Dupaty, like De Brosses, an eminent lawyer, an acquaintance of Diderot and an early friend of a conspicuous figure of a later time, the ill-starred Vergniaud, travelled in Italy almost immediately before the Revolution (1785), and his letters, when read with those of De Brosses, are a curious illustration of the change that had come over the spirit of men in the interval. He leaves the pictures of the Pitti collection at Florence, and plunges into meditation in the famous gardens behind the palace, rejoicing with much expansion in the glories of light and air, in greenery and the notes of birds, and finally sums all up in one rapturous exclamation of the vast superiority of nature over art.[24] [24] Dupaty's _Lettres sur l'Italie_, No. 40. In talking of Rome, he complains in a very Diderotian spirit of the want of _le beau moral_. "On ne trouve ici dans les moeurs ni des hommes prives ni des hommes publics, cette moralite, cette bienseance, dont les moeurs francoises sont pleines. _Le beau moral est absolument inconnu._ Or, c'est pour atteindre a ce beau moral dans tous les genres que la sensibilite est la plus tourmentee; qu'elle est en proie aux contentions de l'esprit, aux emulations de l'ame ... qu'elle pare avec tant de raffinement et de peine, les ecrits, les discours, les passions, enfin toute la vie publique et privee.' It is impossible, in reading how deeply Diderot was affected by fifth-rate paintings and sculpture, not to count it among the great losses of literature that he saw few masterpieces. He never made the great pilgrimage. He was never at Venice, Florence, Parma, Rome. A journey to Italy was once planned, in which Grimm and Rousseau were to have been his travelling companions;[25] the project was not realised, and the strongest critic of art that his country produced never saw the greatest glories of art. If Diderot had visited Florence and Rome, even the mighty painter of the Last Judgment and the creator of those sublime figures in the New Sacristy at San Lorenzo, would have found an interpreter worthy of him. But it was not to be. "It is rare," he once wrote, "for an artist to excel without having seen Italy, just as a man seldom becomes a great writer or a man of great taste without having given severe study to the ancients."[26] Diderot at least knew what he lost. [25] x. 514, _n._ [26] xi. 241.