As chiefs of the first school we have two men, each of whom presents to us one of the richest organisations and the most widely extending genius which human nature has, perhaps, ever produced; these were Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo, both of whom were sculptors as well as painters; and also architects, musicians, and poets. We will first speak of Leonardo da Vinci, whose style presents two very distinct epochs; the first tending to vigour in the shadows, to a mistiness in reflected lights, to a general effect produced by a certain oddness, or rather by a strange representation of truth; a combination of qualities which, as M. Michiels says, makes Leonardo the “most northerly of the Italian painters” (Fig. 250). His second style, “clear, serene, and precise,” transports us into a “completely southern sphere.” But some secret influence drew the artist so forcibly towards his earlier manner, that he returned to it at an advanced age in painting the famous portrait of Mona Lisa, which adorns the gallery of the Louvre. We must not forget the fact that we have to attribute to Pope Leo X. the great revival of the arts, and especially of painting, in Italy at the commencement of the sixteenth century. “In Michael Angelo,” still to quote the words of M. Michiels, “science, power, grandeur, and all the more severe qualities are combined. No vulgar artifice and no affectation. The painter was imbued with a sublime ideal of majestic types from which nothing was able to divert him. He felt as if there were existing in himself a whole population of heroes, whom, by the aid of painting and sculpture, he endeavoured to withdraw from their mental concealment, and to embody in incarnate forms. His personages scarcely seem to belong to our race; they appear to be creatures worthy of some more spacious world, to the proportions of which their physical vigour and their moral energy would well respond. The very women do not possess the grace of their sex; we might fancy them valiant Amazons well capable of mastering a horse or of crushing an enemy. This great man’s object was neither to charm nor to please; his delight rather was to astonish and to strike with admiration or terror; but it is this very excess of power which enabled him to win the approbation of all.” [Illustration: Fig. 250.--The Holy Family, by Leonardo da Vinci, from the Picture in the Museum at St. Petersburg.]