Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/291

1519] of the body," which from the first he set before him.

An unfinished study of a penitent St. Jerome, kneeling in prayer before the crucifix, with his lion at his side, and the view of Santa Maria Novella in the background, now in the Vatican, is the only other work of Leonardo's Florentine period that is left us. The early works which Vasari describes, the Rotella and Medusa, in which he indulged his taste for fantastic horrors, and the Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, with each flower and leaf carefully studied, have all vanished.

In July, 1481, Leonardo was living in his own house in Florence and received certain sums of money in advance from the monks of San Donato, as well as a load of wood and one lira six soldi for painting their clock. After that his name disappears from contemporary records until 1487, when we find him living at the court of Milan, in the service of Lodovico Sforza, Regent, and afterwards Duke, of Milan. The silence of documents has given rise to all manner of strange theories regarding Leonardo's career of six years, and Dr. Richter ventured on the bold conjecture that during these five or six years the painter travelled in Syria, became engineer to the Sultan of Cairo, and even embraced the Mahometan religion. The chief argument in support of this theory is a letter that may be found among Leonardo's MSS., in which the writer describes an earthquake which took place at Aleppo in 1483, and illustrates his account with maps of Armenia. But these notes, it is plain, are borrowed from the record of some