This fascination for the symphonic harmonies of the body was not only an anxiety to the popes; it distressed also the noble women who wished to constitute themselves directors of the aesthetic movement, or rather to become the very incarnation of beauty and love. How far these women, possessed by the desire of securing the triumph of intellectual beauty, found themselves compelled to make certain concessions, is a knotty question to which, as it seems to us, people have as a rule furnished somewhat too liberal answers. So far as the men were concerned, there is no possible doubt about their materialistic tastes; we have, in a by no means small number of records and anecdotes, not to speak of legends, excellent evidence of their partiality for lifelike representations; they demanded them, insisted on having them. To satisfy them, art set itself to picture the unclothed; it is plain that the platonist women had no option but to rise in revolt. But there exist some Venuses, sculptured or painted, to which the artist undoubtedly intended to give the spicy attractiveness of portraits. The figures show realistic touches, sometimes positive deformities; there are hump-backed Venuses, emaciated Venuses, Venuses of mountainous bulk. They invariably wear beautiful jewellery, a necklace, for example, and have their little dog beside them. A characteristic detail is that their hair has been the object of the most sedulous painstaking; it is a masterly scaffolding of crimped and waved and curled locks, interspersed with jewels in such a way as to make quite clear that this is no shy woodland nymph, but a woman of fashion, a woman of wealth, and even, as far as that can be shown, of birth and breeding. This class of figure is admirably represented on certain of Titian’s canvases, and it is an almost immemorial tradition to take them as the painter seems to intend, namely, as portraits of distinguished women. Are we to believe that the religion of beauty, in purifying all things, led women to adopt so extreme a custom? We do not believe it.