In the tapestry room one of his Highness's gentlemen waited to reconduct
Odo. Their way lay through the portrait gallery of which he had
previously caught a glimpse, and here he begged his guide to leave him.
He felt a sudden desire to meet his unknown ancestors face to face, and
to trace the tendencies which, from the grim Bracciaforte and the
stately sceptical humanist of Leo's age, had mysteriously forced the
race into its ever-narrowing mould. The dusky canvases, hung high in
tarnished escutcheoned frames, presented a continuous chronicle of the
line, from Bracciaforte himself, with his predatory profile outlined by
some early Tuscan hand against the turrets of his impregnable fortress.
Odo lingered long on this image, but it was not till he stood beneath
Piero della Francesca's portrait of the first Duke that he felt the
thrill of kindred instincts. In this grave face, with its sensuous mouth
and melancholy speculative eyes, he recognised the mingled strain of
impressionability and unrest that had reached such diverse issues in his
cousin and himself. The great Duke of the "Golden Age," in his
Titianesque brocade, the statuette of a naked faun at his elbow, and a
faun-like smile on his own ruddy lips, represented another aspect of the
ancestral spirit: the rounded temperament of an age of Cyrenaicism, in
which every moment was a ripe fruit sunned on all sides. A little
farther on, the shadow of the Council of Trent began to fall on the
ducal faces, as the uniform blackness of the Spanish habit replaced the
sumptuous colours of the Renaissance.
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