Leonardo da Vinci's unfinished _Saint Jerome_, in the Vatican at Rome, is exactly like intarsia work; the ground almost black, the men and the lion a light brown. This particular way of painting reminds me of the intarsia work in the halls in Santo Spirito in Bergamo by Fra Damiano in 1520; done just one year after Leonardo died. Here, in this supple and vigorous work in wood, I saw what could be done by a fine artist in the handling of somewhat intractable material. The work was broad or minute at will, with splendid masses and divisions of color in some designs which seemed to represent the Deluge, sharp, clear, firmly outlined in the patterns of streets and houses; full of rich color in the setting of wood against wood, and at times almost as delicate as a Japanese design. There was the head of John the Baptist laid on a stone slab, which was like a drawing of Daumier. And, in the whole composition of the design, with its two ovals set on each side like mirrors for the central horror, there was perfect balance. San Acre, this superb intarsia work of Fra Damiano, seemed a criticism on Lotto, the criticism of a thing, comparatively humble in itself, but in itself wholly satisfying, upon the failure of a more conspicuous endeavor, which has made its own place in art, to satisfy certain primary demands which one may logically make upon it. In the Jerome, as in his finished work, one sees Leonardo's undeviating devotion to the perfect achievement of everything to which he set his hand; and how, after a long lapse of time, in the heat of the day, he crosses Florence to mount the scaffold, adds two or three touches to a single figure, and returns forthwith. Never did Michelangelo paint in such various ways as Leonardo; for, in his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, art ceases to approach one directly, through this sense or that, through color, or some fancied outlook of the soul; only, one seems to be of the same vivid and eternal world as these meditative and joyous beings, joyous even in hell, where the rapture of their torment broods in eyes and limbs with the same energy as the rapture of God in creation, of the women in disobedience.