XI. THE PLACE OF DRAGONS 389

of imperfection and shamelessness-are in transfigured form those Lycian husbandmen whose foul words mocked Latona, whose feet defiled the wells of water she thirsted for,¹ as the veiled mother painfully journeyed with those two babes on her arm, of whom one should be Queen of Maidenhood, the other, Lord of Light, and Guardian of the Ways of Men.* This subtle association between batrachians and love declining to sense lay very deep in the Italian mind. In Ariadne Florentina there are two engravings from Botticelli of Venus, as a star floating through heaven and as foamborn rising from the sea.² Both pictures are most subtly beautiful, yet in the former the lizard likeness shows itself distinctly in the face, and a lizard’s tail appears in manifest form as pendulous crest of the chariot, while in the latter not only contours of profile and back,† but the selected attitude of the goddess, bent and half emergent, with hand resting not over firmly upon the level shore, irresistibly recall a frog.

229. In the foreground, between St. George and the Dragon, a spotted lizard labours at the task set Sisyphus in hell for ever. Sisyphus, the cold-hearted and shifty son of Ćolus, ‡ stained in life by nameless lust, received his mocking doom of toil, partly for his treachery-winning this only in the end,-partly because he opposed the divine conception of the Ćacid race; but above all, as penalty for the attempt to elude the fate of death “that is appointed alike for all,” by refusal for his own body of that “sowing in corruption,” against which a deeper furrow is prepared by the last of husbandmen with whose labour each of us has on earth to do. Then, finding that Carpaccio has had in his mind one scene of Tartarus, we may believe the corpse in the background, torn by carrion-birds, to be not merely

* AguieuV

† Compare the account of the Frog’s hump, Ariadne Florentina, § 111 [Vol. XXII. p. 367].

‡ Compare Pindar’s use of aioloV as a fit adjective for yeudoV Nem. viii. 43.

¹ [Ovid, Metamorphoses vi. 363 seq.]

² [See, in this edition, Plate XXVI. in Vol. XXII. (p. 368), and Plate XIV. in Vol. XX. (p. 336).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]