Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/288

244 the sublime greatness of art, that he only saw faults in works which others hailed as marvellous creations." As he says himself in a celebrated passage of his "Treatise on Painting":

We may regret that Leonardo painted so few pictures, and we may deplore still more the singular fatality which has destroyed his greatest creations, the ruin which overtook the Sforza monument and the misfortunes which have left the Last Supper a mere wreck. But we must remember, on the other hand, the perfection of the works of art which he has left behind him, and which, few as they are in number, have for ever raised the standard of human attainment.

Leonardo the Florentine, as he commonly called himself, was born in 1452, at Vinci, a fortified borgo on the western slopes of Monte Albano, halfway between Pisa and Florence. He was the natural son of Ser Piero, a young notary of the place, and of a girl of good family named Caterina, who, after giving birth to this son, married a peasant of Vinci. Piero also married in the same year, and had four wives and a family of twelve children. He was a man of remarkable vigour and energy, who held important offices in Florence, and had a house