ting for sculpture, and made him hasten to Florence to
see the works of Donatello and of Ghiberti.

Domenico Neroni must have spent several years of his life--between
1470 and 1480--in Florence, but little of his work has remained in that
city,--little, at least, that we can identify with certainty. For taking
service, as he did, with the Pollaiolos, Verrocchio, Nanni di Banco, and
even with Filippino and Botticelli, wherever his inquisitive mind could
learn, or his restless, fastidious, laborious talent gain him bread, it
is presumable that much of his work might be discovered alongside that
of his masters, in the collective productions of the various workshops.
It is possible thus that he had a hand in much metal and relief work
of the Pollaiolos, and perhaps even in the embroidering and tapestries
of which they were undertakers; also in certain ornaments, friezes of
Cupids and dolphins, and exquisite shell and acanthus carving of the
monuments of Santa Croce; and it may be surmised that he occasionally
assisted Botticelli in his perspective and anatomy, since that master
took him to Rome when commissioned to paint in the chapel of Pope
Sixtus. Indeed, in certain little-known studies for Botticelli's Birth
of Venus and Calumny of Apelles one may discover, in the strong sweep of
the outline, in the solid fashion in which the figures are planted on
their feet--all peculiarities which disappear in the painted pictures,
where grace of motion and exquisitive research take the place of solid
draughtsman-ship--the hand of the artist whom the restless desire to
confront ever new problems alone prevented from attaining a place among
the great men of his time.

For there was in Domenico Neroni, from the very outset of his career, a
curiosity after the hidden, a passion for the unattainable, which kept
him, with greater power than many of his contemporaries, and vastly
greater science, a mere student throughout his lifetime. He resembled
in some respects his great contemporary Leonardo, but while the eager
inquisitiveness of the latter was tempered by a singular power of
universal enjoyment, a love of luxury and joyousness in every form, the
intellectual activity of Neroni was exasperated into a kind of unhappy
mania by the fact that its satisfaction was the only happiness that he
could conceive. He would never have understood, or understanding would
have detested, the luxurious _dilettante_ spirit which made Leonardo
prefer pa