al
tower, with its hooks for chains, and its holes for beams, a vague vision
thereof rises in our mind. And in the presence of certain groups by
Signorelli, representing murderous scuffles or supernatural destruction,
we feel as if we had come in contact with the other reality of those
times, the thing which serene art and literature and the love of antiquity
have driven into the background. But the complete vision of the time and
place, the certain knowledge of that Rome of Sixtus IV. and Innocent
VIII., we can now no longer grasp, a dreadful phantom passing too
rapidly across the centuries.

It is with this feeling of impotence in my attempt to follow the
thoughts of an illiterate artist of the Renaissance, that I prefer
to conclude this strange story of the quest after antique beauty and
antique gods by quoting a page from one of the barbarous chroniclers
of mediaeval Rome. The entry in the continuation of Infessura's diary
is headed "Pictor Sacrilegus":--

"On the 20th July of the year of salvation fourteen hundred and
eighty-eight, there were placed for three days in a cage on high in
the Campo dei Fiori, Messer Niccolo Filarete, Canon of Sancto Joanne;
also Domenico, the Volterran, painter and architect to the magnificent
Cardinal Ascanio, and Frate Garofalo of Valmontone, they having been
discovered in the act of desecrating the Church of SS. Jervase and
Protasius, and stealing for magic purposes the ostensorium and many gold
chalices and reliquaries with precious stones; and it was Frate Garofalo
who, being versed in witchcraft and treasure finding, was the accomplice
of the above, and denounced them on the feast of Corpus Domini. And the
twenty-third of the said month of July they were justiced, and in this
manner. _Videlicet_, Filarete and Domenico, having been removed from the
cage, were dragged on hurdles as far as the square of San Joanni, and
Frate Garofalo went on an ass, all of them crowned with paper mitres.
Frate Garofalo was hanged to the elm-tree of the square. Of Filarete and
Domenico, the right hand was chopped off, after which they were burned
in the said square. And their chopped off right hands were taken to the
Capitol and nailed up above the gate, alongside of the She-wolf of
metal. Laus Deo."

VALEDICTORY

I

While gathering together the foregoing pages, written at different
periods and in different phases of thought, the knowledge has grown on
me that I was saying farewell to