rcely at the traitor's throat; Thomas
darts forward, doubting, to ask, "Lord, is it I?" Every face expresses
deep and different reaction. There sits Judas, his face tense, the cords
of his neck standing out, his muscles taut with the supreme effort not to
betray the evil purpose which, nevertheless, lowers on his visage as
plainly as a thunder cloud on a sultry afternoon.

Throughout life Leonardo was fascinated with an enigmatic smile that he
had seen somewhere, perhaps in Verocchio's studio, perhaps on the face of
some {676} woman he had known as a boy. His first paintings were of
laughing women, and the same smile is on the lips of John the Baptist and
Dionysus and Leda and the Virgin and St. Anne and Mona Lisa! What was he
trying to express? Vasari found the "smile so pleasing that it was a
thing more divine than human to behold"; Ruskin thought it archaic, Muentz
"sad and disillusioned," Berenson supercilious, and Freud neurotic.
Reymond calls it the smile of Prometheus, Faust, Oedipus and the Sphinx;
Pater saw in it "the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie
of the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambitions and imaginary loves, the
return to the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias." Though some great
critics, like Reinach, have asserted that Mona Lisa [Sidenote: Mona Lisa]
is only subtle as any great portrait is subtle, it is impossible to
regard it merely as that. It is a psychological study. And what means
the smile? In a word, sex,--not on the physical side so studied and
glorified by other painters, but in its psychological aspect. For once
Leonardo has stripped bare not the body but the soul of desire,--the
passion, the lust, the trembling and the shame. There is something
frightening about Leda caught with the swan, about the effeminate
Dionysus and John the Baptist's mouth "folded for a kiss of irresistible
pleasure." If the stories then told about the children of Alexander VI
and about Margaret of Navarre and Anne Boleyn were true, Mona Lisa was
their sister.

Everything he touched acquires the same psychological penetration. His
Adoration of the Magi is not an effort to delight the eye, but is a
study, almost a criticism, of Christianity. All sorts of men are brought
before the miraculous Babe, and their reactions, of wonder, of amazement,
of devotion, of love, of skepticism, of scoffing, and of indifference,
are perfectly recorded.

{677} [Sidenote: The Venetians]

After the