Identifier: greatpicturesassx00sing (find matches)
Title: Great pictures, as seen and described by famous writers
Year: 1899 (1890s)
Authors: Singleton, Esther, d. 1930, ed. and tr
Subjects: Painting
Publisher: New York : Dodd, Mead and Company
Contributing Library: Boston Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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and would have been outof keeping with a genius of which one characteristic is thetendency to lose itself in a refined and graceful mystery.The suspicion was but the time-honoured form in whichthe world stamps its appreciation of one who has thoughtsfor himself alone, his high indifferentism, his intolerance ofthe common forms of things ; and in the second editionthe image was changed into something fainter and moreconventional. But it is still by a certain mystery in hiswork, and something enigmatical beyond the usual measureof great men, that he fascinates, or perhaps half repels.His life is one of sudden revolts, with intervals in whichhe works not at all, or apart from the main scope of hiswork. By a strange fortune the works on which his morepopular fame rested disappeared early from the world, asthe Battle of the Standard; or are mixed obscurely with 1 The spelling commonly used is Mona Lisa. The editor has thought best,however, to keep the form of spelling used by Walter Pater.
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Monna Lisa. L. da Vinci. MONNA LISA I43 the work of meaner hands, as the Last Supper. His typeof beauty is so exotic that it fascinates a larger numberthan it delights, and seems more than that of any otherartist to reflect ideas and views and some scheme of theworld within ; so that he seemed to his contemporaries tobe the possessor of some unsanctified and secret wisdom ;as to Michelet and others to have anticipated modern ideas.He trifles with his genius, and crowds all his chief workinto a few tormented years of later life; yet he is sopossessed by his genius that he passes unmoved throughthe most tragic events, overwhelming his country andfriends, like one who comes across them by chance onsome secret errand. . . . His art, if it was to be something in the world, must beweighted with more of the meaning of nature and purposeof humanity. Nature was u the true mistress of higher in-telligences. So he plunged into the study of nature.And in doing this he followed the manner of the o

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