[Illustration: FIG. 27.--Poliphilo by the Stream. From the “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.” Venice, 1499.] [Illustration: FIG. 28.--Poliphilo and the Nymphs. From the “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.” Venice, 1499.] [Illustration: FIG. 29--Ornament. From the “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.” Venice, 1499.] These designs, of which the few that can be given afford only a slight idea, so various are they in beauty and feeling, have been attributed to many illustrious masters, Giovanni Bellini and Raphael among others; but perhaps the conjecture which assigns them to Benedetto Montagna is the most probable. They show what remarkable artistic taste there was even in the inferior masters of Italy. “They are,” says Professor Sydney Colvin,[38] “without their like in the history of wood-cutting; they breathe the spirit of that delightful moment when the utmost of imaginative _naïveté_ is combined with all that is needed of artistic accomplishment, and in their simplicity are in the best instances of a noble composition, a masculine firmness, a delicate vigor and graceful tenderness in the midst of luxurious or even licentious fancy, which cannot be too much admired. They have that union of force and energy with a sober sweetness, beneath a last vestige of the primitive, which in the northern schools of Italy betokens the concurrent influence of the school of Mantegna and the school of Bellini.” Italy never afterward produced so noble a monument of the art as this work of its early days. [Illustration: FIG. 30.--Poliphilo meets Polia. From the “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.” Venice, 1499.] [Illustration: FIG. 31.--Nero Fiddling. From the Ovid of 1510. Venice.] [Illustration: FIG. 32.--The Physician. From the “Fasciculus Medicinæ.” Venice, 1500.] [Illustration: FIG. 33.--Hero and Leander. From the Ovid of 1515. Venice.]