As if artifice was an answer.
Maguire told me that Leonardo only once painted a portrait to the best of his ability, and swore never to repeat the act, as it drove the man who paid for it into madness to see his beloved wife reproduced so exactly.
I was sceptical. He laughed. As if artifice was an answer, he said again.
The sun was going down behind Donard. The water in the harbour darkened. A ship just in from the Pale was tying up for the night. At the edge of the village, a gang of men were laying off for the day. The creat they were building was nearly done; tomorrow they’d do the thatch. The bare frame of the roof looked more like an unlit bonfire than a house.
He did visit him, though, the man he called the Great Leonardo, spoke with him, in the artist’s last days, propped up in Clos Lucé to receive Francis, king of the Franks.
Sometimes Maguire tries to tell us about the paintings. The halls and halls of paintings, and gold leaf, and mirrors, and books, and lamps of a hundred candles each that hung from the high and colourful ceilings, and he can never manage. He says the paintings were enough to turn your head, that each one was like a whole story, stood in front of you so you could look at it. He goes on about a smile, some woman in a Spanish veil, a look she gave him that near knocked him down. He stares up at the sky, grows impatient. Whatever they were, he obviously loved them.