Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/143

Rh We catch a glimpse of him again at Rome in 1514, surrounded by his mirrors and vials and furnaces, making strange toys that seemed alive of wax and quicksilver. The hesitation which had haunted him all through life, and made him like one under a spell, was upon him now with double force. No one had ever carried political indifferentism farther; it had always been his philosophy to 'fly before the storm;' he is for the Sforzas or against them, as the tide of their fortune turns. Yet now he was suspected by the anti-Gallican society at Rome, of French tendencies. It paralysed him to find himself among enemies; and he turned wholly to France, which had long courted him.

France was about to become an Italy more Italian than Italy itself. Francis the First, like Lewis the Twelfth before him, was attracted by the finesse of Lionardo's work; La Gioconda was already in his cabinet, and he offered Lionardo the little Château de Clou, with its vineyards and meadows, in the soft valley of the Masse, and not too far from the great outer sea. M. Arsène Houssaye has succeeded in giving a pensive local colour to this part of his subject, with which, as a Frenchman, he could best deal. 'A Monsieur Lyonard, peinteur du Roy pour Amboyse,'—so the letter of Francis the First is headed. It opens a prospect, one of the most attractive in the history of art, where, under a strange