ten days afterwards, on the second of May, he died, and was buried in the royal chapel of St. Florentin, at Amboise.

EONARDO is the wizard or diviner; to him the Renaissance offers her mystery and lends her magic. Art and science were never separated in his work; and both were not unfrequently subservient to some fanciful caprice, some bizarre freak of originality. Curiosity and love of the uncommon ruled his nature.

"While he was a boy," says Vasari, "Leonardo modelled in terra-cotta certain heads of women smiling." When an old man, he left 'Mona Lisa ' on the easel, not quite finished,—the portrait of a subtle, shadowy, uncertain smile. This smile, this enigmatic revelation of a movement in the soul, this seductive ripple on the surface of the human personality, was to Leonardo a symbol of the secret of the world, an image of the universal mystery. It haunted him all through his life, and innumerable were the attempts he made to render by external form the magic of this fugitive and evanescent charm. …

Leonardo's turn for physical science led him to study the technicalities of art with fervent industry. Whatever his predecessors had acquired in the knowledge of materials, the chemistry of colors, the mathematics of composition, the laws of perspective, and the illusions of chiaroscuro, he developed to the utmost. To find a darker darkness and a brighter brightness than had yet been shown upon the painter's canvas, to solve problems of foreshortening, to deceive the eye by finely graduated tones and subtle touches, to submit the freest play of form to simple figures of geometry in grouping, were among the objects he most earnestly pursued. Wherever he perceived a difficulty he approached and conquered it. Love, which is the soul of art—Love, the bond-slave of Beauty and the son of Poverty by Craft—led him to these triumphs.

Art, nature, life, the mysteries of existence, the infinite capacity of human thought, the riddle of the world, all that the Greeks called Pan, so swayed and allured him that, while he dreamed and wrought and never ceased from toil, he seemed to have achieved but little. The fancies of his brain were, perhaps, too subtle and too fragile to be made apparent to the eyes of men. He was wont, after years of labor, to leave his work still incomplete, feeling that he could not perfect it as he desired; yet even his most fragmentary sketches have a finish beyond the scope of lesser men. "Extraordinary power," says Vasari, "was in his case conjoined with remarkable facility, a mind of regal boldness, and magnanimous daring." Yet he was constantly accused of indolence and inability to execute. Often and often he made vast