'Nay, Messer Leonardo, he would not understand you.'
'Such a man could not fail to understand. The mischief is that he is diffident and has too little self-confidence. He fears and tortures himself and is jealous, because he does not yet know his own strength. It is folly in him. I would reassure him. What has he to fear in me? I have seen his sketch for the 'Soldiers bathing' and, believe me, madonna, I was astounded, and could scarce believe my own eyes. No one can conceive the value of this young man, nor what he will rise to. Even now he is not only my equal, but stronger than I. Deny it not, madonna, for I speak what I know to be true: he is my superior.'
She smiled, reflecting his expression like an image in a mirror.
One day in Santa Maria del Carmine, in the Cappella Brancacci, where were the famous frescoes of Tomaso Masaccio, the school of all the great masters, he saw a lad, scarcely more than a boy, studying and copying as he had done himself in his youth. He wore a paint-stained old black frock, clean but coarse and homespun linen. He was tall and willowy, with a slight neck, very white and long, delicate as a girl's. His face was oval, clear cut, and pale, with a somewhat sensuous beauty, and great dark eyes like those of the Umbrian peasant women from whom Perugino painted his Madonnas, eyes with no depth of thought, deep and void as the sky. Leonardo saw the youth a second time in the Sala del Papa at Santa Maria Novella, where his own cartoon for the 'Battle of Anghiari' was exhibited. This the lad was studying and copying with no less care than he had bestowed on Masaccio's frescoes. He evidently knew Leonardo by sight, but did not venture to speak to him.
The Master addressed him; and then hurriedly, excitedly, and with many blushes, half-presumptuous yet childishly artless, the boy confessed that he looked on Leonardo as his master, as the greatest of all Italian masters, whose shoe's-latchet Michelangelo Buonarroti was not worthy to unloose.
Leonardo examined his drawings, and after further converse, on other occasions, became convinced that here was a great master of the future.
Sensitive and responsive as an echo to all voices, submissive to influence as a woman, he at present imitated both Perugino and Pinturicchio (with whom he had recently been working in the library at Siena), and also Leonardo; but under this immaturity the latter found a freshness of feeling in him superior to any he had met. And the lad seemed to have already fathomed by guesswork the deepest mysteries of art and life; had surmounted the greatest obstacles as if involuntarily, lightly, by chance, almost in play. Every gift seemed to have been bestowed on him freely; he knew no searchings of heart, no weary toil, no hesitation, no despairing efforts, no hopeless puzzles, such as had always been to Leonardo an incubus and a curse. And when the Master spoke to him of the need for patient study of nature, and of the laws of painting, the youth fixed on him soft wondering eyes, and, it was evident, listened merely out of reverence for the great man's opinion.
One day he made an observation which surprised Leonardo by its depth:—
'I have noticed,' he said, 'that while one is painting one should not think. Everything then turns out better.'
It seemed as if this youth's whole being was a proof that the perfect harmony of reason and feeling, of love and science, which the Master sought so ardently, did not, nor could not exist. And in face of the modest and careless frankness which shone in those unanxious eyes, Leonardo felt greater doubt of the work of his own whole life, greater doubt of the future destiny of art, than had ever tormented him when confronted by the rivalry and scorn of Michelangelo.