ome; for it is
with more noble things, even as with the rooms which we inhabit, which
strike us as small and dingy only on returning from larger and better
lighted ones.

It is to this period of incipient but ill-understood classicism that
belongs the only work of Domenico Neroni--at least the only work still
extant nowadays--which possesses, over and above its artistic or
scientific merit, that indefinable quality which we must simply call
_charm_; to this time, with the one exception of the famous woodcuts
done for Filarete. Domenico began about this time, and probably under
the stress of necessity, to make frontispieces for the books with which
Florentine printers were rapidly superseding the manuscripts of twenty
years before: collections of sermons, of sonnets, lives of saints,
editions of Virgil and Terence, quaint versified encyclopaedias, and even
books on medicine and astrology. From these little woodcuts, groups of
saints round the Cross, with Giotto's tower and Brunellesco's dome in
the distance, pictures of Fathers of the Church or ancient poets seated
at desks in neatly panelled closets--always with their globes, books,
and pot of lilies, and a vista of cloisters; or battles between chaste
viragos, in flying Botticellian draperies, and slim, naked Cupids; from
such frontispieces Domenico passed on to larger woodcuts, destined to
illustrate books never printed, or perhaps, like the so-called _playing
cards of Mantegna_ and certain prints of Robetta, to be bought as cheap
ornaments for walls. Some of those that remain to us have a classical
stiffness, reminding one of the Paduan school; others, and these his
best, remind one of the work of Botticelli. There is, for instance, the
figure of a Muse, elaborately modelled under her ample drapery, seated
cross-legged by a playing fountain, on a carpet of exquisitely designed
ground-ivy, a little bare trellis behind her, a tortoise lyre in her
hand; which has in it somewhat of that odd, vague, questioning character,
half of eagerness, half of extreme lassitude, which we find in
Botticelli. Only that in Neroni's work it seems not the outcome of a
certain dreamy spiritual dissatisfaction--the dissatisfaction which
makes us feel that Botticelli's flower-wreathed nymphs may end in the
pool under the willows like Ophelia--but rather of a torturing of line
and attitude in search of grace. Grace! Unclutchable phantom, which
had appeared tantalisingly in Neroni's recollecti