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 mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint 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.  The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life.  Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

During these years at Florence Leonardo’s history is the history of his art; he himself is lost in the bright cloud of it.  The outward history begins again in 1502, with a wild journey through central Italy, which he makes as the chief engineer of Caesar Borgia.  The biographer, putting together the stray jottings of his manuscripts, may follow him through every day of it, up the strange tower of Sienna, which looks towards Rome, elastic like a bent bow, down to the sea-shore at Piombino, each place appearing as fitfully as in a fevered dream....  We catch a glimpse of him again at Rome in 1514, surrounded by his mirrors and vials and furnaces, making strange toys that seemed alive of wax and quicksilver.  The hesitation which had haunted him all through life, and made like one under a spell, was upon him now with double force.  No one had ever carried political indifferentism farther; it had always been his philosophy to “fly before the storm;” he is for the Sforzas or against them, as the tide of their fortune turns.  Yet now he was suspected by the anti-Gallian society at Rome of French tendencies.  It paralyzed him to find himself among enemies; and he turned wholly to France, which had long courted him.

France was about to become an Italy more Italian than Italy itself.  Francis the First, like Lewis the Twelfth before him, was attracted by the finesse of Leonardo’s work; La Gioconda was already in his cabinet, and he offered Leonardo the little Chateau de Clou, with its vineyards and meadows, in the soft valley of the Masse, and not too far from the great outer sea.  M. Arsene Houssaye has succeeded in giving a pensive local colour to this part of his subject, with which, as a Frenchman, he could best deal.  “A Monsieur Lyonard, peinteur du Roy pour Amboyse,”—­so the letter of Francis the First is headed.  It opens a prospect, one of the most attractive in the history of art, where, under a strange mixture of lights, Italian art dies away as a French exotic.

    Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London, 1873).

FOOTNOTES: 

[9] The spelling commonly used is “Mona Lisa.”  The editor has thought best, however, to keep the form of spelling used by Walter Pater.