this, like the
amiable fellow that he was, retired from the undertaking; and the
friars, to the end that Leonardo might paint it, took him into their
house, meeting the expenses both of himself and of all his
household; and thus he kept them in expectation for a long time, but
never began anything. In the end, he made a cartoon containing a
Madonna and a S. Anne, with a Christ, which not only caused all the
craftsmen to marvel, but, when it was finished, men and women, young
and old, continued for two days to flock for a sight of it to the
room where it was, as if to a solemn festival, in order to gaze at
the marvels of Leonardo, which caused all those people to be amazed;
for in the face of that Madonna was seen whatever of the simple and
the beautiful can by simplicity and beauty confer grace on a picture
of the Mother of Christ, since he wished to show that modesty and
that humility which are looked for in an image of the Virgin,
supremely content with gladness at seeing the beauty of her Son,
whom she was holding with tenderness in her lap, while with most
chastened gaze she was looking down at S. John, as a little boy, who
was playing with a lamb; not without a smile from S. Anne, who,
overflowing with joy, was beholding her earthly progeny become
divine--ideas truly worthy of the brain and genius of Leonardo. This
cartoon, as will be told below, afterwards went to France. He made a
portrait of Ginevra d' Amerigo Benci, a very beautiful work; and
abandoned the work for the friars, who restored it to Filippino; but
he, also, failed to finish it, having been overtaken by death.

Leonardo undertook to execute, for Francesco del Giocondo, the
portrait of Monna Lisa, his wife; and after toiling over it for four
years, he left it unfinished; and the work is now in the collection
of King Francis of France, at Fontainebleau. In this head, whoever
wished to see how closely art could imitate nature, was able to
comprehend it with ease; for in it were counterfeited all the
minutenesses that with subtlety are able to be painted, seeing that
the eyes had that lustre and watery sheen which are always seen in
life, and around them were all those rosy and pearly tints, as well
as the lashes, which cannot be represented without the greatest
subtlety. The eyebrows, through his having shown the manner in
which the hairs spring from the flesh, here more close and here more
scanty, and curve according to the pores of the skin, could