y Pinturicchio: amused,
delighted, not moved nor fascinated; finding every moment something new,
some charming piece of gilding, some sweet plumed head, some quaint
little tree or town; making a journey of lazy discovery in a sort of
world of Prince Charmings, the real realm of the "Faery Queen," quite
different in enchantment from the country of Spenser's Gloriana, with
its pale allegoric ladies and knights, half-human, half-metaphysical,
and its make-believe allegorical ogres and giants. This is the real
Fairyland, this of Boiardo: no mere outskirts of Ferrara, with real,
playfully cynical Ferrarese men and women tricked out as paladins and
Amazons, and making fun of their disguise, as in Ariosto; no wonderland
of Tasso, with enchanted gardens copied out of Bolognese pictures and
miraculous forests learned from theatre mechanicians, wonders imitated
by a great poet from the cardboard and firework wonders of Bianca
Cappello's wedding feasts. This is the real fairyland, the wonderland of
mediaeval romance and of Persian and Arabian tales, no longer solemn or
awful, but brilliant, sunny, only half believed in; the fairyland of the
Renaissance, superficially artistic, with its lightest, brightest
fancies, and its charming realities; its cloistered and painted courts
with plashing fountains, its tapestried and inlaid rooms, its towered
and belvedered villas, its quaint clipped gardens full of strange
Oriental plants and beasts; and all this transported into a country of
wonders, where are the gardens of the Hesperides, the fountain of
Merlin, the tomb of Narcissus, the castle of Morgan-le-Fay; every quaint
and beautiful fancy, antique and mediaeval, mixed up together, as in some
Renaissance picture of Botticelli or Rosselli or Filippino, where
knights in armour descend from Pegasus before Roman temples, where
swarthy white-turbaned Turks, with oddly bunched-up trousers and
jewelled caftans, and half-naked, oak-crowned youths, like genii
descended, pensive and wondering, from some antique sarcophagus, and
dapper princelets and stalwart knights, and citizens and monks, all
crowd round the altar of some wonder-working Macone or Apolline or
Trevigante; some comic, dreadful, apish figure, mummed up in
half-antique, half-oriental garb. Or else we are led into some dainty,
pale-tinted panel of Botticelli, where the maidens dance in white
clinging clothes, strewing flowers on to the flower-freaked turf; or
into some of Poliphilo's