From what has been already said we shall be better able to understand Lionardo’s love of the bizarre and grotesque.  One day a vine-dresser brought him a very curious lizard.  The master fitted it with wings injected with quicksilver to give them motion as the creature crawled.  Eyes, horns, and a beard, a marvellous dragon’s mask, were placed upon its head.  This strange beast lived in a cage, where Lionardo tamed it; but no one, says Vasari, dared so much as to look at it.[245] On quaint puzzles and perplexing schemes he mused a good part of his life away.  At one time he was for making wings to fly with; at another he invented ropes that should uncoil, strand by strand; again, he devised a system of flat corks, by means of which to walk on water.[246] One day, after having scraped the intestines of a sheep so thin that he could hold them in the hollow of his hand, he filled them with wind from a bellows, and blew and blew until the room was choked, and his visitors had to run into corners.  Lionardo told them that this was a proper symbol of genius.

Such stories form what may be called the legend of Lionardo’s life; and some of them seem simple, others almost childish.[247] They illustrate what is meant when we call him the wizard of the Renaissance.  Art, nature, life, the mysteries of existence, the infinite capacity of human thought, the riddle of the world, all that the Greeks called Pan, so swayed and allured him that, while he dreamed and wrought and never ceased from toil, he seemed to have achieved but little.  The fancies of his brain were, perhaps, too subtle and too fragile to be made apparent to the eyes of men.  He was wont, after years of labour, to leave his work still incomplete, feeling that he could not perfect it as he desired:  yet even his most fragmentary sketches have a finish beyond the scope of lesser men.  “Extraordinary power,” says Vasari, “was in his case conjoined with remarkable facility, a mind of regal boldness and magnanimous daring.”  Yet he was constantly accused of indolence and inability to execute.[248] Often and often he made vast preparations and accomplished nothing.  It is well known how the Prior of S. Maria delle Grazie complained that Lionardo stood for days looking at his fresco, and for weeks never came near it; how the monks of the Annunziata at Florence were cheated out of their painting, for which elaborate designs had yet been made; how Leo X., seeing him mix oils with varnish to make a new medium, exclaimed, “Alas! this man will do nothing; he thinks of the end before he makes a beginning.”  A good answer to account for the delay was always ready on the painter’s lips, as that the man of genius works most when his hands are idlest; Judas, sought in vain through all the thieves’ resorts in Milan, is not found; I cannot hope to see the face of Christ except in Paradise.  Again, when an equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza had been modelled in all its parts, another model was begun because Da Vinci