Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/124

102 of Milan, moved a people as fantastic, changeful, and dreamlike. To Lionardo least of all men could there be anything poisonous in the exotic flowers of sentiment which grew there. It was a life of exquisite amusements, (Lionardo became a celebrated designer of pageants,) and brilliant sins; and it suited the quality of his genius, composed in almost equal parts of curiosity and the desire of beauty, to take things as they came.

Curiosity and the desire of beauty—these are the two elementary forces in Lionardo's genius; curiosity often in conflict with the desire of beauty, but generating, in union with it, a type of subtle and curious grace.

The movement of the fifteenth century was twofold: partly the Renaissance, partly also the coming of what is called the 'modern spirit,' with its realism, its appeal to experience; it comprehended a return to antiquity, and a return to nature. Raffaelle represents the return to antiquity, and Lionardo the return to nature. In this return to nature he was seeking to satisfy a boundless curiosity by her perpetual surprises, a microscopic sense of finish by her finesse, or delicacy of operation, that subtilitas naturœ which Bacon notices. So we find him often in intimate relations with men of science, with Fra Luca Paccioli the mathematician, and the