animate world, as
to senseless vegetables and plants, and to the lower kinds of living
creatures, as birds, fishes, and reptiles; whereas nobler creatures, as
lions, tigers, horses, cattle, stags, and unicorns, are robed in white
or dull skins, the noblest breeds, indeed, both of horses, as those of
the Soldans of Egypt and Numidia, and of oxen, as those of the valleys
of the Clitumnus and Chiana, being white; whence, indeed, the poet Virgil
has said that such latter are fittest for sacrifice to the immortal
gods; 'hinc albi, Clitumne, greges,' and what follows. And man, the
masterpiece of creation, is white; and only in the less noble portions
of his body, which have no sensitiveness and no shape (being, indeed,
vegetative and deciduous), as hair and beard, partaking of colour.
Wherefore the ancient Romans and Greeks, portraying their gods, chose
white marble for material, and not gaudy porphyry or jasper, and
portrayed them naked. Whence certain moderns, calling themselves
painters, who muffle our Lord and the Holy Apostles in many-coloured
garments, thinking thereby to do a seemly and honourable thing, but
really proceeding basely like tailors, might take a lesson if they
could."

The quotation from Virgil, and the allusion to the statues of the
immortal gods, shows that Neroni must have written these lines in
the later part of his career, when already under the influence of
that humanist Filarete, who played so important a part in his life,
and when possessed already by those notions which brought him to so
strange and fearful an end. But from his earliest years he sought
for form, despising other things. He passed with contempt through a six
months' apprenticeship at Perugia, railing at the great factory of
devotional art established there by Perugino, of whom, with his rows of
splay-footed saints and spindle-shanked heroes, he spoke with the same
sweeping contempt as later Michelangelo. At Siena, which he described
(much as its earlier artists painted it) as a town of pink toy-houses
and scarlet toy-towers, he found nothing to admire save the marble
fountain of Jacopo della Quercia, for the antique group of the Three
Graces, later to be drawn by the young Raphael, had not yet been given
to the cathedral by the nephew of Pius II. The sight of these noble
reliefs, particularly of the one representing Adam and Eve driven out of
Paradise, with their strong and well-understood nudities, determined him
to exchange pain