Opposite is the
portrait of Beatrice d'Este, in whom Leonardo seems to have caught some
presentiment of early death, painting her precise and grave, full of the
refinement of the dead, in sad earth-coloured raiment, set with pale
stones.
Sometimes this curiosity came in conflict with the desire of beauty; it
tended to make him go too far below that outside of things in which art
begins and ends. This struggle between the reason and its ideas, and the
senses, the desire of beauty, is the key to Leonardo's life at
Milan--his restlessness, his endless re-touchings, his odd experiments
with colour. How much must he leave unfinished, how much recommence!
His problem was the transmutation of ideas into images. What he had
attained so far had been the mastery of that earlier Florentine style,
with its naive and limited sensuousness. Now he was to entertain in this
narrow medium those divinations of a humanity too wide for it, that
larger vision of the opening world, which is only not too much for the
great, irregular art of Shakspere; and everywhere the effort is visible
in the work of his hands.
Pages:
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161