Page:Masters in art. Leonardo da Vinci.djvu/37

 are now, however, disposed to admit these as genuine; while, on the contrary, they consider that the 'Virgin of the Rocks' in the National Gallery, the 'Belle Feronniere,' in the Louvre, and the 'Portrait of an Unknown Princess,' in the Ambrosiana at Milan, are not Leonardo's work, although each of them has its stout partisans. Other paintings formerly attributed to Leonardo da Vinci seem to have no just claims to be reckoned as his work.

OR Francesco del Giocondo," wrote Vasari, "Leonardo undertook to paint the portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife; but, after loitering over it for four years, he finally left it unfinished. Mona Lisa was exceedingly beautiful, and while Leonardo was painting her portrait he took the precaution of keeping some one constantly near her to sing or play on instruments, or to jest and otherwise amuse her, to the end that she might continue cheerful." It was probably in 1500 that Leonardo began this, the most marvellous of all portraits, antique or modern.

"'La Gioconda' is," writes Walter Pater, "in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least. As often happens with works in which invention seems to reach its limit, there is an element in it given to, not invented by, the master. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last. What was the relationship of a living Florentine to this creature of his thought? By means of what strange affinities had the person and the dream grown up thus apart, and yet so closely together? Present from the first incorporeally in Leonardo's thought, dimly traced in the designs of Verocchio, she is found present at last in II Giocondo's house.

"The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy; and, as St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands."