Of these, perhaps, was the Prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the aged Padre Bandelli. He “kicked” over the intolerable tardiness of the artist; years rolled by--five years, ten years, and more--and still the fresco was not done. At length all was finished saving only two heads, those of the betrayer and the Betrayed, the opposite poles of darkness and glory; and there once more, and finally it seemed, the composition halted. Bandelli protested, grew wroth, complained at last to the Duke himself. Leonardo responded with a demand for models--the one wholly guiltless of original sin, the other--Judas. Of the latter he lived in hopes; if he could find him, he might help him to the former, as the deepest darkness of a well betrays the stars above; if he could not, he might use the Prior himself at a pinch. The Duke laughed, sided with his favourite, and the Prior withdrew discomfited. More years went by. At length one day, as he was strolling in the streets with Duke Ludovico, his Magnificence hanging familiarly on his arm, Leonardo looked up and saw his Judas. He was one of two criminals, being carted for their gibbeting, who went by at the moment. The rogues jogged in a tumbril, their arms spliced back, their teeth grinning without merriment. A monk, holding up a small crucifix and gabbling mechanically as he ogled the passing petticoats, faced them; the executioner, brawny and impassive, sat before, chewing a fig; a ragged _contadino_ with straw in his shoes, leading a horse as dusty and threadbare as an old overbeaten carpet, shambled at the head. Leonardo exclaimed “At last!” and adding excitedly “Release unto me Barabbas!” halted the procession with a gesture. “Give me this man,” he appealed to the Duke, “for my Judas. Eternal infamy shall be his in lieu of death.” It was a trifling gift; Ludovico graciously, of his omnipotence, bestowed it. Leonardo begged permission to return to the Palace, and thence ascended to his atelier, that unclean hostage slinking at his heels. In the room he stood the creature up against a wall and studied him. Low cupidity, bestial self-indulgence, sin at its meanest and rankest were struggling there, out of the abject terror of death, to reassert themselves. Squalid, fulsome, with battered evil face and wild eyes shadowed under hair, the tint and almost the texture of ruined thatch, the thing fawned on its preserver, and was repelled, and fawned again, but at a distance, and stood whimpering. And thenceforward Leonardo set himself to unravel the riddle of this monstrous life.