ging along their
crests, is a wilderness of barren, livid hillocks, separated by huge
fissures and crevassed by huge cracks, with here and there separate
rocks, projecting like Druidic stones from the valley of gaping ravines;
and beyond them all a higher mountain, among whose rocks and ilexes you
doubtfully distinguish the walls and towers of the Etruscan city. A mass
of Cyclopean wall and great black houses, grim with stone brackets and
iron hooks and stanchions, all for defence and barricade, Volterra looks
down into the deep valleys, like the vague heraldic animal, black and
bristly, which peers from the high tower of the municipal palace. One
wonders how this could ever have been a city of the fat, voluptuous
Etruscans, whose images lie propped up and wide-eyed on their stone
coffin-lids. The long wars of old Italic times, in which Etruria fell
before Rome, must have burned and destroyed, as one would think, the
land as well as the inhabitants, leaving but grey cinders and blackened
stone behind. Siena and Florence ruined Volterra once more in the Middle
Ages, isolating it near the pestilential Maremma and checking its growth
outward and inward. The cathedral, the pride of a mediaeval commonwealth,
is still a mean and unfinished building of the twelfth century. There
is no native art, of any importance, of a later period; what the town
possesses has come from other parts, the altar-pieces by Matteo di
Giovanni and Signorelli, for instance, and the marble candelabra,
carried by angels, of the school of Mino da Fiesole.

In this remote and stagnant town, the artistic training of Domenico
Neroni was necessarily imperfect and limited throughout his boyhood
to the paternal goldsmith's craft. Indeed, it seems likely that some
peculiarities of his subsequent life as an artist, his laboriousness
disproportionate to all results, his persistent harping on unimportant
detail, and his exclusive interest in line and curve, were due not
merely to an unhappy and laborious temperament, but also to the long
habit of an art full of manual skill and cunning tradition, which
presented the eye with ingenious patterns, but rarely attempted, save in
a few church ornaments, more of the domain of sculpture, to tell a story
or express a feeling.

Besides this influence of his original trade, we find in Domenico
Neroni's work the influence of his early surroundings. His native
country is such as must delight, or help to form, a painter of p