ound itself, while the saints are sucked into the background,
their accessories only, staff and gridiron, allowed to assert themselves
by a sharp shadow; a marvellous vision of white heavenly roses, their
pointed buds and sharp spines flourishing on martyrs' blood and incense,
grown into the close lips and long eyes, the virginal body and thin
hands of Mary. From these reliefs we come to the compositions, group
inside group, all shelving into portico and forest vista, of the pulpit
of Sta. Croce, the perspective bevelling it into concavities, like those
of panelling; the heads and projecting shoulders lightly marked as some
carved knob or ornament; to the magnificent compositions in light and
shade, all balancing and harmonising each other, and framed round by
garlands of immortal blossom and fruit, of Ghiberti's gates.

Nor is this all. The sculpture of the Renaissance, not satisfied with
having portrayed the real human being made of flesh and blood, of bone
and skin, dark-eyed or flaxen-haired, embodied in the marble the
impalpable forms of dreams. Its latest, greatest, works are those
sepulchres of Michelangelo, whose pinnacle enthrones strange ghosts of
warriors, and whose steep sides are the unquiet couch of divinities
hewn, you would say, out of darkness and the light that is as darkness.

A SEEKER OF PAGAN PERFECTION

BEING THE LIFE OF DOMENICO NERONI, PICTOR SACRILEGUS

Every time, of late years, of my being once more in Rome, I have been
subject to a peculiar mental obsession: retracing my steps, if not
materially, in fancy at least, to such parts of the city as bear witness
to the strange meeting of centuries, where the Middle Ages have altered
to their purposes, or filled with their significance, the ruined remains
of Antiquity.

Such places are scarcer than one might have expected, and for that
reason perhaps more impressive, more fragmentary and enigmatic. There
are the colossal columns--great trickles and flakes of black etching as
with acid their marble--of the temple of Mars Ultor, with that Tuscan
palace of Torre della Milizia rising from among them. There is, inside
Ara Coeli--itself commemorating the legend of Augustus and the Sibyl--the
tomb of Dominus Pandulphus Sabelli, its borrowed vine-garlands and satyrs
and Cupids surmounted by mosaic crosses and Gothic inscriptions; and
outside the same church, on a ground of green and gold, a Mother of God
looking down from among gurgoyles and esc