calmly, inexorably, and altogether justifiably ordained:—_It is not the invention of the painter which creates the picture; but an inviolable law, a tradition of the Church. It is not the painter, but the holy fathers, who have to invent and dictate. To them, manifestly, belongs the composition; to the painter, only the execution._ The fifteenth century was the century of broken bonds—bonds of discipline, bonds of morality. Men tasted liberty, had discovered Man; and, like schoolboys breaking bounds, playing truant, dazed in some rich orchard, they revelled and rollicked among fruits hitherto forbidden, potentialities long-dormant now alive. Unaccustomed sight had yet but imperfect impressions. Men saw “men as trees walking”; but as far as they went the impressions were vivid, life-like, true. Study the mercilessly precise drawings of Cavaliere Andrea Mantegna, the Lombard, pupil of Squarcione, who painted for the Lord Innocent P.P. VIII that chapel on the Belvedere which was destroyed by the Lord Pius P.P. VI, and who won his knighthood by painting for the Marquess Don Francesco de Gonzaga of Mantua. Study the works of Messer Luca Signorelli, “the first and last painter except Michelangelo to use the body without sentiment, without voluptuousness, without any secondary intention whatsoever, as the supreme decorative principle” (_Symonds’ Renascence_); who, having had killed at Cortona his young and splendid son, stripped the body naked, and, with iron nerve, painted from it during a day and a night, “that he might be able, through the work of his own hand, to contemplate that which nature had given him, but which an adverse fortune had taken away.” (_Vasari._) Above all, study Messer Alessandro Filipepi (detto Botticelli), who, having finished the chapel of the Lord Xystus P. P. IV, was back again in Florence, painting for Lorenzo de’ Medici. How many of the Medici he put into his pictures we never shall know; but if ever a painter painted from the life Alessandro Filipepi was that painter; and, with a little sympathetic ingenuity, one can trace at least a single precious portrait through his pictures, and into the pictures of another and more conventional painter; and, in this way, learn what like was one very prominent personality of the Borgian Era, as παίς, μειράκιον, σιδεύνης, ἐφήβος, ανδρός· Study the angel-boys and San Giambattista in the round Madonna of the National Gallery and the round Coronation of Madonna at the Uffizi. Study the Hermes Ptenopedilos in the Primavera that Botticelli painted on the verses of Lucretius Carus (737–740) as a setting for a portrait of an unknown lady of the House of Medici. And study the limber San Sebastiano at Berlin. Then study murdered Giuliano’s bastard, the Lord Giulio de’ Medici, Archbishop of Florence, Knight of St. John of Jerusalem, and Cardinal-Deacon of Santa Maria _in Domnica_, in the portrait of the myopic Lord Leo P.P. X by Messer Rafaele Sanzio da Urbino.