energetically posed and surrounded by greenery. The thing is at once monumental and pastoral and its freedom and tonality almost as modern as a Besnard. I would willingly dwell longer on so sympathetic an artist, but can only refer the interested reader to Dr. F. M. Clapp’s two authoritative volumes. [Illustration: FIG. 163. Bronzino. Eleonora of Toledo and her son.—_Uffizi._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 165. Pontormo. The Halberdier.—_C. C. Stillman, N. Y._ ] For a century and more after Pontormo’s death in 1556 there are still occasional artists of talent at Florence, but there is no longer a Florentine school. The masterpieces of Michelangelo were at Rome, those of Raphael widely scattered. Conscious of her decline, Florence begins to import artists—the Flemish portraitist, Sustermans; the Venetian decorator, Luca Giordano. One of her own abler painters, Francesco Salviati, attaches himself to the Venetian manner. Being an academic city, Florence eschews the rugged naturalism of Caravaggio, but has no longer vitality enough to find a substitute of her own. In the late sixteenth century her fresco painting sinks to the pompous emptiness represented by Giorgio Vasari, or by the hardly better mythologies of the brothers Federigo and Taddeo Zuccaro. In the seventeenth century she still can produce an idyllist of great romantic and sensuous charm in a Francesco Furini and a genial illustrator in a Giovanni di San Giovanni. But such names only suggest the incoherence of the times. Florence is no longer a main current but an eddy, and what small flood-tide still runs courses in the more resolute academism of Bologna, which is to be capable of inspiring a Poussin; and in the raw naturalism of Naples, which is about to give lessons to a Velasquez. [Illustration: FIG. 166. Pontormo. Frescoed Lunette.—_Poggio a Cajano._ ] ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER V POETRY AND PAINTING IN THE RENAISSANCE Reversing the maxim _ut pictura poesis_, the Renaissance believed that painting should be poetical. Indeed the term _poesia_ is commonly applied to all painting of a mythological or idyllic sort. Angelo Poliziano’s unfinished but very popular poem on the joust of 1468 is lavish in descriptions, of which the painters made use. Botticelli surely got more than a hint for the Birth of Venus from stanzas xcix-ci of _La Giostra_, though the mood of the picture is wholly Sandro’s own and unlike the pagan joyousness of Poliziano. “One saw Born in the sea, free and joyous in her acts, A damsel with divine visage Driven ashore by the ardent zephyrs Balancing on a shell; and it seemed the heavens rejoiced thereat.”