Leonardo is the illegitimate son of Sir Piero Antonio da Vinci. He was born in 1452, in northern Italy, near Florence. He is thus the contemporary of Raphael and Michelangelo; he keeps step with them, and with them forms the supreme trinity of the Renaissance.

At school his superiority showed in all branches. But his constant desire to draw obliged his father to nourish this bent in him, and he placed him in the studio of the painter Andrea Verrocchio as a pupil. Andrea was then at work on a picture representing the Baptism of Christ, and he entrusted his new pupil with painting one of the angels of that picture; and his angel came out so perfect that it exposed the faults of the other parts of the picture, which brought his master's resentment down upon him.

So he left the studio — he had by then attained such artistic ability as made him independent of teachers — and gave himself to independent work. Perhaps what most concerns us after that, among the events of his life, which I shall not go into, is a journey he made to the East in 1480 on an engineering mission; he visited Egypt, Syria, and Turkey, and returned after four years to Italy, and devoted the greater part of his life, which ended in 1519, to painting.

He nourished his artistic soul with everything he saw in nature and in life, keeping far, from his earliest youth, from fantasy, cleaving to his own self, indiffer-ent — unlike the sons of his age — to drawing inspi-ration from the glories of the ancients, though he took care to study them. He was particularly enamored of the psychological side, and above all of persons of unusual character, with strange heads and odd beards. Indeed, if he saw a man of this kind, he would follow him the whole day long, until his impression had settled firmly in his mind; then he would go back and draw him as though he stood before him.

He went so deep into psychology that he arrived at the theory Freud propounded afterward; but his devotion to painting and to science did not allow him to expand upon its exposition or to preach it. And from this concern with psychology, Leonardo's art came to have a special mark: the preparing of his figures so as to place the appreciator in an atmosphere of the meanings of their souls — or rather, of their meanings in Leonardo's own soul, for he believed in the creative soul of the artist.

That mark appears plainly in most of his pictures, and especially in the Last Supper and in the Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda.

As for the Last Supper, or the secret supper, it is a picture representing Christ with his disciples at table, and the first thing its appreciator notices is that anxiety showing on the faces of the disciples,

born of that pressing desire, possessing them all, to know the one who would betray the Master. Were the picture before us, we could study the other seats of beauty in it. It is related, apropos of the Last Supper, that Leonardo fell behind the time appointed him in finishing this picture, and the prior of the monastery complained of him to the governor of the city. The governor was intelligent and sensitive, but, to be rid of the prior's insistence, he summoned Leonardo, and after excusing himself — the summons being the fruit of tiresome insistence — he begged him, with all courtesy, to try to hasten the completion of the picture. When Leonardo sensed this in him, he began to speak to him of art, showing him how men of genius are in their most fertile season of production when they appear to people's eyes to be idle; for artistic masterpieces take shape in secret, within the artist, and then come forth by way of the hand or the tongue, so that people imagine that their coming forth is their creation — whence such conduct as the prior's. And wishing to jest with him, and to have a dig at the prior, he went on: "And I still need two faces to complete the picture: the face of Christ and the face of Judas. As for the first, I believe I cannot find it on earth, and to this hour I have not gained strength enough to be able to summon it up in my imagination with all its beauty, its perfection, and its heavenly grace. As for the second, it is hard to find a man of his character. But his reverence the prior has now solved the second half of the problem, and there remains to me only the face of Christ."

In fact Leonardo succeeded completely in painting both faces; but he was assured only of his success in painting Judas, and all his life he kept saying: I could not paint Christ.

Some historians of art have taken these words literally, and said that Leonardo did not finish the face of Christ. This is like the saying of Paul Valéry: I have never finished a poem in my life.

A few years after finishing the Last Supper, he began the picture of the Mona Lisa, at the opening of the sixteenth century, and spent four years painting it. Leonardo used to say: "For painting portraits we must have a special studio, its walls black and its roof closed against the sun, so that only a faint light may enter. If that is not possible for us, then let us refrain from painting except when the skies are heavy with clouds and the light is dim, for those are the best hours for painting."

And in one of those hours, on the evening of a day late in a misty spring, faint rays of sun looked out from behind the clouds upon the face of Mona Lisa. Leonardo saw her, and went off in rapture to make ready the painting studio, saying to himself: "Will she