uke a salary of five hundred crowns a year.
He was fourteen years at the court of Milan, where, among other works,
he painted his 'Cenacolo,' or 'Last Supper,' one of the grandest
pictures ever produced. He painted it, contrary to the usual practice,
in oils upon the plastered walls of the refectory of the Dominican
convent, Milan. The situation was damp, and the material used proved so
unsuitable for work on plaster, that, even before it was exposed to the
reverses which in the course of a French occupation of Milan converted
the refectory into a stable, the colours had altogether faded, and the
very substance of the picture was crumbling into ruin.

The equestrian statue of the old Duke of Milan by Lionardo excited so
much delight in its first freshness, that it was carried in triumph
through the city, and during the progress it was accidentally broken.
Lionardo began another, but funds failed for its completion, and
afterwards the French used the original clay model as a target for their
bowmen.

Lionardo returned to Florence, and found his great rival, Michael
Angelo, already in the field. Both of the men, conscious of mighty
gifts, were intolerant of rivalry. To Lionardo especially, as being much
the elder man, the originator and promoter of many of the new views in
art which his opponent had adopted, the competition was very
distasteful, and to Michael Angelo he used the bitter sarcasm which has
been handed down to us, 'I was famous before you were born.'

Nevertheless Lionardo consented to compete with Michael Angelo for the
painting in fresco of one side of the council-hall, by the order of the
gonfaloniere for the year. Lionardo chose for his subject a victory of
the Florentines over the Milanese, while Michael Angelo took a scene
from the Pisan campaigns. Not only was the work never done (some say
partly because Lionardo _would_ delay in order to make experiments in
oils) on account of political troubles, but the very cartoons of the two
masters, which all the artists of the day flocked to see, have been
broken up, dispersed, and lost; and of one only, that of Michael Angelo,
a small copy remains, while but a fragment from Lionardo's was preserved
in a copy made by Rubens.

Lionardo went to Rome in the pontificate of Leo X., but there his
quarrel with Michael Angelo broke out more violently than ever. The Pope
too, who loved better a gentler, more accommodating spirit, seemed to
slight Lionardo, and the gr