It
is so with the so-called Saint John the Baptist of the Louvre--one of
the few naked figures Leonardo painted--whose delicate brown flesh and
woman's hair no one would go out into the wilderness to seek, and whose
treacherous smile would have us understand something far beyond the
outward gesture or circumstance. But the long, reedlike cross in the
hand, which suggests Saint John the Baptist, becomes faint in a copy at
the Ambrosian Library, and disappears altogether in another, in the
Palazzo Rosso at Genoa. Returning from the last to the original, we are
no longer surprised by Saint John's strange likeness to the Bacchus
which hangs near it, which set Theophile Gautier thinking of Heine's
notion of decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves, after the fall of
paganism, took employment in the new religion. We recognise one of those
symbolical inventions in which the ostensible subject is used, not as
matter for definite pictorial realisation, but as the starting-point of
a train of sentiment as subtle and vague as a piece of music.
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