e, 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.

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 m