d and purple
striped print frocks; creatures with heads set on necks like towers or
columns, necks firm in broad, well-fleshed chest as branches in a tree's
trunk; great penthouses of reddish yellow or lustreless black crimped
hair over the forehead; the forehead, like the cheeks, furrowed a good
deal--perhaps we dainty people might say, faded and wrinkled by work in
the burning sun and the wind; women whom you see shovelling bread into
the heated ovens, or plashing in winter with bare arms in half-frozen
streams, or digging up a turnip field in the drizzle; or on a Sunday,
standing listless by their door, surrounded by rolling and squalling
brats, and who, when they slowly look up at the passer-by, show us, on
those monumental faces of theirs, a strange smile, a light of bright
eyes and white teeth; a smile which to us sophisticated townspeople is
as puzzling as certain sudden looks in some comely animal, but which yet
makes us understand instinctively that we have before us a Nencia; and
that the husband yonder, though he now swears at his wife, and perhaps
occasionally beats her, has nevertheless, in his day, dreamed, argued,
raged, and sung to himself just like Lorenzo's Vallera.

The "Nencia da Barberino" is certainly Lorenzo dei Medici's masterpiece:
it is completely and satisfactorily worked out. Yet we may strain
possibilities to the point of supposing (which, however, I cannot for a
moment suppose) that this "Nencia" is a kind of fluke; that by an
accident a beautiful and seemingly appreciative poem has resulted where
the author, a mediaeval realist of a superior Villon sort, had intended
only a piece of utter grotesqueness. But important as is the "Nencia,"
Lorenzo has left behind him another poem, greatly inferior in
completeness, but which settles beyond power of doubt that in him the
Renaissance was not merely no longer mediaeval, but most intensely
modern. This poem is the "Ambra." It is simply an allegorical narrative
of the inundation, by the river Ombrone, of a portion, called Ambra, of
the great Medicean villa of Poggio a Caiano. Lorenzo's object was
evidently to write a semi-Ovidian poem, of a kind common in his day, and
common almost up to our own: a river-god, bearded, crown of reeds, urn,
general dampness and uproariousness of temper, all quite correct; and a
nymph, whom he pursues, who prays to the Virgin huntress to save her
from his love, and who, just in the nick of time, is metamorphosed into