inting to sculpture, because whereas the sculptor is covered
with a mud of marble dust, and works in a place disorderly with chips
and rubbish, the painter "sits at his easel, well dressed and at ease,
in a clean house adorned with pictures, his work accompanied by music
or the reading of delightful books, which, untroubled by the sound of
hammering and other noises, may be listened to with very great pleasure."
The workshop of Neroni, when he had one of his own, was full of cobwebs
and dust, littered with the remains of frugal and unsavoury meals,
and resolutely closed to the rich and noble persons in whose company
Leonardo delighted. And if Neroni, in his many-sided activity, eventually
put aside sculpture for painting, it was merely because, as he was wont
to say, a figure must needs look real when it is solid and you can
walk round it; but to make men and women rise out of a flat canvas or
plastered wall, and stand and move as if alive, is truly the work of a
god.

Men and women, said Neroni; and he should have added men and women nude.
For the studies which he made of the anatomy of horses and dogs were
destined merely to shed light on the construction of human creatures;
and his elaborate and exquisite drawings of undulating hills and sinuous
rivers, nay, of growths of myrtle and clumps of daffodils, were intended
as practice towards drawing the more subtle lines and curves of man's
body. And as to clothes, he could not understand that great anatomists
like Signorelli should huddle their figures quite willingly in immense
cloaks and gowns; still less how exquisite draughtsmen like his friend
Botticelli (who had the sense of line like no other man since Frate
Lippo, although his people were oddly out of joint) could take pleasure
in putting half-a-dozen veils atop of each other, and then tying them
all into bunches and bunches with innumerable bits of tape! As to himself,
he invariably worked out every detail of the nude, in the vain hope that
the priests and monks for whom he worked would allow at least half of
those beautiful anatomies to remain visible; and when, with infinite
difficulties and bad language, he gradually gave in to the necessity of
some sort of raiment, it was of such a nature--the hose and jerkins of
the men-at-arms like a second skin, the draperies of the womankind as
clinging as if they had been picked out of the river, that a great many
pious people absolutely declined to pay the agreed on sum