(7) I can, if needful, also make bombs, mortars, and field-pieces of beautiful and useful shape, entirely different from those in common use.
(8) Where the use of bombs is not practicable, I can make crossbows, mangonels, ballistæ, and other machines of extraordinary efficiency and quite out of the common way. In fine, as the circumstances of the case shall demand, I can prepare engines of offence for all purposes.
(9) In case of the conflict having to be maintained at sea, I have methods for making numerous instruments, offensive and defensive, with vessels that shall resist the force of the most powerful bombs. I can also make powders or vapours for the offence of the enemy.
(10) In time of peace, I believe that I could equal any other, as regards works in architecture. I can prepare designs for buildings, whether public or private, and also conduct water from one place to another.
Furthermore, I can execute works in sculpture, marble, bronze, or terra-cotta. In painting also I can do what may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.
I can likewise undertake the execution of the bronze horse, which is a monument that will be to the perpetual glory and immortal honour of my lord your father of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Sforza.
And if any of the above named things shall seem to any man to be impossible and impracticable, I am perfectly ready to make trial of them in your excellency’s park, or in whatever other place you shall be pleased to command, commending myself to you with all possible humility.[g]
Leonardo liked better to theorise, observe, and commit his inferences and perceptions to his memorandum-book, than to weary himself with those slavish details which are essential to the production of every immortal work. From these causes, aided by his extreme fastidiousness of taste and love for minute finish, his works were few, and scarcely one of them was ever completed. But this very universality of capacity, with his eagerly inquiring spirit, qualified him to supply the defects under which art yet laboured: no one has as good a claim as he, to be considered the parent of the highest school in his art; and no artist, before or since, has ever united in himself so many of the most illustrious qualities of genius.
His most characteristic excellence, in his own profession, is his tone of feeling and imagination, which is mild, graceful, and poetically devotional; too ethereal for effectively depicting scenes from active life, but admirably harmonised to religious subjects. To these merits in the poetical elements of his art, he added others not less valuable in the practical; for not only was he the first who exhibited minutely scientific anatomical knowledge, but he set a perfect example of relief and harmony in colouring, for which, especially in that rich dark style which is common with him, his pictures and those of his school are at this day a banquet to the eye.[h]
