tting wings on shoulders, and claws
on fingers and toes, how wonderfully the sphere of its angelic and
diabolic characters would be contracted! Reduced only to the sources of
expression in face or movements, you might still find in good early
sculpture very sufficient devils; but the best angels would resolve
themselves, I think, into little more than, and not often into so much
as, the likenesses of pretty women, with that grave and (I do not say
it ironically) majestic expression which they put on, when, being very
fond of their husbands and children, they seriously think either the
one or the other have misbehaved themselves.

12. And it is not a little discouraging for me, and may well make you
doubtful of my right judgment in this endeavor to lead you into closer
attention to the bird, with its wings and claws still in its own
possession;--it is discouraging, I say, to observe that the beginning
of such more faithful and accurate observation in former art, is
exactly coeval with the commencement of its decline. The feverish and
ungraceful natural history of Paul, called, "of the birds," Paolo degli
Uccelli, produced, indeed, no harmful result on the minds of his
contemporaries, they watched in him, with only contemptuous admiration,
the fantasy of zoological instinct which filled his house with painted
dogs, cats, and birds, because he was too poor to fill it with real
ones. Their judgment of this morbidly naturalistic art was conclusively
expressed by the sentence of Donatello, when going one morning into the
Old Market, to buy fruit, and finding the animal painter uncovering a
picture, which had cost him months of care, (curiously symbolic in its
subject, the infidelity of St. Thomas, of the investigatory fingering
of the natural historian,) "Paul, my friend," said Donatello, "thou art
uncovering the picture just when thou shouldst be shutting it up."

13. No harm, therefore, I repeat, but, on the contrary, some wholesome
stimulus to the fancy of men like Luca and Donatello themselves, came
of the grotesque and impertinent zoology of Uccello.

But the fatalest institutor of proud modern anatomical and scientific
art, and of all that has polluted the dignity, and darkened the
charity, of the greater ages, was Antonio Pollajuolo of Florence.
Antonio (that is to say) the Poulterer--so named from the trade of his
grandfather, and with just so much of his grandfather's trade left in
his own disposition, that being s