i6 love's meinie. 



coeval with the commencement of its decUne. The 

 feverish and ungraceful natural history of Paul, called, 

 " of the birds," Paolo degli Uccelli, produced, indeed, 

 no harmful result on the minds of his contempo- 

 raries ; they watched in him, with only contemptuous 

 admiration, the fantasy of zoological instinct which 

 filled his house with painted dogs, cats, and birds, 

 because he was too poor to fill it with real ones. 

 Their judgment of this morbidly naturalistic art was 

 conclusively expressed by the sentence of Donatello, 

 when going one morning into the Old Market, to 

 buy fruit, and finding the animal painter uncover- 

 ing a picture, which had cost him months of care, 

 {curiously symbolic in its subject, the infidelity of 

 St. Thomas, of the investigatory fingering of the 

 natural historian,) " Paul, my friend," said Donatello, 

 "thou art uncovering the picture just when thou 

 shouldst be shutting it up." 



13. No harm, therefore, I repeat, but, on the con- 

 trary, some wholesome stimulus to the fancy of men 

 like Luca and Donatello themselves, came of the 

 grotesque and impertinent zoology of Uccello. 



But the fatallest institutor of proud modern 

 anatomical and scientific art, and of all that has 

 polluted the dignity, and darkened the charity, of the 

 greater ages, was Antonio Pollajuolo of Florence. 

 Antonio (that is to say) the Poulterer — so named 



