Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/306

262 one passage, "of how many things do you become the slave for the sake of money!" All he asked was freedom from care, and a quiet home in which he could work and study at leisure. "I am never weary when I am useful," is one of his favourite mottoes. "In serving others I cannot do enough."

By February, 1505, Leonardo's cartoon was completed, and he began to paint the central group of horsemen fighting round the standard on the wall of the Council Hall. Unfortunately, he determined to try a stucco ground, such as Pliny describes to have been employed by Roman artists, and, after wasting endless time and labour on the experiment, found that the substance was too soft and would not hold the colour. This disastrous result filled him with vexation, and before long he abandoned the work in despair. His failure was the more lamentable because of the unanimous testimony which contemporaries bear to the heroic beauty of the warriors and horses in the unfinished painting, which for some years adorned the Council Hall. Leonardo's cartoon remained in the Pope's hall, while that of Michelangelo was hung in the Medici Palace, where Benvenuto Cellini saw them, in 1559, and describes them as the school of the whole world. But these vanished in the course of the next century, and to-day nothing remains to us of Leonardo's masterpiece excepting a few scattered studies and Raphael's copy of the central group, in the University Galleries at Oxford. It is only when we turn to the painter's vivid and dramatic picture of a battle, in the "Trattato," and read the eloquent words in which he paints the confused