o's life are more or less years of
wandering. From his brilliant life at court he had saved nothing, and he
returned to Florence a poor man. Perhaps necessity kept his spirit
excited: the next four years are one prolonged rapture or ecstasy of
invention. He painted the pictures of the Louvre, his most authentic
works, which came there straight from the cabinet of Francis the First,
at Fontainebleau. One picture of his, the Saint Anne--not the Saint Anne
of the Louvre, but a mere cartoon, now in London--revived for a moment a
sort of appreciation more common in an earlier time, when good pictures
had still seemed miraculous; and for two days a crowd of people of all
qualities passed in naive excitement through the chamber where it hung,
and gave Leonardo a taste of Cimabue's triumph. But his work was less
with the saints than with the living women of Florence; for he lived
still in the polished society that he loved, and in the houses of
Florence, left perhaps a little subject to light thoughts by the death
of Savonarola--the latest gossip (1869) is of an undraped Monna Lisa,
found in some out-of-the-way corner of the late Orleans collection--he
saw Ginevra di Benci, and Lisa, the young third wife of Francesco del
Giocondo. As we have seen him using incidents of sacred story, not for
their own sake, or as mere subjects for pictorial realisation, but as a
symbolical language for fancies all his own, so now he found a vent for
his thoughts in taking one of these languid women, and raising her, as
Leda or Pomona, Modesty or Vanity, to the seventh heaven of symbolical
expression.

La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the
revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness,
only the Melancholia of Duerer is comparable to it; and no crude
symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We
all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in
that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea.
Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least.* As often
happens with works in which invention seems to reach its limits, there
is an element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In that
inestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession of Vasari, were
certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty that
Leonardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to
connect with these designs of the elder,