He is one of those artists, much respected in their own days, who suffered eclipse from the superior splendour of immediate successors, and to whom, through sympathy stimulated by prolonged study of the fifteenth century, we have of late paid tardy and perhaps exaggerated honours.[183] His fellow-workers seem to have admired him as an able draughtsman gifted with a rare if whimsical imagination; but no one recognised in him a leader of his age.

For us he has an almost unique value as representing the interminglement of antique and modern fancy at a moment of transition, as embodying in some of his pictures the subtlest thought and feeling of men for whom the classic myths were beginning to live once more, while new guesses were timidly hazarded in the sphere of orthodoxy.[184] Self-confident sensuality had not as yet encouraged painters to substitute a florid rhetoric for the travail of their brain; nor was enough known about antiquity to make the servile imitation of Greek or Roman fragments possible.

Yet scholarship had already introduced a novel element into the culture of the nation.

It was no doubt with a kind of wonder that the artists heard of Fauns and Sylvans, and the birth of Aphrodite from the waves.

Such fables took deep hold upon their fancy, stirring them to strange and delicate creations, the offspring of their own thought, and no mere copies of marbles seen in statue galleries.