Not all painters are precocious (早熟), but Picasso was. In a technical way, he was as much a prodigy as Mozart, and his precocity seems to have fixed his peculiar sense of vocation. He was the son of a painter and by 13 he was so good at drawing that his father is said to have handed over his own brushes and paints to the boy and given up painting. If the story is true, it explains to some extent the mediumistic confidence with which Picasso worked. "Painting is stronger than I am, he once remarked." "It makes me do what it wants." If one were told that Science and Charity had been done by a 30-year-old Spanish scholar, one would have predicted a competent future for the man. Once one realizes that it was painted by a boy not yet 16, the skill seems ominously significant, like a visitation—and that is the general impression conveyed by Picasso' s earliest work.