Ariosto was a gentleman of birth and position. He spent most of his life in the service of his princes, the House of Este. In later life he withdrew from their employment, and lived in his own house, _parva sed apta_ (small but suitable), to which the literary pious still make pilgrimages. He wrote the "Orlando Furioso" between 1505 and 1515, and thereafter devoted most of his leisure to improving and polishing it. Basking in the sunshine of fashionable admiration, he little suspected that another man, who had spent his life in mighty feats of architecture, painting, and sculpture, would in his old age write sonnets that should be read and reread like a breviary by serious men and women who passed his own luxurious rhetoric unheeded. Michelangelo's sonnets (some of which were written to Vittoria Colonna) are the noblest embodiment of those high ideas of love which came down from Plato to the philosophers of the Palazzo Medici in Florence and the courtiers at the ducal palace in Urbino. They are crammed to bursting with passionate intensity, and in that respect have no equals, even in English. In the fine arts the High Renaissance has a score of famous men. Among them three or four stand head and shoulders above their fellows. Each is marked by extraordinary individuality of talents, character, and disposition: Michelangelo by passionate fury--_terribilita_; Raphael by sweet serenity; Bramante by his even commingling of poise and ardour; Leonardo by his noble curiosity. Of Leonardo, Vasari says: "Sometimes according to the course of nature, sometimes beyond and above it, the greatest gifts rain down from heavenly influences upon the bodies of men, and crowd into one individual beauty, grace, and excellence in such superabundance that to whatever that man shall turn, his very act is so divine, that, surpassing the work of all other men, it makes manifest that it is by the special gift of God, and not by human art. This was true of Leonardo da Vinci; who, beside a physical beauty beyond all praise, put an infinite grace into whatever he did, and such was his excellence, that to whatever difficult things his mind turned he easily solved them." Leonardo (1452-1519) was a Florentine. He was trained by the subtle Verrocchio, from whom he learned the smile, if it be a smile, on the faces of his portraits of women. After leaving Verrocchio's workshop he went to Lombardy, where he spent sixteen years at the court of Milan. There he did a hundred different things: he modelled a great equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza (since destroyed), painted portraits, drew architectural designs,--for a cupola, a staircase, a bathroom, a triumphal arch, etc.,--executed hydraulic works, studied the cultivation of the grape, and played on his silver lyre. In the refectory of a Dominican monastery he painted his fresco of The Last Supper. One of the novices, who watched this handsome young painter at work, says that