“The stain!” he said. “What folly! It confounds the issue. I shall not find my Christ!”
He dismissed his model, and returned to the ducal Palace. On his way he encountered a birdseller; a number of wee songsters imprisoned in a yoke of netted sieves hung over his shoulders. He paid the man for all, cut the strings, and released the pretty flock. A wide-eyed child, his moist lips parted in an eager smile, watched the quivering escape heavenwards.
“There stands my Christ,” thought the artist. “For the moment his small soul is free, free from the world, free from the shadow of the Fall, mounting with the happy little birds all mirrored in his eyes.”
From that day he set aside the divine problem, and confined his labours to the grosser figures of his group. He worked, forgetting his former model, and Lucio, the ideal of guileless manhood, passed into the mist of half-remembered things.
Messer Leonardo was a very great man. His genius was as multifarious as it was gigantic; but of its very nature it confessed a flaw. One vast conception in him pushed out another, so that the last was for ever claiming precedence over all before. His mind was a great hall thronged with uncompleted Titans. A scheme once realised, the way pointed out, he was impatient of its mere achievement. No supreme creator ever left so many immortal works unfinished—the varnishing and the sand-papering, so to speak, were matters for lesser souls.
Of these, perhaps, was the Prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the aged Padre Bandelli. He “kicked” over the intolerable tardiness of the artist; years rolled by—five years, ten years, and more—and still the fresco was not done. At length all was finished saving only two heads, those of the betrayer and the Betrayed, the opposite poles of darkness and glory; and there once more, and finally it seemed, the composition halted. Bandelli protested, grew wroth, complained at last to the Duke himself. Leonardo responded with a demand for models—the one wholly guiltless of original sin, the other—Judas. Of the latter he lived in hopes; if he could find him, he might help him to the former, as the deepest darkness of a well betrays the stars above; if he could not, he might use the Prior himself at a pinch. The Duke laughed, sided with his favourite, and the Prior withdrew discomfited. More years went by.
At length one day, as he was strolling in the streets with Duke Ludovico, his Magnificence hanging familiarly on his arm, Leonardo looked up and saw his Judas. He was one of two criminals, being carted for their gibbeting, who went by at the moment. The rogues jogged in a tumbril, their arms spliced back, their teeth grinning without merriment. A monk, holding up a small crucifix and gabbling mechanically as he ogled the passing petticoats, faced them; the executioner, brawny and impassive, sat before, chewing a fig; a ragged contadino with straw in his shoes, leading a horse as dusty and threadbare as an old overbeaten carpet, shambled at the head. Leonardo exclaimed “At last!” and adding excitedly “Release unto me Barabbas!” halted the procession with a gesture. “Give me this man,” he appealed to the Duke, “for my Judas. Eternal infamy shall be his in lieu of death.”
It was a trifling gift; Ludovico graciously, of his omnipotence, bestowed it. Leonardo begged permission to return to the Palace, and thence ascended to his atelier, that unclean hostage slinking at his heels. In the room he stood the creature up against a wall and studied him. Low cupidity, bestial self-indulgence, sin at its meanest and rankest were struggling there, out of the abject terror of death, to reassert themselves. Squalid, fulsome, with battered evil face and wild eyes shadowed under hair, the tint and almost the texture of ruined thatch, the thing fawned on its preserver, and was repelled, and fawned again, but at a distance, and stood whimpering. And thenceforward Leonardo set himself to unravel the riddle of this monstrous life.
He wrought for many days; and then gradually a strange awe began to assail him. There was something emerging from the darkness, a light, a vibration, which shook and confused his purpose. What was it? A Judas—with the glimmer of some lost angel reappearing, faint and indefinite, in the backward abysm of his eyes! That would never do—or would it—perhaps the best of all? He stayed his hand in amazement. The wonder grew, and with it some emotion, some reluctant sympathy with the debased thing—reciprocal, he somehow felt it to be.
And then one morning suddenly the creature spoke. It was in the refectory, whither he had been conveyed, that the Master might consider him in his actual relation to the composition—whence, still flowered, faint and mystic, the unsolved riddle of the Christ—and his voice came in a moment like a breaking water: