subject, and was designed for a "secular" purpose. It probably once
formed part of a marriage-chest. The important share which the
landscape has in the composition, and its serious attempt at
perspective, are also worthy of note. As an example of the master
himself, of the painter of the great panoramic procession of the
notables of his day, which under the title of the _Adoration of the
Kings_, covers the walls of the chapel in the Medici Palace at Florence,
of the designs of the history of S. Agostino at San Gemignano, and of
the frescoes in Campo Santo at Pisa, it is of course extremely
inadequate, but it suffices to indicate many paths which the young
artist was to strike out from the old track which sufficed for his
saint-like master.

_In the National Gallery_ (London, 1895).

MONNA LISA[9]

_(LEONARDO DA VINCI)_

WALTER PATER

In Vasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci as we now read it there are some
variations from the first edition. There, the painter who has fixed the
outward type of Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator,
holding lightly by other men's beliefs, setting philosophy above
Christianity. Words of his, trenchant enough to justify this impression,
are not recorded, and would have been out of keeping with a genius of
which one characteristic is the tendency to lose itself in a refined and
graceful mystery. The suspicion was but the time-honoured form in which
the world stamps its appreciation of one who has thoughts for himself
alone, his high indifferentism, his intolerance of the common forms of
things; and in the second edition the image was changed into something
fainter and more conventional. But it is still by a certain mystery in
his work, and something enigmatical beyond the usual measure of great
men, that he fascinates, or perhaps half repels. His life is one of
sudden revolts, with intervals in which he works not at all, or apart
from the main scope of his work. By a strange fortune the works on which
his more popular fame rested disappeared early from the world, as the
_Battle of the Standard_; or are mixed obscurely with the work of
meaner hands, as the _Last Supper_. His type of beauty is so exotic that
it fascinates a larger number than it delights, and seems more than that
of any other artist to reflect ideas and views and some scheme of the
world within; so that he seemed to his contemporaries to be the
possessor of some unsanctified and secret wisdom; as