He started violently, saluted instinctively. It was the Emperor himself.
“By God’s favour, sire,” he said.
“Precisely,” said the Emperor dryly, and walked away.
Leonardo da Vinci
“I cannot read the truth into these eyes. Their riddle still eludes me.” When the passion of two natures meets in perfect reciprocity the resulting fruit is genius. It is procreation in the divine sense—divine creation by deputy, that is to say—whereby the love that is in the souls of both, each for the other, blossoms in the flawless understanding. Leonardo, the glorious bastard, was the earnest of such a meeting—a moment rarely possible, but still possible to any union—and the seal of its creative ecstasy was on his hand and on his brow. He was beautiful as he was inspired; yet, even as the Fates keep secrets from the gods themselves, from him was withheld the full interpretation of his own transcendent visions.
The young man to whom he spoke, and into whose eyes he had turned to look, lowered his lids as if abashed or aggrieved, and just perceptibly shrugged his shoulders.
“Master,” he said, presuming on the Master’s tolerance, “is it not the mystery of original sin in them which baffles you? And where on this earth are eyes to lack that riddle? You are too old, Master, by near fifteen hundred years to find the model you seek. There was never but one in all the world.”
He looked up suddenly, an odd shadow of challenge or defiance in those same vilified orbs, and again veiled them under drooped lashes.
Messer Leonardo stood musing, half abstracted. He was wont to hunt for the faces for his pictures about the city, and when he marked a quarry, to pursue it in and out of the human warren like a weasel, tasting its life in anticipation, until the moment came to seize and drain it. So had he captured the model for his Christ—among the people, as was meet—Lucio, the widow’s son, who had a face like an angel’s, and the gift, it seemed, of immortal youth. Lucio’s mother was the poorest of the poor, and bedridden at that; yet the fond pride in her kept her grown child in idleness. She embroidered rich cloths for tailors, and made a sufficient pittance; but him she would never let soil his lovely hands in menial service. It had been a different thing, however, when Messer Leonardo, the Duke’s own petted protégé, had proposed to introduce Lucio into the great picture of the Last Supper he was about to paint for the monks of Santa Maria delle Grazie. And as its divine protagonist! Here was service deliriously sanctified. Lucio must be enraptured to consecrate his young glowing beauty to an end so sublime. And he went, indeed, to the great Master’s atelier in the Palace, and was made the subject of innumerable studies, pending his appearance in the fresco.
The fresco itself was to be painted on an end wall of the monastery refectory, continuing in perspective the actual rafters of the room, and so far consisted in no more than a charcoal drawing, masterly outlining the group assembled at the consecration. Only the Christ Himself bloomed in flowery suggestion from the midmost throng, a figure iridescent, half revealed, as if it were verily a dream materialising.