the mind of this Florentine, surrounded
hitherto by the intricacies of Gothic buildings. They had formed the
link to those fragments of ancient architecture, more intact but also
more hidden than in our days, whose dignity of proportion and grace of
detail--vast rosetted arches and slender rows of fluted pillars--our
modern and Hellenicised taste has treated with too ready contempt. For
this Vitruvian art, unoriginal and bungling in the eyes of our purists,
was yet full of the serenity, the ampleness which the Middle Ages lacked,
and affected the men of the fifteenth century much like a passage of
Virgil after a canto of Dante. It formed the fit setting for those
remains of antique sculpture which were then gradually beginning to be
drawn from the earth. Of such statues and reliefs--which the men of
the Renaissance regarded as the work rather of ancient Rome than of
Greece--a certain amount was beginning to be carried all over Italy, and
notably to the houses of the rich Florentine merchants, who incrusted
their staircase walls with inscriptions and carvings, and set statues
and sarcophagi under the columns of their courtyards. But such sculpture
was chosen rather for its portable character than its excellence; and
although single busts and slabs were diligently studied by Florentine
artists, there could not have existed in Florence a number of antiques
sufficient to impress the ideal of ancient art upon men surrounded on
all sides by the works of medieval painters and sculptors.

To the various sights of Rome must be due that sudden enlarging of
style, that kind of new classicism, which distinguishes the work of
fifteenth-century masters after their visit to the Eternal City, enabling
Ghirlandaio, Signorelli, Perugino, and Botticelli to make the Sixtine
Chapel, and even the finical Pinturicchio, the Vatican library, into
centres of fresh influence for harmony and beauty.

The result upon Domenico Neroni was a momentary confusion in all his
artistic conceptions. Too much of a seeker for new things, for secret
and complicated knowledge, to undergo a mere widening of style like his
more gifted or more placid contemporaries, he fell foul of his previous
work and his previous masters, without finding a new line or new ideals.
The frescoes of Castagno, the little panels of the Pollaiolos, nay, even
the works of Donatello, were no longer what they had seemed before his
Roman journey, and even what he had remembered them in R