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 version, in the Palazzo
Rosso at Genoa. Returning from the latter to the original, we are
no longer surprised by Saint John's strange likeness to the
Bacchus which hangs near it, and 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 [119] train of
sentiment, subtle and vague as a piece of music. No one ever
ruled over the mere subject in hand more entirely than Leonardo,
or bent it more dexterously to purely artistic ends. And so it
comes to pass that though he handles sacred subjects continually,
he is the most profane of painters; the given person or subject,
Saint John in the Desert, or the Virgin on the knees of Saint
Anne, is often merely the pretext for a kind of work which carries
one altogether beyond the range of its conventional associations.
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