The unhappy Byron also wrote to somebody: “The Venus is more for admiration than for love. What struck me most was the mistress of the Raphael portrait.” Alas! nobody believes now that the picture has anything to do with La Fornarina.
As for Shelley, when in 1819 he saw at Florence the Medusa attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, he broke into lyric raptures,
“Its horror and its beauty are divine,
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, &c. &c.
* * *
“’Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;
For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare,
Kindled by that inextricable error! . . .”
Kindled indeed by that inextricable error! For the Medusa is now given up by every connoisseur. It is a mere inartistic futility and to-day every lover of the arts must grow stony at the sight of it. That immortal line “the tempestuous loveliness of terror” is the only thing to its credit, though some might count, too, the passage in which Pater gloats over its beauty of conception.