importance in the history of art as illustrated in the National Gallery.  It is the first in which the artist has given full play to his imagination, and entered the romantic world of classic legend, and, with one exception, the first which is purely secular in subject, and was designed for a “secular” purpose.  It probably once formed part of a marriage-chest.  The important share which the landscape has in the composition, and its serious attempt at perspective, are also worthy of note.  As an example of the master himself, of the painter of the great panoramic procession of the notables of his day, which under the title of the Adoration of the Kings, covers the walls of the chapel in the Medici Palace at Florence, of the designs of the history of S. Agostino at San Gemignano, and of the frescoes in Campo Santo at Pisa, it is of course extremely inadequate, but it suffices to indicate many paths which the young artist was to strike out from the old track which sufficed for his saint-like master.

    In the National Gallery (London, 1895).

MONNA LISA[9]

(LEONARDO DA VINCI)

WALTER PATER

In Vasari’s life of Leonardo da Vinci as we now read it there are some variations from the first edition.  There, the painter who has fixed the outward type of Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator, holding lightly by other men’s beliefs, setting philosophy above Christianity.  Words of his, trenchant enough to justify this impression, are not recorded, and would have been out of keeping with a genius of which one characteristic is the tendency to lose itself in a refined and graceful mystery.  The suspicion was but the time-honoured form in which the world stamps its appreciation of one who has thoughts for himself alone, his high indifferentism, his intolerance of the common forms of things; and in the second edition the image was changed into something fainter and more conventional.  But it is still by a certain mystery in his work, and something enigmatical beyond the usual measure of great men, that he fascinates, or perhaps half repels.  His life is one of sudden revolts, with intervals in which he works not at all, or apart from the main scope of his work.  By a strange fortune the works on which his more popular fame rested disappeared early from the world, as the Battle of the Standard; or are mixed obscurely with the work of meaner hands, as the Last Supper.  His type of beauty is so exotic that it fascinates a larger number than it delights, and seems more than that of any other artist to reflect ideas and views and some scheme of the world within; so that he seemed to his contemporaries to be the possessor of some unsanctified and secret wisdom; as to Michelet and others to have anticipated modern ideas.  He trifles with his genius, and crowds all his chief work into a few tormented years of later life; yet he is so possessed by his genius that he passes unmoved through the most tragic events, overwhelming his country and friends, like one who comes across them by chance on some secret errand....