by-past master, as with its
germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of
something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work.
Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image
defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express
historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady,
embodied and beheld at last. What was the relationship of a living
Florentine to this creature of his thought? By means of what strange
affinities had the person and the dream grown up thus apart, and yet so
closely together? Present from the first incorporeally in Leonardo's
thought, dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio, she is found present
at last in Il Giocondo's house. That there is much of mere portraiture
in the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, the
presence of mimes and flute-players, that subtle expression was
protracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and by renewed
labour never really completed, or in four months and as by stroke of
magic, that the image was projected?

*Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson in the lips and
cheeks, lost for us.

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 outward form, the animalism of
Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie 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, she 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 o