Michelangelo
was twenty-seven years old; Leonardo more than fifty; and Raffaelle,
then nineteen years old, visiting Florence for the first time, came and
watched them as they worked.
We catch a glimpse of him again, at Rome in 1514, surrounded by his
mirrors and vials and furnaces, making strange toys that seemed alive of
wax and quicksilver. The hesitation which had haunted him all through
life, and made him like one under a spell, was upon him now with double
force. No one had ever carried political indifferentism farther; it had
always been his philosophy to "fly before the storm"; he is for the
Sforzas, or against them, as the tide of their fortune turns. Yet now in
the political society of Rome, he came to be suspected of concealed
French sympathies. It paralysed him to find himself among enemies; and
he turned wholly to France, which had long courted him.
France was about to become an Italy more Italian than Italy itself.
Francis the First, like Lewis the Twelfth before him, was attracted by
the finesse of Leonardo's work; La Gioconda was already in his cabinet,
and he offered Leonardo the little Chateau de Clou, with its vineyards
and meadows, in the pleasant valley of the Masse, just outside the walls
of the town of Amboise, where, especially in the hunting season, the
court then frequently resided.
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