lved riddle that the
master read; a procession of shadows, cast by reality, that, entering the
camera lucida of the artist's brain, gained new and spiritual
quality.[239] In some of them his fancy seems to be imprisoned in the
labyrinths of hair; in others the eyes deep with feeling or hard with
gemlike brilliancy have caught it, or the lips that tell and hide so much,
or the nostrils quivering with momentary emotion. Beauty, inexpressive of
inner meaning, must, we conceive, have had but slight attraction for him.
We do not find that he drew "a fair naked body" for the sake of its carnal
charm; his hasty studies of the nude are often faulty, mere memoranda of
attitude and gesture. The human form was interesting to him either
scientifically or else as an index to the soul. Yet he felt the influence
of personal loveliness His favourite pupil Salaino was a youth "of
singular grace, with curled and waving hair, a feature of personal beauty
by which Lionardo was always greatly pleased." Hair, the most mysterious
of human things, the most manifold in form and hue, snakelike in its
subtlety for the entanglement of souls, had naturally supreme
attractiveness for the magician of the arts.

With like energy Lionardo bent himself to divine the import of ugliness.
Whole pages of his sketch-book are filled with squalid heads of shrivelled
crones and ghastly old men--with idiots, goitred cretins, criminals, and
clowns. It was not that he loved the horrible for its own sake; but he was
determined to seize character, to command the gamut of human physiognomy
from ideal beauty down to forms bestialised by vice and disease. The story
related by Giraldi concerning the head of Judas in the "Cenacolo" at
Milan, sufficiently illustrates the method of Lionardo in creating types
and the utility of such caricatures as his notebooks contain.[240]

It is told that he brought into his room one day a collection of
reptiles--lizards, newts, toads, vipers, efts--all creatures that are
loathsome to the common eye. These, by the magic of imagination, he
combined into a shape so terrible that those who saw it shuddered.
Medusa's snake-enwoven head exhaling poisonous vapour from the livid lips;
Leda, swanlike beside her swan lover; Chimaera, in whom many natures
mingled and made one; the conflict of a dragon and a lion; S. John
conceived not as a prophet but as a vine-crowned Faun, the harbinger of
joy:--over pictorial motives of this kind, attractive by