Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/134

112 or circumstance. But the long reed-like cross in the hand, which suggests Saint John the Baptist, becomes faint in a copy at the Ambrosian Library, and disappears altogether in another in the Palazzo Rosso at Genoa. Returning from the last to the original, we are no longer surprised by Saint John's strange likeness to the Bacchus, which hangs near it, which set Gautier thinking of Heine's notion of decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves after the fall of paganism, took employment in the new religion. We recognise one of those symbolical inventions in which the ostensible subject is used, not as matter for definite pictorial realisation, but as the starting-point of a train of sentiment, as subtle and vague as a piece of music. No one ever ruled over his subject more entirely than Lionardo, or bent it more dexterously to purely artistic ends. And so it comes to pass that though he handles sacred subjects continually, he is the most profane of painters; the given person or subject, Saint John in the Desert, or the Virgin on the knees of Saint Anne, is often merely the pretext for a kind of work which carries one quite out of the range of its conventional associations.

About the 'Last Supper,' its decay and restorations, a whole literature has risen up, Goethe's pensive sketch of its sad fortunes being far the best. The