Take again another head, still more full of sentiment, but of a
different kind, a little drawing in red chalk which every one remembers
who has examined at all carefully the drawings by old masters at the
Louvre. It is a face of doubtful sex, set in the shadow of its own hair,
the cheek-line in high light against it, with something voluptuous and
full in the eyelids and the lips. Another drawing might pass for the
same face in childhood, with parched and feverish lips, but with much
sweetness in the loose, short-waisted childish dress, with necklace and
bulla, and in the daintily bound hair. We might take the thread of
suggestion which these two drawings offer, when thus set side by side,
and, following it through the drawings at Florence, Venice, and Milan,
construct a sort of series, illustrating better than anything else
Leonardo's type of womanly beauty. Daughters of Herodias, with their
fantastic head-dresses knotted and folded so strangely to leave the
dainty oval of the face disengaged, they are not of the Christian
family, or of Raffaelle's.
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