Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/230

194 he afterwards made busts, and that "twenty masks taken from nature" were among the works which he executed for the Medici. A picture of another class, the fine portrait of a Florentine lady with rippling hair and refined features, which still bears Leonardo's name, in the Lichtenstein Gallery, at Vienna, can with more certainty be ascribed to Andrea's hand, and may possibly represent Lucrezia Donati, the Queen of Lorenzo's Tournament. But little as remains to us of Andrea's painted work, and doubtful as is the attribution of these few pictures it is at least certain that he was the master of two of the greatest masters of the next generation—the Umbrian Perugino and the Florentine Leonardo. In these busts and statues, which wear so life-like and speaking an expression, in these admirably drawn heads and delicately rounded cheeks, with full eyes and curly locks, in the bronze Christ of Or' San Michele, and the lovely angel of the Uffizi, we have the germ of Leonardo's art. Here, dimly foreshadowed in the master's creations, we find already that power of expression and exquisite grace which is the secret of the scholar's indefinable charm.

Andrea never married; his art was enough to fill his whole life, as Leonardo found in his turn, and his pupils were dear to him as his own children. To the one he loved best of all, Lorenzo di Credi, he left, by his will, the task of finishing the great equestrian statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni, which the Venetian Senate had invited him to execute. The work had been given him in 1479, but it was not till the summer of 1488, that his model was finally completed; and just as he was about to cast the statue in bronze, he