ricably
with this there is an element of mockery also; so that, whether in
sorrow or scorn, he caricatures Dante even. Legions of grotesques sweep
under his hand; for has not nature too her grotesques--the rent rock,
the distorting light of evening on lonely roads, the unveiled structure
of man in the embryo, or the skeleton?

All these swarming fancies unite in the Medusa of the Uffizii. Vasari's
story of an earlier Medusa, painted on a wooden shield, is perhaps an
invention; and yet, properly told, has more of the air of truth about it
than any-thing else in the whole legend. For its real subject is not the
serious work of a man, but the experiment of a child. The lizards and
glow-worms and other strange small creatures which haunt an Italian
vineyard bring before one the whole picture of a child's life in a
Tuscan dwelling--half castle, half farm--and are as true to nature as
the pretended astonishment of the father for whom the boy has prepared a
surprise. It was not in play that he painted that other Medusa, the one
great picture which he left behind him in Florence. The subject has been
treated in various ways; Leonardo alone cuts to its centre; he alone
realises it as the head of a corpse, exercising its powers through all
the circumstances of death. What may be called the fascination of
corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty.
About the dainty lines of the cheek the bat flits unheeded. The delicate
snakes seem literally strangling each other in terrified struggle to
escape from the Medusa brain. The hue which violent death always brings
with it is in the features: features singularly massive and grand, as we
catch them inverted, in a dexterous foreshortening, sloping upwards,
almost sliding down upon us, crown foremost, like a great calm stone
against which the wave of serpents breaks. But it is a subject that may
well be left to the beautiful verses of Shelley.

The science of that age was all divination, clairvoyance, unsubjected to
our exact modern formulas, seeking in an instant of vision to
concentrate a thousand experiences. Later writers, thinking only of the
well-ordered treatise on painting which a Frenchman, Raffaelle du
Fresne, a hundred years afterwards, compiled from Leonardo's bewildered
manuscripts, written strangely, as his manner was, from right to left,
have imagined a rigid order in his inquiries. But this rigid order was
little in accordance with the restlessness