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Flesh-tints, varying from the strong red tone of Jonah's athletic manhood, through the glowing browns of the seated Genii, to the delicate carnations of Adam and the paler hues of Eve; orange and bronze in draperies, medallions, decorative nudes, russets like the tints of dead leaves; lilacs, cold greens, blue used sparingly; all these colours are dominated and brought into harmony by the greys of the architectural setting.
We were to do the fighting, monsieur, but to have little of the reward; that was for the Russians lying on the frontier. It was a pretty plot you and the Queen had arranged." "Whose tale is that, Vasilici? You are easily deceived if you believe it." "We learnt the truth when we received this, monsieur." And the brigand held up the bracelet of medallions.
First, the hand of the sculptor had carved it into numerous medallions, on which the pencil of the painter had then delineated the most remarkable scenes in early Florentine history. Round the sides, or cornices, were beautifully sculptured in marble the heads of the principal ancestors of the Count of Arestino.
The portraits of the dukes of Milan and their families carry us into a very different realm of feeling. Medallions above the doors of sacristy and chancel, stately figures reared aloft beneath gigantic canopies, men and women slumbering with folded hands upon their marble biers we read in all those sculptured forms a strange record of human restlessness resolved into the quiet of the tomb.
Amid this fantastic labyrinth of twisted forms we find medallions painted in chiaroscuro with subjects taken chiefly from Ovidian and Dantesque mythology. Here every attitude of men in combat and in motion has been studied from the nude, and multitudes of figures draped and undraped are compressed into the briefest compass.
The same Paolino was commissioned by the Procurators of S. Mark to paint certain angular medallions that are in the ceiling of the Nicene Library, which was left to the Signoria by Cardinal Bessarion, with a vast treasure of Greek books.
Between the tapestries, again, there were breadths of carved panelling, crowded with all things round and sweet, with fruits and flowers and strange musical instruments, with flying cherubs, and fair faces in laurel-wreathed medallions; while in the middle of the wall a great oriel window broke the dim venerable surfaces of wood and tapestry with stretches of jewelled light.
I do not consider that even an Italian nobleman, were he orphan from his cradle, and thrice a widower, has any right to keep locked up from the investigation of scholars an unequalled collection of Roman coins, and a very presentable show of medallions and medals properly so-called. Are you aware that this boorish patrician has in his possession the eight types of medal of the gens Attilia?"
The chairs were of ancient workmanship and materials; over the doors were painted sketches of shepherds and shepherdesses, after the style and manner of Boucher; and at each side pretty medallions in crayons, harmonizing well with the furnishings of this charming apartment, the only one throughout the great mansion in which any distinctive taste prevailed.
About the room, over or by the shelves, stand portrait busts or medallions of great authors, both Greek and Roman, the "blind" Homer being represented in traditional form, but the majority, from Aeschylus and Thucydides down to Virgil and Livy, being authentic and excellent likenesses.
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