painted it with sweet and solemn effect in
the refectory of Saint Onofrio; but still with all the mystical
unreality of the school of Perugino. Vasari pretends that the central
head was never finished; but finished or unfinished, or owing part of
its effect to a mellowing decay, this central head does but consummate
the sentiment of the whole company--ghosts through which you see the
wall, faint as the shadows of the leaves upon the wall, on autumn
afternoons; this figure is but the faintest, most spectral of them all.
It is the image of what the history it symbolises has more and more
become for the world, paler and paler as it recedes into the distance.
Criticism came with its appeal from mystical unrealities to originals,
and restored no lifelike reality but these transparent shadows, spirits
which have not flesh and bones.

The Last Supper was finished in 1497; in 1498 the French entered Milan,
and whether or not the Gascon bowmen used it as a mark for their arrows,
the model of Francesco Sforza certainly did not survive. What, in that
age, such work was capable of being--of what nobility, amid what racy
truthfulness to fact--we may judge from the bronze statue of Bartolomeo
Colleoni on horseback, modelled by Leonardo's master, Verrocchio (he
died of grief, it was said, because, the mould accidentally failing, he
was unable himself to complete it), still standing in the piazza of
Saint John and Saint Paul at Venice. Some traces of the thing may remain
in certain of Leonardo's drawings, and also, perhaps, by a singular
circumstance, in a far-off town of France. For Ludovico became a
prisoner, and ended his days at Loches in Touraine;--allowed at last, it
is said, to breathe fresher air for awhile in one of the rooms of a high
tower there, after many years of captivity in the dungeons below, where
all seems sick with barbarous feudal memories, and where his prison is
still shown, its walls covered with strange painted arabesques, ascribed
by tradition to his hand, amused a little, in this way, through the
tedious years:--vast helmets and faces and pieces of armour, among
which, in great letters, the motto Infelix Sum is woven in and out, and
in which, perhaps, it is not too fanciful to see the fruit of a wistful
after-dreaming over all those experiments with Leonardo on the armed
figure of the great duke, that had occupied the two so often during the
days of his good fortune at Milan.

The remaining years of Leonard