e, his pitiful child's
arms and projecting clavicles, straddling with hand on hip; was it
possible that a great hero, the slayer of a giant (Domenico's notions
of giants were taken rather from the romances of chivalry recited in
the market than from study of Scripture) should have been made like
that? And so, like his great contemporary Mantegna in far-off Lombardy,
Domenico turned that eager curiosity with which he had previously sought
for the secret of flayed limbs and fleshless skeletons, to studying the
mystery of proportion and beauty which was hidden, more subtly and
hopelessly, in the broken marbles of the Pagans.

It happened one day, somewhere about the year 1485, that he was called
to examine a group of Bacchus and a Faun, recently brought from Naples
by the banker Neri Altoviti, of the family which once owned a charming
house, recently destroyed, whose triple row of pillared balconies used
to put an odd Florentine note into the Papal Rome, turning the swirl of
the Tiber opposite Saint Angelo's into a reach of the Arno. The houses
of the Altovitis in Florence were in that portion of the town most
favoured by the fifteenth century, already a little way from the market:
the lion on the tower of the Podesta, and the Badia steeple printing the
sky close by; while not far off was the shop where the good bookseller
Vespasiano received orders for manuscripts, and conversed with the
humanists whose lives he was to write. The Albizis and Pandolfinis,
illustrious and numerous families, struck in so many of their members by
the vindictiveness of the Medicis, had their houses in the same quarter,
and at the corner of the narrow street hung the carved escutcheon--two
fishes rampant--of the Pazzis: their house shut up and avoided by the
citizens, who had so recently seen the conspirators dangling in hood and
cape from the windows of the public palace. The house of the Altovitis
was occupied on the ground floor by great warehouses, whose narrow,
grated windows were attainable only by a steep flight of steps. The
court was surrounded on three sides by a cloister or portico, which
repeated itself on the first and second floors, with the difference that
the lowest arches were supported by rude square pillars, ornamented
with only a carved marigold, while the uppermost weighed on stout oaken
shafts, between which ropes were stretched for the drying of linen; and
the middle colonnade consisted of charming Tuscan columns, where Si