reason of their
complexity or mystery, he loved to brood; and to this fascination of a
sphinx-like charm we owe some of his most exquisite drawings. Lionardo
more than any other artist 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. Lov