“ He is the only painter who has known how to be beautiful without being antique. He expresses subtleties, suavities, elegancies, quite unknown to the ancients. The beautiful Greek heads are, in their irreproachable correctness, merely serene; those of Leonardo are sweet, but not from any weakness of soul—rather from a sort of indulgent and benign superiority. It seems as if spirits of quite another nature than our own look out at us from his canvases, through the eye-holes of the human physical mask, with something of pitying commiseration, and something like a hint of malice. ”

“ Has such a smile ever really hovered on human lips, or was it caught from the face of that mocking sphinx who forever guards the Palace of the Beautiful?
Painter of the mysterious, the ineffable, the twilight, Leonardo's pictures may be compared to music in a minor key. Time, which has robbed other ancient paintings of half their charm, has but added charm to his, by deepening- the shadows in which the imagination loves to wander—shadows like veils, which half dissolve to show the vision of a secret thought; colors that are dead, like the colors of things in moonlight. ”

“ THE place which Leonardo da Vinci holds in the history of art must always be unique. He stands alone among the painters of the Renaissance, by reason not only of the rare perfection of the high intellectual qualities of his art, but of the extraordinary influence which he exerted upon his contemporaries, and the universal character of his genius. Never before or since in the annals of the human race has the same passionate desire for knowledge been combined with the same ardent love of beauty, never have artistic and scientific powers been united in the same degree as in this wonderful man. ”

“ He did nothing to degrade art; he only exalted it to a perfection where certain charming qualities of the delicious primitives became impossible.
Leonardo is the most thoughtful of all painters, unless it be Albrecht Dürer. The mind and its infinite suggestions are his realm. With Raphael it is beauty and harmony; with Michelangelo it is passion and strength; with him it is thought and feeling—thought so deep that voice can never utter it, feelings so sensitively delicate, so preternaturally refined, that they elude our grasp ”

“ Anne and the Virgin the case is quite different, for into these figures Leonardo has put all his genius, and in them the interest of the picture centres. One is the mother of the other; but Leonardo chose to represent them both as young with the same youth, beautiful with the same haunting beauty, and no logical objections prevented his carrying out this design. The pure loveliness and harmony of the two figures is enthralling. They are both enchantresses, dowered with a strange, mysterious and sensuous beauty that seems made up of light and shade,—pure spirit, with no admixture of human clay. ”

“ The attendant angel has, perhaps, the finest head and the proudest that ever pencil traced on canvas. Half youth, half heavenly maid, she must belong to the highest order of heaven's hierarchy, with that face so pure, so ethereal in its loveliness, the omnipresent smile half hidden at the corner of her lips. Hers surpasses all human beauty, and her face seems rather that face of which men may only dream. ”

“ Childlike and sincere, their vision ranges over a narrow field, and depicts imperfectly the things that it beholds; while his powerful mind grasps the most hidden secrets of nature and of the human heart, and his wizard fingers transfer them to the canvas with unerring skill. They are still mediæval, while he is modern, belonging not to the past, but to our own and all succeeding generations. Their art is an attempt; his the perfection of achievement. They are fascinating by their immaturity ”

“ Art, nature, life, the mysteries of existence, the infinite capacity of human thought, the riddle of the world, all that the Greeks called Pan, so swayed and allured him that, while he dreamed and wrought and never ceased from toil, he seemed to have achieved but little. ”

“ 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 color. ”

“ A kind of basaltic cave, in which flows a stream that through its limpid water shows the pebbles of its bed, shelters the holy group, while beyond, through the arched entrance to the grotto, lies a rocky landscape, sparsely set with trees, wherein a river runs;—and all of this is of such an indefinable color that it seems like those faint wonderlands through which we wander in our dreams. ”

“ THE world, perhaps, contains no example of a genius so universal as Leonardo's, so creative, so incapable of self-contentment, so athirst for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far in advance of his own and of subsequent ages. ”

“ Painting was only one of the varied forms in which his activity was displayed. As sculptor, architect, and engineer Leonardo was alike illustrious in his day; as a philosopher and man of Science he has been justly hailed as the precursor of Galileo, of Bacon, and of Descartes. Alexander von Humboldt proclaimed him to be the greatest physicist of the fifteenth century, the one man of his age who "united a remarkable knowledge of mathematics with the most admirable intuition of nature;" ”

“ Nowhere more fully than in the Virgin's face has the master expressed that seductive and profane loveliness which haunted his own visions. The landscape which serves as a background to the figures—a landscape of strewn rocks and water and purple distances hemmed in by azure mountains with the rugged and broken outlines that he loved—adds an ineffable something to their mystery, and their grandeur. ”

“ To make himself rich or famous by availing himself of any of the superiorities he had acquired was quite outside his desire; he labored only to prove to himself that he was superior. Having created the one most beautiful of portraits, the one most beautiful picture, the one most beautiful fresco, the one most beautiful cartoon, he was content, and gave his mind to other things,—to the modelling of an immense horse, to the building of the Naviglio canal, to the contriving of engines of war, to the invention of a diving-armor, flying-machines, and other more or less chimerical imaginations. ”

“ There Leonardo lived until he was twenty-four years of age. As he grew up he attracted attention not only by his personal beauty and great strength, but also by his passion for learning. Music and mathematics were among his favorite studies, but he was still fonder of drawing and modelling. At fifteen he entered the studio of Andrea Verocchio, who, as the representative of the scientific school of Florentine artists, was well fitted to develop Leonardo's peculiar genius. ”

“ His charm is reserved for those who by deeper examination are enabled to discern and appreciate those subtle and hidden meanings with which his works are charged. Leonardo da Vinci's name has been and ever will be a popular one; his art can never be that; it is too lofty, too sublime. ”

“ Leonardo's turn for physical science led him to study the technicalities of art with fervent industry. Whatever his predecessors had acquired in the knowledge of materials, the chemistry of colors, the mathematics of composition, the laws of perspective, and the illusions of chiaroscuro, he developed to the utmost. ”

“ A good answer to account for the delay was always ready on the painter's lips, as that the man of genius works most when his hands are idlest; Judas, sought in vain through all the thieves' resorts in Milan, is not found; "I cannot hope to see the face of Christ except in Paradise." "I can do anything possible to man," he wrote to Lodovico Sforza, "and as well as any living artist either in sculpture or painting;" ”

“ Nothing could be more admirable than the foreshortening of the two tender little crouching bodies, nothing more finely modelled than the little limbs, with their infinitely delicate gradations of shadow. ”

“ He knew that the tides obeyed the moon, and that the waters of the sea must rise highest at the equator. Long before Bacon he evolved a philosophy, looking to human experiences and to nature for all solution of his doubts. ”

“ He looked into the heavens, and perceived that the world was not the centre of created things, forestalling the discovery of Copernicus; and he saw that the universe is held together by the attraction of gravitation. ”

“ Anne,' in the Louvre, and the angel of Verocchio's 'Baptism,' in the Academy at Florence. The greater number of authoritative modern critics are now, however, disposed to admit these as genuine; while, on the contrary, they consider that the 'Virgin of the Rocks' in the National Gallery, the 'Belle Feronniere,' in the Louvre, and the 'Portrait of an Unknown Princess,' in the Ambrosiana at Milan, are not Leonardo's work, although each of them has its stout partisans. Other paintings formerly attributed to Leonardo da Vinci seem to have no just claims to be reckoned as his work. ”

“ A better fortune has attended the other great creation of these last years of the painter's residence in his native city. This is the portrait, now in the Louvre, of 'Mona Lisa,' the fair Neapolitan wife of Francesco del Giocondo, magistrate and prior of Florence.
The bitter disappointment which Leonardo felt at the failure of his painting in the Palazzo Vecchio was increased by a vexatious lawsuit into which he was drawn, owing to the refusal of his half-brothers to allow him to share in his father's and uncle's inheritance ”

“ His countenances express incredible sensibility and mental power; they overflow with unexpressed ideas and emotions. Alongside of them Michelangelo's personages are simply heroic athletes; Raphael's virgins are only placid children whose souls are still asleep. His beings feel and think through every line and trait of their physiognomy. Time is necessary to enter into communion with them ”

“ He was the first modern artist in whom absolute technical skill and a great creative mind went hand in hand, and in neither respect has he ever been surpassed.
No man has ever made greater changes in the technique of painting. ”

“ A man who innovated so much as Leonardo, who converted the works of Jiis predecessors into relics of the past, and lifted art to a higher and a broader plane, necessarily bore it away from many a sweet dell where at times we still delight to linger ”

“ Unfortunately, he could not satisfy himself, and tried one design after another, without deciding upon any of them, until even the duke began to lose patience. Three years and a half later, however, at the wedding of Lodovico's niece Bianca, Leonardo's model was sufficiently advanced to be placed on the piazza of the Castello, under a triumphal arch. Poets and chroniclers hailed the great statue as one of the wonders of the age. They compared Leonardo to Phidias and Praxiteles, and Lodovico to Pericles and Augustus. ”

“ The ideal representation of a dramatic moment, the life breathed into each part of the composition, the variety of the types chosen to express the varieties of character, and the scientific distribution of the twelve apostles in four groups of three around the central Christ, mark the appearance of a new spirit of power and freedom in the arts. ”

“ Truly we have seen them before—not on this earth indeed; but perhaps in some far pre-existence of which they awaken the faint echo of a memory.—FROM THE FRENCH.
GEORGE B. ROSE 'RENAISSANCE MASTERS'
LEONARDO DA VINCI was the first perfect painter among the moderns. Compared with him his predecessors are all primitives. Between their art and his there yawns an immense chasm. They are striving, with doubtful success, to give tangible form to simple ideas; he bodies forth with consummate power thoughts too subtle and profound for vocal utterance. ”

“ He who thus penetrated into the most secret parts of nature preferred always the more to the less remote, what, seeming exceptional, was an instance of law more refined, the construction about things of a peculiar atmosphere and mixed lights. ”

“ After dwelling on his capacity as military engineer and his ability to construct cannons and scaling-ladders, mortars and engines of beautiful and useful shape, he concludes: "In time of peace, I believe I can equal any one in architecture, in constructing public and private buildings, and in conducting water from one place to another. ”

“ They are suggestive because we seek to realize what they are trying to express; he is infinitely more so because he represents more than our minds can seize. We feel that he was familiar with all the thoughts that haunt us now, perhaps with some that will only come to our remote descendants. ”

“ A few authorities, Richter among them, believe that more than the left-hand kneeling angel in this picture was Leonardo's work, because much of it is painted in oils, while Verocchio's medium was tempera; but the majority of critics still consider that Leonardo's share in the work was confined to the figure assigned to him by Vasari. ”