for paintings
more suited to Pagan than to Christian countries; and indeed Fra Girolamo
Savonarola included much work of Domenico's in his very finest burnings.

Such familiarity with nude form was not easily attained in the fifteenth
century. Mediaeval civilisation gave no opportunities for seeing naked
or half-naked people moving freely as in the antique palaestra; and
there had yet been discovered too few antique marbles for the empiric
knowledge of ancient sculptors to be empirically inherited by modern
ones. Observation of the hired model, utterly insufficient in itself,
required to be supplemented by a thorough science of the body's
mechanism. But physiology and surgery were still in their infancy;
and artists could not, as they could after the teachings of Vesalius,
Fallopius, and Cesalpinus, avail themselves of the science accumulated
for medical purposes. Verrocchio and the Pollaiolos most certainly, and
Donatello almost without a doubt, practised dissection as a part of
their business, as Michelangelo, with the advantage of twenty years of
their researches behind him, practised it passionately in his turn. Of
all the men of his day, Domenico Neroni, however, was the most fervent
anatomist. He ran every risk of contagion and of punishment in order
to procure corpses from the hospital and the gibbet. He undermined his
constitution by breathing and handling corruption, and when his friends
implored him to spare his health, he would answer, although unable to
touch food for sickness, by paraphrasing the famous words of Paolo
Uccello, and exclaiming from among his grisly and abominable properties,
"Ah! how sweet a thing is not anatomy!"

There was nothing, he said--for he spoke willingly to any one who
questioned him on these subjects--more beautiful than the manner in
which human beings are built, or indeed living creatures of any kind;
for, in the scarcity of corpses and skeletons, he would pick up on his
walks the bones of sheep that had died on the hill-sides, or those of
horses and mules furbished up by the scavenger dogs of the river-edge.
It was marvellous to listen to him when he was in the vein. He sat
handling horrible remains and talking about them like a lover about his
mistress or a preacher about God; indeed, bones, muscles, and tendons
were mistress and god all in one to this fanatical lover of human form.
He would insist on the loveliness of line of the scapula, finding in the
sweep of the _acromi