. Leonardo da Vinci, artist, thinker and man of science. o treats the littleintimate drama : the Virgin caressing her son, watching his pla^directing his education—and treats it with as much charm, if not wjthquite the same precision of touch. The playfulness, the lightness, andat the same time, the conviction with which he endows these scenes oftwo or three actors, are not to be rendered in words. They are idylsof the freshest and most innocent kind, without that note of melancholywhich the prescience of pain to come often puts in the eyes and on thelips of the young mother. The composition i
. Leonardo da Vinci, artist, thinker and man of science. o treats the littleintimate drama : the Virgin caressing her son, watching his pla^directing his education—and treats it with as much charm, if not wjthquite the same precision of touch. The playfulness, the lightness, andat the same time, the conviction with which he endows these scenes oftwo or three actors, are not to be rendered in words. They are idylsof the freshest and most innocent kind, without that note of melancholywhich the prescience of pain to come often puts in the eyes and on thelips of the young mother. The composition is curiously modern. How much of freedom thereis, even in the faces ! The artist, unfettered by traditional portraits,takes as model for the Virgin, Christ, the Apostles and Saints, the menand women around him. He troubles himself little about attributes,preserving or suppressing them according to the exigencies of hisscheme. He goes so far as to represent the Virgin with bare feet, aheresy into which Fra Angelico, nourished in the severe tradition of. FOK THE INFANT JOHN THE BAPTIST.(Mancc! Gallery, Caen.) LEONARDOS IDEA OF COLOUR 173 the Dominicans, would never have fallen, a heresy which orthodoxpainters abjured once more after the Council of Trent. But if Leo-nardo, like the majority of his Florentine contemporaries, brought hisdivinities down to earth, he gave a warmth and poetry to his concep-tions, well calculated to awaken religious fervour, and no painter,indeed, has passed for a more devout artist. Strange paradox!Leonardo and Perus^ino, the two artists Vasari charges with absolutescepticism, are just the two whose works breathe most eloquently offaith ! Leaving warmth and intensity of harmony to his fellow-student,Perugino, with his deep and brilliant greens and reds, his precise con-tours, his firm, and often hard modelling, Leonardo, in his Virgin of theRocks, as in all his later works, determined to win colour from shadesapparently the most neutral, greens vergin
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