Another phase of the same impulse led to special treatises upon ideal characters. The picture of the perfect householder was drawn by Alberti, that of the courtier by Castiglione, that of the prince by Machiavelli. Da Vinci discoursed upon the physical proportions of the human form. Firenzuola and Luigini analysed the beauty of women; Piccolomini undertook to describe the manners of a well-bred lady; and La Casa laid down rules for polite behaviour in society. The names of treatises of this description might easily be multiplied. Enough, however, has been said to show the tendency of the Italian intellect to occupy itself with salient qualities, whether exhibited in individuals or idealised and abstracted by the reflective fancy. The whole of this literature implies an intense self-consciousness in the nation, an ardent interest in men as men, because of the specific virtue to be found in each. The spirit, therefore, in which these authors of the Renaissance approached their task was wholly different from that which induced the mediæval annalist to register the miracles of saints, to chronicle the princes of some dynasty or the abbots of a convent. Nor had it much in common with the mythologising enthusiasm of romantic poets. The desire for edification and the fire of fancy had yielded to an impulse more strictly scientific, to a curiosity more positive. The attention directed in literature and social intercourse upon great men implied a corresponding thirst for posthumous glory as a subjective quality of the Renaissance character. To perpetuate a name and fame was the most fervent passion, shared alike by artists and princes, by men of letters and by generals. It was not enough for a man to show forth the vigour that was in him, or to win the applause of his contemporaries. He must go beyond and wrest something permanent for himself from the ideal world that will survive our transient endeavours. When Alfonso the Magnanimous employed Fazio to compose his chronicle, when Francesco Sforza paid Filelfo for his verses by the dozen, when Cosimo de' Medici regretted that he had not spent more wealth on building, when Bartolommeo Colleoni decreed the erection of his chapel at Bergamo, and his statue on the public square of Venice, these men, so different in all things else, were striving, each after his own fashion, to buy an immortality his own achievements in the field or Senate might not win. Dante, here as elsewhere the first to utter the word of the modern age, has given expression to this thirst for lasting recollection in his lines about the planet Mercury:[6]-- Questa picciola stella si correda De' buoni spirti, che son stati attivi, Perchè onore e fama gli succeda. [Footnote 6: _Paradiso_, vi. 112.]