is told of him which may remind us of Goethe's determination to
overcome his giddiness. In his youth his head was singularly sensitive
to changes of temperature; but by gradual habituation he brought
himself at last to endure the extremes of heat and cold bareheaded. In
like manner he had a constitutional disgust for onions and honey; so
powerful, that the very sight of these things made him sick. Yet by
constantly viewing and touching what was disagreeable, he conquered
these dislikes; and proved that men have a complete mastery over what
is merely instinctive in their nature. His courage corresponded to his
splendid physical development. When a boy of fifteen, he severely
wounded himself in the foot. The gash had to be probed and then sewn
up. Alberti not only bore the pain of this operation without a groan,
but helped the surgeon with his own hands; and effected a cure of the
fever which succeeded by the solace of singing to his cithern. For
music he had a genius of the rarest order; and in painting he is said
to have achieved success. Nothing, however, remains of his work and
from what Vasari says of it, we may fairly conclude that he gave less
care to the execution of finished pictures, than to drawings
subsidiary to architectural and mechanical designs. His biographer
relates that when he had completed a painting, he called children and
asked them what it meant. If they did not know, he reckoned it a
failure. He was also in the habit of painting from memory. While at
Venice, he put on canvas the faces of friends at Florence whom he had
not seen for months. That the art of painting was subservient in his
estimation to mechanics, is indicated by what we hear about the
camera, in which he showed landscapes by day and the revolutions of
the stars by night, so lively drawn that the spectators were affected
with amazement. The semi-scientific impulse to extend man's mastery
over nature, the magician's desire to penetrate secrets, which so
powerfully influenced the development of Lionardo's genius, seems to