h its
sensitiveness to pain, and its emphasis on what is called "the inner
life," that I want further to illustrate the meaning of {188}
discernment in art, by referring to the representation of the spirit of
the Renaissance in the painting of Leonardo da Vinci. I quote the
following from Pater's description of "La Gioconda":

The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is
expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to
desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are
come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out
from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of
strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it
for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful
women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into
which the soul with all its maladies has passed. All the thoughts and
experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which
they have of power to refine and make expressive the human form, the
animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reveries of the middle age
with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the
pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks
among which she sits; like the vampire, which has been dead many times,
and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep
seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange
webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of
Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to
her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the
delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged
the eyelids and the hands.[7]

The power of Renaissance painting is not wholly a matter of color,
texture, modelling, and composition; for though it contains these and
many {189} sensuous and perceptual values besides, it conveys through
them with surpassing truth and delicacy ideas as evasive as they are
subtle and profound. There is an ecstasy of mind in the discernment of
these ideas, and a blend of emotion that follows in their train, both
of which are conditioned by insight; that is, by a process that is
neither sensuous, perceptual, nor emotional merely, but, in an
additional sense, intellectual.

The interest in apprehension may thus be exhibited and satisfied in