Ercole of Ferrara, the Marquis Gian Francesco of Mantua, and many other brilliant and historic characters; among them was Cæsar Borgia, and possibly it was on this occasion, before his newly finished picture, that Leonardo first met this extraordinary man, into whose service he shortly after entered. The other end of the refectory is filled with a vast fresco of the Crucifixion, by Montorfano, signed with his name and the date 1495. The perfect state of preservation of this poor, laboured and crowded composition, an inferior example even of the Milanese school, seems a bitter irony here. The Lombard painter, sticking to the old groove, has achieved the permanence which Leonardo recklessly risked for the sake of an experiment. At the lower corner of the painting, on either side, are portraits of the ducal family kneeling in devotion, Lodovico and the little Maximilian on the left, Beatrice and the younger child Francesco on the right, and these, unlike the rest of the picture, are in very bad condition—almost obliterated. Vasari affirms them to have been painted by Leonardo himself at the special command of the Duke, and in oil, like the Last Supper; but the portraits themselves, as far as can be judged from what remains of them, are quite mediocre and do not bear out his statement. * * * * * In San Satiro, entered from Via Torino, we come at last to a building really by Bramante. The church is properly called Sta. Maria, the ancient S. Satiro being represented by a chapel incorporated with it. It was founded in 1476, on the site of a shrine containing a miraculous picture of the Virgin. It is a purely Renaissance building, but has certain peculiarities due to cramped conditions, the builder having been restricted in space and bound by the necessity of embodying the remains of the old Basilica of S. Satiro on one side and of an existing Chapel of S. Teodoro on the other. The difficulties have been ingeniously surmounted, and the effect is very fine, but it seems a pity that the genius of Bramante should not have had room for free play. The general impression on entering into the rich and gilded obscurity of the interior is of great breadth and spaciousness. The three aisles, in which the dividing pilasters and arches are unusually low in proportion to the height of the roof—a feature explained by the necessity of according them with the old S. Satiro, now the Chapel of the Pietà—open out into a great space roofed by a lofty cupola and with wide transepts. The church ends in a grandiose semicircular choir. Here the architect met with his chief difficulty, being prevented by the street outside from carrying the building as far eastward as was necessary for his design after allowing full scope for the rise of the cupola. He has overcome it by a deceptive use of perspective, the depth of the choir being simulated, not real. The device can only be admired for its