he saw
with astonishment his friend Vittorio's indifference to these wonders.
Count Benedetto, it was clear, was resigned to his nephew's lack of
interest. The old man doubtless knew that he represented to the youth
only the rich uncle whose crotchets must be humoured for the sake of
what his pocket may procure; and such kindly tolerance made Odo regret
that Vittorio should not at least affect an interest in his uncle's
pursuits.

Odo's eagerness to see and learn filled Count Benedetto with a simple
joy. He brought forth all his treasures for the boy's instruction and
the two spent many an afternoon poring over Piranesi's Roman etchings,
Maffei's Verona Illustrata, and Count Benedetto's own elegant
pencil-drawings of classical remains. Like all students of his day he
had also his cabinet of antique gems and coins, from which Odo obtained
more intimate glimpses of that buried life so marvellously exhumed
before him: hints of traffic in far-off market-places and familiar
gestures of hands on which those very jewels might have sparkled. Nor
did the Count restrict the boy's enquiries to that distant past; and for
the first time Odo heard of the masters who had maintained the great
classical tradition on Latin soil: Sanmichele, Vignola, Sansovino, and
the divine Michael Angelo, whom the old architect never named without
baring his head. From the works of these architects Odo formed his first
conception of the earlier, more virile manner which the first contact
with Graeco-Roman antiquity had produced. The Count told him, too, of
the great painters whose popularity had been lessened, if their fame had
not been dimmed, by the more recent achievements of Correggio, Guido,
Guercino, and the Bolognese school. The splendour of the stanze of the
Vatican, the dreadful majesty of the Sistine ceiling, revealed to Odo
the beauty of that unmatched moment before grandeur broke into bombast.
His early association with the expressive homely art of the chapel at
Pontesordo and with the half-pagan beauty of Luini's compositions had
formed his taste on soberer lines than the fashion of the day affected;
and his imagination breathed freely on the heights of the Latin
Parnassus. Thus, while his friend Vittorio stormed up and down the quiet
rooms, chattering about his horses, boasting of his escapades, or
ranting against the tyranny of the Sardinian government, Odo, at the old
Count's side, was entering on the great inheritance of the past.