anished from
Florence at the same time as my friend, and we left our Mother of the
Lilies to seek and find very dissimilar fortunes. This fountain had a
niche above it, in which niche he that built the fountain designed, no
doubt, to set some image of his own design. But he never carried out his
purpose, why or wherefore I neither knew nor cared, and in that niche
some Magnifico that was kindly minded to the people had set up a stone
image, a relic of the old beautiful pagan days, that had been unearthed
in some garden of his elsewhere. It was the figure of a very comely
youth that was clothed in a Grecian tunic, and because, when it was
first dug up, it showed some traces of color on the tunic and the naked
legs and arms and the face and the hair, therefore one of the artificers
of the said Magnifico took it upon himself to paint all as, so he said,
it had once been painted. And he made the limbs a flesh color, and gave
the face its pinks, and the lips their carnation, and the eyes their
blackness, very lively to see; and he adorned the hair very craftily
with gold-leaf, and he painted the shirt of the adorable boy a very
living crimson. It was a very beautiful piece of work with all these
embellishments, and though there were some that said it was an idol and
should not be tolerated, yet, for the most part, the Florentines liked
it well enough, and it saved the cost of a new statue for the vacant
space.

So it stood there this day that I think of and write of, a very brave
and radiant piece of color, too, for the eye to rest on that had wearied
of looking at the gray stone palace hard by, the palace of Messer Folco
Portinari, that showed so gray and grim in all weathers, save where the
brown rust on its great iron lamps and on the great rings in the wall
lent its dulness some hint of pigment. Over the wall that hid the garden
of the palace I saw and see crimson roses hang and scarlet pomegranate
blossoms. Opposite this gloomy house of the great man that was so well
liked of the Florentines, against the pillars of the arcade, there
stood, as I recall it, a bookseller's booth, where manuscripts were
offered for sale on a board. Here he that had the means and the
inclination could treat himself at a price to the wisdom of the ancient
world. I fear I was never one of those so minded. The wisdom of my own
world contented me to the full, and ever it seemed to me that it
mattered less what Messer Plato or Messer Cicero said