Another and a very important element in his development was the constant intercourse which he maintained with the most learned Paduan scholars, and the keen pleasure with which he joined in their antiquarian researches in the neighbourhood. He accompanied Felice Feliciano, a famous collector of inscriptions, on several excursions in the environs of Verona and the Lago di Garda for the express purpose of examining classical remains, and in 1463 this same Feliciano dedicated his work on ancient epigrams to the painter, whose learning he extols in the highest terms. One result of these explorations in the classic ground of Sermione appears in the fragments of Latin inscriptions which are repeatedly introduced, in the Eremitani frescoes, and on one Roman portico the name of Vitruvius Cerdo, a Verona architect of ancient days, is still distinctly legible. This practice was a common one with many of the artists of Squarcione and Mantegna’s school, who, in their genuine enthusiasm for classical art, copied antique monuments and inscriptions with the minutest accuracy, and afterwards used them as accessory portions of their own compositions. We have a notable example of this habit in the drawing of a pagan altar bearing an inscription to the effect that it was found in a vault of the Baths of Caracalla, then known as the Antonine palace at Rome. The drawing, evidently by the hand of some Paduan artist, is now preserved at Christ Church, Oxford. Besides Feliciano, Andrea numbered among his intimate friends several eminent scholars then studying at the University of Padua, such as Matteo Bossi, afterwards Abbot of Fiesole, and the Hungarian bishop Giovanni Pannonio, who celebrated the artist’s genius in Latin verse as early as 1458, and whose portrait Mantegna painted in the same year. This rare degree of culture which made him the friend of scholars, this genuine delight in classical studies and antique art, was destined to supply our master with some of his highest inspirations, and ultimately render him the foremost representative among painters of that enthusiasm for antiquity which was the ruling passion of Italy in the fifteenth century.