Tuscan sculptors and painters have been studying the antique a little. But with monks for models, and the legends of mad hermits and martyrs for subjects, the vision of Olympus itself would be of small use to them.”
“I understand,” said Nello, with a significant shrug, as they walked along. “You are of the same mind as Michele Marullo, ay, and as Angelo Poliziano himself, in spite of his canonicate, when he relaxes himself a little in my shop after his lectures, and talks of the gods awaking from their long sleep and making the woods and streams vital once more. But he rails against the Roman scholars who want to make us all talk Latin again: ‘My ears,’ he says, ‘are sufficiently flayed by the barbarisms of the learned, and if the vulgar are to talk Latin I would as soon have been in Florence the day they took to beating all the kettles in the city because the bells were not enough to stay the wrath of the saints.’ Ah, Messer Greco, if you want to know the flavour of our scholarship, you must frequent my shop: it is the focus of Florentine intellect, and in that sense the navel of the earth—as my great predecessor, Burchiello, said of his shop, on the more frivolous pretension that his street of the Calimara was the centre of our city. And here we are at the sign of ‘Apollo and the Razor.’ Apollo, you see, is bestowing the razor on the Triptolemus of our craft, the first reaper of beards, the sublime Anonimo , whose mysterious identity is indicated by a shadowy hand.”
“I see thou hast had custom already, Sandro,” continued Nello, addressing a solemn-looking dark-eyed youth, who made way for them on the threshold. “And now make all clear for this signor to sit down. And prepare the finest-scented lather, for he has a learned and a handsome chin.”
“You have a pleasant little adytum there, I see,” said the stranger, looking through a latticed screen which divided the shop from a room of about equal size, opening into a still smaller walled enclosure, where a few bays and laurels surrounded a stone Hermes. “I suppose your conclave of eruditi meets there?”