the present
hour, and for a few only, perhaps chiefly for himself. Other artists
have been as careless of present or future applause, in
self-forgetfulness, or because they set moral or political ends above
the ends of art; but in him this solitary culture of beauty seems to
have hung upon a kind of self-love, and a carelessness in the work of
art of all but art itself. Out of the secret places of a unique
temperament he brought strange blossoms and fruits hitherto unknown; and
for him, the novel impression conveyed, the exquisite effect woven,
counted as an end in itself--a perfect end.

And these pupils of his acquired his manner so thoroughly, that though
the number of Leonardo's authentic works is very small indeed, there is
a multitude of other men's pictures through which we undoubtedly see
him, and come very near to his genius. Sometimes, as in the little
picture of the Madonna of the Balances, in which, from the bosom of His
mother, Christ weighs the pebbles of the brooks against the sins of men,
we have a hand, rough enough by contrast, working upon some fine hint or
sketch of his. Sometimes, as in the subjects of the Daughter of Herodias
and the Head of John the Baptist, the lost originals have been re-echoed
and varied upon again and again by Luini and others. At other times the
original remains, but has been a mere theme or motive, a type of which
the accessories might be modified or changed; and these variations have
but brought out the more the purpose, or expression of the original. It
is so with the so-called Saint John the Baptist of the Louvre--one of
the few naked figures Leonardo painted--whose delicate brown flesh and
woman's hair no one would go out into the wilderness to seek, and whose
treacherous smile would have us understand something far beyond the
outward gesture or circumstance. But the long, reedlike cross in the
hand, which suggests Saint John the Baptist, becomes faint in a copy at
the Ambrosian Library, and disappears altogether in another, in the
Palazzo Rosso at Genoa. Returning from the last to the original, we are
no longer surprised by Saint John's strange likeness to the Bacchus
which hangs near it, which set Theophile Gautier thinking of Heine's
notion of decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves, after the fall of
paganism, took employment in the new religion. We recognise one of those
symbolical inventions in which the ostensible subject is used, not as
matter for definite pict