'Jesus was troubled in spirit, and testified and said, Verily verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me. Then the disciples looked one on another, doubting of whom he spake. Now there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of his disciples whom Jesus loved.'
Giovanni again raised his eyes to the fresco. The faces of the apostles were so animated that he seemed to hear their speech, to look into the depths of their souls, confounded as they were by the most mysterious, the most terrible of all catastrophes that have ever taken place—the birth of that sin by which God was to die.
Specially was he impressed by Judas, by St. Peter, and St. John. The head of Judas was not yet painted, and the body, bent backward, but dimly outlined. Clutching desperately at the bag with convulsive fingers, he had overturned the salt-cellar, and the salt was spilled. Peter, impetuous in his wrath, was starting up from behind, a knife still in his right hand, his left on the shoulder of John, as if asking the beloved disciple 'of whom doth He speak?' With his silver hair, with his splendid resentment, his whole frame showed that fiery zeal, that thirst for great deeds, with which, upon understanding the ineluctable sufferings of his Master he was to cry 'Lord, why cannot I follow thee now? I will lay down my life for thy sake!' John, on the contrary, with his long silken tresses, his eyelids lowered as if in the peace of sleep, his folded hands, the long oval of his face—seemed the ideal of calm and heavenly serenity. Alone among the disciples he knew no suffering, no fear, no wrath.
Giovanni saw, and he said to himself, 'Here is the true Leonardo! And I had doubted and wellnigh believed the calumnies. The man impious who created that? Nay, who among men is closer to Christ than he?'
The painter, meantime, having completed the face of John with delicate touches of the brush, began the charcoal outline of the head of Jesus. Vainly, however; he had meditated upon that head for ten years, yet still he could not accomplish even the first sketch. Always when confronted by that emptiness where the divine countenance should appear, the artist trembled with mortal anguish and the sense of his own impotence. Throwing the charcoal aside, passing a cloth over the few lines he had lightly traced, he fell into one of those reveries which sometimes lasted for entire hours. Giovanni ventured to approach him, and saw his face as it were aged, severe, wearing the imprint of unremitting tension, of silent despair.
Yet, his eyes falling on those of his pupil, Leonardo said kindly—
'Well, then, amico mio, what say you of it?'
'What words have I, Master? It is beautiful, with a beauty beyond aught in this world. None other has so understood that scene! But nay, I will not speak—I cannot.'
His voice shook with tears; but presently he added in a low voice, 'One thing I would ask. Among such faces, what can be the face of Judas?'
The master, without answering, handed him a paper sketch. It showed a face terrible but not repulsive, not wicked even, but big with infinite grief, with the profound bitterness of great knowledge.