A Treatise on Painting

the prowess of chivalry—already reduced to a fairy tale by Ariosto—and the enthusiasms of faith in the midst of a people who no longer thought of the Sepulcher of Christ Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso treated chivalry with irony, while the "enthusiasms of faith" refers to the religious themes of Torquato Tasso, whose Jerusalem Delivered reflected a late Renaissance attempt to revive crusading ideals.. All others appear as mere decorators of that great banquet, in which neither was paganism truly reborn, nor was Christianity purified. Thus, in politics, cunning was held to be the "science of State," and Italy, facing the powerful monarchies of Europe that made her the field for their ambitions, responded not with united arms, but with the subterfuge of leagues and treaties concluded today and renounced tomorrow; but all these tricks and clever maneuvers were not enough, and she fell prey to the victor.

Leonardo da Vinci is perhaps the only great man who links the Renaissance to modern times. His universal genius, which joined within itself the most exquisite aspects of art and the most practical applications of science, foresaw the great scientific movement that would awaken in the near future. He invoked experience as the interpreter of the secrets of nature, which he held as the teacher of superior intellects. Through these intuitions, which abound in his treatises and notes—where he placed, almost without knowing it, the seeds of optics The study of light and vision., hydraulics The study of the movement of liquids., and mechanics—Leonardo can be said to reach out and shake hands with Galileo.

But how he too must have felt the misery of his time! Ignored by the Medici in Florence, unwelcome to Leo X in Rome, he had to settle for Ludovico "the Moor" in Milan, who did not even possess the prowess and courage that were the virtues of his lineage. Once the Moor fell, he found no better course than to place himself in the service of Cesare Borgia A ruthless Italian nobleman and condottiero, famous for the political schemes described by Machiavelli in The Prince., another scoundrel of the same stripe as the Sforzas; and he followed him, as a military engineer, in the campaign of the Romagna. Failing even there, he was reduced to hiring himself out to Francis I, who aspired to bring Italian culture to France, and he died in a foreign land, at Cloux near Amboise, in 1519.