Bachus and St. John the Baptist (The Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci p.345 - Dimitri Merejkowski)

“At this time the Master began a strange picture.

Sheltered by overhanging rocks, in a cool shadow among flowering grasses, sat a god; he was long-haired and fair as a woman, but languid and pale; his head crowned with vine-leaves, a spotted skin round his loins, a thyrsus in his hand. He sat with legs crossed and seemed to be listening, a hinting smile on his lips, his finger pointing in the direction whence came the sound, perhaps the song of Maenads, perhaps the voice of great Pan, that thrilling sound from which all living things must flee.

In Boltraffio’s casket Leonardo had found an amethyst gem, doubtless a gif from Monna Cassandra, with an engraving of Dyonisus. There were also stray leaves from Euripide’s tragedy, the Bacchae, translated from the Greek and copied out by Giovanni. Many times had Leonardo read these fragments; amongst them the address of Pentheus to the unknown god.

‘Ha! of thy form thou art not ill-favoured, stranger,

For woman’s tempting !

No wrestler thou, as show thy flowing locks

Down thy cheek floating, fraught with all desire;

And white from heedful tendance is thy skin,

Smit by no sunshafts, but made wan by shade,

While thou dost hunt desire with beauty’s lure’

And the chorus of Bacchantes, answering the impious king, extol Dyonisus as ‘the most terrible, the most beneficent of gods, who giveth to mortals the drunkeness of ecstasy.’

On the same page, side by side, with the verses from Euripides, Giovanni had copied verses from the Bible.

Leaving his Bachus unfinished, Leonardo began another picture, still more strange, of St. John the Baptist. He worked at it mor continuously and more rapidly than his won't, as if feeling that his days were numbered, that his strenght was every day declining, and that now or never he must give expression to that mystery which all his life he had hidden from men, -even from himself.

Soon he picture was sufficiently advanced for the conception to be clear. The background was dark, recalling the gloom of that cavern he had once described to Monna Lisa as the occasion of both curiosity and fear. Yet the dimness was not impenetrable, but blent with light, melting into it as smoke dissolves into sunlight, as distant music vibrates away into silence. And between the darkness and the perfect light appeared what at first seemed a phantom, but presently snowed more distinct than life itself; the face and figure of a naked youth, womanish, seductively beautiful, recalling the words of Pentheus.

But instead of the leopard’s skin wore a garment of camel’s hair; instead of the thyrsus tea carried a cross, Smiling, with bent head, as if listening, all expectation, all curiosity, yet half afraid, he pointed with one hand to the cross, with the other to himself, and on his lips the words seemed to treble:--

‘There cometh one after me whose shoe’s-latchet I am not worthy to unloose’”