The Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci

Giovanni had been sent to Florence by his uncle, Oswald Ingrim, the painter on glass (_magister a vitreis_), a German from Graetz, and pupil of Johann Kirchheim, the famous Strasburg master. He was to buy certain transparent and brilliant pigments which could be obtained only in the Tuscan city, and were required by Ingrim for his work in Milan Cathedral. The boy was the natural son of Reinold the lapidary, Oswald's brother, and had got the name of Boltraffio from his Lombard mother, whom Oswald asserted to be a shameless woman and the cause of his brother's ruin. Brought up by his crabbed uncle, Giovanni was a lonely and frightened child, reared on tales of unclean powers, demons, hags, sorcerers, and were-wolves. His special horror was a certain demon which, according to the North Italian tradition, appeared under the form of a woman, and was called the 'White She-devil,' or the 'Mother of the Snowy Eyebrow.'

Yet even in his earliest infancy, when his uncle would silence his sobs with threats of the _Diavolessa bianca_, the child felt a curiosity mingling with his terror, a shrinking wish that some day he might meet the white one face to face, and behold her countenance with his own eyes.