out to be a cosmopolitan dandy, expert in all the refinements of many capitals. There are days when his serious, clerical face gives you the impression of a fanatic friar ready to die for his faith; and there are days when he suggests a gay and acrobatic Pierrot. He may play the subverter of tradition, mocking old ways more cruelly than any futurist; and the next day he will make you see the beauty and the fineness of a sentence of Manzoni or a line of Leopardi as no professional man of letters will ever do.
The secret of his charm lies in the changing wealth of his many aspects. He is at the same time an aristocrat and a man of the people, a Tuscan of the Valdarno and a Parisian, a theorist and a lyrist, a devotee and a libertine, a fanatic and a dilettante, profound and transparent. Like the clear water of the Ambra which runs by his home, his polytheistic sensitiveness mirrors the infinite variety of the world, and renders it more delicate and more beautiful.
II
But in all this lively transformation of the spirit one quality remains dominant. Ardengo Soffici is at all times, and beyond all else, an artist. An artist when he tells of others, when he tells of himself, when he amuses himself by
