The rst of Pater's actual Renaissance studies was the essay on Leonardo da Vinci, published in November 1869. Within the more technical context of poetry and the ne arts, Pater continues to search for new and more adequate formulas of human "wholeness" and "completeness," especially in the "engaging personalities" of his Renaissance hero-artists. Everywhere in these studies occurs the theme of the abandonment, or modication, or "use" of the old religion." In the search for formulas for his "strange," "singular," curious," "subtle," "exotic," "remote" souls, Christianity, or at least medieval Christian art, becomes the supplier of the "inwardness" that Pater demands as a supplement to Greek form. But Pater's successive formulas for the place of Christianity in Western culture, some of them more conciliatory than in the earliest essays, to some extent reect, in their mutual incompatibility, the accretive and random development of the Renaissance volume. It is no exaggeration to say that in his Leonardo essay Pater continues to take his basic denitions and evaluations from Matthew Arnold. Arnoldian phrasing is at the very heart of the essay. "Curiosity and the desire of beauty — these are the two elementary forces in Leonardo's genius; curiosity often in conict with the desire of beauty, but generating, in union with it, a type of subtle and curious grace". Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, which had appeared in book form in January 1869, makes "curiosity" (or "a desire after the things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are") and the "keen desire for beauty" — the "sweetness and light" of the farewell lecture — the essential components of culture or the Greek spirit. Moreover the next words of Pater's essay conrm the Arnoldian matrix: "The movement of the fteenth century was two-fold: partly the Renaissance, partly also the coming of what is called the 'modem spirit,' with its realism, its appeal to experience; it comprehended a return to antiquity, a return to nature". Arnold's Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, "On the Modern Element in Literature" (1857), nally published in February 1869, had discussed the characteristics of "modern" periods like Periclean Athens: great energy, great freedom, "the most unprejudiced and intelligent observation of human affairs," and "intellectual maturity" or the "critical spirit". Arnold's full analysis of the "modern spirit" came in "Heinrich Heine" (1863) where he underlines the lack of correspondence between the spirit and the needs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the vast inherited system of institutions and dogmas. "Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment" also conceives the Renaissance as "a return towards the pagan spirit.... towards the life of the senses and the understanding," a "reaction against the rule of the heart and the imagination". Finally, in Culture and Anarchy Arnold had spoken of the Renaissance as "that great re-awakening of Hellenism, that irresistible return of humanity to nature and to seeing things as they are". The central motif of Pater's volume, that of an enlarged and enriched version of human nature at the heart of the Italian Renaissance, is sounded in the Leonardo essay. The agitation and restlessness of Leonardo's "sinister" art, essentially a conict between the reason and the senses, come from his "divinations of a humanity too wide" for the earlier Florentine style, "that larger vision of the opening world which is only not too much for the great, irregular art of Shakespeare". The holistic and inclusive quality of Pater's vision of an expanding human nature is apparent when he makes the Mona Lisa, in what is perhaps the most notorious passage in his writings, the embodiment of the old fancy of "a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences," or the symbol of the modern idea of "humanity as wrought upon, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life". Moreover, Leonardo becomes a hero of Arnoldian disinterestedness applied to the life of the artist. Setting the ends of art above "moral or political ends," for him "the novel impression conveyed, the exquisite effect woven, counted as an end in itself-a perfect end". The line of the other essays is set when Pater ends by dismissing the question of Leonardo's religion as irrelevant in one who set beauty before all else.