into the objects they created.

The greatest painters the world has seen, and many others who would be
greatest in any other time, were contemporaries of Luther. They had a
gospel to preach no less sacred to them than was his to him; it was the
glad tidings of the kingdom of this world: the splendor, the loveliness,
the wonder and the nobility of human life. When, with young eyes, they
looked out upon the world in its spring-tide, they found it not the vale
of tears that they had been told; they found it a rapture. They saw the
naked body not vile but beautiful.

[Sidenote: Leonardo, 1452-1519]

Leonardo da Vinci was a painter of wonder, but not of naive admiration of
things seen. To him the miracle of the world was in the mystery of
knowledge,--and he took all nature as his province. He gave his life and
his soul for the mastery of science; he observed, he studied, he pondered
everything. From the sun in the heavens to the insect on the ground,
nothing was so large as to impose upon him, nothing too small to escape
him. Weighing, measuring, experimenting, {675} he dug deep for the inner
reality of things; he spent years drawing the internal organs of the
body, and other years making plans for engineers.

When he painted, there was but one thing that fascinated him: the soul.
To lay bare the mind as he had dissected the brain; to take man or woman
at some self-revealing pose, to surprise the hidden secret of
personality, all this was his passion, and in all this he excelled as no
one had ever done, before or since. His battle picture is not some
gorgeous and romantic cavalry charge, but a confused melee of horses
snorting with terror, of men wild with the lust of battle or with hatred
or with fear. His portraits are either caricatures or prophecies: they
lay bare some trait unsuspected, or they probe some secret weakness. Is
not his portrait of himself a wizard? Does not his Medusa chill us with
the horror of death? Is not Beatrice d'Este already doomed to waste
away, when he paints her?

[Sidenote: The Last Supper]

The Last Supper had been treated a hundred times before him, now as a
eucharistic sacrament, now as a monastic meal, now as a gathering of
friends. What did Leonardo make of it? A study of character. Jesus has
just said, "One of you will betray me," and his divine head has sunk upon
his breast with calm, immortal grief. John, the Beloved, is fairly sick
with sorrow; Peter would be fie