and the lips. Another drawing might pass for the
same face in childhood, with parched and feverish lips, but with much
sweetness in the loose, short-waisted childish dress, with necklace and
bulla, and in the daintily bound hair. We might take the thread of
suggestion which these two drawings offer, when thus set side by side,
and, following it through the drawings at Florence, Venice, and Milan,
construct a sort of series, illustrating better than anything else
Leonardo's type of womanly beauty. Daughters of Herodias, with their
fantastic head-dresses knotted and folded so strangely to leave the
dainty oval of the face disengaged, they are not of the Christian
family, or of Raffaelle's. They are the clairvoyants, through whom, as
through delicate instruments, one becomes aware of the subtler forces of
nature, and the modes of their action, all that is magnetic in it, all
those finer conditions wherein material things rise to that subtlety of
operation which constitutes them spiritual, where only the finer nerve
and the keener touch can follow: it is as if in certain revealing
instances we actually saw them at their work on human flesh. Nervous,
electric, faint always with some inexplicable faintness, they seem to be
subject to exceptional conditions, to feel powers at work in the common
air unfelt by others, to become, as it were, receptacles of them, and
pass them on to us in a chain of secret influences.

But among the more youthful heads there is one at Florence which Love
chooses for its own--the head of a young man, which may well be the
likeness of Andrea Salaino, beloved of Leonardo for his curled and
waving hair--belli capelli ricci e inanellati--and afterwards his
favourite pupil and servant. Of all the interests in living men and
women which may have filled his life at Milan, this attachment alone is
recorded; and in return Salaino identified himself so entirely with
Leonardo, that the picture of Saint Anne, in the Louvre, has been
attributed to him. It illustrates Leonardo's usual choice of pupils, men
of some natural charm of person or intercourse like Salaino, or men of
birth and princely habits of life like Francesco Melzi--men with just
enough genius to be capable of initiation into his secret, for the sake
of which they were ready to efface their own individuality. Among them,
retiring often to the Villa of the Melzi at Canonica al Vaprio, he
worked at his fugitive manuscripts and sketches, working for