here, 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 mode in which
the world stamps its appreciation of one who has thoughts for himself
alone, his high indifference, 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 sacred wisdom; as to Michelet and others to have
anticipated modern ideas. He trifles with his genius, and crowds all his
chief work into a few tormented years of later life; yet he is so
possessed by his genius that he passes unmoved through the most tragic
events, overwhelming his country and friends, like one who comes across
them by chance on some secret errand.

His legend, as the French say, with the anecdotes which every one knows,
is one of the most brilliant in Vasari. Later writers merely copied it,
until, in 1804, Carlo Amoretti applied to it a criticism which left
hardly a date fixed, and not one of those anecdotes untouched. The
various questions thus raised have since that time become, one after
another, subjects of special study, and mere antiquarianism has in this
direction little more to do. For others remain the editing of the
thirteen books of his manuscripts, and the separation by technical
criticism of what in his reputed works is really his, from what is only