That would have been the total failure of all their tactics, and on this point Plato was beaten out and out. Even in that coterie at Urbino where to cultivate the purest platonism was the delightful occupation of life, there was a general smile when one of the company, smiling discreetly himself, reminded them of the Master’s recommendation that young girls should practise gymnastics in a costume of primitive simplicity. Ladies were not at all enamoured of a troglodytic beauty, and anyone who fancied that the contemplation of Michelangelo’s or Signorelli’s, works would turn their heads would have been greatly mistaken. Julian de’ Medici, on being bantered by his friends about the way he kept his fair lady out of sight, humorously replies: “Madam, if I thought her beautiful I would show her without her finery, as Paris insisted on seeing the Three Goddesses; but in that case she would need to be attired by those divinities themselves; and since ’tis thought she is pretty, I prefer to take care of her.”[176] Platonist women felt extreme repugnance for anything resembling publicity or vulgarisation—anything likely to come under the common gaze. One day, at a ball, a young girl seemed a prey to a gloomy pre-occupation from which nothing could rouse her, and her friends wore themselves out in vainly conjecturing the reason. At last they got the key to the mystery: “I was pondering,” she said, “a notion which haunts and worries me, and I cannot rid my heart of it. All our bodies have to rise at Judgment Day, and stand naked before the judgment seat of God, and I cannot bear the distress I feel at the thought that I too must appear stark naked.”[177] It cannot be denied, of course, that there exists a certain number of Olympian portraits. But these have nothing to do with platonism, and further, many of them were executed without assistance from the model. When a fashionable woman was having her portrait painted, she did not pretend to patience, and would not sit. Proof enough, surely! The artist had to dash off a hurried sketch with the speed of a present-day photographer; the portrait was afterwards worked up from this sketch in the studio, and a succession of replicas was made from it. It is obvious that, getting possession of fashionable ladies’ heads in this way, the artists had every opportunity of making an ill use of them, and supplying them with a costume not bargained for. Nowadays the fun would strike us as in rather doubtful taste; but women were in those days so good-natured and quick-witted that they were the very first to laugh at a sorry jest of this kind, especially if their personal rank placed them above suspicion, and still more if the portrait was pretty and flattering.