Painting, however, was far from being the exclusive focus of his studies and affections. He only accorded it an importance that was secondary among the arts that beautify man's earthly sojourn. Architecture, on the other hand, which raises monuments to the gods, solemn intermediaries between earth and heaven, took up the greater part of his thoughts, but he did not look for its laws and marvels in the gigantic creations of contemporary art, the bizarre and often grotesque whims and fancies of a fantasy, lacking, according to him, the outward grace of reason and taste. Carried forward by the motion of the Renaissance, which was by then starting to make itself felt in Italy, Francesco only still belonged as far as faith went to this modern world renewed by Christianity. He wholly admired Antiquity and worshipped at its shrine, and a strange alliance had taken place in his mind between the beliefs of a religious man and the aesthetics of a pagan. He took this preoccupation too far to see in modern languages themselves nothing other than rustic jargons more or less totally corrupted by Barbarians, which were only good to allow men to negotiate the material necessities of life, and which were not capable of rising to translate eloquently or poetically ideas and feelings. The result of this was that he had forged for his own usage a sort of intimate dialect in which Italian only served to define certain elements of syntax and the odd soft inflexion, but which was much more redolent of the followers of Homer or of Titus Livius and Lucan than of Petrarch and Boccaccio. This singular turn of mind, which was at that time the defining hallmark of original powers of organisation and a personality destined, to all appearances, to exert a great influence on the century, had isolated Francesco from the rest of the world. He gave to it the general impression of being a melancholic seer who had fallen prey to an illusory genius that had rendered him insensitive to the gentle ways of life in society. He was sometimes seen nevertheless in the palazzo of the illustrious Leonora Pisani, the heiress, at the age of eight and twenty, to the greatest fortune ever known in the whole of the Veneto after that of her cousin Polia, the only daughter of the last of the Poli in Treviso. The house of Leonora was then the sanctuary of poetry and the arts, and this muse's influence caused irresistibly to congregate around her all the talents of her age. It was soon noticed that Francesco was going there more often, although more absorbed in his daydreams and sadder than usual, but his visits suddenly became less frequent, and then he stopped coming altogether.