Through long days he would follow up and down the streets of Florence or of Milan beautiful unknown faces, learning them by heart, interpreting their changes of expression, reading the thoughts through the features.  These he afterwards committed to paper.  We possess many such sketches—­a series of ideal portraits, containing each an unsolved riddle that the master read; a procession of shadows, cast by reality, that, entering the camera lucida of the artist’s brain, gained new and spiritual quality.[239] In some of them his fancy seems to be imprisoned in the labyrinths of hair; in others the eyes deep with feeling or hard with gemlike brilliancy have caught it, or the lips that tell and hide so much, or the nostrils quivering with momentary emotion.  Beauty, inexpressive of inner meaning, must, we conceive, have had but slight attraction for him.  We do not find that he drew “a fair naked body” for the sake of its carnal charm; his hasty studies of the nude are often faulty, mere memoranda of attitude and gesture.  The human form was interesting to him either scientifically or else as an index to the soul.  Yet he felt the influence of personal loveliness His favourite pupil Salaino was a youth “of singular grace, with curled and waving hair, a feature of personal beauty by which Lionardo was always greatly pleased.”  Hair, the most mysterious of human things, the most manifold in form and hue, snakelike in its subtlety for the entanglement of souls, had naturally supreme attractiveness for the magician of the arts.

With like energy Lionardo bent himself to divine the import of ugliness.  Whole pages of his sketch-book are filled with squalid heads of shrivelled crones and ghastly old men—­with idiots, goitred cretins, criminals, and clowns.  It was not that he loved the horrible for its own sake; but he was determined to seize character, to command the gamut of human physiognomy from ideal beauty down to forms bestialised by vice and disease.  The story related by Giraldi concerning the head of Judas in the “Cenacolo” at Milan, sufficiently illustrates the method of Lionardo in creating types and the utility of such caricatures as his notebooks contain.[240]

It is told that he brought into his room one day a collection of reptiles—­lizards, newts, toads, vipers, efts—­all creatures that are loathsome to the common eye.  These, by the magic of imagination, he combined into a shape so terrible that those who saw it shuddered.  Medusa’s snake-enwoven head exhaling poisonous vapour from the livid lips; Leda, swanlike beside her swan lover; Chimaera, in whom many natures mingled and made one; the conflict of a dragon and a lion; S. John conceived not as a prophet but as a vine-crowned Faun, the harbinger of joy:—­over pictorial motives of this kind, attractive by reason of their complexity or mystery, he loved to brood; and to this fascination of a sphinx-like charm we owe some of his most exquisite drawings.  Lionardo more than any other artist