Two questions remain, after much busy antiquarianism,
concerning Leonardo's death--the question of the exact form of
his religion, and the question whether Francis the First was
present at the time. They are of about equally little importance in
the estimate of Leonardo's genius. The directions in his will
concerning the thirty masses and the great candles for the church
of Saint Florentin are things of course, their real purpose being
immediate and practical; and on no theory of religion could these
hurried offices be of much consequence. We forget them in
speculating [129] how one who had been always so desirous of
beauty, but desired it always in such precise and definite forms,
as hands or flowers or hair, looked forward now into the vague
land, and experienced the last curiosity.
1869.
NOTES
113. *How princely, how characteristic of Leonardo, the answer,
Quanto più, un' arte porta seco fatica di corpo, tanto più è vile!
Return.
123. *Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson in
the lips and cheeks, lost for us.
125. +"[. . .] with Eastern merchants:" is the punctuation used in
the 1901 Macmillan edition. Macmillan's 1910 Library edition
erroneously uses a space followed only by a period. The Norton
Anthology editors emend the text to contain a comma after
"merchants" rather than a colon, but I have chosen to follow the
unusual, but seemingly correct, 1901 punctuation.
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
[130] IT is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard
poetry, music, and painting--all the various products of art--as but
translations into different languages of one and the same fixed
quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain
technical qualities of colour, in painting; of sound, in music; of
rhythmical words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in
art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic,
is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the
opposite principle--that the sensuous material of each art brings
with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the
forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind--is the
beginning of all true aesthetic criticism. For, as art addresses not
pure sense, still less the pure intellect, but the "imaginative
reason" through the senses, there are differences of kind in
aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differences in kind of the
gifts of sense themselves. Each art, therefore, having its own
peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm, has its own [131]
special mode of reaching the imagination, its own special
responsibilities to its material. One of the functions of aesthetic
criticism is to define these limitations; to estimate the degree in
which a given work of art fulfils its responsibilities to its special
material; to note in a picture that true pictorial charm, which is
neither a mere poetical thought or sentiment, on the one hand, nor
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