f Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound
of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has
moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.
The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand
experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of
humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of
thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of
the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

During these years at Florence Leonardo's history is the history of his
art; he himself is lost in the bright cloud of it. The outward history
begins again in 1502, with a wild journey through central Italy, which
he makes as the chief engineer of Caesar Borgia. The biographer, putting
together the stray jottings of his manuscripts, may follow him through
every day of it, up the strange tower of Siena, which looks towards
Rome, elastic like a bent bow, down to the seashore at Piombino, each
place appearing as fitfully as in a fever dream.

One other great work was left for him to do, a work all trace of which
soon vanished, The Battle of the Standard, in which he had Michelangelo
for his rival. The citizens of Florence, desiring to decorate the walls
of the great council-chamber, had offered the work for competition, and
any subject might be chosen from the Florentine wars of the fifteenth
century. Michelangelo chose for his cartoon an incident of the war with
Pisa, in which the Florentine soldiers, bathing in the Arno, are
surprised by the sound of trumpets, and run to arms. His design has
reached us only in an old engraving, which perhaps helps us less than
what we remember of the background of his Holy Family in the Uffizii to
imagine in what superhuman form, such as might have beguiled the heart
of an earlier world, those figures may have risen from the water.
Leonardo chose an incident from the battle of Anghiari, in which two
parties of soldiers fight for a standard. Like Michelangelo's, his
cartoon is lost, and has come to us only in sketches, and in a fragment
of Rubens. Through the accounts given we may discern some lust of
terrible things in it, so that even the horses tore each other with
their teeth; and yet one fragment of it, in a drawing of his at
Florence, is far different--a waving field of lovely armour, the chased
edgings running like lines of sunlight from side to side. Michelangelo
was twenty