His copy-books are full of the drawings of horses, and probably his greatest work of art, judged by the opinion of his day and the rough sketches still extant of his design, was the statue he modelled for Ludovico ‘Il Moro’ of Francesco Sforza, the famous _condottiere_ poised on horseback. Unfortunately it perished almost at once, hacked in pieces by the French soldiery when they drove Ludovico from his capital some years later. Leonardo has been called the ‘true founder of the Italian School of oil-painting’. His most celebrated picture, ‘The Last Supper’, painted in oils as an experiment, on the walls of a convent near Milan, began to flake away, owing to the damp, even before the artist’s death. It has been so constantly retouched since, that very little, save the consummate art in the arrangement of the figures, and the general dramatic simplicity of the scene depicted, is left to show the master-hand. Even this is enough to convey his genius. Amongst the most famous of his works that still remain are his ‘Mona Lisa’, sometimes called ‘La Gioconda’, the portrait of a Neapolitan lady, and the ‘Madonna of the Rocks’, both in the gallery of the Louvre. Leonardo excelled his age in engineering, in his knowledge of anatomy and physics, in his inventive genius that led him to guess at the power of steam, and struggle over models of aeroplanes, at which his generation laughed and shrugged their shoulders. He himself took keen pleasure in such versatility, but his art, that held other men spellbound with admiration, would plunge him in depression. ‘When he sat down to paint he seemed overcome with fear’, says one account of him, and describes how he would alter and finally destroy, in despair of attaining his ideal, canvases that those about him considered already perfect. It is little wonder then that few finished works came from the brush of this indefatigable worker; but his influence on his age and after-centuries was none the less prodigious. Leonardo stands for all that was best in the Renaissance--its zest for truth, its eager vitality and love of experiment, but most of all for its sympathy. He is the embodiment of that motto that seems more than any other to express the Renaissance outlook: _Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto_--‘I am a man, and nothing pertaining to mankind is foreign to my nature.’ * * * * *