He began to look at his picture with all his own full artist vision, and was soon in that mood of conviction of the perfectibility, and so of the significance, of his picture--a conviction essential to the most intense fervor, excluding all other interests--in which alone he could work.

Christ's foreshortened leg was not right, though.

He took his palette and began to work.

As he corrected the leg he looked continually at the figure of John in the background, which his visitors had not even noticed, but which he knew was beyond perfection.