The Adoration of the Kings, Figure 152, is the richest, most complicated, most beautifully ordered picture of its century; even Leonardo was not to surpass it simply as a composition. Like all rich things it will bear many analyses. You may consider it as a triangle, with the reciprocal forms enriched, or, with Dr. Thys, as the combination of two radiating motives, one centred on the Madonna’s face, the other on the soft alert body of the Child. Such analyses are only important as temporary aids to understanding of the main fact that in the making of such a masterpiece a clear and subtile geometry is involved. Later Leonardo was to declare that there is no science which cannot undergo mathematical demonstration, and he probably would have added—no art. Of his own art at least the saying is true. It may have been not so much his native indolence that arrested a work which had claimed months of passionate preparation at the moment when creation was at its height, as the conviction that it would lose something if fully realized. One can see how he loved the summary touches of dark and light, the swift, sufficient evocation of body and soul which he had learned from Masaccio. He may have hated to cover up such work, and a critic today may well be in doubt whether the gain in finishing it would have atoned for the loss. Or Leonardo da Vinci may already have been called to Milan and a new artistic life. However that be, the monks of Secopto, after a long wait, turned to Filippino Lippi, who had already undertaken one lapsed commission for Leonardo, and he promptly achieved an Adoration of the Kings which only shows how inimitable Leonardo was, and how little mere richness counts in any picture.