To turn from these to the Cranachs in Vienna is to be in another world
of art: an art more purposely perverse, more curiously unnatural; but,
where his genius is shown at its greatest, is in an exquisite Judith
holding the head of Holofernes, which lies, open-eyed, all its red
arteries visible, painted delicately. She wears orange and red clothes,
with collars and laces, and slashed sleeves through which many rings are
seen on her fingers; she has a large red hat placed jauntily on her
head. She is all peach-blossom and soft, half-cruel sweetness with all
the wicked indifference of her long narrow eyes, the pink mouth and
dimpled chin. She is a somnambulist, and the sword she holds is scarcely
stained. There are two drops of blood on the table on which she rests
the great curled head with its open eyes; her fingers rest on the
forehead almost caressingly. She is _Monna Lisa_, become German and
bourgeoise, having certainly forgotten the mysterious secret of which
she still keeps the sign on her face.
Writing in Florence on Leonardo da Vinci I used by way of comparison two
Greek marbles I had seen in London; one, the head of an old man, which
is all energy and truth--comparable only in Greek work, with the drunken
woman in Munich, and, in modern art, with _La Vieille Heaulmière_ of
Rodin; the other, a woman's head, which ravishes the mind. The lips and
eyes have no expression by which one can remember them; but some
infinitely mysterious expression seems to flow through them as through
the eyes and lips of a woman's head by Leonardo. And all this reminds me
of certain unforgettable impressions; and, most of all, when in Bologna
I saw, in the Museo Civico, the spoils of Etruscan sepulchres, that
weighed on me heavily; and, at the same time, I felt an odor of death,
such as I had not even felt in Pompeii; where in so frightful a step
backward of twenty centuries, the mind reels, clutching at that somewhat
pacifying thought, for at least its momentary relief. Here were the
bodies of men and women, molded for ever in the gesture of their last
moment, and these rigid corpses are as vivid in their interrupted life
as the damp corpses in the morgue. In Bologna, as I was pursued by the
sight of the hairpins of dead women, there flashed on me this wonderful
sentence of Leonardo: "Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the
withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she
had twice been carried away."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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