ed, like the
famous Holy Face of Lucca, by angels. For an absolute contempt for the
artistic value of such miraculous images did not, in the mind of Neroni,
throw any doubt on their authenticity; in the same way that the passion
for antiquity, the hankering after Pagan beliefs, did not probably
interfere with the orthodoxy of so many of the humanists. Domenico,
besides, remembered that Virgil and Ovid, whom he had not read, but
whose fables he had sometimes been asked to illustrate, were constantly
talking of visions of gods and goddesses, nay, of their descending upon
earth to unite themselves with mortals in love or friendship, for he had
had to furnish designs for woodcuts representing Diana and Endymion,
Jupiter and Ganymede, the gods coming to Philemon and Baucis, and Apollo
tending the herds of Admetus. Neither did it occur to Domenico's mind
that the existence of the old gods might be a mere invention, or a mere
delusion of the heathen. For all their classic culture, the men of
the fifteenth century, as the men of the thirteenth for all their
scholasticism, were in an intellectual condition such as we rarely
meet with nowadays among educated persons; and Domenico, a mere
handicraftsman, had not learned from the study of Cicero and Plato to
examine and understand the difference between reality and fiction.
To him a scene which was frequently painted, an adventure which was
written down and could be read, was necessarily a reality. Dante had
spoken of the gods, and what Dante said was evidently true, the
allegorical meaning, the metaphor, entirely escaping this simple mind;
and Virgil, Homer, Ovid told the most minute details about gods and
goddesses, and they themselves were grave and learned men. Domenico did
not even think that the ancient gods were dead. Of course heaven was now
occupied by Christ and His saints, those heavenly hosts of whom he would
think, when he thought of them at all, as seated stepwise on a great
stand, blue and pink and green in dress, golden discs about their heads,
and an atmosphere of fretted gold, of swirling stencilled golden angels'
wings all round them, and God the Father, a great triangle blazing with
Alpha and Omega, above Jesus enthroned, and His mother; and it was they
who ruled things here, and to them he said his prayers night and
morning, and knelt in church. But _here_, somehow did not cover the
whole universe, nor did that pink and blue and gold miniature painter's
heaven e