le age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the
return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than
the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead
many times, and learned 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 the 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.

It is Leonardo's conception, yet with a difference. Here the critic has
woven about the subject an exquisite tissue of associations, a whole
wide background of knowledge and thought and feeling which it lay
beyond the painter's range to evoke; but the critic is denied the
vividness, the immediateness and intimate warmth of vital contact,
which the painter was able to achieve. The Lisa whom Leonardo
shows us and the Lisa whom Pater interprets for us are the same in
essence yet different in their power to affect us. The difference
resulting from the kind of medium employed is well exemplified by
Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel." The fundamental concept of both
poem and picture is identical, but picture and poem have each its
distinctive range and limitations and its own peculiar appeal. If we
cancel the common element in the two, the difference remaining
makes it possible for us to realize how much of the effect of a work
of art inheres in the medium itself. Painting may be an aid to
literature in that it helps us to more vivid images; the literary
interpretation of pictures or music gives to the works with which it
deals an intellectual definiteness. But the functions peculiar to each
art are not to be confounded nor the distinctions obscured.

Pictures are not a substitute for literature, and their true meaning is
finally not to be translated into words. Their beauty is a visible
beauty; the emotions they rouse are such as can be conveyed
through the sense of sight.