It is the landscape, not of dreams or of
fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand
with a miracle of finesse. Through Leonardo's strange veil of sight
things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light
of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or
through deep water.
And not into nature only; but he plunged also into human personality,
and became above all a painter of portraits; faces of a modelling more
skilful than has been seen before or since, embodied with a reality
which almost amounts to illusion, on dark air. To take a character as it
was, and delicately sound its stops, suited one so curious in
observation, curious in invention. So he painted the portraits of
Ludovico's mistresses, Lucretia Crivelli and Cecilia Galerani the
poetess, of Ludovico himself, and the Duchess Beatrice. The portrait of
Cecilia Galerani is lost; but that of Lucretia Crivelli has been
identified with La Belle Feroniere of the Louvre, and Ludovico's pale,
anxious face still remains in the Ambrosian library.
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