who has ever lived (except perhaps his great predecessor Leo Battista Alberti) felt the primal sympathies that bind men to the earth, their mother, and to living things, their brethren.[241] Therefore the borderland between humanity and nature allured him with a spell half aesthetic and half scientific.  In the dawn of Hellas this sympathetic apprehension of the world around him would have made him a supreme mythopoet.  In the dawn of the modern world curiosity claimed the lion’s share of his genius:  nor can it be denied that his art suffered by this division of interests.  The time was not yet come for accurate physiological investigation, or for the true birth of the scientific spirit; and in any age it would have been difficult for one man to establish on a sound basis discoveries made in so many realms as those explored by Lionardo.  We cannot, therefore, but regret that he was not more exclusively a painter.  If, however, he had confined his activity to the production of works equal to the “Cenacolo,” we should have missed the most complete embodiment in one personality of the twofold impulses of the Renaissance and of its boundless passion for discovery.

Lionardo’s turn for physical science led him to study the technicalities of art with fervent industry.  Whatever his predecessors had acquired in the knowledge of materials, the chemistry of colours, the mathematics of composition, the laws of perspective, and the illusions of chiaroscuro, he developed to the utmost.  To find a darker darkness and a brighter brightness than had yet been shown upon the painter’s canvas; to solve problems of foreshortening; to deceive the eye by finely graduated tones and subtle touches; to submit the freest play of form to simple figures of geometry in grouping, were among the objects he most earnestly pursued.  At the same time his deep feeling for all things that have life, gave him new power in the delineation of external nature.  The branching of flower-stems, the outlines of fig-leaves, the attitudes of beasts and birds in motion, the arching of the fan-palm, were rendered by him with the same consummate skill as the dimple on a cheek or the fine curves of a young man’s lips.[242] Wherever he perceived a difficulty, he approached and conquered it.  Love, which is the soul of art—­Love, the bondslave of Beauty and the son of Poverty by Craft—­led him to these triumphs.  He used to buy caged birds in the marketplace that he might let them loose.  He was attached to horses, and kept a sumptuous stable; and these he would draw in eccentric attitudes, studying their anatomy in detail for his statue of Francesco Sforza.[243] In the “Battle of the Standard,” known to us only by a sketch of Rubens,[244] he gave passions to the horse—­not human passion, nor yet merely equine—­but such as horses might feel when placed upon a par with men.  In like manner the warriors are fiery with bestial impulses—­leonine fury, wolfish ferocity, fox-like cunning.  Their very armour takes the shape of monstrous reptiles.  To such an extent did the interchange of human and animal properties haunt Lionardo’s fancy.