orial realisation, but as the starting-point of
a train of sentiment as subtle and vague as a piece of music. No one
ever ruled over his subject more entirely than Leonardo, or bent it more
dexterously to purely artistic ends. And so it comes to pass that though
he handles sacred subjects continually, he is the most profane of
painters; the given person or subject, Saint John in the Desert, or the
Virgin on the knees of Saint Anne, is often merely the pretext for a
kind of work which carries one quite out of the range of its
conventional associations.

About the Last Supper, its decay and restorations, a whole literature
has risen up, Goethe's pensive sketch of its sad fortunes being far the
best. The death in childbirth of the Duchess Beatrice was followed in
Ludovico by one of those paroxysms of religious feeling which in him
were constitutional. The low, gloomy Dominican church of Saint Mary of
the Graces had been the favourite shrine of Beatrice. She had spent her
last days there, full of sinister presentiments; at last it had been
almost necessary to remove her from it by force; and now it was here
that mass was said a hundred times a day for her repose. On the damp
wall of the refectory, oozing with mineral salts, Leonardo painted the
Last Supper. A hundred anecdotes were told about it, his retouchings and
delays. They show him refusing to work except at the moment of
invention, scornful of whoever thought that art was a work of mere
industry and rule, often coming the whole length of Milan to give a
single touch. He painted it, not in fresco, where all must be impromptu,
but in oils, the new method which he had been one of the first to
welcome, because it allowed of so many afterthoughts, so refined a
working out of perfection. It turned out that on a plastered wall no
process could have been less durable. Within fifty years it had fallen
into decay. And now we have to turn back to Leonardo's own studies,
above all to one drawing of the central head at the Brera, which, in a
union of tenderness and severity in the face-lines, reminds one of the
monumental work of Mino da Fiesole, to trace it as it was.

It was another effort to lift a given subject out of the range of its
conventional associations. Strange, after all the misrepresentations of
the middle age, was the effort to see it, not as the pale Host of the
altar, but as one taking leave of his friends. Five years afterwards the
young Raffaelle, at Florence,