[149] But not a doubt can remain in the mind of such as have a real sense of art, that the Virgin of the Rocks is by far the more profound work of genius. And if Ambrogio da Predis only worked upon it under Leonardo's guidance, then Ambrogio da Predis must be acclaimed the greater artist. There can be no shadow of doubt that the Virgin of the Rocks is in greater and most important part the work of Leonardo da Vinci ; and, not only so, but it is about his supreme achievement in painting that has come down to us. The dozen years or so of difference in the time of the creation of the two masterpieces would account for the enormous increase of power revealed in the Virgin of the Rocks-if Leonardo chiefly painted it. There are unimportant details in the picture which, by their comparative weakness of handling, may admit of Ambrogio da Predis's workmanship, though even these are open to grave question. That the gilt halos, the cross of the little Baptist, and certain retouchings on the left hand of the Virgin, the right arm of the child Christ, and the forehead of the little St. John the Baptist, are not Leonardo's original handiwork, may be likely enough. But the masterly arrangement of the whole scheme, the profound harmony with which it is uttered, giving forth the resounding orchestration of light and shade as of majestic musical sounds, the haunting melody of the piece created by the subtle play of light and shadow upon the features and figures which create a sense as of moving living things, the wondrous impressionism aroused by the massing of these lights and shadows, the vibrant depth of the landscape, and the almost awful reverence of the exquisite simple protecting love of motherhood for childhood, for all its tender passion, holding a tragic threat even whilst that sphinx-like smile wreathes the lips of mother and guardian angel, all this vast gamut of the sensed emotions that are roused in the [150] presence of this wondrously destined Child as Son of God, and of the tragic destiny that stands in the deep shadows of the rocks for that Mother, are stated with a dramatic intensity that the art of painting heretofore had never approached, and has never surpassed. The naïve, simple faith of an earlier church has departed, the elaborate paganised Christianity of Florence of the fourteen-hundreds is swept aside, and a man has arisen who sees in the great world-story a compelling and dramatic significance that has an intensity that is Greek in its inevitable tragedy, but giving forth a philosophy of which Greece knew nothing, which even the Italy of his own day is unable to understand.

There, on the stroke of 1500, the republic of Florence has brought forth a man who rises above the mere worldly ambitions and mere social success that rack the age, who leaps from one endeavour to another, reckless of the accumulation of mere wealth, bent only on so exercising his vast gifts that he may move forward to largest experience of life and enable mankind, by the wizardy of his art, to partake of that vaster emotional experience.

And this intense and eager gaze wherewith he saw life, with all its subtlety, balked at every step by all its baffling enigma, all this keen sense of the profundity of life and created things, he bent his whole powers to express in his art. He was not content to make of painting a beautiful decorative design ; he compelled all his intense powers to the passionate endeavour to make his art reveal the mystic significance of things-he essayed to realise the type and character and significance of everything. He was not content merely to range the realm of colour in order to play elaborate five-fingered exercises in it ; he but employed it as part of a great whole, as no more important, nor less important, than the play of light and shade, than form [151] and depth and space and arrangement, to utter forth the profound sense of life. He used painting with plastic power, as though to unite the strength of sculptured forms with it. He created a style, bending all the crafts to it, so that they would but give forth the music that was in him.

From the year 1483, being thirty-one, to 1487, all record, gossip, and report of him are silent throughout Italy ; and the silence lends force to the tradition that he went abroad to the East as engineer in the service of the Sultan of Egypt. To Milan he came back in his thirty-fifth year, and by 1490 was writing his Treatise on Painting, getting to work again also on the famed colossal equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza in plaster, which was set up in Milan, but was destined never to be completed in bronze; for it was never cast in metal, owing to the disasters that fell, as out of the blue, upon Milan in 1500, when, in the April of 1500, after the defeat of Ludovico, then Duke of Milan, at the battle of Novara, the French bowmen brought down the plaster figure in ruins.

But before these black days were to fall on Milan and send Leonardo packing, he was at work upon the huge painting on which his greatest fame as a painter rests-the world-reputed masterpiece of The Last Supper. Painted in oils upon the stucco surface of the wall of the Refectory in the Dominican Convent of S. Maria delle Grazie at Milan, Leonardo put the last touch of his brush upon it in 1498, his forty-sixth year. The use of oil upon a stucco ground caused the rapid decay of the great work within a couple of generations of its painting ; and neglect and ill-use-the monks damaged the lower part by piercing it with the top of a doorway through the wall ; and Napoleon's cavalry, being stabled in the Refectory against his strict orders, [152] pelted dirt at the heads of the figures-came well-nigh to ending it. Yet the splendid ghost of it remains. A copy, the size of the original, now in the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy at Burlington House, said to have been painted by Marco d'Oggiono, one of Leonardo's pupils, gives with crude sense of colour and form some poor idea of it. But the ghost of what it once was, where it is still to be seen in Milan, holds far more hint of the original. The composition yields a sense of grandeur, and the whole is instinct with dramatic and tragic intensity. It is told of Leonardo that the prior of the convent, complaining to Ludovico Sforza that the artist was idling over the fresco, Leonardo silenced him by threatening to paint the prior's portrait into the face of Judas. How the painting has escaped its many vicissitudes-it was long used for storing hay, and has been flooded more than once-is a marvel. In detail it must have contained superb qualities. The study for the Head of the Christ at the Brera in Milan reveals the intense dramatic insight and astounding faculty for character, the supreme grip in the creation of types fitted to express the idea, and the exquisite poetic vision of Leonardo da Vinci in consummate fashion.

Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, had married the fifteen-year-old Beatrice d'Este in 1491. The extravagant girl refused to wear a certain handsome gown of woven gold - she possessed eighty-four - which Ludovico had given to her, if Cecilia Gallerani wore hers, which was exactly like it, and which Ludovico had given to the fair charmer. Ludovico gave up both the beauty and her gown, getting the lady married off to Count Ludovico Bergamini within a year of his own marriage with Beatrice d'Este. But Milan's eyes got wandering again full soon ; and five years later, in 1496, Ludovico Sforza was deeply enamoured [153] of Duchess Beatrice's lady-in-waiting, Lucrezia Crevelli. Leonardo painted Lucrezia Crevelli's picture, but it is certainly not the portrait attributed to him in the Louvre.

However, Beatrice d'Este's jealousies were near at an end. On the 2nd of the January of 1497, after spending three hours in prayer in the Church of S. Maria delle Grazie, which Leonardo's Last Supper adorns, she gave birth that night to a still-born child, and a few hours later breathed her last. It made Ludovico a changed man ; broken with grief, he visited her tomb every day.

But stormy days were coming for Milan. In the September of 1499 Ludovico left Milan for the Tyrol to raise an army against the French invasion ; in his absence, on the 14th of the month, Bernardino di Corte sold the city to the French ; Louis XII. entered it in triumph on the 6th of October-the French holding the city for twelve years.

By some strange chance, the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy also possesses Leonardo's fine cartoon for his Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John, upon which he wrought in the autumn of 1499, destined therefore to be the last Work of his hands in Milan ; for the Duke Ludovico had to flee the city, into which Louis XII. of France made his triumphant entry.

Leonardo had hurriedly left Milan also, and the spring of 1500 saw him at Mantua, where he met Isabella d'Este, the beautiful sister of the dead Beatrice-his portrait of her in chalk is now at the Louvre.

Leonardo went from Mantua to Venice ; thence, about the Easter of 1500, back to Florence. The cartoon which he made for his second Virgin and Child with Saint Anne in the April of 1501 has vanished ; but the oil painting is now at the Louvre, said to show also the partnership of a pupil.

[154] It was soon after his return to Florence that Leonardo began to paint his world-famous Mona Lisa, the third wife of Francesco del Giocondo, hence its name La Joconde. We have Vasari's gossip for it, that Leonardo " loitered over the picture for four years," and that " whilst he was painting the portrait, Leonardo took the precaution to keep some one ever near her, to sing or play on instruments, or to jest and otherwise amuse her, to the end that she might continue cheerful." The haunting smile of Mona Lisa, and her intent rapt gaze as of one listening to music, were caught and fixed with all the mature skill and wizardry of Leonardo's genius. The picture, after its many and merciless cleanings, remains a ghost of its once self; yet what a wondrous and haunting ghost it is !

But during its painting Leonardo did many things. He visited Umbria, acting as engineer and architect to Cesare Borgia.

The pedant critics, straining every masterpiece into their eternal cult of beauty, label her as beautiful. Well; 'tis an affair of taste, and matters little ! It is far greater and more compelling than mere beauty. Its strange and haunting sense of life-one can hear the breath stirring in the languorous body, feel the peculiar charm of the sphinx-like smile-its complete immersion in the atmosphere that holds the figure, make it one of the supreme works of man's hand.

The Mona Lisa was bought by Francis I. of France, and remained in the possession of the kingly house of France, until it passed to the French nation, one of the most precious possessions of the Louvre.