of the Louvre, and Ludovico's pale,
anxious face still remains in the Ambrosian library. Opposite is the
portrait of Beatrice d'Este, in whom Leonardo seems to have caught some
presentiment of early death, painting her precise and grave, full of the
refinement of the dead, in sad earth-coloured raiment, set with pale
stones.

Sometimes this curiosity came in conflict with the desire of beauty; it
tended to make him go too far below that outside of things in which art
begins and ends. This struggle between the reason and its ideas, and the
senses, the desire of beauty, is the key to Leonardo's life at
Milan--his restlessness, his endless re-touchings, his odd experiments
with colour. How much must he leave unfinished, how much recommence!
His problem was the transmutation of ideas into images. What he had
attained so far had been the mastery of that earlier Florentine style,
with its naive and limited sensuousness. Now he was to entertain in this
narrow medium those divinations of a humanity too wide for it, that
larger vision of the opening world, which is only not too much for the
great, irregular art of Shakspere; and everywhere the effort is visible
in the work of his hands. This agitation, this perpetual delay, give him
an air of weariness and ennui. To others he seems to be aiming at an
impossible effect, to do something that art, that painting, can never
do. Often the expression of physical beauty at this or that point seems
strained and marred in the effort, as in those heavy German
foreheads--too German and heavy for perfect beauty.

For there was a touch of Germany in that genius which, as Goethe said,
had "thought itself weary"--muede sich gedacht. What an anticipation of
modern Germany, for instance, in that debate on the question whether
sculpture or painting is the nobler art.* But there is this difference
between him and the German, that, with all that curious science, the
German would have thought nothing more was needed; and the name of
Goethe himself reminds one how great for the artist may be the danger of
overmuch science; how Goethe, who, in the Elective Affinities and the
first part of Faust, does transmute ideas into images, who wrought many
such transmutations, did not invariably find the spell-word, and in the
second part of Faust presents us with a mass of science which has almost
no artistic character at all. But Leonardo will never work till the
happy moment comes--that moment of bien-etre, w