utcheons on to the marble
river-god of the yard of the Capitol below. Then also, where pines and
laurels still root in the unrifled tombs, the skeleton feudal fortress,
gutted as by an earthquake, alongside of the tower of Caecilia Metella.
These were the places to which my thoughts were for ever recurring; to
them, and to nameless other spots, the street-corner, for instance,
where an Ionic pillar, with beaded and full-horned capital, is walled
into the side of an insignificant modern house. I know not whether, in
consequence of this straining to see the meeting-point of Antiquity and
the Middle Ages (like the fancy, sometimes experienced, to reach the
confluence of rivers), or rather as a cause thereof, but a certain story
has long lurked in the corners of my mind. Twenty years have passed since
first I was aware of its presence, and it has undergone many changes. It
is presumably a piece of my inventing, for I have neither read it nor
heard it related. But by this time it has acquired a certain traditional
veracity in my eyes, and I give to the reader rather as historical fact
than as fiction the study which I have always called to myself: _Pictor
Sacrilegus_.

I

Domenico, the son of Luca Neroni, painter, sculptor, goldsmith, and
engraver, about whom, owing either to the scarcity of his works or
the scandal of his end, Vasari has but a few words in another man's
biography, must have been born shortly before or shortly after the year
1450, a contemporary of Perugino, of Ghirlandaio, of Filippino Lippi,
and of Signorelli, by all of whom he was influenced at various moments,
and whom he influenced by turns.

He was born and bred in the Etruscan town of Volterra, of a family which
for generations had exercised the art of the goldsmith, stimulated,
perhaps, by the sight of ornaments discovered in Etruscan tombs, and
carrying on, peradventure, some of the Etruscan traditions of two
thousand years before. The mountain city, situate on the verge of the
malarious seaboard of Southern Tuscany, is reached from one side through
windings of barren valleys, where the dried-up brooks are fringed,
instead of reed, with the grey, sand-loving tamarisk; and from the other
side, across a high-lying moorland of stunted heather and sere grass,
whence the larks rise up scared by only a flock of sheep or a mare and
her foal, and you journey for miles without meeting a house or a clump
of cypresses. In front, with the white road zigzag