Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/117

Rh had always been the art by which Verrocchio set least store. And as in a sense he anticipates Lionardo, so to the last Lionardo recalls the studio of Verrocchio, in the love of beautiful toys, such as the vessel of water for a mirror, and lovely needle-work about the implicated hands in the 'Modesty and Vanity', and of reliefs, like those cameos which in the 'Virgin of the Balances' hang all round the girdle of Saint Michael, and of bright variegated stones, such as the agates in the 'Saint Anne', and in a hieratic preciseness and grace, as of a sanctuary swept and garnished. Amid all the cunning and intricacy of his Lombard manner this never left him. Much of it there must have been in that lost picture of 'Paradise', which he prepared as a cartoon for tapestry to be woven in the looms of Flanders. It was the perfection of the older Florentine style of miniature painting, with patient putting of each leaf upon the trees and each flower in the grass, where the first man and woman were standing.

And because it was the perfection of that style, it awoke in Lionardo some seed of discontent which lay in the secret places of his nature. For the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts; and this picture—all that he had done so far in his life at Florence—was after all in the old slight manner. His art, if it was to be something in the world, must