[THE BOYHOOD OF A PAINTER]
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there took place, first in Italy and afterwards in the other countries of Europe, a great change known in history as the Renaissance. The long word simply means "rebirth", and the name was given to this period because then all the interest in art and literature and music and beauty of every kind, which had seemed for centuries to be dead, came to life again. Painters and poets and musicians began to fill the world with their songs and their pictures. You are going to read now the story of one of the most famous of the painters of the fifteenth century in Italy.
Leonardo da Vinci, the great painter, was the son of a lawyer in the beautiful city of Florence. Even as a tiny child he began to show what profession he was likely to follow, for as soon as he could crawl, he would scramble away when his mother was not looking, to a place in the garden where after a shower there was always a pile of mud. He would sit happily on the ground pinching the mud into some sort of shape, and the older he grew the more the shape became like that of some object that he knew. When his mother missed him and came in search of him, the baby would scream in disgust, and the only way to quiet him was to play on the lute, an instrument very much like our mandolin.
Ser Piero, Leonardo's father, was very proud of his astonishing little son, and resolved that he must have the very best teachers that could be found. So the boy was still very young when his lessons began. Lessons were no trouble to him, for he quite took away the breath of all his teachers by his amazing quickness, no matter whether the work was arithmetic, or languages, or music. Whatever he heard once he understood and remembered.
Whatever lessons he might be doing, however, Leonardo spent his spare time in drawing and in modelling figures in clay. His father decided that this was the talent which the boy ought specially to make use of. So he took his son to his friend the sculptor Verocchio. When they reached the studio, Leonardo was given some clay and told to model anything he liked. He sat down on the floor, and soon finished a tiny statuette which was so lifelike that it might have been the work of the sculptor himself. Verocchio was delighted, and declared that he must have this boy as a pupil at once.
As Leonardo grew older, he began to outstrip his master in the art of painting, though not in that of sculpture. At one time, it is said, Verocchio was working on a picture of the baptism of Jesus by John, in which an angel was represented as standing at one side. He entrusted the painting of this angel to his pupil. When the master came to look at the finished figure, he stood gazing in astonished silence. He was too true an artist not to feel that he and Leonardo had changed places, and that the boy's painting of the angel was worth all the rest of the picture. The story goes that Verocchio was so impressed by the feeling that he could only do badly what Leonardo could do perfectly that he never painted again.
One of the most interesting tales of the artist's boyhood tells of his painting of a shield. His father, Ser Piero, had gone to his country house outside of Florence. One evening a farmer of the neighborhood was brought to him as he sat in the garden, asking that he might speak with Ser Piero. He knew the farmer well, for they had often gone fishing together. "Well, what now, Francisco?" he asked, as the farmer came up bowing and bearing in his hands a wooden shield. Francisco explained that he had cut down a fig tree near his house, as it was too old to bear fruit, and that he had cut out of its wood the shield he was carrying. He had brought it to Ser Piero, hoping that the master would have the goodness to get it painted with some design, for he wished to hang it up in his kitchen as a remembrance of the old tree.