Page 502 - swanns-way

fastidious, and with a delicacy that was rendered almost
touching by the evidence of his splendid strength. Then he
passed it to one of his satellites, a novice and timid, who was
expressing the panic that overpowered him by casting furi-
ous glances in every direction, and displayed all the dumb
agitation of a wild animal in the first hours of its captivity.
A few feet away, a strapping great lad in livery stood
musing, motionless, statuesque, useless, like that purely
decorative warrior whom one sees in the most tumultuous
of Mantegna’s paintings, lost in dreams, leaning upon his
shield, while all around him are fighting and bloodshed and
death; detached from the group of his companions who were
thronging about Swann, he seemed as determined to re-
main unconcerned in the scene, which he followed vaguely
with his cruel, greenish eyes, as if it had been the Massa-
cre of the Innocents or the Martyrdom of Saint James. He
seemed precisely to have sprung from that vanished race—
if, indeed, it ever existed, save in the reredos of San Zeno
and the frescoes of the Eremitani, where Swann had come
in contact with it, and where it still dreams—fruit of the
impregnation of a classical statue by some one of the Mas-
ter’s Paduan models, or of Albert Duerer’s Saxons. And the
locks of his reddish hair, crinkled by nature, but glued to his
head by brilliantine, were treated broadly as they are in that
Greek sculpture which the Man-tuan painter never ceased
to study, and which, if in its creator’s purpose it represents
but man, manages at least to extract from man’s simple out-
lines such a variety of richness, borrowed, as it were, from
the whole of animated nature, that a head of hair, by the

502 Swann’s Way