I am watching how he works at his Cenacolo. Betimes, before sunrise, he goes to the convent refectory, and paints till the shadows close in on him, nor does the brush fall from his hands, nor does he remember food and drink. Sometimes he lets whole weeks go by in which he touches not his paints. Sometimes he will stand for two hours on the scaffold before the picture examining it and criticising what he has done. At other times I have known him rush forth in the mid-day heat through the blazing streets, being drawn by some viewless power to the monastery; he will mount his scaffold, do two touches or mayhap three, and rush away at once.
He is working at the countenance of the Apostle John. To-day he should have completed it. Instead he remained at home with the child Jacopo, watching the flight of hornets, wasps, and flies. So absorbed is he in studying the construction of their bodies that 'twould seem on it depended the destiny of the human race. Having perceived that the hind legs of flies serve them as a rudder, he experienced greater pleasure than if he had found the secret of perpetual felicity. He thinks the discovery useful, and like to serve his apparatus for flight. Poor Apostle John!
To-day there is a new distraction, and the flies are abandoned. The Master is working on a design, beautiful and wondrous delicate, which is to form the coat-of-arms of an academy not yet existing outside the brain of the duke. The device is a square containing a crown of cords, geometrically intertwined, in knots without beginning or end. I could not restrain myself, but reminded him of the unfinished apostle. He shrugged his shoulders, and without raising his eyes from the crown of cords, he said through his closed teeth:—
'Patience! time enough! The head of John will not run away!'
I begin to comprehend Cesare's malice!
The duke has entrusted to him the construction within the palace of hearing-tubes concealed in the thickness of the walls, after the fashion of the Ear of Dionysius. Leonardo began with ardour, but now has cooled and catches at every pretext for laying the work aside. The duke hurries him and is wroth; this morning he summoned him several times to the palace, but the Master is occupied with experiments on vegetables. He has cut away the roots from a pumpkin, leaving but one small shoot, which he assiduously drenches with water. To his great joy the plant has not withered. 'The mother,'says he, 'nourishes well her children.' Sixty little oblong pumpkins have formed.