For Leonardo had always hoped that his difference with Michelangelo would die a natural death; and he was anxious for an occasion which would bring them to speech together.
The younger man, hearing his name pronounced, stopped and raised his eyes. He was reserved and shy, even to wildness, dreading the stare of strangers, and fancying that they scorned his ugliness, which he himself was never able to forget. Now he looked suspiciously at the company in the loggia; but when he saw Leonardo's smile, and his piercing glance bent down upon him, for the older man was much the taller of the two, shyness changed into rage. He grew pale and red by turns; words choked him; but at last he blurted out:—
'Explain it yourself, most intelligent of sages, sold to the Lombards! Books are your proper pastime; you who spent sixteen years trying to hatch a clay horse, and when you tried to cast it in bronze threw up the task in despair.' He knew he was speaking outrageously; but such was his fury that no words seemed to him sufficiently insulting to hurl at his rival.
Leonardo made no reply; he looked the other full in the face, and the bystanders also were silent, watching the two men.
Before the violence of Buonarroti, Leonardo's calm almost feminine smile, tinged with sadness, suggested weakness. But he himself remembered Monna Lisa's words, that Michelangelo would never pardon him for his gift of that quietness which is mightier than storm.
Michelangelo finding no more words waved his hand, turned quickly, and went on his way, with his shambling gait, his dull unconscious habit of growling, his bent head and bowed shoulders, upon which seemed to rest some superhuman burden. Soon he disappeared as if dissolved into the turbid copper-coloured rain and the wild and threatening sunlight.
Leonardo walked on. On the bridge one of the company in the loggia of the Palazzo Spini overtook him—a little man with the aspect of a Jew, though a pure-blooded Florentine, known to Leonardo as a scandal-monger. The painter crossed the bridge, the other running by his side, talking of Michelangelo, and trying to force Leonardo into some adverse criticism of his rival, which no doubt he intended to repeat at the earliest opportunity. Leonardo, however, refused to be drawn into this trap, and remained silent.
The intruder was not to be shaken off.
'Tell me, Messere,' he said, 'have you yet finished your portrait of La Gioconda?'
'I have not,' answered the painter. 'Why are you interested?'