dawntime of discovery, that he was almost justified in this
delusion. Having caught the Proteus of the world, he tried to grasp him;
but the god changed shape beneath his touch. Having surprised Silenus
asleep, he begged from him a song; but the song Silenus sang was so
marvellous in its variety, so subtle in its modulations, that Lionardo
could do no more than recall scattered phrases. His Proteus was the spirit
of the Renaissance. The Silenus from whom he forced the song was the
double nature of man and of the world.

By ill chance it happened that Lionardo's greatest works soon perished.
His cartoon at Florence disappeared. His model for Sforza's statue was
used as a target by French bowmen. His "Last Supper" remains a mere wreck
in the Convent delle Grazie. Such as it is, blurred by ill-usage and
neglect, more blurred by impious re-painting, that fresco must be seen by
those who wish to understand Da Vinci. It has well been called the
compendium of all his studies and of all his writings; and,
chronologically, it is the first masterpiece of the perfected
Renaissance.[252] Other painters had represented the Last Supper as a
solemn prologue to the Passion, or as the mystical inauguration of the
greatest Christian sacrament.[253] But none had dared to break the calm of
the event by a dramatic action. The school of Giotto, Fra Angelico,
Ghirlandajo, Perugino, even Signorelli, remained within the sphere of
symbolical suggestion; and their work gained in dignity what it lost in
intensity. Lionardo combined both. He undertook to paint a moment, to
delineate the effect of a single word upon twelve men seated at a table,
and to do this without sacrificing the tranquillity demanded by ideal art,
and without impairing the divine majesty of Him from whose lips that word
has fallen. The time has long gone by for detailed criticism or
description of a painting known to everybody. It is enough to observe that
the ideal representation of a dramatic moment, the life breathed into each
part of the composition, the variety of the types chosen to express
varieties of character, and the scientific distribution of the twelve
Apostles in four groups of three around the central Christ, mark the
appearance of a new spirit of power and freedom in the arts. What had
hitherto been treated with religious timidity, with conventional
stiffness, or with realistic want of grandeur, was now humanised and at
the same time transported into a higher in