[266] Ibid. pp. 355-359, 367-372.
[267] For example the lines beginning "Sospetto e cure." Ibid. p. 368.
[268] Op. Volg. i. lxv. He was not alone in this experiment. Barbarous Italian Sapphics and Hexameters are to be found in the Accademia Coronaria on Friendship, of which more in the next [chapter].
[269] De Re Ædificatoria, Florence, 1485. This preface is a letter addressed to Lorenzo de' Medici.
[270] "Quicquid ingenio esset hominum cum quâdam effectum elegantiâ, id prope divinum dicebat," says the anonymous biographer. This sentence is the motto of humanism as elaborated by the artistic sense. Its discord with the religion of the middle ages is apparent.
[271] Op. Volg. i. 8.
[272] This we learn from the last words of the first edition, "Tarvisii cum decorissimis Poliae amore lorulis distineretur misellus Poliphilus MCCCCLVII." The author's name is given in the initial letters to the thirty-eight chapters of the book.
[273] For this and other points about the Hypnerotomachia see Ilg's treatise Ueber der Kunsthistorischen Werth der Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Wien, Braunmüller, 1872.
[274] It ought, however, to be said that, being the first paragraph of the whole book, its style is not so free and simple as in more level passages. Though I do not pretend to understand the meaning clearly, I subjoin a translation.—"Phœbus advancing at that moment, when the forehead of Matuta Leucothea whitened, already free from Ocean's waves, had not yet shown his whirling wheels suspense. But bent with his swift chargers, Pyrous first and Eous just disclosed to view, on painting the pale chariot of his daughter with vermeil roses, in most vehement flight pursuing her, made no delay. And sparkling over the azure and unquiet wavelets, his light-showering tresses flowed in curls. Upon whose advent at that point descending to her rest stayed Cynthia without horns, urging the two steeds of her carriage with the Mule, the one white and the other dark, drawing toward the furthest horizon which divides the hemispheres where she had come, and, routed by the piercing star who lures the day, was yielding. At that time when the Riphaean mountains were undisturbed, nor with so cold a gust the rigid and frost-creating east-wind with the side-blast blowing made the tender branches quake, and tossed the mobile stems and spiked reeds and yielding grasses, and vexed the pliant tendrils, and shook the flexible willows, and bent the frail fir-branches 'neath the horns of Taurus in their wantonness. As in the winter time that wind was wont to breathe. Likewise the boastful Orion was at the point of staying to pursue with tears the beauteous Taurine shoulder of the seven sisters."
[275] When the book was translated into French and republished at Paris in the sixteenth century, the blocks were imitated, and at a later epoch it became fashionable to refer them to Raphael. The mistake was gross. Its only justification is the style adopted by the French imitators in their rehandling of the illustrations to Poliphil's soul pleading before Venus. These cuts seem to have felt the influence of the Farnesina frescoes.