La Gioconda is infinitely wise, for she has lived. That supreme poise is only possible to one who knows. All the experiences and emotions of manifold existence have etched and molded that form and face until the body has become the perfect instrument of the soul.
Like every piece of intense personality, this picture has power both to repel and to attract. To this woman nothing is either necessarily good or bad. She has known strange woodland loves in far-off eons when the world was young. She is familiar with the nights and days of Cleopatra, for they were hers—the lavish luxury, the animalism of a soul on fire, the smoke of curious incense that brought poppy- like repose, the satiety that sickens—all these were her portion; the sting of the asp yet lingers in her memory, and the faint scar from its fangs is upon her white breast, known and wondered at by Leonardo who loved her. Back of her stretches her life, a mysterious, purple shadow. Do you not see the palaces turned to dust, the broken columns, the sunken treasures, the creeping mosses and the rank ooze of fretted waters that have undermined cities and turned kingdoms into desert seas? The galleys of Pagan Greece have swung wide for her on the unforgetting tide, for her soul dwelt in the body of Helen of Troy, and Pallas Athene has followed her ways and whispered to her the secrets even of the gods.
Aye! not only was she Helen, but she was Leda, the mother of Helen. Then she was Saint Anne, mother of Mary; and next she was Mary, visited by an Angel in a dream, and followed by the Wise Men who had seen the Star in the East.
The centuries, that are but thoughts, found her a Vestal Virgin in Pagan Rome when brutes were kings, and lust stalked rampant through the streets. She was the bride of Christ, and her fair, frail body was flung to the wild beasts, and torn limb from limb while the multitude feasted on the sight.
True to the central impulse of her soul the Dark Ages rightly called her Cecilia, and then Saint Cecilia, mother of sacred music, and later she ministered to men as Melania, the Nun of Tagaste; next as that daughter of William the Conqueror, the Sister of Charity who went throughout Italy, Spain and France and taught the women of the nunneries how to sew, to weave, to embroider, to illuminate books, and make beauty, truth and harmony manifest to human eyes. And so this Lady of the Beautiful Hands stood to Leonardo as the embodiment of a perpetual life; moving in a constantly ascending scale, gathering wisdom, graciousness, love, even as he himself in this life met every experience halfway and counted it joy, knowing that experience is the germ of power. Life writes its history upon the face, so that all those who have had a like experience read and understand. The human face is the masterpiece of God.
BOTTICELLI
In Leonardo's "Treatise on Painting," only one contemporary is named—Sandro Botticelli…. The Pagan and Christian world mingle in the work of Botticelli; but the man himself belonged to an age that is past and gone—an age that flourished long before men recorded history. His best efforts seem to spring out of a heart that forgot all precedent, and arose, Venus-like, perfect and complete, from the unfathomable Sea of Existence. —Walter Pater
[Illustration: Botticelli]
One Professor Max Lautner has recently placed a small petard under the European world of Art, and given it a hoist to starboard, by asserting that Rembrandt did not paint Rembrandt's best pictures. The Professor makes his point luminous by a cryptogram he has invented and for which he has filed a caveat. It is a very useful cryptogram; no well-regulated family should be without it—for by it you can prove any proposition you may make, even to establishing that Hopkinson Smith is America's only stylist. My opinion is that this cryptogram is an infringement on that of our lamented countryman, Ignatius Donnelly.
But letting that pass, the statement that Rembrandt could not have painted the pictures that are ascribed to him, "because the man was low, vulgar and untaught," commands respect on account of the extreme crudity of the thought involved. Lautner is so dull that he is entertaining.