making of such masterpieces.

That passion for reality itself made him cold to other passions. We know
Michelangelo and Beethoven as men in some respects very like other men.
They were anxious, fretful, full of affections and grievances, and much
concerned with their relations. Leonardo is like Melchizedek, not only
by the accident of birth, for he was a natural son, but by choice. He
never married, he never had a home; there is no evidence that he was
ever tied to any man or woman by his affections; yet it would be stupid
to call him cold, for his one grand passion absorbed him. Monks
suspected him, but in his heart he was celibate like the great monkish
saints, celibate not by vows but by preoccupation. It is clear that
from youth to age life had no cumulative power over him; as we should
say in our prosaic language, he never settled down, for he let things
happen to him and valued the very happening. He was always like a
strange, wonderful creature from another planet, taking notes with
unstaled delight but never losing his heart to any particular. Sex
itself seems hardly to exist for him, or at least for his mind. Often
the people in his drawings are of no sex. Rembrandt draws every one,
Leonardo no one, as if he were his own relation. Women and youths were
as much a subject of his impassioned curiosity as flowers, and no more.
He is always the spectator, but a spectator who can exercise every
faculty of the human mind and every passion in contemplation; he is the
nearest that any man has ever come to Aristotle's Supreme Being.

But we must not suppose that he went solemnly through life living up to
his own story, that he was mysterious in manner or in any respect like a
charlatan. Rather, he lived always in the moment and overcame mankind by
his spontaneity. He had the charm of the real man of genius, not the
reserve of the false one. The famous statement of what he could do,