up around him a Court of Learning, and his pupils and followers were
counted by the score. To the last of his long life he carried with him
the bright, expectant animation of youth; and to all who knew him he was
"Leonardo--the only Leonardo."

But great as was Leonardo, we call the time in which he lived, the age of
Michelangelo.

When Leonardo was forty, and at the very height of his power, Michel
Agnola Buonarroti, aged twenty, liberated from the block a marble Cupid
that was so exquisite in its proportions that it passed for an antique,
and men who looked upon it exclaimed, "Phidias!"

Michel Agnola became Michelangelo, that is to say, "Michel the Angel," in
a day. The name thrown at him by an unknown admirer stuck, and in his
later years when all the world called him "Angelo" he cast off the name
his parents had given him and accepted the affectionate pet name that
clung like the love of woman.

Michelangelo was born in a shabby little village but a few miles from
Florence. In another village near by was born Leonardo. "Great men never
come singly," says Emerson. And yet Angelo and Leonardo exercised no
influence upon each other that we can trace. The younger man never came
under the spell of the older one, but moved straight on to his destiny,
showing not the slightest arc in his orbit in deference to the great
luminary of his time.

The handsome Leonardo was social: he loved women, and music, and
festivals, and gorgeous attire, and magnificent equipage. His life was
full of color and sweeping, joyous, rainbow tints.