And not into nature only; but he plunged also into human personality, and became above all a painter of portraits; faces of a modelling more skilful than has been seen before or since, embodied with a reality which almost amounts to illusion on dark air.  To take a character as it was, and delicately sound its stops, suited one so curious in observation, curious in invention.  So he painted the portraits of Ludovico’s mistresses, Lucretia Crivelli and Cecilia Galerani the poetess, of Ludovico himself, and the Duchess Beatrice.  The portrait of Cecilia Galerani is lost, but that of Lucretia Crivelli has been identified with La Belle Ferronniere of the Louvre, and Ludovico’s pale, anxious face still remains in the Ambrosian.  Opposite is the portrait of Beatrice d’Este, in whom Leonardo seems to have caught some presentiment of early death, painting her precise and grave, full of the refinement of the dead, in sad earth-coloured raiment, set with pale stones....

The Last Supper was finished in 1497; in 1498 the French entered Milan, and whether or not the Gascon bowmen used it as a mark for their arrows, the model of Francesco Sforza certainly did not survive.  Ludovico became a prisoner, and the remaining years of Leonardo’s life are more or less years of wandering.  From his brilliant life at court he had saved nothing, and he returned to Florence a poor man.  Perhaps necessity kept his spirit excited:  the next four years are one prolonged rapture or ecstasy of invention.  He painted the pictures of the Louvre, his most authentic works, which came there straight from the cabinet of Francis the First, at Fontainebleau.  One picture of his, the Saint Anne—­not the Saint Anne of the Louvre, but a mere cartoon now in London—­revived for a moment a sort of appreciation more common in an earlier time, when good pictures had still seemed miraculous; and for two days a crowd of people of all qualities passed in naive excitement through the chamber where it hung, and gave Leonardo a taste of Cimabue’s triumph.  But his work was less with the saints than with the living women of Florence; for he lived still in the polished society that he loved, and in the houses of Florence, left perhaps a little subject to light thoughts by the death of Savonarola (the latest gossip is of an undraped Monna Lisa, found in some out-of-the-way corner of the late Orleans collection), he saw Ginevra di Benci, and Lisa, the young third wife of Francesco del Giocondo.  As we have seen him using incidents of the sacred legend, not for their own sake, or as mere subjects for pictorial realisation, but as a symbolical language for fancies all his own, so now he found a vent for his thoughts in taking one of those languid women, and raising her, as Leda or Pomona, Modesty or Vanity, to the seventh heaven of symbolical expression.