He did not at once or entirely desert his art;
only he was no longer the cheerful, objective painter, through whose
soul, as through clear glass, the bright figures of Florentine life,
only made a little mellower and more pensive by the transit, passed on
to the white wall. He wasted many days in curious tricks of design,
seeming to lose himself in the spinning of intricate devices of lines
and colours. He was smitten with a love of the impossible--the
perforation of mountains, changing the course of rivers, raising great
buildings, such as the church of San Giovanni, in the air; all those
feats for the performance of which natural magic professed to have the
key. Later writers, indeed, see in these efforts an anticipation of
modern mechanics; in him they were rather dreams, thrown off by the
overwrought and labouring brain. Two ideas were especially fixed in him,
as reflexes of things that had touched his brain in childhood beyond the
measure of other impressions--the smiling of women and the motion of
great waters.
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