Leonardo Da Vinci 1452-1519

Mona Lisa (La Gioconda).

During these years, 1503-06, Leonardo also finished the portrait of Madonna Lisa, the Nea politan wife of Zanobi del Giocondo. In this lady he had found a sitter whose face and smile possessed in a singular degree the haunting, enigmatic charm in which he delighted. He worked, it is said, at her portrait during some portion of four successive years, causing music to be played during the sittings that the rapt expression might not fade from off her countenance. The picture was bought afterwards by Francis I. for 4,00o gold florins, and is now one of the glories of the Louvre. The portrait casts an irre sistible spell alike by subtlety of expression, by refinement and precision of drawing, and by the romantic invention of its back ground. It has been the theme of endless critical rhapsodies, among which that of Pater is perhaps the most imaginative as it is the best known.

Louis XII.

In the spring of 1506 Leonardo, moved perhaps by chagrin at the failure of his work in the Hall of Council, ac cepted a pressing invitation to Milan, from Charles d'Amboise, Marechal de Chaumont, the lieutenant of the French king in Lombardy. The leave of absence granted to him by the signory on the request of the French viceroy was for three months only. The period was several times extended, at first grudgingly, Soderini complaining that Leonardo had treated the republic ill in the matter of the battle picture ; whereupon the painter honourably offered to refund the money paid, an offer which the signory as honourably refused. Louis XII. sent messages urgently desiring that Leonardo should await his own arrival in Milan, having seen a small Madonna by him in France (probably that painted for Robertet) and hoping to obtain from him works of the same class and perhaps a portrait. The king arrived in May 1507, and soon afterwards Leonardo's services were formally and amicably trans ferred from the signory of Florence to Louis, who gave him the title of painter and engineer-in-ordinary. In September of the same year troublesome private affairs called him to Florence. His father had died in 1504, apparently intestate.

There are traces of work done during his residence at Florence. A sheet of sketches drawn there in 1508 shows the beginning of a Madonna now lost except in the form of copies, one of which (known as the "Madonna Litta") is at St. Petersburg (Leningrad), another in the Poldi-Pezzoli museum at Milan. A letter from Leonardo to Charles d'Amboise in 1511, announcing the end of his law troubles, speaks of two Madonnas of different sizes that he means to bring with him to Milan. Meantime the master's main home and business were at Milan. He had attached to him self a new and devoted young friend and pupil of noble birth, Francesco Melzi and was a frequent visitor at the villa of the Melzi family at Vaprio.

Rome.

In 1512 the ageing master uprooted himself from Milan, and moved with his chattels and retinue of pupils to Rome, into the service of the house that first befriended him, the Medici. The vast enterprises of Pope Julius II. had already made

Rome the chief seat and centre of Italian art. The accession of Giulio de' Medici in 1513 under the title of Leo X. raised on all hands hopes of still ampler and more sympathetic patronage. Leonardo's special friend at the papal court was the pope's young est brother, Giuliano de' Medici, a youth who combined dissipated habits with thoughtful culture and a genuine interest in arts and sciences. But the conditions of the time and place proved adverse. The young generation held the field. Michelangelo and Raphael were fresh from the glory of their great achievements in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze. After a stay of less than two years, Leonardo left Rome. On meeting Francis I., young and brilliant successor to Louis XII., an immediate and strong sym pathy sprang up, and Leonardo determined to accept the royal invitation to France, where a new home was offered him with every assurance of honour and regard.

Amboise.—The remaining two and a half years of Leonardo's life were spent at the Castle of Cloux near Amboise, which was as signed, with a handsome pension, to his use. In the spring of 1518 Leonardo had occasion to exercise his old talents as a festival master when the dauphin was christened and a Medici-Bourbon marriage celebrated. He drew the designs for a new palace at Amboise and was much engaged with the project of a great canal to connect the Loire and Saone. An ingenious attempt has been made to prove, in the absence of records, that the famous spiral staircase at Blois was also of his designing.

Among his visitors was a fellow-countryman, Cardinal Louis of Aragon, whose secretary has left an account of the day. Leonardo, it seems, was suffering from some form of slight paralysis which impaired his power of hand. But he showed the cardinal three pictures, the portrait of a Florentine lady done for Giuliano de' Medici (the Gioconda?), the Virgin in the lap of St. Anne (the Louvre picture; finished at Florence or Milan 1507-1513?), and a youthful John the Baptist. The last, which may have been done since he settled in France, is the darkened and partly repainted, half-length figure in the Louvre. Of the "Pomona" mentioned by Lomazzo as a work of the Amboise time his visitor says nothing. Besides pictures, the master seems also to have shown and explained to his visitors some of his vast store of notes and observations on anatomy and physics. He kept hoping to get some order among his papers, the accumulation of more than forty years, and perhaps to give the world some portion of the studies they contained. But his strength was nearly exhausted. On Easter Eve 1519, feeling that the end was near, he made his will. It made provision for masses to be said and candles to be offered in three different churches of Amboise, first among them that of St. Florentin, where he desired to be buried, as well as for 60 poor men to serve as torch-bearers at his funeral. He received the sacraments of the Church and died on May 2, 1519.