what might easily have been foreseen; they first became jealous rivals, and at length open and inveterate enemies[1].
Leonardo’s reputation, which had been for many years gradually increasing, was now so firmly established, that he appears to have been looked up to as being, what he really was, the reviver and restorer of the art of painting; and to such an height had the curiosity to view his works been excited, that Raphael, who was at that time young, and studying, thought it worth his while to make a journey to Florence in the month of October 1504[2], on purpose to see them. Nor was his labour lost, or his time thrown away in so doing; for on first seeing the works of Leonardo’s pencil, he was induced to abandon the dry and hard manner of his master Perugino’s colouring, and to adopt in its stead the style of Leonardo[3], to which circumstance is owing no small portion of that esteem in the art, to which Raphael afterwards very justly arrived.
His father having died in 1504[4], he in consequence of that event became engaged with his half-brothers, the legitimate sons of Pietro da Vinci, in a law-suit for the recovery of a share of his father’s property, which in a letter from
