contemporaries of Poggius and AEneas Sylvius, of
Ficinus and Politian, that the art of the Romans and Greeks should, like
their poetry, philosophy, and even their virtues, be of transcendent and
unqualified splendour. Why it should be thus they asked as little as why
the sun shines, mediaeval men as they really were, and accepting quite
simply certain phenomena as the result of inscrutable virtues. Even later,
when Machiavelli began to examine why the ancients had been more valorous
and patriotic than his contemporaries, nay, when Montaigne expounded
with sceptical cynicism the superior sanity and wisdom of Pagan days,
people were satisfied to think--when they thought at all--that antique
art was excellent because it belonged to antiquity. And it was not till
the middle of the eighteenth century that the genius of Winkelmann brought
into fruitful contact the study of ancient works of art, and that of the
manners and notions of antiquity, showing the influence of a civilisation
which cultivated bodily beauty as an almost divine quality, and making
us see behind that beautiful nation of marble the generations of living
athletes, among whom the sculptor had found his critics and his models.

To a man like Domenico Neroni, devoid of classical learning and
accustomed to struggling with anatomy and perspective, the problem of
ancient art was not settled by the fact of its antiquity. He had gone
once more to Rome on purpose to see as many old marbles as possible,
and he brought to their study the feverish curiosity with which in
former years he had flayed and cut up corpses and spent his nights in
calculations of perspective. To such a mind, where modern scientific
methods were arising among mediaeval habits of allegory and mysticism,
the statues and reliefs which he was perpetually analysing became a sort
of subsidiary nature, whose riddles might be read by other means than
mere investigation; for do not the forces of Nature, its elemental
spirits, give obedience to wonderful words and potent combinations of
numbers?

Certain significant facts had flashed across his mind in his studies
of that almost abstract, nay, almost cabalistic thing, the science of
bodily proportions. It was plain that the mystery of antique beauty--the
ancient symmetry, _symmetria prisca_ as a humanist designs it in his
epitaph for Leonardo da Vinci--was but a matter of numbers. For a man's
length, if he stand with outstretched arms, is the same from