This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1874 Excerpt: ... than Titian when he painted some of his finest works; than Tintoretto when he executed his seventy-four feet of " Paradise" in the ducal palace. But Leonardo's strength, put forth in so many different directions in youth and middle life, did not last him through a protracted old age, as in the case of these painters. From the time of his retirement--or exile, as perhaps he considered it--into France, he no longer occupied himself with plans for any great work, or at all events he never put his plans into execution, nor, with the exception of the canal of Romorentin, for which designs have been found among his manuscripts, does he seem to have been consulted on any engineering undertaking such as had occupied so much of his time in Milan.1 It was evidently as an artist that he was valued in France; and it was, perhaps, in the hope that he would establish a French Academy, and found a School of Art in France as he had done at Milan, that Francis I. brought him across the Alps. The French school at this time had scarcely advanced beyond manuscript illumination, in which it had excelled as early as the fourteenth century. Jean Fouquet, "peintre et enlumineur" to Louis XI., had carried this branch of painting to great perfection; but Louis XII., in his wars in Italy, had seen some of the great monumental works of Italian art, and Francis I., treading in his footsteps, had conceived the idea of importing the Italian style into France, an idea which, as before said, he probably hoped to carry out by means of Leonardo, but which he only succeeded in doing when, many years after, he invited II Rosso (Maltre Roux), Primaticcio, and Nicolo dell'Abbate, to decorate his palace at Fontainebleau. These artists 1 In the "Codex Atlantico," we find a little note saying that ...