uneasy sensation, arising from a sudden and violent solution of continuity, or other accident in the nerves, membranes, vessels, muscles, &c. of the body. Pain, according to some, consists in a motion of the organs of sense; and, according to others, it is an emotion of the soul occasioned by those organs.

As the brain is the seat of sensation, so it is of pain. Boerhaave, and most other authors on this subject, assign a stretching of the nerves as the only immediate cause of pain: but as the nerves do not appear to consist of fibres, this cause of pain does not seem to be well-founded; nor indeed will it be easy to treat this subject clearly, but in proportion as the means of sensation are undefiled.

Many kinds of pain are met with in authors: such as A gravitational pain; in which there is a sense of weight on the part affected, which is always some fleshly one, as the liver, &c. A pulsative pain; which, Galen says, always succeeds some remarkable inflammation in the containing parts, and is observed in abscesses while suppurating. A tenitive pain, which is also called a distending pain; it is excited by the distension of some nervous, muscular, or membranous part, either from some humour, or from flatulence. An acute pain is, when great pain is attended with quick and lively sensations: A dull pain is, when a kind of numbness is as much complained of as the pain is.

The mediate and more remote causes of pain are generally obvious; and when so, the cure will consist for the most part in removing them: for though in many instances the chief complaint is very distant from the seat of these causes, yet their removal is the proper method of relief. See Medicine, spasm.

Perhaps all pains may be included, with irritation, in those that have spasm or inflammation for their source. When pain is owing to inflammation, the pulse is quicker than in a natural state; it is also generally full, hard, and tense; the pain is equal, throbbing, and unremitting. If a spasm is the cause, the pulse is rarely affected; at intervals the pain abates, and then returns. PAINTING

Painting is the art of representing to the eyes, by means of figures and colours, every object in nature that is discernible by the sight; and of sometimes expressing, according to the principles of physiognomy, and by the attitudes of the body, the various emotions of the mind. A smooth surface, by means of lines and colours, represents objects in a state of projection; and may represent them in the most pleasant dress, and in a manner most capable of enchanting the senses. Still farther, the objects which delight us by their animation and lively colours, speak to the soul, by giving us the image of what we hold most dear, or by indicating an action which inspires us with a taste for innocent pleasures, with courage, and with elevated sentiments. Such is the definition, and such are the effects of painting.

By an admirable effort of human genius, painting offers to our eyes everything which is most valuable in the universe. Its empire extends over every age and country. It presents to us the heroic deeds of ancient times as well as the facts in which we are more conversant, and distant objects as well as those which we daily see. In this respect it may be considered as a supplement to nature, which gives us only a view of present objects.

The art of painting is extremely difficult in the execution; and its merit can only be appreciated by those who profess the art.

The painter who invents, composes, and colours conceptions which are only agreeable, and which speak merely to the eye of the spectator, may be reckoned to possess the first merit in the style of embellishment and decoration.

The painter who is distinguished for noble and profound conceptions; who, by means of a perfect delineation, and colours more capable of fixing the attention than dazzling the eye, conveys to the spectators the sentiments with which he himself was inspired; who animates them with his genius, and makes a lasting impression on their minds; this artist is a poet, and worthy to share even in the glories of Homer.

It is in forming this great idea of his art that the painter becomes himself great.

But if he seek only to please or astonish by the illusion of colours, he must rest contented with the secondary merit of flattering the eye with the variety and opposition of tints, or of making an indistinct assemblage of a great multiplicity of objects. It is in painting as it is in poetry. The man who clothes trivial or common ideas in verse, exercises the profession of twisting syllables into a certain measure. The poet who clothes in good verse ideas and sentiments, that are merely agreeable, professes an agreeable art. But he who, by the magic of verse, of ideas, of imagery, or of colours, adds sublimity to the sublime objects of nature, is a great poet and a great painter. He deserves the crown which the nations have decreed to Homer, Virgil, Milton, Raphael, and the statuary who modelled the ancient Apollo. It is reasonable to place in the same class those who have expressed the same ideas, whether it be in verse or in colours, on brash or on marble. The painter and statuary, who excel in their professions, deserve all the respect due to genius; they are of the number of those men whom nature, sparing of her best gifts, grants but occasionally to the inhabitants of the earth. If they are sublime, they elevate the human race; if they are agreeable only, they excite those sweet sensations necessary to our happiness.

In laying before our readers a succinct account of this noble art, we shall, first, give the history of painting, including its rise, progress, and decline, in ancient and modern times; an account of the schools, and of the different merits of painters; and a comparison between the ancient and modern painting. Secondly, we shall lay down the principles of the art, and the order in which the artist conducts his studies. Thirdly, we shall enumerate the different classes of painting, with observations on each. And, Fourthly, we shall treat of economical or house-painting. PAINTING.

HISTORY.

Sect. I. Rise, Progress, and Decline of Painting in Ancient and Modern Times.

It is to be imagined that men must naturally, and very early, have conceived an idea of the first principles of the art of painting; the shadow of each plant and animal, and of every object in nature, must have afforded them the means of conceiving, and pointed out the possibility of imitating, the figures of all bodies. Thus the savage nations, an emblem of what men were in the infancy of society, possess the first rudiments of this art, even before those which are useful and almost necessary to existence; their naked bodies are covered with punctures of various forms, into which they infuse indelible colours. The next demand for this art, is to preserve the memory of warlike exploits. It is more natural to form some representation of an action, than to give an account of it by means of arbitrary characters. Hence the picture-writing of the Mexicans, and the more artful hieroglyphics of Egypt.

Painting consisted of simple outlines long before the expression of relief or the application of colour. It was simply drawing; and the master-pieces of painting in that rude period were not superior to the sports of children. Although occupied about a single point, it was not brought to perfection; for constant experience instructs us that men never excel in the inferior parts of an art till they are capable of carrying the whole to perfection.

After employing for a long time those simple outlines, the next step in the art of painting was to make the imitation more complete, by applying colours: this was first accomplished by covering the different parts of the figure with different colours in the same way that we colour maps; and several nations, as the Egyptians, the Chinese, and the different nations of India, have never painted in a better manner. Other nations, more ingenious and more attentive to the arts, observing that the objects of nature have relief, have invented what is called claro-oscuro. The Greeks, the most ingenious, penetrating, and delicate of all, invented this part antecedent to colours; than which there cannot be a greater proof of their exquisite taste, as the glare of colours without judgment excites more admiration in the minds of the vulgar and ignorant, than the camoufage or drawings of one colour executed by the most skilful artist.

These general observations concerning the gradual improvement of this art, will be best illustrated by a more particular attention to the ancient nations in which it flourished.

Plato, who lived 400 years before the Christian era, informs us that painting had been practised in Egypt for ten thousand years; that some of the productions of that high antiquity were in existence; and that they bore an exact resemblance to those which the Egyptians executed in his time. Without regarding the period of ten thousand years mentioned by Plato, it is reasonable to consider it as an indeterminate period, which carries us back to very remote antiquity.

The figures either in the painting or sculpture of Rife, Peru, Egypt were extremely stiff; the legs were drawn together, and their arms were palled to their sides. It appears that their only model was their mummies, and that their skill in anatomy was derived from embalming them. They were extremely incorrect in every part of the head; they placed the ears much higher than the nose. Besides, they gave the face the form of a circle instead of an oval; the chin was short and rounded; the cheeks excessively so; and they turned upwards the corners of the mouth and eyes. Many of these faults may be ascribed to the formation of the human face in Egypt; but the placing of the ears could only be founded in caprice or ignorance.

The exactness of the Egyptian proportion is much celebrated; but although we grant that they observed the proper length of the different parts of the human body, they were still defective artists, since they did not observe the breadth, and were moreover ignorant altogether of the shape and size of the muscles. Works converted to religious purposes chiefly occupied the Egyptian painters. They had figures for imitation from which they would not depart, and those figures were monstrous; the bodies of animals with the heads of men; the bodies of men with the heads of animals: or, if the figure was more agreeable to nature in its parts, yet it was so deformed and imaginary, as to have nothing similar to it as a whole in the creation of God.

The monuments of Egyptian painting with which we are best acquainted (says Winklemann) are the chests of mummies. These works have resisted the injuries of time, and are still submitted to the examination of the curious. The white, made of white lead, is spread over the ground of the piece; the outlines of the figure are traced with black strokes, and the colours are four in number; namely, blue, red, yellow, and green, laid on without any mixture or fading. The red and blue prevail most; and those colours seem to have been prepared in the coarsest manner. The light is formed by leaving those parts of the ground where it is necessary, covered with the white lead, as it is formed by the white paper in some of our drawings. This description is sufficient to convince us that the whole art of painting in Egypt consisted in colouring; but every person knows, that without tints and the mixture of colours painting can never arrive at great perfection.

In Upper Egypt there seems to have existed a kind of colofin painting, which has never been examined except by travellers who were no great critics in the art. Winklemann had some reason to express a desire that those remains of antiquity, with regard to the manner of working, the style, and the character, had been accurately explored. Walls of 24 feet in height, and pillars of 32 feet in circumference, are wholly covered with those colofin figures. According to Norden they are coloured in the same manner with the mummies: the colours are applied to a ground prepared in manner of fresco; and they have retained their freshness for many thousand years. Winklemann adds, that all the efforts of human skill and industry could make make as little impression on them as the injuries of time. His enthusiasm for antiquity has perhaps led him into this extravagant exaggeration.

It appears that the great employment of the Egyptian painters was on earthen vessels, on drinking cups, in ornamenting barges, and in covering with figures the chests of mummies. They painted also on cloth; but painting, as an industrious occupation, supposes a workman, not an artist: the decoration of temples, house-painting, and that of the figures relative to religion, are to be considered only in this point of view. The workmen in Russia who paint our Saviour holding the globe in one hand, and blessing the people with the other, are not members of the imperial academy of fine arts.

Pliny informs us that the Egyptian artists painted also the precious metals; that is to say, they varnished or enamelled them. It is doubtful what this art was, but most probably it consisted in covering gold or silver with a single colour.

The Egyptians are supposed to have continued this coarse style till the reign of the Ptolemies.

The Persians were so far from excelling in the arts, that the paintings of Egypt were highly esteemed among them after they had conquered that country.

The carpets of Persia were of great value in Greece, even in the time of Alexander the Great, and these were adorned with various figures; but this is no proof that they were well executed, any more than a demand for several of the Chinese productions is at present a proof of the taste of that people in the arts. It was the fabrication of the silk, and not the truth of the representation, which made the Greeks admire the carpets of Persia.

The Persians, as well as the Arabians, had some knowledge of Mosaic work. This is only valuable when it copies, in a manner that cannot be destroyed, the works of a great master; but if the Persians had no good pictures to copy into Mosaic, it was of no consequence to be able to arrange, in a solid manner, pieces of flint one beside another.

There is only one Persian painter whose name has descended to posterity; and he is preferred, not because he was a painter, but because he accommodated the ancient doctrine of the two principles to the Christian religion. Besides, it is doubted whether Manet was a Persian or a Greek, and it is still less known whether he was a painter. He is praised in Asia for drawing straight lines without a ruler.

The modern Persians have made no kind of progress in the arts. The emperor Schah-abbas, wishing from caprice to be instructed in drawing, was obliged to have recourse to a Dutch painter who happened to be in his dominions.

The modern Persians paint on cloth, and the artists in India are their rivals in this branch of industry; but their paintings are purely capricious. They represent plants and flowers which have no existence in nature; and their only merit consists in the brightness and the strength of their colours.

Besides this, the art in India, as it was in the most remote antiquity, is confined to monstrous figures connected with their religion, animal not to be found in the world, and idols with a multitude of arms and heads, which have neither exactness in their forms nor proportions. See Polytheism.

The paintings of Thibet discover great patience in the artist, and are remarkable for the fineness of their strokes. Their painters might dispute with Apelles and Protogenes for extreme tenacity of pencil; but it is in this alone, without any regard to the art, in which their merit consists.

Some of the idols in Thibet are executed in a certain style of relievo; but those productions are not only imperfect, they are also so destitute of beauty as to forbid every hope of excellence in the art. The same thing may be observed with regard to many of the eastern nations; they seem to have that want of style which would forever condemn them to mediocrity, even if they should happen to arrive at it.

An obscure Italian painter, named Giovanni Ghirarini, who travelled into China, whose judgment is more to be depended on in an art which he practised than that of other travellers, declares that the Chinese have not the least idea of the fine arts; and this opinion is confirmed by everything which we know of that people.

The Chinese seem not to have the smallest conception of perspective. Their landscapes have no plan, no variety in the appearance of the clouds, and no diminishing of the objects in proportion to their distance.

The great object of their painting seems to consist in making their figures as unlike nature as possible: it is a serious caricature of the human figure.

To make the art flourish, it is necessary that the artist be esteemed and rewarded. In China, there is no artist so poorly paid as the painter.

The ignorant admire the brightness and purity of their colours; but simple colours appear always bright and pure: The difficulty of the art consists in melting them into one another in such a manner that the mixture shall not be perceived. It must at the same time be confessed, that their natural colours are more brilliant than ours; but if there be any merit in this, it is to be ascribed to their climate, not to their ability.

A Jesuit missionary, who in his youth had been a grinder of colours, was raised to the greatest eminence as a painter in the Imperial court of China, and Raphael himself was never so much respected. The Chinese battles sent from that country to Paris to be engraved, are the works of the Jesuits; and except they were done by the Chinese themselves, it is impossible to conceive that they could be worse executed.

The Chinese, like other eastern nations, have a few simple strokes which they repeat in all their variety of figures. In the figures on the earthen ware, they discover no knowledge of forms, no expression of the most conspicuous muscles, and no idea of proportion. And in all the paintings of China, anatomy seems to bear no relation to the art. Some heads done by a Chinese painter have a sort of resemblance to nature, but they are in a low and vicious taste: The fulness of the drapery conceals the parts in such a manner that they do not seem to exist under it. Sculpture in China is in a state of no great perfection, but at the same time it is better executed than their paintings. The ancient inhabitants of Etruria, now called Tuscany, were the first who connected the arts with the study of nature. In some of their monuments which still remain, there is to be observed a first style, which shows the art in its infancy; and a second, which, like the works of the Florentine artists, shows more of greatness and exaggeration in the character than precision or beauty.

Pliny says that painting was carried to great perfection in Italy before the foundation of Rome; perhaps he means in comparison with the infancy of the art in Greece at that period; but it appears that even in his time the painters of Etruria were held in great reputation.

The only Etrurian paintings which remain, have been found in the tombs of the Tarquins. They consist of long painted friezes, and pilasters adorned with huge figures, which occupied the whole space from the base to the cornice. These paintings are executed on a ground of thick mortar, and many of them are in a state of high preservation.

Winklemann is of opinion that the Greek colonies established at Naples and Nola, had at a very early period cultivated the imitative arts, and taught them to the Campanians established in the middle of the country. This learned antiquarian considers as works purely Campanian, certain medals of Capua and Teanum, cities of Campania into which the Greek colonies never penetrated. The head of a young Hercules, and the head of a Jupiter, according to Winklemann, are executed in the finest manner. It is still a question, however, in the learned world, whether these medals owe their existence to Carthage or to Campania.

"But there have been discovered (adds Winklemann) a great number of Campanian vases covered with painting. The design of the greatest part of these vases (says he) is such, that the figures might occupy a distinguished place in a work of Raphael. Those vases, when we consider that this kind of work admits of no correction, and that the stroke which forms the outline must remain as it is originally traced, are wonderful proofs of the perfection of the art among the ancients." Winklemann had an opportunity of examining a very fine Campanian vase, on which was painted a burlesque representation of the loves of Jupiter and Alcmena. But as this must have been derived from some fragment of a Grecian comedy, the Count de Caylus is persuaded that the Campanian vases are of Greek origin.

Although the history of Greek painting be more fully known than that of the same art among the barbarous nations, it is nevertheless involved in much obscurity. Pliny is almost the only author who has preserved the materials of its history; and he complains, that on this occasion the Greek writers have not discovered their usual exactness. They place, says he, the first painter of whom they speak in the 90th Olympiad, 420 years before the Christian era. It is certain that painting in dry colours existed at the time of the siege of Troy, or at least when Homer wrote the account of it. The buckler of Achilles is a sufficient proof that the Greeks were then acquainted with the basso-rilievo, a kind of sculpture which bears a near affinity to painting.

N° 255.

In the Iliad, Helen is represented as working at a Rife, Pro-tapery, whereon she figured the numerous combats of which she was the cause. When Andromache was informed of her husband's death, she was occupied in representing on tapestry flowers of various colours. From these facts, it is certain that painting was not confined to simple strokes, nor even to the camaiou; and hence it is reasonable to conclude, that what is called linear painting was practised long before the time of Homer. Polygnotus of Thasos, who lived about 420 years before the Christian era, was the first painter of any eminence in Greece. Pliny informs us that he was the first who clothed his female figures, who varied the colours of the different parts of their drapery, or who opened their mouths in such a manner as to show their teeth. Aristotle, who flourished in a subsequent period, allows this painter to have excelled in expression. But the art of painting may be still considered in its infancy in Greece, till about 400 years before the Christian era, when Zeuxis and Parrhasius flourished. In the contest between these eminent painters, Zeuxis declared himself to be overcome, because in a cluster of grapes which he painted he had deceived the birds; whereas Parrhasius in a curtain which he executed deceived his rival. The principal works of Zeuxis are his Penelope, in which, according to Pliny, he appears to have expressed the manners of that princess; a Jupiter surrounded by the gods; a Hercules strangling the serpents in the presence of Amphitron and Alcmena; an Helen and a Marsyas bound. From this enumeration of these works, and from the fame which they have acquired, it is evident that the difficult parts of the art, and those which in the execution render it estimable, were now begun to be studied. By Appelles, Protogenes, and Euphranor, it was carried to the greatest height of perfection. Grace, and symmetry, and proportion, and illusion, were now added by the greatest masters to the noblest objects of nature.

We have already seen, that before the foundation of Rome the arts were cultivated in Etruria. They were also early introduced into Latium; but whether that country employed its own artists or those of Etruria, remains altogether uncertain. One need not be astonished, that at a period when the arts were in their infancy in Greece, they were raising statues to their kings in Rome; but at that period all their artists were Etrurians or Latins; and when they conquered Italy, they made all the nations of it as barbarous as they were themselves.

In the year 259 from the building of the city of Rome, and 494 years before the Christian era, Ap-pius Claudius consecrated a number of shields in the temple of Bellona, which contained in basso relievo the portraits of his family. This example was followed; and in process of time it was common among the Romans to place those images in private houses. The execution in basso-relievo is a proof that they had an idea of painting, at least with one colour. As long as the Romans employed artists of other nations, they had little desire to cultivate the arts; but towards the year of Rome 450, and 303 years before Christ, one of the Fabii thought it no discredit to a noble family to employ himself in painting. He painted the temple of Safety; and his works remain- ed till that temple was destroyed by fire, in the reign of Claudius. It is worthy of remark, that the same man was the first painter and the first historian in his country.

The example of Fabius, furred from his profession, did not excite his fellow-citizens to imitation. A century and a half elapsed before the tragic poet Pacuvius, nephew of Ennius, painted the temple of Hercules in the forum boarium. The glory which he had acquired by his dramatic works shed some lustre on the art, which he consecrated to exercise; but did not confer on it that respect which could recommend it to general practice. The paintings of Fabius were the works or rather the recreations of his youth; those of Pacuvius, the amusements of his old age: but painting is a difficult art, which requires the whole attention, and which can never be prosecuted with success, except those who love it are solely devoted to the performance.

It appears that there were no eminent painters at Rome till the time of the emperors; but as the national spirit was changed, the profession of the fine arts acquired more respectability. The Romans, during the time of the republic, were animated with the spirit of liberty and the desire for conquest. When these two passions were weakened, the love of the arts obtained among them. As a proof of this it is sufficient to say, that Nero himself gloried in being an artist. A Colossian picture of 120 feet was painted at Rome by the command of this emperor, which was afterward destroyed by lightning. The name of the painter is not recorded, and there are various opinions concerning the merit of the performance; but the thing chiefly worthy of observation is, that this is the only painting on cloth mentioned by ancient authors.

The paintings of the ancient artists were either moveable or on the ceilings or compartments of buildings. According to Pliny, the most eminent were those who painted moveable pictures. The latter were either on fir-wood, larch, boxwood, or canvas, as in the colossal picture mentioned above, and sometimes on marble. When they employed wood, they laid on in the first instance a white ground. Among the antiquities of the Herculaneum are four paintings on white marble.

Their immovable paintings on walls were either in fresco or on the dry stucco in distemper. Indeed all the ancient paintings may be reduced to, firstly, fresco-painting; secondly, water-colour or distemper-painting on a dry ground; and, thirdly, encaustic painting.

The ancient fresco-paintings appear to have been always on a white stucco-ground, the colours inlaid very deep, and the drawing much more bold and free than any similar performance of modern art. The outlines of the ancient paintings on fresco were probably done at once, as appears from the depth of the incision and the boldness and freedom of the design, equal to the care and spirit of a pencilled outline.

In general the ancients painted on a dry ground, even in their buildings, as appears from the Herculanean antiquities, most of which are executed in this manner. At Rome and Naples, the first (deepest) coat is of true Puzzolana, of the same nature with the terras now used in mortar, required to keep out wet, about one finger thick; the next of ground

marble or alabaster, and sometimes of pure lime or Rife, Pro-stucco, in thicknesses about one third of the former grefs, and Upon this they appear to have laid a coat of black, and then another of red paint; on which last the subject itself was executed. Such seems to have been their method of painting on walls; but in their moveable pictures, and in the performance of their first artists, and where effect of shade and light were necessary, they doubtless used white.

The colours employed they seem to have mixed up with size, of which they preferred that made by boiling the ears and genitals of bulls. This appears to have made the colours so durable and adhesive, that the ancient paintings lately found bear washing with a soft cloth and water; and sometimes even diluted aquafortis is employed to clean their paintings on fresco. Pliny says that glue dissolved in vinegar and then dried, is not again soluble.

What the encaustic painting of the ancients was, has been much disputed. From the works of Vitruvius and Pliny, it appears evidently that it was of three kinds.

Firstly, where a picture painted in the common way, was covered with a varnish of wax melted, diluted with a little oil, and laid on warm with a brush.

Secondly, where the colours themselves were mixed up with melted wax, and the mixture used while warm. And,

Thirdly, where a painting was executed on ivory by means of the cefrum or viriculum.

Some experiments on this last method by Mr Colebrook may be found in the Phil. Trans. vol. 51. and more particular directions in Muntz's Treatise on Encaustic Painting.

It appears from ancient writings of the best authority, that in the earliest and purest times of this art, the painters used few colours, perhaps not more than four. "The paintings of the ancients (says Dionysius Halicarnassus) were simple and unvaried in their colouring, but correct in their drawing, and distinguished by their elegance. Those which succeeded, less correct in their drawing, were more finished, more varied in their light and shades, uniting their effect to the multitude of their colours." But no certain conclusion can be drawn, that the more early among the great painters of the ancients, such as Apollodorus, Zeuxis, Timanthes, &c. had no more colours than four to use, merely because they did not use them. On the contrary, it may be conjectured with some degree of probability, from their chasteness in design, and from the complaints Pliny makes of the gaudy taste of the Roman painters, that the Greeks in general were designedly chaste in their colouring, and not so merely from necessity, at least about the time of Zeuxis and Apelles; for the former could not have painted grapes so naturally as he is said to have done with four colours only; and the rebuke given by the latter to one of his scholars who had painted an Helen very gaudily, is a confirmation of these observations. "Young man (says Apelles), not being able to make her beautiful, you have made her rich."

Of white colouring substances, the ancients had the white lead variously prepared, a white from calcined oars used egg-shells, and preparations from cretaceous and argillaceous earths. The moderns in addition have ma-

Vol. XIII. Part II. gigery of bismuth, little used; and ought to have the calces of tin and zinc.

Of blacks, the ancients had preparations similar to lamp, ivory, blue, and Frankfort black; also to Indian ink and common writing ink; and they used, what we do not, the precipitate of the black dyers wats.

The ancients possessed a species of vermilion or fine cinnabar, a coarser cinnabar, red-lead, various earths burnt and unburnt, apparently similar to our red ochre; Venetian red, Indian red, Spanish brown, burnt terra de Sienna, and scarlet ochre; they had also a substance alike in colour and in name to our dragon’s blood.

The yellow pigments of the ancients were generally the same with our orpiments, king’s-yellow, Naples-yellow, &c. They did not possess turpeth-mineral, mineral-yellow, or gamboge; nor do they appear to have known of gall-stone as a pigment.

Of blue paints they had preparations from the lapis syanus and lapis armenius. Indigo they had, and perhaps bice and smelt; for they made blue glaas, but whether from some ore of cobalt or of wolfram must be uncertain: they had not Prussian blue, verditer, nor litmus, which we have. We do not use the blue precipitate of the dyers wats, nor mountain blue, which they certainly employed.

Of green colours, they had verdegrise, terra vert, and malachite or mountain green. The latter is not in use among us. Sap green, green verditer, and Scheele’s green, appear to have been unknown to them: like us, they procured as many tints as they pleased from blues and yellow vegetables.

We have no original purple in use: that from gold by means of tin, though very good when well prepared, is too dear perhaps, and unnecessary. Their purple was a tinged earth. Their orange or sandarac (red orpiment) they also possess. Hence there does not appear to have been any great want of pigments, or any very material difference between the colours they used and such as we generally employ. Perhaps the full effect of colouring may be obtained without the use of the exceeding brilliant pigments, depending chiefly on the proportion and opposition of tints.

The ancients could not know anything about the spirit varnishes, distillation being a modern invention; but they were undoubtedly acquainted with the use of the better oil varnishes, that is, with the use and effect of resinous gums dissolved in boiling inspissated oils.

One of the best preserved mummies in the British museum has an astonishing brightness of colours on the outside of the coffin. Thousands of years have not impaired them; they are as fresh as if they had been laid on yesterday.

The chalk ground, and the excellency of the colours, some of which imply a good deal of chemical and metallurgical knowledge, do not sufficiently account for their splendour and freshness: it must be owing to other circumstances; either to the mixture of shining colours, or to a hard glossy skin which visibly covers them all over.

From an accurate examination of one of those mummies belonging to the university of Cambridge, it appeared, that the varnish which covered the colours could not be dissolved, or in the least affected by common water; and that it equally resisted the dissolving effect and power of the strongest spirits: hence it is reasonable to conclude, that the coffins of the mummies were not covered with size, whites of eggs, simple gums, or any preparation of wax, but with a fine transparent oil varnish. It was discovered at the same time, that the colours themselves were not prepared or mixed with oil; for where the external glossy skin was damaged, broken, or rubbed off, even common water would wash the colours away, and affect the chalk ground under them.

Pliny has described the general and particular effects of the varnish of Apelles, under the name of atrament, so distinctly, that no body can mistake the thing or the mixture he is speaking of. He has mentioned the thinning glossy skin of the varnish which excites the brightness of the colours, and preserves them against dust; he observed, that this skin was laid on so thin, that it could not be discerned at any distance; nor was he less accurate in reporting the particular effects of that mixture which Apelles made use of; it harmonized and lowered the tone of the brightest florid colours in an imperceptible manner, and the whole appeared as if it had been seen through jingleless. The chemists and connoisseurs are fully of opinion, that no liquid substance or mixture of any kind is fit to produce these effects besides the oil varnishes: and if there are not, Apelles and the Greeks were certainly acquainted with those varnishes; a fact which might be strongly urged in behalf of their knowledge of oil colours.

The black outlines of the figures on the most ancient Greek paintings yet extant, that is, on Etruscan vases, are so sharp, so thick, and drawn in so easy and masterly a manner, that one cannot help looking upon them as having been drawn in oil colours. Had they been in tempera or water colours on the red clay ground on which they are applied, they would have been imbibed and soaked into it. Our china and enamel painters prepare and apply their colours with spike or other liquid oils; and the Greek masters seem to have done the same, unless they should appear to have burnt their vases before they painted them, or to have used a mixture of dissolved wax or gum for giving a body to their colours, which might have answered the same end as oils. And this is the more probable, as there is some reason to believe that these vases went through two different fires, that of baking them, and that of smelting or burning in their colours.

The Greek and Roman paintings that have been preserved or discovered at Rome and Herculaneum do not countenance the supposition of oil colours; at least, Turnbull and the academists at Naples, who have described the royal collection at Portici, Cochin, and many other authors who have seen and described them, do not hint any thing of that nature. On the other hand, Vitruvius, who has left us so many valuable notices of the ancient arts, acquaints us, that there was a kind of painting which absolutely required a mixture of oil. And Pliny, to the same purpose, expressly says, “Sun and moon shine are inimical and obnoxious to red lead. The remedy is to apply the red wax when hot and melted with some oil on the well-dried walls, which is to be done with brushes.” From these observations, the evidence which the ancients have given us in behalf of themselves, and of their knowledge of oil painting, may be summed up in few words.

Their having been acquainted with the white chalk ground, which many modern masters have used for oil painting on boards, proves no more than that the ancients might have done the same.

The oil varnishes used by the Egyptians and by Apelles might have brought them to the discovery of oil painting; but as it appears both from mummies and from the works of Pliny, that their colours were not prepared and mixed with that varnish, and as it is plain rather that this varnish was externally laid over the finished pictures; no other conclusion can be drawn, except that they were within sight of the discovery, and that it is a matter of wonder that they should not have laid hold of it.

The outlines of the old Greek or Etruscan vases are merely fallacious appearances.

The old Greek and Roman paintings on walls and stones are either painted in distemper and fresco, or they have not been sufficiently examined.

The oil used in the coarser wax and wall paintings, proves at most that experiments had been tried with oils; but we have no direct proofs of oil painting having been underlaid or used by the Egyptians, Greeks, or Romans; and that, however great their skill or ingenuity, they might very well have been within sight and reach of the discovery, and nevertheless have missed it.

The art of painting was revived in Europe about the end of the 13th or beginning of the 14th century. The human mind, however, plunged in profound ignorance, was destitute of every principle of sound philosophy which might enable it to determine on the objects of the arts; and of consequence the painters contented themselves with works adapted to the general taste, without beauty and without proportion. In Italy, where the first attempts were made, they were employed in representing the mysteries of the passion, and subjects of a similar nature, on the walls of chapels and churches. Their labours were directed to a vast number of figures, rather than to the beauty and perfection of each; and the art in more modern times has always preserved somewhat of this absurd fault which it contracted at that early period. The artist in our times is not, like those in Greece, at liberty to devote his talents only to men of knowledge and discernment; he is constrained to please those who are rich, and very frequently those who are ignorant. Instead of profiting to himself the perfection of the art as the great object of his pursuit, he must rest his success and character on the facility of his operation and the abundance of his works.

Painting did not long continue in the imperfect condition in which it was left by those who first cultivated it among the moderns. It was natural that their successors should endeavour to surpass them by joining some degree of theory to the barbarous practice they had adopted. The first thing which they discovered, or rather which they revived after the manner of the ancients, was perspective. This made the artists capable of expressing what is called foreshortening, and of giving more effect and more truth to their works.

Dominique Ghirlandaio, a Florentine, was the first artist who enriched the style of his composition by grouping his figures, and who gave depth to his pictures, by distinguishing, by exact gradations, the spaces which his figures occupied; but his successors have far surpassed him in boldness of composition.

Leonard da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Giorgion, Titian, Bartholomew de St Marc, and Raphael, flourished about the end of the 14th century. Leonard da Vinci was the inventor of a great many details in the art: Michael Angelo, by studying the ancients, and by his knowledge of anatomy, arrived at great elegance in drawing the outlines of his figures; Giorgion enriched the art in general, and gave greater brilliancy to his colours than his predecessors: Titian, by a careful imitation of nature, made great proficiency in the truth and perfection of his tones: Bartholomew de St Marc studied particularly the part of drapery, and discovered the claro-oscuro, the best manner of giving drapery to his figures, and of making the naked to be felt even where they were covered: Raphael, endowed with a superior genius, began with studying carefully all his predecessors and all his contemporaries. He united in himself all the excellencies which they possessed; and formed a style more perfect and more universal than any painter who went before or who has succeeded him. But while he excelled in every part of the art, he was chiefly superior in those of invention and of composition. It is probable that the Greeks themselves would have been filled with admiration if they had beheld his chief pieces in the Vatican, where to the greatest abundance of paintings is joined so much perfection, and purity, and ease.

After painting had arrived at the greatest perfection among the Greeks by the exertions of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, Apelles found nothing to add to the art except grace; in the same manner among the moderns, after Raphael had appeared, grace was the only thing wanting to the art, and Correggio became the Apelles of Europe. Painting was by him carried to the highest degree among the moderns; the taste of the best critics and the eye of the vulgar were equally gratified.

After these great masters a considerable interval elapsed till the time of the Caracci. Those artists, born at Bologna, by studying the works of their predecessors with great care, and particularly those of Correggio, became the first and the most celebrated of their imitators. Hannibal possessed a very correct design, and united somewhat of the ancient style to that of Lewis his brother; but he neglected to inquire into the intricate principles and philosophy of the art. The pupils of the Caracci formed a school after their manner; but Guido, a painter of an easy and happy talent, formed a style altogether graceful, and rich, and easy. Guerriero formed after Caravaggio, or invented himself a particular style of the claro-oscuro, composed of strong shades and vivid oppositions.

Peter de Cortone succeeded those great imitators of their predecessors and of nature; who finding it difficult to succeed in that kind of painting, and having besides great natural abilities, applied himself chiefly to composition or arrangement, and to what the artists call taste. He distinguished invention from composition; appeared not to have attended to the former, but chiefly to those parts which are most prominent in the picture, and to the contralting of groups. It was then that the practice was introduced of loading pictures with a great number of figures, without examining whether or not they agreed to the subject of the history. The ancient Greeks employed a very small number of figures in their works, in order to make the perfection of those which they admitted more evident. The disciples or imitators of Cortona, on the other hand, have sought to conceal their imperfections by multiplying their figures. This school of Cortona is divided into many branches, and has changed the character of the art. The multiplication of figures, without a judicious and proper choice, carried back the art of painting to that point where the first restorers of it among the moderns had left it; while at the same time the disciples of Cortona were enabled to give to this first condition of the art a greater degree of perfection than the first artists.

About the middle of the 17th century flourished at Rome Carlo Maratti, who, aiming at the greatest perfection, carefully studied the works of the first painters, and particularly those of the school of the Caracci. Although he had already studied nature, he discovered by the works of these artists that it is not always proper to imitate her with a scrupulous exactness. This principle, which he extended to every part of the art, gave to his school a certain style of carefulness, which however is considerably degenerated.

France has also produced great masters, particularly in the part of composition; in which Poussin, after Raphael, is the best imitator of the style of the ancient Greeks. Charles le Brun and many others distinguished themselves for great fertility of genius; and as long as the French school departed not from the principles of the Italian school, it produced masters of great merit in the different branches of the art.

Mengs, from whom this account is taken, is not deceived when he declares the art of painting to have degenerated in France after Le Brun; but he seems to be mistaken in giving the imitation of the works of Rubens found at Paris as the cause of this decay. It appears from this opinion, that the recent French school was not well known to him. The French, indeed, if we may believe their own authors, were never much occupied in the imitation of Rubens; and they have for a long time despised him. But the perfection of the dramatic art in France, the dres of their actors, the magnificence and manners of the court, have contributed very much to the decay of painting. Instead of forming their taste on the beautiful simplicity of nature, their painters studied the gestures and the attitudes of comedians, the fopperies of women of fashion, the affected airs of courtiers, the pageantry of Versailles, and the magnificence of the opera. Mengs says, "that the French have formed a national style, of which ingenuity and what they call esprit are the discriminating qualities; that they have ceased to introduce Greek, Egyptian, Roman, or barbarian personages into their paintings; and that, after the example of Poussin, they content themselves with figures altogether French, as if it were their intention to hand down to posterity that such a nation once existed."

Since, according to the confession of Mengs, their figures are altogether French, there is no reason to believe that the French painters have imitated Rubens, whose works are marked much more strongly than those of his master Æneas with the Flemish character. The truth is, that their painters, like Cortona and Maratti, have crowded their pictures with a great number of figures; have grouped them in a manner most calculated to strike the senses; have been more intent on agreeable artifices than expression and beauty; and, finally, that they have borrowed the manners of the court and theatre.

The first masters of the great schools of painting, with the ancients and nature for their guides, and their genius for their support, carried every part of the art to the greatest height of perfection. Those who followed them, and who had the example of their predecessors in addition to the first sources of truth and beauty, did by no means arrive at the same excellence. The Caracci in their school, Paul Vero- nese, and all the painters of his time, Vandyke, and all those who exercised the art in Italy, in Flanders, and in France, supported it with great brilliancy. But soon after the number of artists was multiplied, and slavishly copying men of inferior talents, they produced works of an inferior nature. Some wanting to be colourists, their pieces were exaggerated; others affecting simplicity, became cold and insipid. At this period of the art, men of real abilities, and covetous of fame, who wished to rise superior to the mediocrity of the times, seem not to have taken the road of truth and nature. They affected a style of pompous preparation, and annexed a kind of merit to the expert management of the pencil. The affected forms of Cortona and of his pupils, the fantastical attitudes and the poignant effects of Piazetta, and in short the ingenious contrivances of the last masters of the French school, are decided proofs of this increasing bad taste.

It appears, that for some time past greater pains has been taken to form men for the art than to encourage those who possess the talent. In consequence of this ruinous practice, schools for drawing, very different from those formed by able painters, have been exceedingly multiplied; and there give the elements according to an uniform system, by which the mind is laid under a regular restraint at the very threshold of the profession. This evil is productive of two inconveniences; it gives middling painters, and it multiplies them to that degree, as to halten the downfall and bring into contempt the art itself.

The particular reputation of the Italian painters furnishes another reason for the decline of the art. The first painters of that country were few in number; they were honoured, and they deserved to be honoured. Their distinguished reputation has conferred a value on the general paintings of their countrymen. The desire of possessing taste, or of being thought to possess it, has led the rich and the ignorant of all nations to give a preference to the Italian market. Necessity, in this case, would multiply the painters; and their abilities must bear a pretty exact proportion to the discrimination of those who give the price.

The decline of painting has also arisen from the despotism which for some time reigned in the academic societies. In fact, these have often been ruled by men who would force every exertion of genius into their peculiar tract of operation. If they required such or such merit of execution, the first principles of the art were neglected for that peculiar excellency. In this manner the schools were absolute in behalf of design as long as statuary was held in chief estimation. The artist, whose abilities and inclination led him to colouring, was obliged to abandon a pursuit which could be of no service to him, and devote himself to that for which he was not qualified by nature. On the other hand, if the instructions of the schools be confined to colouring, a mind disposed to the choice and exactness of forms will find no encouragement, and be forever lost to the art. In this manner the ignorance of those who wish to be connoisseurs, and the narrow views of those who pretend to direct the general taste, have equally contributed to the decline of the arts.

Sect. II. Of the Schools.

A School, in the fine arts, denominates a class of artists who have learned their art from a certain master, either by receiving his instructions, or by studying his works; and who of consequence discover more or less of his manner, from the desire of imitation, or from the habit of adopting his principles.

All the painters which Europe has produced since the renovation of the arts are classified under the following schools: the school of Florence, the school of Rome, the school of Venice, the Lombard school, the French school, the German school, the Flemish school, the Dutch school, and the English school.

This school is remarkable for greatness; for attitudes seemingly in motion; for a certain dark severity; for an expression of strength, by which grace perhaps is excluded; and for a character of design approaching to the gigantic. The productions of this school may be considered as overcharged; but it cannot be denied that they possess an ideal majesty, which elevates human nature above mortality. The Tuscan artists, satisfied with commanding the admiration, seem to have considered the art of pleasing as beneath their notice.

This school has an indisputable title to the veneration of all the lovers of the arts, as the first in Italy which cultivated them.

Painting, which had languished from the destruction of the Roman empire, was revived by Cimabue, born of a noble family in Florence in the year 1240. This painter translated the poor remains of the art from a Greek artist or two into his own country. His works, as may easily be imagined, were in a very ordinary style, but they received the applause and admiration of his fellow citizens; and if Cimabue had not found admirers, Florence in all probability would not have been honoured with Michael Angelo. The number of painters became soon so considerable in Florence, that in the year 1350 they established a society under the protection of St Luke.

Masolino, towards the beginning of the 15th century, gave more grandeur to his figures, adjusted their drapery better, and filled over them a kind of life and expression. He was surpassed by Masaccio his pupil; who first gave force, animation, and relievo to his works.

Andrew Castagna was the first Florentine who painted in oil. But Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo, contemporary painters, were the glory of the school of Florence. Michael Angelo was superior to Leonardo in grandeur, in boldness of conception, and in knowledge of design; but Leonardo was superior to him in all the amiable parts of the art. Leonardo, possessed of a fine imagination, and full of sensibility, devoted himself in painting to express the affections of the soul; and if, in this fulsome branch of the art, he was afterwards surpassed by Raphael, he had at least the glory not only of exceeding all the painters who went before him, but of pursuing a path which none of them had attempted. His design was pure and neat, and not wholly destitute of greatness. He never went beyond nature, and he made a good choice of objects for imitation.

Michael Angelo, less formed to experience sweet affections than vehement passions, sought in nature what the strength of man might accomplish, not that which constitutes beauty. He delighted in being great and terrible, more than in graceful and pleasant attitudes. Well acquainted with anatomy, he knew more exactly than any other artist in what manner to express the joining of the bones of the body, and the office and insertion of the muscles; but too eager to display his knowledge of anatomy, he seems to have forgotten that the muscles are softened by the skin which covers them; and that they are less visible in children, in women, and in young men, than in confirmed and vigorous manhood. "In his figures (says Mengs) the articulations of the muscles are so easy and free, that they appear to be made for the attitude in which he represents them. The fleshy parts are too much rounded, and the muscles are in general too large and of too equal strength. You never perceive in his figures a muscle at rest; and although he knew admirably well how to place them, their action is very frequently inconsistent with their situation."

"He did not possess (says Sir Joshua Reynolds) so many delightful parts of the art as Raphael; but those which he had acquired were of a more sublime nature. He saw in painting little more than what might be attained in sculpture; and he confined it to exactness of form and the expression of passions."

He informs us, in one of his letters, that he modelled in earth or wax all the figures which he intended to paint. This method was familiar to the great painters of his time, and ought never to be abandoned. It appears, that in representing them in this manner in relievo, the painter can imitate them much more exactly than when they are drawn with a crayon or pencil on a plain surface.

"Michael Angelo (continues Sir Joshua Reynolds) never attempted the lesser elegancies and graces in the art. Vasari says, he never painted but one picture in oil; and resolved never to paint another, saying it was an employment only fit for women and children.

"If any man had a right to look down upon the lower accomplishments as beneath his attention, it was certainly Michael Angelo; nor can it be thought strange, that such a mind should have slighted, or have been with-held from paying due attention to all those graces and embellishments of art which have diffused such lustre over the works of other painters." Ancient Rome, rich with the works brought from Greece, or finished in its own bosom by Grecian artists, handed down in its ruins the remains of that glory to which it had been elevated. It was by the study of these remains that the modern artists were formed; they derived from them the knowledge of design, the beauty of exquisite forms, greatness of style, and justness of expression, carried to that length only which did not affect the beauty of the figure. From them also they derived the principles of the art of drapery; and they followed these principles even while they made the drapery of modern paintings more large and flowing than what was practised by the ancient sculptors. The Roman school was altogether devoted to the principal parts of the art, to those which require genius and vast conceptions; and was no farther occupied with colours than what was necessary to establish a difference between painting and sculpture, or rather between painting varied with colours and in claro-obscuro.

Raphael Sanzio, born at Urbino in 1483, and scholar to Pietro Perugino, was the undoubted founder of this school. His first manner was that of Perugino his master; but he travelled twice to Florence to study the great artists who flourished in that city.

It was fortunate for Raphael, says Mengs, that he was born in what he terms the infancy of the art, and that he formed himself by copying nature before he had access to see the works of any great master. He began by studying, with great exactness, the simple truth in his figures. He was then ignorant that any choice was necessary; but he saw the works of Leonardo da Vinci, of Masaccio, and of Michael Angelo, which gave his genius a new direction. After this he perceived that there was something more in the art of painting than a simple imitation of truth. But the works of those masters were not sufficiently perfect to point out the best choice to make; and he continued in uncertainty till he saw at Rome the works of the ancients. Then he perceived that he had found the true models which he wanted; and in imitating them he had only to follow the natural impulse of his genius.

Habituated by his first manner to imitate nature with precision, it was not difficult to carry the same exactness into the imitation of the ancients; and it was a great advantage to him that he flourished in an age wherein the artists were not arrived at facility of execution at the expense of rigorous exactness. He never lost sight of nature; but he was instructed by the ancients in what manner she should be studied. He perceived, that the Greeks had not entered into minute details, that they had selected what was great or beautiful, and that one of the chief causes of the beauty of their works was the regularity of their proportions: he began, therefore, by carefully studying this part of the art. He saw also that the joinings of the bones, and the free play of their articulations, are the causes of all graceful movement: he therefore, after the example of the ancients, gave the greatest attention to this part, and was led by these observations not to be contented with the simple imitation of nature.

His design is excellent, but neither so perfect nor so finished as that of the Greeks. He excelled in representing the character of philosophers, apostles, and other figures of that kind; but he did not equal the Greeks in ideal figures, which ought to carry the impression of divinity. His taste for design was more Roman than Greek, because he formed it chiefly on the basso-rilievo which he found at Rome. On this account he had the habit of marking strongly the bones and the articulations, and labouring the fleshy parts less; but as these basso-rilievi are very exact with regard to the reciprocal proportions of every member, he excelled in this part, while at the same time he did not give to his figures all the elegance of the Greek artists, nor the flexibility of articulation which is admired in the Laocoön, in the Apollo of Belvidere, and in the Gladiator.

The manners and spirit of his age, and the subjects which he most commonly treated, prevented him from reaching the ideal of the ancients. Having seldom occasion to represent figures altogether ideal, he devoted himself to purity of expression. He knew that the expression of the passions of the soul is absolutely necessary in an art which represents the actions of men, since from those affections the actions may be said truly to originate. To make figures act, and yet neglect the interior springs of action, is nothing more than a representation of automata. The attitudes and action are evident; but they appear not to act of themselves, because they are void of those principles from which alone men are supposed to act. An artist who neglects expression, gives no just representation of character, even though he should take nature for his model.

Raphael’s first care, when he wanted to compose a piece, was to weigh the expression; that is to say, to establish, according to the nature of the subject, the passions which were to animate the characters. All the figures, all the accessories, all the parts of the composition, were moulded to the general expression.

As he had not found examples in the ancient statues of the claro-obscuro, he was comparatively weak in this part; and if there was anything remarkable in his distribution of light and shade, he owed it to the works of the Florentine painters. It cannot be said, however, even with regard to the claro-obscuro, that he imitated nature without taste. He delighted in what are called masses of light; and disposed the great lights in the most conspicuous places of his figures, whether naked or in drapery. If this method did not produce effects highly illusive, it gives his works that distinctness which makes his figures conspicuous at a distance; and this must be allowed to be an essential part of the art of painting. He did not proceed beyond this; and content with that kind of claro-obscuro which comprehends imitation, he never attempted that which is ideal.

The composition and the ensemble of his figures were the chief excellences of Raphael. His philosophical mind could not be affected with objects which had not expression. He had too high an idea of painting to consider it as a mute art; he made it speak to the heart and soul; and he could only do this in subjects which required expression. If Raphael did not reach the Greek excellence, if he did not possess the art of embellishing nature in the same high degree, he saw at least, and imitated her in whatever was expressive and... The Greeks sailed with majesty (says Mengs) between earth and heaven; Raphael walked with propriety on the earth.

Composition is in general (says the same author) of two kinds: Raphael's is the expressive kind; the other is the theatrical or picturesque, which consists of an agreeable disposition of the figures. Lanfranc was the inventor of this last, and after him Pietro de Cortona. I give the preference to Raphael; because reason presides over all his works, or at least the greatest part of them. He never allowed himself in common ideas, and was never allured to give any thing in his accessory figures which might turn the attention from the principle object of the piece.

A history of the schools is nothing more than a history of the painters who founded them. In those two which we have already given, Michael Angelo and Raphael come readily forward to claim our attention; and therefore we cannot do better than conclude the account by the masterly contrast of these eminent painters given by Sir Joshua Reynolds. "If we put those great artists (says he) in a light of comparison with each other, Raphael had more taste and fancy, Michael Angelo more genius and imagination. The one excelled in beauty, the other in energy. Michael Angelo has more of the poetical in operation; his ideas are vast and sublime; his people are a superior order of beings; there is nothing about them, nothing in the air of their actions, or their attitudes, or the style and cast of their limbs or features, that puts one in mind of their belonging to our species. Raphael's imagination is not so elevated; his figures are not so much disjointed from our own diminutive race of beings, though his ideas are chaste, noble, and of great conformity to their subjects. Michael Angelo's works have a strong, peculiar, and marked character; they seem to proceed from his own mind entirely; and that mind so rich and abundant, that he never needed, or seemed to disdain, to look abroad for foreign help. Raphael's materials are generally borrowed, though the noble structure is his own. The excellency of this extraordinary man lay in the propriety, beauty, and majesty of his characters; his judicious contrivance of composition, correctness of drawing, purity of taste, and the skilful accommodation of other men's conceptions to his own purpose."

This school is the child of nature. The Venetian painters, not having under their eyes like the Roman the remains of antiquity, were destitute of the means of forming a just idea of the beauty of forms and of expression. They copied without choice the forms of nature; but they were chiefly delighted with the beauties which presented themselves in the mixture and the variety of natural colours. Their attention not being detached from this part by any thing of greater importance, colouring was their chief object, and they succeeded in it. They did not rest contented with characterizing the objects by comparison, in making the colour proper for one of more value by the colour more proper for another; but they endeavoured still farther, by the agreement and opposition of the coloured objects, and by the contrast of light and shade, to produce a vigorous effect, to demand and fix the attention. Dominic, who was said to have perished at Florence by the jealousy of Andrea del Sarto, and who was the second Italian artist who painted in oil, had educated, before he quitted Venice, his native country, Jacques Bellin, who was remarkable for nothing but the picturesque education which he gave to Gentel and John his two sons.

Gentel, who was the eldest, painted chiefly in water colours. John contributed much to the progress of his art in painting constantly in oil, and after nature. Although he always retained great stiffness in his manner, he had less than his father or brother. Great neatness of colouring, and an approach to harmony, are evident in his works. His taste in design is Gothic, the air of his heads is sufficiently noble, his attitudes are without judgment, and his figures without expression. He had for scholars Giorgion and Titian, who deserve to be considered as the founders of the Venetian school.

Giorgion distinguished himself by a design of a better taste than that of his master; but he chiefly surpassed him in colouring. He died in his 32nd year; and excited the emulation of Titian, who soon greatly excelled him.

Tiziano Vecelli, known best by the name of Titian, was instructed to copy nature in the most servile manner in the school of John Bellin; but when he had seen the works of Giorgion, he began to study the ideal in colouring.

The truth of history is not to be expected in his historical paintings, or in those of the artists of the same school. He seems to have paid little attention to the convenience of scene, to the costume, to expression adapted to the subject, or, finally, to the accommodation of parts which characterize the works of those who have studied the ancients. He was in short a great painter, and nothing more.

But although he deserves not to be placed among the most distinguished artists in point of judgment, yet he is by no means destitute of great and noble conceptions. There is often to be found among his male figures a considerable degree of grandeur; but if he has sometimes, like Michael Angelo, overcharged his design, it was more discovered in the swelling of the soft and fleshy parts, than in vigour and muscular strength.

Almost entirely devoted to simple imitation, he had scarcely greater choice in the claro obscuri than in design. He cannot be justly reproached at the same time for weakness in this particular; because in endeavouring to imitate the colours of nature, he was obliged to observe the degrees of light. And in proportion as he succeeded in the imitation of natural colours, he must be less defective in the claro obscuri; but it is not in the knowledge of this part of the art that we are to seek for the beauties of his works. These are to be found in the happy dispositions of colours both proper and local, and he carries this to the highest point of perfection.

The artists in the Florentine and Roman schools painted most commonly in water colours or in fresco; and in the exercise of their profession, instead of nature, they finished their works from their first sketches. Titian painted in oil, and finished from the objects in nature; and this practice, joined to his exquisite talents, gave the greatest truth to his colours. His being a portrait-painter was also of advantage to him as a colourist. In this department he was accustomed to the colours of nature in carnations and draperies. He was a landscape-painter; and here also he took the colours from nature.

"As Titian perceived (says Mengs) that the objects which are beautiful in nature have often a bad effect in painting, he found it necessary to make a choice in the objects of imitation; and he observed, that these were objects of which the local colours were extremely beautiful, which nevertheless were in a great measure destroyed by the reflection of light, by the porosity of the body, and by different luminous tints, &c. He perceived also, that in every object there was an infinite number of half tints, which conducted to the knowledge of harmony. In short, he observed in the objects of nature a particular agreement of transparency, of opacity, of rudeness, and of polish, and that all objects differed in the degrees of their tints and their shades. It was in this diversity he sought the perfection of his art; and in the execution he moderated the effect of natural colours. For example, in a carnation which had many demi-tints, he confined himself to one; and he employed even less than a demi-tint, where there were few in the natural object. By this means he obtained a colouring exquisitely fine; and in this part he was a great master, and deserves to be carefully studied."

Titian has in general little expression in his pictures, and he sometimes introduces figures which augment the coldness of the piece; for if it be true that the heads, even in historical painting, ought to be studied after nature, it is true also that an individual nature ought not to be prefented, but one general and ideal. It is necessary that they should be men, while they resemble not men we are accustomed to see. The painter fails in the effect which he ought to produce, if, when he represents Achilles, Hector, and Caesar, his personages are familiar to our observation.

The colours of his paintings are so mingled together, as to give no idea of the colours on his pallet; which distinguishes him from Rubens, who placed his colours one at the side of another. It is impossible to say, on the narrowest inspection, with what colours he produced his tints. This practice, which enabled him to imitate so exactly the colours of nature, gives a marked distinction to his manner of painting. In the examination of his works, the critics lose an ordinary source of pleasure which arises from marking the freedom of hand; but they may console themselves with the natural and exquisite touches of this artist.

He is of historical painters one of those who have succeeded in landscape. His situations are well chosen; his trees are varied in their forms, and their foliage well conceived. He had a custom of representing some remarkable appearance in his landscapes to render them more striking.

The distinguishing characteristics of this school are grace, an agreeable taste for design, without great correction, a mellowness of pencil, and a beautiful mixture of colours.

Antonio Allegri, called Corregio, was the father and greatest ornament of this school. He began like the painters of his time to imitate nature alone; but, as he was chiefly delighted with the graceful, he was careful to purify his design from all short turnings and unnecessary angles. He perceived that largeness contributed to grace; and therefore he not only rejected all small figures, but enlarged as much as possible the outlines, avoided acute angles and straight lines, and by these means gave an easy grandeur to his design. He made his figures elegant and large; he varied the outlines by frequent undulations; but he was not always pure and correct.

Corregio painted in oil, a kind of painting susceptible of the greatest delicacy and sweetness; and as his character led him to cultivate the agreeable, he gave a pleasing captivating tone to all his pictures. He sought transparent colours to represent shades conformable to nature, and adopted a manner of glazing which actually rendered his shadows more obscure. Obscurity in painting cannot be fully obtained without transparent colours; for these absorb the rays of light, and of consequence give less reflection. He laid his colours very thick on the brightest parts of his pictures, to make them capable of receiving, by a proper touch, the greatest degree of light. He perceived, that the reflections of light correspond with the colour of the body from which they are reflected; and on these principles he founded his theory of colours with respect to light and shade and reflection. But it is chiefly in the colour of his shades that he deserves to be imitated; for his lights are too clear, and somewhat heavy; and his fleshy parts are not sufficiently transparent.

Harmony and grace are connected together; and on this account Corregio excelled also in harmony. As the delicacy of his taste suffered him not to employ strong oppositions, he naturally became a great master in this part, which chiefly consists of easy gradations from one extreme to another. He was harmonious in his design, by making the lines which formed the angles of the contour arched and undulated. Both in the lights and shades, he placed always between the two extremes a space which served to unite them, and to form a passage from the one to the other. The delicacy of his organs made him perceive, better than any other artist, what relief was necessary to the eye after a violent exertion; and he was therefore careful to follow a bold and prevailing colour with a demi-tint, and to conduct the eye of the spectator, by an invisible gradation, to its ordinary state of tension. In the same manner (says Mengs) does agreeable and melting music pull one gently out of sleep, that the awaking resembles enchantment more than the disturbing of repose. A delicate taste in colours, a perfect knowledge of the claro obscuro, the art of uniting light to light, and shade to shade, together with that of detaching the objects from the ground, inimitable, grave, and perfect harmony, were the qualities which distinguished Corregio from all the painters, and placed him near the head of his profession.

The Carracci, Lewis, Augustin, and Hannibal, formed what is called the second Lombard school, which is frequently distinguished by the name of the school of Bologna.

Lewis was the master of the other two; he had studied the works of Titian and Paul Veronese at Venice, those of André del Sarte at Florence, those of Corregio at Parma, and those of Jules Romaen at Mantua. but he chiefly endeavoured to imitate the manner of Corregio. Hannibal fluctuated between Corregio and Titian. Augustin their rival in painting had his mind cultivated by learning, and devoted part of his time to poetry and music, to dancing and to other manly exercises. These three painters often employed their talents on the same piece; and it was admirable that their united labours seemed to be animated with the same spirit.

They established an academy at Bologna, which their zeal for the advancement of their art made them call "Academia degli Disfederati"; but it was afterward called the Academy of the Carracci, because the reputation which these artists acquired, permitted not a more illustrious name to be given to an establishment of which they were the founders. In this school were taught the art of constructing models, perspective, and anatomy; lessons were given on the beautiful proportions of nature, on the best manner of using colours, and on the principles of light and shade. They held frequent conferences, in which not only artists, but men of general knowledge, were permitted to elucidate points relative to the art of painting; but they were separated upon Hannibal's going to Rome to adorn the gallery of the cardinal Farnese.

The works of the Carracci are often, from the resemblance of their manner, confounded together; especially those which were finished previous to the residence of Hannibal at Rome. Meanwhile each of them has a decided character distinct from the other two. Lewis had less fire, but more of gracefulness and grandeur; Augustin had more spirit in his conception, and more pleasantness in his execution; Hannibal is characterized by boldness, by a design more profound, by an expression more lucky, and by an execution more solid.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, who saw the works of Lewis at Bologna, holds him out in his discourses as the best model for what is called style in painting; which is the faculty of disposing colours in such a manner as to express our sentiments and ideas. "Lodovico Carracci," says he, "(I mean in his best works) appears to me to approach the nearest to perfection. His unaffected breadth of light and shadow, the simplicity of colouring, which, holding its proper rank, does not draw aside the least part of the attention from the subject, and the solemn effect of that twilight which seems diffused over his pictures, appears to me to correspond with grave and dignified subjects better than the more artificial brilliancy of sunshine which enlightens the pictures of Titian."

Hannibal is esteemed by the best judges as a model for beauty and design. Those who blame him for becoming less a colourist at Rome than he was at Bologna, ought to recollect that it is his performances at Rome which have chiefly secured his reputation. Severe critics have maintained that his design is too little varied in his figures; that he excels only in male beauty; that in imitating ancient statues, he excites some resemblance, but without arriving at the fulness of idea and of style which characterize the ancients; or, in other words, that he hath forced fully imitated the exterior of their manner, but that he was incapable of reaching the interior and profound reasonings which determined those admirable artists.

The success of Hannibal, and the reputation which he acquired, have been pernicious to the art. His successors, deluded by these considerations, have made him the object of their imitation, without ascending to the sources from which he derived his knowledge, and which he never could equal. The result has been, that, instead of becoming equal to Hannibal, they have often copied his imperfections.

This school has been so different under different French masters, that it is difficult to characterize it. Some of its artists have been formed on the Florentine and Lombard manner, others on the Roman, others on the Venetian, and a few of them have distinguished themselves by a manner which may be called their own. In speaking in general terms of this school, it appears to have no peculiar character; and it can only be distinguished by its aptitude to imitate easily any impression; and it may be added, speaking still in general terms, that it unites, in a moderate degree, the different parts of the art, without excelling in any one of them.

It is equally difficult to determine the progress of painting in France. Miniature painting, and painting on glass, were early cultivated in that country; and in these two kinds, the Italians had often recourse to the French artists. When Francis I encouraged Rosso a Florentine, and Primaticcio a Bolognian, the painters in France were not remarkable for any superior talent; but they were capable of working under these foreign artists.

Cousin, a painter on glass and portrait-painter, was the first who established any kind of reputation in France. He was correct, but possessed very little elegance of design.

Painting, for some time encouraged by Francis I, fell into a state of languor, from which it was not recovered till the reign of Louis XIII. Jacques Blanchard, formed at the Venetian school, and called the French Titian, flourished about this period. But as he died young, and without educating any pupils to perpetuate his manner, he must be regarded as a single good artist, and not as a founder of the French school.

In the same manner Poussin, one of the greatest French painters, and whom they call the Raphael of France, educated no pupils, nor formed any school. His style and character of painting are described by Sir Joshua Reynolds as simple, careful, pure, and correct. No works of any modern (adds the same author) have so much of the air of antique painting as those of Poussin. His best performances have a remarkable dryness of manner, which, though by no means to be recommended for imitation, yet seems perfectly correspondent to that ancient simplicity which distinguishes his style.

In the latter part of his life he changed from this manner to one much softer and richer; where there is a greater union between the figures and the ground. His favourite subjects were ancient fables; and no painter ever was better qualified to paint such subjects, not only from his being eminently skilled in the knowledge of the ceremonies, customs, and habits of the ancients, but from his being so well acquainted with the different characters which those who invented them gave their allegorical figures.

If Poussin, in the imitation of the ancients, represents Apollo driving his chariot out of the sea by way of representing the sun rising, if he personifies lakes and rivers, it is no way offensive in him, but seems perfectly of a piece with the general air of the picture. On the contrary, if the figures which people his pictures had a modern air or countenance, if they appeared like our countrymen, if the draperies were like cloth or silk of our manufacture, if the landscape had the appearance of a modern view, how ridiculous would Apollo appear? instead of the sun, an old man; or a nymph with an urn, instead of a river or a lake.

Poussin, however, more admired than imitated, had no manner of influence in forming the French school. Simon Vouet, his enemy and persecutor, had this honour, because his pupils, in the happy age of the arts in France, conferred on it the greatest splendour. Vouet was a man of distinguished abilities; but the school which he erected would have had no continuance if his scholars had pursued his manner of painting. He had a kind of grandeur and facility; but his design was false with regard to colours, and without any idea of expression. It was said of him, that he only needed to take the pencil in his hand to finish with one stroke the subject which he had conceived; and on this account one is tempted to be pleased, because he is astonished. He had the merit of destroying the infirm manner which reigned in France, and of pointing the way to a better taste.

If Vouet laid the foundation of the French school, Le Brun finished the edifice. When Le Brun was placed under the tuition of Vouet, he astonished his master and the rest of his pupils with the rapidity of his progress. At the age of 26 he finished his piece called the horfs of Diomede, which gained a place in the palace royal (A), beside those of the most eminent painters. He was afterwards recommended to Poussin; but the young artist was more disposed by his natural inclinations to that modern part of the art which is called the great machine, than to the profound and studied manner of the Greek artists. Poussin at the same time was of great service to him, in recommending to his study the monuments, the customs, the dress of the ancients; their architecture, their rites, their spectacles, their exercises, their combats, and their triumphs.

Le Brun had a noble conception and a fruitful imagination. He was on no occasion inferior to the vast compositions which he undertook, and he chiefly excelled in rigorous costume and exact likenesses.

Few painters have united so great a number of essential qualities and accessories of the art; and if he had superiors, it consisted in this, that they possessed some particular quality in a more eminent degree.—He was a good drauer, but his design was far from being so elegant as that of Raphael, or so pure as that of Domenico, and it was less lively than that of Hansil Caracci, whom he had taken for a model. In drapery he followed the Roman school: the clothes which he gave to his figures were not like those of the Venetian school, of such and such a stuff; they were draperies and nothing more, and this manner agreed with the heroic style of his works; but in this part he was not equal to the painter of Urbino.—He had studied the expression of the affections of the soul, as is evident from his treatise on the character of Schools, the passions: but after observing the general characters, and establishing the principal strokes of expression, he thought he reached the whole extent of this subject, which is so infinitely extended. He always employed the few characters which he had once found out, and neglected to study the prodigious variety of gradations by which the interior affections are manifested in the exterior appearance. He fell into the manner of repeating always; and possessed neither the delicacy, nor the depth, nor the extreme justness, of Raphael's expression. He loved and possessed in a high degree the grand machine of the art; he was delighted with great compositions; and he gave them life, and animation, and variety; but he wanted the vigour and inspiration of Raphael. His compositions are formed on philosophical principles, but those of Raphael are created. Le Brun thought well; Raphael, Poussin, le Sueur, thought most profoundly.—Le Brun had elevation, but he was not elevated like Raphael, to the sublime.

In colouring, Le Brun did not imitate the painters of the Venetian school. The sweet attractions and strong and solid colours of the schools of Rome and Lombardy seem rather to have been the object of his imitation; and from them also he learned an easy, agreeable, and bold management of the pencil.

As Le Brun possessed a great share of lively imagination, he delighted in allegory, which gives the greatest scope for ingenious invention. The fecundity and resources of his imagination appeared still farther, in his inventing symbols for his allegorical figures, without raising contented with those employed by the ancients. But fanciful representations of this kind are distant from the operations of true genius. Spirit and thought in the arts are very different from spirit and thought in literary productions. A painter of moderate abilities may introduce into his works a great deal of the invention which belongs to poetry without enriching his peculiar art. The true spirit of painting consists in making the figures appear in the very circumstances and attitudes in which they are supposed to act, and penetrated with the sentiments with which they ought to be affected. By these means the spectator is more certainly interested than if the actions and thoughts were represented by allegorical symbols. Poussin appears to have less waste of spirit and imagination than Le Brun, while at the same time he gives more delight to people of spirit and imagination.

Enfach le Sueur was the contemporary and rival of Le Brun; and no painter approached nearer to Raphael in the art of drapery, and in disposing the folds in the most artful and the noblest manner. His design was in general more slender than that of Raphael, but, like his, it was formed on the model of the ancients. Like Raphael he represented with art and precision the affections of the soul; like him, he varied the air of the head, according to the condition, the age, and the character of his personages; and, like him, he made the different parts of every figure contribute to the general effect. His intention in composing was to express his subject, not to make shining contrasts.

(A) Where it may now be is uncertain. Perhaps it has perished in the wreck of taste, art, science, and elegance, against which French democracy has waged a ruinous war. contrasts or beautiful groups of figures, not to astonish and bewitch the spectator by the deceitful pomp of a theatrical scene, or the splendor of the great machine. His tones are delicate, his tints harmonious, and his colours, though not so attractive as those of the schools of Venice and Flanders, are yet engaging. They steal peaceably on the soul, and fix it without distraction on the parts of the art, superior to that of colouring.

His preaching of St Paul, and the picture which he painted at St Gervais, which the critics compare with the best productions of the Roman school, and the 22 pictures which he painted for the Carthusian monastery at Paris, and which were lately in possession of the king, are esteemed his best pieces. His contemporaries affirm, that he considered as sketches merely those excellent performances which are the glory of the French school.

If Le Sueur had lived longer, or if, like Le Brun, he had been employed under a court, fond of the arts and of learning, to execute the great works of the age, the French school would have adopted a different and a better manner. The noble beauty of his heads, the simple majesty of his draperies, the lightness of his design, the propriety of his expression and attitudes, and the simplicity of his general disposition, would have formed the character of this school. The deceitful pomp of theatrical decoration would have been more lately introduced, or perhaps would never have appeared, and Paris might have been the counterpart to Rome. But as Le Brun, by an accidental concurrence of favourable circumstances, was the fashionable painter, to be employed or rewarded it was necessary to imitate his manner; and as his imitators possessed not his genius, his faults became not only current but more deformed.

The French school not long ago changed its principles; and if, when peace shall be restored to this unhappy nation, they continue to follow the road which, while the arts flourished among them, they marked out for themselves, they have the chance of becoming the most rigid observers of the laws imposed on the Greek artists. The Count de Ceyles, pupil of Bouchardon, who by his rank and fortune had the means of encouraging the imitators of the ancients, and of the masters of the 15th century, first formed the design of restoring a pure taste to the art of painting. He was seconded by the talents of M. Vien, an artist who had only occasion to have his lessons and his example laid before him.—In this manner commenced a revolution, so much the more wonderful, as it was scarcely ever known that any nation substituted a system of simple and rigid excellence in place of a false and glittering taste. The history of all nations, on the contrary, discovers a gradual progress from a rude beginning to perfection, and afterwards to irremediable decay. The French had the prospect of stopping short in this ordinary course. They began in a manner which promised success; and the best consequences may be expected, if the internal commotions of France do not destroy the taste for the arts, the exercise of which they have suspended.

In Germany there can hardly be said to be a school, as it is a continuation of single artists, who derived their manner from different sources of originality and imitation. There were some German painters of eminence, when the art, emerging from its barbarous state, first began to be cultivated with success in Europe. As they were totally unacquainted with the ancients, and had scarcely access to the works of their contemporaries in Italy, they copied nature alone, with the exception of somewhat of that stiffness which forms the Gothic manner. It is this manner, if we speak of the early German painters, which characterizes their school. But this is by no means the case with their successors, part of whom were educated in Flanders and part in Italy: For if Mengs or Dietrich were comprehended in this school, there would be nothing peculiar to its manner discovered in their works. And it is therefore necessary to confine our observations to the more ancient German painters, in whom the Gothic style is conspicuous.

Albert Durer was the first German who corrected the bad taste of his countrymen. He excelled in engraving as well as painting. His genius was fertile, his compositions varied, his thoughts ingenious, and his colours brilliant. His works, though numerous, were finished with great exactness; but as he owed every thing to his genius, and as works of inferior merit were by the false taste of the times preferred to his, it was impossible for him altogether to avoid the faults of his predecessors. He is blamed for stiffness and aridity in his outlines, for little taste or grandeur in his expression, for ignorance of the costume of aerial perspective and of gradation of colours: but he had carefully studied lineal perspective, architecture, and fortification.

John Holbein or Holbein, nearly contemporary with Albert Durer, painted in oil and water colours. He excelled chiefly in history and in portrait painting. His colours are fresh and brilliant, and his works are highly finished; but in his historical subjects, his draperies are not in so good a taste as those of Albert Durer.

The Flemish school is recommended to the lovers of the art by the discovery, or at least the first practice, of oil painting. Van Mander gives us the account of this wonderful discovery in the following words: "John Van Eyck was so excellent a chemist, that he discovered a method of varnishing his distemper colours with a varnish, which was made of some oils, and was very pleasing on account of the gloss and lustre it gave them. Many artists in Italy had vainly attempted to find out that secret; they never hit on the true method. It happened once that John, in his usual manner, having highly finished one of his pictures on boards, and having varnished it with his new invented varnish, exposed it to dry in the sun; but whether the boards were not well joined, or whether the heat of the sun was too violent, the boards split asunder and opened in the junctures. John saw with concern that his work was spoiled, and resolved to contrive something against future accidents of the same kind. Being disgusted at distemper painting and varnishing, he thought of a varnish that might dry without sunshine; and having tried many oils and substances, he found that linseed and nut oil dried better than any other. He boiled them with some other drugs, and produced the best varnish in the world. Ever bent on improvement, he found, after much inquiry, that colours mixed with these oils worked and dried extremely well, and when dried would... be water-proof. He observed likewise, that these oils would animate and give them a gloss and lustre without any farther varnishing." The truth, however, of this account is now very much questioned; and it is even proved by the manuscripts of Theophilus Presbyter, and also by some old oil paintings in England, that this method of painting was discovered long before the time of John Van Eyck. At the same time we admit, that John and his brother Hubert may have been the first who brought oil painting into general practice, not only by showing the excellence of which it was susceptible, but also by making several improvements on the art. And this is the more probable, from the great reputation which their pictures acquired over all Europe by the freshness and delicacy of their colours. The attention of the Italian painters was chiefly excited, insomuch that Antoine de Messina performed a journey into Flanders for the express purpose of acquiring the confidence of John Van Eyck, and of discovering the secret.

John de Bruges was the founder of painting as a profession in Flanders; Peter Paul Rubens was the founder of the art. This extraordinary person produced an immense number of works. He excelled equally in historical, portrait, and landscape painting; in fruits, flowers, and in animals. He both invented and executed with the greatest facility; and to show the extent of his powers, he frequently made a great number of sketches of the same subject altogether different, without allowing any time to elapse between them. The works of Rubens were destitute of that soft inspiration, productive of sweet and pleasant effects, so conspicuous in the works of Raphael; but he possessed that sprightliness of genius and strength of mind which is ever ready to burst forth in wonderful and astonishing effects. His figures appear to be the exact counter-part of his conceptions, and their creation nothing more than a simple act of the will.

His talent for design is unjustly censured, for on every occasion his design is noble and easy. He had great knowledge of anatomy, but he was hurried away by the impetuosity of his imagination and the ardour for execution; he preferred splendor to the beauty of forms, and sacrificed correctness of design too often to the magic of colours. In short, his qualities suppose a mind full of fire and vigour, rather than accuracy or profound thought. His drapery may be considered rather as fine than properly adapted to his figures: for, in the language of the art, to clothe and to give drapery are not synonymous terms. A portrait painter may excel in clothing his personages, while he is totally incapable of giving good drapery to an historical painting. His chief merit consists in colouring; though in this branch of the art he has not equalled Titian. He is the first among painters eminent for pomp and majesty; the first among those who speak to the eye, and the power of the art is often carried by him almost to enchantment.

It is evident from the works of Rubens, that his method of painting was to lay the colours in their place, one at the side of another, and mix them afterwards by a slight touch of the pencil. Titian mingled his tints as they are in nature, in such a manner as to make it impossible to discover where they began or terminated; the effect is evident, the labour is concealed. Thus Rubens is more dazzling, and Titian more harmonious. In this part, the first excites the schools' attention, the second fixes it. The carnations of Titian resemble the blush of nature; those of Rubens are brilliant and polished like satin, and sometimes his tints are so strong and separated as to appear like spots.

"Rubens (says Sir Joshua Reynolds) is a remarkable instance of the same mind being seen in all the various parts of the art. The whole is so much of a piece, that one can scarce be brought to believe but that if any one of them had been more correct and perfect, his works would not be so complete as they appear. If we should allow a greater purity and correctness of drawing, his want of simplicity in composition, colouring, and drapery, would appear more gross."

In his composition his art is too apparent. His figures have expression, and act with energy, but without simplicity or dignity. His colouring, in which he is eminently skilled, is notwithstanding too much of what we call tinted. Throughout the whole of his works there is a proportionable want of that nicety of distinction and elegance of mind, which is required in the higher walks of painting; and to this want it may be in some degree attributed, that those qualities which make the excellency of this sublimate style appear in him with their greatest lustre.—Indeed the facility with which he invented, the richness of his composition, the luxuriant harmony and brilliancy of his colouring, to dazzle the eye, that whilst his works continue before us, we cannot help thinking that all his deficiencies are fully supplied.

The Flemish school, of which Rubens is the greatest master, is remarkable for great brilliancy of colours and the magic of the claro-obscuro. To these may be joined a profound design, which is yet not founded on the most beautiful forms; a composition possessed of grandeur, a certain air of nobleness in the figures, strong and natural expressions; in short, a kind of national beauty, which is neither copied from the ancients nor from the Roman nor Lombard schools, but which deserves to please, and is capable of pleasing.

To speak in general terms, and without regarding the Dutch a great number of exceptions, the Dutch school shows scarcely none of the above qualities to great perfection, except that of colouring. Far from excelling in the beauty of heads and forms, they seem chiefly to delight in the exact imitation of the lowest and most ignoble. Their subjects are derived from the tavern, the smith's shop, and from the vulgar amusements of the rudest peasants. The expressions are sufficiently marked; but it is the expression of passions which debauch instead of ennobling human nature. One would think that they practised the art of degrading the bodies and souls of men.

It must be acknowledged, at the same time, that the Dutch painters have succeeded in several branches of the art. If they have chosen low objects of imitation, they have represented them with great exactness; and truth must always please. If they have not succeeded in the most difficult parts of the claro-obscuro, they at least excel in the most striking, such as in light confined in a narrow space, night illuminated by the moon or by torches, and the light of a smith's forge. The Dutch understand the gradations of colours; and by their knowledge of contrast they have arrived at the art of painting light itself. They have no rivals Schools in landscape-painting, considered as the faithful representation or picture of a particular scene; but they are far from equalling Titian, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, &c. who have carried to the greatest perfection the ideal landscape, and whose pictures, instead of being the topographical representation of certain places, are the combined result of every thing beautiful in their imagination or in nature. The Dutch, however, distinguish themselves by their perspective, by their clouds, sea-scenes, animals, fruits, flowers, and insects; and they excel in miniature painting. In short, everything which requires a faithful imitation, colour, and a nice pencil, is well executed by the Dutch painters.

Holland has also produced history painters, as Octavius Van Beem, and Vander Hilst the rival of Van Dyke, and perhaps his superior; but it is not in the works of those artists that we find the character of the Dutch school.

Neither is the origin of their style to be derived from the works of Lucas of Leyden, though, from the time he flourished, viz. about the end of the 15th century, he may be considered as the patriarch of the Dutch school. Lucas painted in oil, in water colours, and on glass; and the kinds of his painting were history, landscape, and portrait. His picture of the Last Judgment is preserved in the Hotel-de-ville of Leyden; it possesses vast merit in point of composition, and a great variety of figures.

If miniature painting be considered as a characteristic of the Dutch school, Cornelius Polenbourg may be regarded as the father of it. He possessed the colour, delicacy of touch, and disposition of the claro-obscuro, which chiefly distinguished this school; and if any thing is to be added, it is want of correctness in his design.

But if the choice of low figures is its chief characteristic, this is to be found in the greatest perfection in the works of the celebrated Rembrandt Vanryn; and it is the more offensive in this artist, as his compositions frequently required an opposite choice of figures. As his father was a miller near Leyden, his education must altogether have depended on the exertion of great talents and the study of nature. He studied the grotesque figure of a Dutch peasant or the servant of an inn with as much application as the greatest masters of Italy would have studied the Apollo of Belvedere or the Venus de Medicis. This was not the manner of elevating himself to the noble conceptions of Raphael; but it was acquiring the imitation of truth in vulgar painting.

"Rembrandt (says M. Defcamps) may be compared to the great artists for colour and delicacy of touch and claro-obscuro. It appears that he would have discovered the art, though he had been the first person that ever attempted it. He formed to himself rules and a method of colouring, together with the mixture of colours and the effect of the different tones. He delighted in the great oppositions of light and shade; and he seems to have been chiefly attentive to this branch of the art. His workshop was occasionally made dark, and he received the light by a hole, which fell as he chose to direct it on the place which he desired to be enlightened. On particular occasions he passed behind his model a piece of cloth of the same colour with the ground he wanted; and this piece of cloth receiving the same ray which en-

lightened the head, marked the difference, in a sensible manner, and allowed the painter the power of augmenting it according to his principles.

"Rembrandt's manner of painting is a kind of magic. No artist knew better the effects of different colours mingled together, nor could better distinguish those which did not agree from those which did. He placed every tone in its place with so much exactness and harmony, that he needed not to mix them, and so destroy what may be called the flower and freshness of the colours. He made the first draught of his pictures with great precision, and with a mixture of colours altogether particular; he proceeded on his first sketch with a vigorous application, and sometimes loaded his lights with so great a quantity of colour, that he seemed to model rather than to paint. One of his heads is said to have a nose nearly as much projected as the natural nose which he copied."

Such is the power of genius, that Rembrandt, with all his faults, and they are enormous, is placed among the greatest artists by M. Defcamps, who saw his works, and was himself an artist. It is necessary to observe, that if Rembrandt was ignorant of the essential parts of his art, or neglected them, he was yet acquainted with expression, which alone was capable of giving animation to his works. His expressions are not noble, but they are just, lively, and executed with great judgment.

John de Laer, a miniature painter, and who made choice of his subjects from common life, deserves a distinguished place in the Dutch school. He painted hunting-scenes, the attacks of robbers, public festivals, landscapes, and sea views; and he ornamented his pictures with old ruins, and enriched them with figures of men and animals. He had a correct design, and employed vigorous and lively colouring.

Van-Oltede, although born at Lubeck, Gerard Dow, Metzu, Miris, Wouwermans, Berghem, and the celebrated painter of flowers Van-Huyfum, belong to the Dutch school.

The greater part of the schools of which we have treated have no longer any existence. Italy alone had four schools, and there only remain at present a very few Italian artists known to foreigners. The school of Rubens is in vain sought for in Flanders. If the Dutch school still exists, it is not known beyond the precincts of Holland. Mengs a German artist has made himself famous in our days; but it was in Italy that he chiefly improved his talents and exercised his art. M. Dietrich, another German, has made himself known to strangers; but two solitary artists do not form a school.

A new school is formed in our times and in our own country, called the English school. It is connected with the academy in London instituted in 1766 by letters patent from the king, and formed only in 1769. Sir Joshua Reynolds is the undoubted founder of it. His works give him a distinguished rank among the artists of the present age, and exhibit a genius in their author which has seldom been surpassed; but the effects which he has contrived to give to them by the formation of a new school, and by the good principles which his discourses to academicians, and his example as a painter, have disseminated, will secure his reputation as long as England shall esteem the advantages and the worth of great abilities. The English tale appears to be formed on the great matters of the Italian and the Flemish schools. Sir Joshua was a great admirer of Michael Angelo, and particularly recommends him to the attention of the academicians.

"I feel (says Sir Joshua) a self-congratulation in knowing myself capable of such sensations as he intended to excite. I reflect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear testimony of my admiration of that truly divine man; and I should desire that the last words which I should pronounce in this academy, and from this place, might be the name of—Michael Angelo." But though he thus enthusiastically admired this very great man, yet he allows, what cannot indeed be denied, that he was capricious in his inventions; "and this (says he) may make some circumspection necessary in studying his works; for though they appear to become him, an imitation of them is always dangerous, and will prove sometimes ridiculous. 'In that dread circle none durst tread but he.' To me, I confess, his caprice does not lower the estimation of his genius, even though it is sometimes, I acknowledge, carried to the extreme: and however those eccentric excursions are considered, we must at the same time recollect, that those faults, if they are faults, are such as never could occur to a mean and vulgar mind; that they flowed from the same source which produced his greatest beauties; and were therefore such as none but himself was capable of committing; they were the powerful impulses of a mind untied to subjection of any kind, and too high to be controlled by cold criticism."

The effect of Sir Joshua's discourses is visible in the pictures of this school. The Death of General Wolfe, the Departure of Regulus for Carthage, the Arrival of Agrippina, and some other subjects, are decided proofs that the English school is acquainted with greatness of style, boldness of expression, and the art of managing a great number of figures. It will be fortunate for the painters of this school, if, more rigid with regard to their forms than ambitious of poignant and astonishing effects, they support the character which they have already acquired. But although England had not enjoyed this brilliant success in painting, she would have immortalized herself by the excellency of her engravings.

It is easy to perceive in all those schools the cause of the character which distinguishes them. In the Roman school, it is the excellent education of its first masters, together with the precious remains of antiquity found in the ruins of ancient Rome. In the Venetian school, the magnificence derived from the commerce of the east, the frequency of feasts and masquerades, and the necessity of painting to the rich and luxurious, who were accustomed to behold these magnificent objects, were the causes of its gaudy taste. In the Dutch school, the peculiarity of its grovelling manner may be accounted for from the habits of the artists. Accustomed to visit taverns and workshops, and having most commonly exposed to their view low and grotesque figures, they represent in their pictures the objects which were most familiar to them in life.

"Beauty (says a French writer *) ought to be the characteristic of the English school, because the artists have it often exposed to their view. If this beauty is not precisely similar to that among the ancients, it is not inferior to it. The English school should also distinguish itself for truth of expression; because the liberty enjoyed in that country gives to every passion its natural and unbiased operation. It will probably long preserve its simplicity unpolluted by the pomp of theatrical taste and the conceit of false and Mores, because the English manners will long preserve their simplicity.

Examine the picture of a Frenchwoman (continues he) painted by an artist of that nation, and you will generally find, in place of expression, a forced grin, in which the eyes and the forehead do not partake, and which indicates no affection of the soul. Examine the picture of an Englishwoman done by one of their painters, and you observe an elegant and simple expression, which makes you at once acquainted with the character of the person represented."

Sect. III. Comparison between the Ancient and Modern Painting.

No person of judgment or taste hesitates to give the superiority to the ancient sculpture; but the moderns comfort themselves with refusing the same superiority to the Greek artists in the art of painting. The small number of their productions which remain, and the probable conjectures which may be formed concerning those which have perished, go the length to prove that the Greek painters conducted themselves on other principles than those which have received the sanction of custom and the force of laws in our schools. But this censure might be applied with equal justice to Homer as an epic poet, and to Sophocles and Euripides as writers of tragedy.

The principal difference between the ancient and modern manner of painting consists in the complication of figures and the pompous decoration of scenery which prevails in the modern, when compared with the unity and simplicity of the ancient painters. This simplicity, however, does not seem to arise from the want of capacity, but from a choice, as Polygnotus, one of their most ancient painters, represents in one of his pieces the siege of Troy, and in another the descent of Ulysses into hell; but they soon decided in favour of simplicity, and their pieces generally contain one or two figures, and very rarely more than three or four.

Poetry in this particular is conducted on very different principles. A poet may with great propriety multiply his characters, and enter into details of a variety of actions, because the whole of his characters and actions do not occupy the mind of his reader at the same time. The whole of his art consists in making one naturally succeed another; but every part of the poem which contains a separate transaction would make a picture capable of fixing the attention. In painting, the eye takes in the whole; and it is by no means satisfied if 20 or 30 figures are presented to it, which it cannot possibly comprehend. It is in vain to group the figures, or to call the attention to the principal object by a greater degree of light; the spectator is anxious to examine every object which is presented to him; and if they are not to be examined, for what reason are they painted? An excellent piece, at the same time, consisting of a great number of figures, will give pleasure; but it is accompanied with that fatigue which one experiences when he runs over a gallery furnished with a great variety of excellent pictures.

Those Those observations on the attention of the spectator led the Greeks to make similar ones on the attention of the artist. They perhaps thought that the painter who had to execute a great variety of figures in the same work, could not study each of them with equal accuracy and care; and of consequence that he might produce something astonishing in the extent, and yet disagreeing in the detail.

This difference, however, between ancient and modern painting, cannot give any decided principle to determine on their comparative merit. We are accustomed to behold assemblages in nature; and it is a fact, that even in affecting scenes a great number of figures may not only be brought together, but that they may heighten the distemps. It is supposing a picture to have little effect, to imagine that we can coolly, and with the same kind of attention, examine the principal and the accessory figures. If it is highly finished, our whole soul must be absorbed in that object which the artist intended to be most conspicuous; and if we give any attention to the surrounding figures, we shall consider them as spectators of the same scene, and derive from them an addition of sympathy and of feeling. The whole question in this particular point of view amounts to this, that the moderns have chosen a more difficult part; and if they have executed it with success, their merit is greater. And this observation will hold good, unless it can be proved that it is utterly impossible to make an assemblage of figures lead to one general and common effect.

The proper manner of deciding the comparative merit of the ancients and moderns, is to consider, as far as we have sufficient data to go upon, to what degree the ancients excelled in the particular departments of this art. There are two sources from which we can derive information; namely, from the memoirs of antiquity which yet remain, and from what the ancient writers have said on the subject of painting, both of which are extremely defective. It is allowed, however, by every skilful person who has viewed the remains of ancient paintings, that none of them appear to be the performances of superior artists, notwithstanding much merit in the design and accuracy in the drawing, which indeed seems to have been habitual to almost every ancient artist. The best among these paintings (according to Sir Joshua Reynolds), "the supposed marriage in the Aldobrandine palace," is evidently far short of that degree of excellence undoubtedly implied in the descriptions of ancient authors, and which from them we are fairly led to expect.

Still more defective, if possible, is this last species of evidence: for we have no direct treatise remaining on the subject by any of the ancients, although many were composed by their artists. The passages from which we are to decide are, either the cursory remarks of writers not expressly treating on the subject of painting, or the descriptions of those who at best can rank but as amateurs of a fashionable art. From these indeed we may pretty safely assert the degree of excellence which the passages imply; but we should reason very inconclusively, were we to deny them any higher or any other merit than appears to be strictly contained in these scattered observations. Let any one for a moment place the modern painters in his mind in the same situation as the ancients, and he will quickly decide on the truth of these remarks.

Nevertheless, it is necessary on this subject to derive some conclusions from the information which is occasionally given in ancient authors. That the ancients paid a particular attention to design, would be evident from the manner in which they speak of this department of the graphic art, even though the moderns were not in possession of such remaining proofs of their excellence herein (though by artists of an inferior class), as to place this point beyond the reach of doubt.

Indeed, when it is considered that, with respect to freedom and correctness of outline, painting and sculpture are very nearly connected; that Phidias and Apelles were nearly contemporaries; that many of the ancient painters, such as Zeuxis, Protogenes, Apelles, &c., were accustomed to modelling for the purpose of sculpture or of casting; that the extreme elegance of design in the ancient statues is so notorious as to be the acknowledged model even for modern artists; and that these ornaments of sculpture were well known and universally admired among the ancients—we shall have little hesitation in admitting their equality with the moderns so far as design is concerned. But should any doubt remain on this point, the drawings from the antiquities of Herculaneum will be striking proofs that truth, elegance, and spirit, in a degree rarely to be met with among the moderns, were habitual even to the common run of artists in the declining age of ancient painting.

The ancients excelled moreover not merely in the common and obvious parts of design; but they appear to have had no inconsiderable degree of skill in the art of foreshortening. The performance of Pausias is a proof of this: *Fecit autem grandes tabulas sic ut spectatores in Pompeii porticibus homin immolationem. Eam enim picturam primus invenit, quam pugnae initia sunt multi, equavit nemo.* Ante omnia, cum longitudinem bovis offendere velit, adverfum cum pinxit, non tranferfum, et abunde intellectur amplitudi. Doin cum omnes qui volunt eminencia videndi, candentium faciant, colorumque condant, hic totum bovem atri coloris fecit; umbraeque corpus ex ipso dedit; magna prope arte in aquo extantia offendens et in confracto folida omnium.*

Nor will it be difficult to show, that the ancient painters were not inferior to the moderns in expression. The state of sculpture alone among the ancients would almost furnish a decisive proof that the fitter art of painting could not be deficient. Among the ancient statues which yet remain, expression is carried to a wonderful height; not merely the features of the face, but almost every muscle of the body, combining to enforce the idea intended to be conveyed.

Mr Webb* very properly observes, that "the ancients thought characters and manners so essential to painting and poetry, that they expressly term picture an art descriptive." We have in Philotaurus the following description of a picture: "We may instantly (says he) distinguish Ulysses by his severity and vigilance; Menelaus by his mildness; and Agamemnon by a kind of divine majesty. In the son of Tydeus is expressed an air of freedom; Ajax is known by his fullness; Hector by his alertness. To give to these such sentiments and actions as are consequential from their peculiar characters, is the ethic of painting."

Another... Another instance of excellence in expression among the ancient paintings was the Medea of Timomachus. She was painted about to kill her infants. Aufonias speaks with admiration of the mingled expression of anger and maternal fondness in her face and manner.

*Immanem exhaustis rerum in diversa laborem* *Fingeret affluitum matris ut ambiguum.* *Iri sub efl lacrymis, milerefluo non caret ira;* *Altere utrum vidras ut fit in altere utro.*

It may not be amiss, however, at this period of our inquiry, to make some observations on the testimonies of ancient authors respecting this subject.

It is certainly true, that when the works of an ancient artist are praised for any real or supposed merit, the commendations will be relative to the degree of perfection to which the art had arisen at the time, and to the opportunities of information, the taste, and judgment of the person who beholds them. Excellence will always be ascribed to him who leaves his contemporaries far behind; and these performances will often be considered as supremely beautiful which exceed in beauty all that have gone before.

In like manner, a person of natural sensibility, but who has been accustomed all his life to performances of an inferior stamp, will be in raptures at any which much exceed the best he has heretofore been taught to admire; and whatever opportunities of information he may have, his evidence will not be of much weight, if he do not possess a sufficient degree of taste and judgment to use them properly.

In ascertaining therefore the degree of credit due to the praises bestowed on any performance in a branch of the fine arts, we must take into consideration the general state of the art at the time, and the competence of the person who bestows the praise.

No slight degree of probability, however, may be attained on both these points, by attending to a circumstance not generally noticed, viz. that in an advanced state of the art, and when the observer is acquainted with its subject, the praise will seldom be given in loose, general, and comprehensive expressions; but the terms in which it is conveyed will be characteristic and determinate, and often technical; they will frequently show the state of the art, by marking the subdivisions and the skill of the observer by judicious discrimination. When, added to these, the latter can refer for comparison to any existent standard of perfection, his praise may fairly be adopted in its full extent, and regarded as evidence upon the point in question.

To apply these observations to painting, it is clear, with respect to the most difficult, the most fundamental, and the highest in rank among the departments of the art, viz. design and expression, that the ancients were fully equal to the moderns; and their expressions of praise must be allowed to imply an equal degree of absolute skill, with similar expressions, if applied to the great matters of modern art. It is also clear that painting was extremely cultivated among the ancients, and that their good painters were more esteemed than artists of equal merit in modern times; that what we should term gentlemen artists were frequent with them, (apud Romanos quoque homos maturae huius arti consitit); and that the expression of the ancient connoisseurs evince much theoretical and technical knowledge of the art, and display a distribution of its parts almost as minute, complete, and scientific, as the present state of it can boast.

With regard to colouring, the praises of the ancient authors chiefly relate to the style of it as exerted upon single figures or particular tints. It may therefore be doubted whether the ancients were possessed of the art of distributing their colours through the whole of a picture, so as to produce an harmony and general tone of colouring similar to that which we admire in the Lombard and Flemish schools. The present remains of ancient paintings do not appear to warrant any such conclusions; but being undoubtedly the works of inferior hands, their authority is very small when alleged against the general or particular merit of the ancient artists. The following extracts will be sufficient to convince, that the ancients did attend to this technical branch of colouring.

Indeed the modern technical expressions appear borrowed from the following passage of Pliny, which may be regarded as decisive on the subject. *Tandem seorsim ipsa difflimit, et invento lumen atque umbrae, differentia colorum alterna vice sese excitante. Dein adjecta est splendor; alius hic quam lumen; quem quia inter hoc et umbrae effet, appellaverunt tonon. Commixturas vero colorum et transtitus, harmogen.* The lumen atque umbrae of this passage might have been regarded as merely descriptive of the light and shade necessary to relieve single figures, if it were not for the subsequent definition of tone. The harmogen of Pliny means the blending or skilful blending and softening colours into one another, rather than what we now call harmony.

Lucian, in his fine description of that spirited painting by Zeuxis of the male and female centaurs, after Zeuxis relating the treatment of the subject itself, proceeds to notice the technical execution of the picture; and he praises particularly the truth and delicacy of the drawing, the perfect blending of the colours, the skilful shading, the scientific preservation of size and magnitude, and the equality and harmony of the proportions throughout the whole piece.

Painters, says Plutarch, increase the effect of the light and splendid parts of a picture by the neighbourhood of dark tints and shades. And Maximus Tyrius observes, that bright and vivid colours are always pleasant to the eye; but this pleasure is always lessened if you omit to accompany them with somewhat dark and gloomy. These passages seem to imply a knowledge of the use of cold and dark tints even where a brilliancy of tone is required. The best among the ancient painters, however, seem to have preferred a chaste and sober style of colouring to the gaudiness and flutter of the later artists.

Upon the whole, therefore, with respect to colouring as employed upon single figures, as the ancients were fully as competent to judge of excellence herein as the moderns; as the expressions of the ancient connoisseurs are very warm in praise of the colouring of many of their painters; as they appear also to have attended very much to the art of colouring; and, moreover, as probable evidence can be adduced that they attended to miniature painting—a considerable degree of merit may be allowed them in the use of the colours they possessed.

Chiaro. Chiaro-Scuro, or the art of placing and proportioning light and shade in such a manner as to produce a pleasing effect, independently of any other circumstance connected with the picture, has been commonly deemed a characteristic difference between the knowledge of ancient and modern painters. On this subject the works of the ancients now remaining give little or no information; hence Sir Joshua Reynolds observes, "that this, which makes so considerable a part of the modern art, was to them totally unknown. If the great painters had possessed this excellence, some portion of it would have infallibly been diffused, and have been discovered, in the works of the inferior rank of artists which have come down to us, and which may be considered as on the same rank with the paintings that ornament our public gardens." But the accounts of the places where these paintings have been found, make it evident that they were thus ornamented at a very inconsiderable expense. The generality of them consist of single figures; some of them of two or three figures, generally relieved by an uniform ground; and, except in a few instances, evidently designed as mere reliefs to a compartment, and answering, as near as may be, the fluecoed ornaments in our modern rooms; nor do any of them seem the works of artists equal in their day to those at present employed on the painted ceilings of private houses.

The Abbé du Bos maintains, on the other hand, that what Pliny and other ancient writers say concerning the chiaro-oscuro, and the delightful distribution of light and shade, is altogether decisive; and that their writings are full of so many probable circumstances, that it cannot be denied that the ancients at least equalled the most celebrated of the moderns in this part of the art.

On the examination of the greater part of the passages from antiquity, it is evident that they may relate to the light and shade of single figures, without involving what is now called the science of the chiaro-oscuro. The passage of Pliny, however, already quoted, and several others, go very near to prove that this branch of painting was underfoot among the ancients. The dark, the light, and mezzo-tint are evidently and accurately described in that passage.

Equally strong is that expression in Quintilian: *Zeusis luminum umbrarumque rationem invenerit traditur.* This cannot well be otherwise translated than by the science of light and shade.

That some technical knowledge of the effect producible by masses of light and shade was possessed by the ancients, appears indubitable from the passages adduced; to what extent it was carried cannot now be ascertained. In all probability they were much inferior in this respect to the moderns; otherwise, although much science of this kind could hardly be expected from the trifling performances that remain, much more would have occurred on the subject, it would have been more largely dwelt on, and more precisely expressed among the observations of ancient authors on the best paintings of the ancient masters.

Neither is there sufficient evidence that the ancients were eminent in that important branch of the composition of a picture, which consists in distributing the figures and objects in groups or masses. There are few examples of this difficult branch of the art among the remaining antiquities; and indeed, from the paucity of the figures introduced in the generality of these ancient paintings, there is little room to expect them, and more. But what makes it still more doubtful whether the ancients attained any degree of eminence in grouping is, that among the many paintings of these great masters enumerated by Pliny, Lucian, or Philostratus, there is none of them praised for this species of excellence. This, however, it must be confessed, may as well arise from want of knowledge in the writer as of skill in the artist; for in a picture found in Herculaneum, which represents in all probability the education of Achilles, the figure of an old man holding a child on his knees, together with that of a woman behind him, form a very agreeable group. A work of the same collection, painted in one colour on marble, consists of five figures grouped very much after the modern idea, if it were not that three of the heads are at the same height. It is extremely probable, that this morfl had been the copy of a picture finished in the purest times of the art. But although it were proved that the ancients did not attempt grouping their figures, it is still uncertain whether this might not arise from their peculiar and perhaps excellent taste in the arts. Wishing to enjoy in the fullest manner their painted figures as they enjoyed the aspect of a statue, they took care that every figure should be detached from another in the same picture, which permitted them to give their objects more relief, and to render them more distinct to the eye of a distant spectator.

We are not therefore to conclude, that they were entirely ignorant of grouping, on the one hand; or that they declined the execution of it from want of skill, on the other. Indeed it actually appears to have been technically attended to by them, whatever might be their comparative excellence in it; for Apelles is expressly affeered by Pliny to have been inferior to Melanthius in composition (*da dispositione*); and one of their paintings, mentioned by the same author, is said to have contained one hundred figures; but this unwieldy number must have been offensive, if they were not grouped with some skill.

From the connection between the sister arts of poetry, painting, and sculpture, and the admirable performances of the ancients in the other two departments of the fine arts, it is reasonable to conclude, that the ancient painters were not deficient in invention. Many instances, were it necessary, might be collected in support of their well-founded claim to this branch of the art; but it will be sufficient to observe, that as invention is rather a natural endowment than an acquired talent, and as the ancients universally seem to be at least equal to the moderns in the gifts of genius and good sense, we cannot but admit, on their part, an equality with ourselves so far as invention is concerned.

Very nearly connected with the subject of invention is that of the costume; by which is meant an attention to probability with respect to times, places, objects, persons, and circumstances in the transaction represented.

The ancient paintings now remaining, so far from exhibiting any proofs of attention to this important branch of the art, are full of gross violations of probability. bability, and representations of impossible connection. But very little stress is to be laid on these instances; first, because they are evidently the performances of artists of no reputation; secondly, because none of them to which this objection can be made are regular representations of any person or transaction; and thirdly, because, as they were (for the most part) manifestly intended as ornaments to apartments, the taste of the owner, and not of the artist, would of course be chiefly consulted. Nothing, however, can be more clear than that the ancients required an attention to probability in the works of their artists; and from the manner in which their writers express themselves on the subject (not so much recommending the practice of it as taking it for granted), we may reasonably conclude, that their best painters were seldom guilty of any gross violation of the costume. Sint fidae famillima veris was an apophthegm generally known, and when known must have been universally admitted.

The principles of the costume are well expressed and illustrated by Horace in the first lines of his Art of Poetry; and Vitruvius, lib. vii. chap. 5, says, that no pictures can be approved of which have not a resemblance to truth and nature. Whether the ancient painters put in practice a greater share of good sense with respect to the costume than the moderns, cannot now be accurately determined; the advantage seems to be in favour of the former: for, as we shall have occasion more particularly to observe afterwards, the most celebrated of modern painters from Raphael to Sir Joshua Reynolds have been guilty of such flagrant breaches of probability, as would appear astonishing to those who are not in the habit of expecting them.

It has been doubted whether the ancients were acquainted with the science of perspective; and if the remains of ancient painting were alone to decide the question, it must be determined against them; for the works of the ancient painters now in possession of the moderns afford no proof of attention to the rules of perspective equal to the performance of a modern sign-painter. The picture of the sacrifice among the Herculanean antiquities, and the fourth of the prints which Bellori has published and described, taken from the paintings in the sepulchre of the Naflonii, are barely tolerable; but the other landscapes (almost the only remaining antique paintings which admit of perspective) are grossly defective in this particular; to much so indeed, that considering the late period when landscape-painting was introduced among the ancients, together with this manifest imperfection in point of perspective of such as are yet extant, we cannot help suspecting the inferiority of the ancients in this respect. In perspective, as in the chiaro-fuoco, had good practice been common, some traces would have been discovered in the works of their lowest artists.

And yet some general knowledge of the principles, and some degree of attention to the practice, of perspective, cannot well be denied to the ancients. They were good mathematicians, they were excellent architects, and some of them are celebrated for their skill in scene-painting. Geminus the Rhodian, contemporary with Cicero, was the author of an express treatise on perspective; and Euclid, Heliodorus, Larifetus, Agatharcus, wrote also on the same subject. It is well known, besides, that the ancients practised the art of painting in perspective on walls in the same Compartment way that it is now done by the moderns; and Pliny (Nat. Hist. lib. xxxv. c. 4.) says, that one of the Ancient walls of the theatre of Claudius Pulcher, representing and Mo-roof covered with tiles, was finished in fo matterly form, a manner, that the rocks, birds of no small sagacity, taking it for a real roof, attempted to light upon it. We are likewise told, that a dog was deceived to such a degree, by certain steps in a perspective of Dantos, that expecting to find a free passage, he made up to them in full speed, and dashed out his brains. But what is still more, Vitruvius tells us in express terms by whom and at what time this art was invented. It was first practised by Agatharcus, a contemporary of Æschylus, in the theatre of Athens; and afterwards reduced to certain principles, and treated as a science, by Anaxagoras and Democritus; thus faring like other arts which existed in practice before they appeared in theory.

Portrait-painting seems to have been a principal employment of the first artist whom the ancients have to boast of, since Alexander is said to have permitted no painter but Apelles, and no sculptor but Phidias, to take his likeness. Pliny particularizes several instances of Apelles as a portrait painter.

In the drawing and colouring of single figures, to which the ancients paid peculiar attention, they must be allowed to be equal, if not superior, to the moderns. That spirit and animation, ease and dignity, were common to the performances of ancient artists, the ancient statues and paintings still remaining most evidently evince; and as they possessed, therefore, all the requisites to excel in portrait-painting, a branch of the art at all times much in request among them, there is good reason to infer, in favour of the ancients, at least an equality with the moderns in this respect.

On the whole, all the principal parts of the art, as purity of design, and beauty and expression in the forms, were not only to be found in the ancient statues, but were actually the foundation of excellence in modern painting; and hence we may conclude, that their painters, formed on the same models, and very often the same men who excelled in sculpture, were not inferior in those branches of the art. But with regard to the inferior parts, the allurement of colouring, the ingenuity of the chiaro-obscuro, the splendor of composition, the art of grouping figures, and the nice handling of the pencil, the moderns are superior to those ancient painters who have most deserved the notice of their contemporary writers. It is still to be observed, however, that the progress of the arts among the ancients, from the principal parts to the more splendid, was somewhat similar to that among the moderns; and as the painters of the first rank were more immediately the objects of criticism and delight to authors of genius, it is impossible at this distance of time to state any accurate comparison between the ancients and moderns in what may be termed the decay of the art. This is particularly the case with regard to colours, there being in ancient as well as in modern times two epochs; the one comprehending Polygnotus and his immediate successors, and the other the painters both of Greece and Rome after the art began to decay. The colouring of Polygnotus was hard, and his manner had something of wild- PART I. Principles of the Art, and the Order of the Artist's Studies.

We have joined these together, because they are like cause and effect; and comprehend both on what parts in the execution of the art the painter is to employ his chief attention, and also the manner in which he is to employ it. We shall not therefore be confined to the dry and abstract, and as it were unembodied principles, but connect them with the useful and agreeable branches of the art, in that order in which it appears to us they should be studied.

Sect. I. Of Anatomy.

To ask if the study of anatomy is requisite to a painter, is the same thing as to ask if, in order to learn any science, a man must first make himself acquainted with the principles of it. It would be an useless waste of time to cite, in confirmation of this truth, the authorities of the ancient masters, and the most celebrated schools. A man, who is unacquainted with the form and construction of the several bones which support and govern the human frame, and does not know in what manner the muscles moving these bones are fixed to them, can make nothing of what appears of them through the integuments with which they are covered; and which appearance is, however, the noblest object of the pencil. It is impossible for a painter to copy faithfully what he sees, unless he thoroughly understand it. Let him employ even so much time and study in the attempt, it cannot but be attended with many and great mistakes: just as it must happen to a man, who undertakes to copy something in a language which he does not understand; or to translate into his own, what has been written in another, upon a subject with which he is not acquainted.

It seldom happens, that nothing more is required of a painter than to copy exactly an object which he has before him. In still and very languid attitudes, in which every member is to appear motionless and dead, a living model may, no doubt, yield for a long time a faithful image, and prove an useful pattern to him. But in regard to gestures any way sudden, motions any way violent, or those momentary attitudes which it is more frequently the painter's business to express, the case is quite different. In these a living model can hold but an instant or two; it soon grows languid, and settles into a fixed attitude, which is produced by an instantaneous concourse of the animal spirits. If, therefore, a painter possess not so thoroughly all the principles of anatomy, as to be at all times able to have immediate recourse to them; if he know not the various manners in which the several parts of the human body play, according to their various positions; living models, far from proving an useful pattern to him, will rather tend to lead him astray, and make him lose sight of truth and nature, by exhibiting the very reverse of what is required, or at least exhibiting it in a very faint and imperfect manner. In living models, we often behold those parts flow, which should be very quick; those cold and torpid, which should have the greatest share of life and spirit in them.

Nor is it, as some may be apt to imagine, merely to represent athletic and vigorous bodies, in which the parts are most bold and determined, that anatomy is requisite: it should be understood, to represent persons of the most delicate frame and condition, even women and children, whose members are smoothest and roundest, though the parts made known by it are not to be strongly expressed in such objects; just as logic is equally requisite under the polished insinuations of the orator and the rough arguments of the philosopher.

But it is needless to spend much time in proving, that a painter should be acquainted with anatomy; or in showing, how far his acquaintance with it should extend. For instance, it is unnecessary for him to enter into the different systems of the nerves, blood-vessels, bowels, and the like; parts which are removed from the sight, and which therefore may be left to the surgeon and the physician, as being a guide in the operations of the former and in the prescriptions of the latter. It is enough for the painter, to be acquainted with the skeleton; in other words, with the figure and connection of the bones, which are, in a manner, the pillars and props of the human body; the origin, progress, and shape, of the muscles, which cover these bones; as also the different degrees in which nature has clothed the muscles with fat, for this substance lies thicker upon them in some places than in others. Above all, he should know in what manner the muscles effect the various motions and gestures of the body. A muscle is composed of two tendinous and slender parts, one called the head, the other the tail, both terminating at the bones; and of an intermediate part, called the belly. The action of a muscle consists in an extraordinary swelling of this intermediate part, while the head remains at rest, so as to bring the tail nearer the head, and consequently the part, to which the tail of the muscle is fixed, nearer to that part into which the head is inserted.

There are many motions, to effect which several of the muscles (for this reason called co-operating muscles) must swell and operate together, while those calculated to effect a contrary motion (and therefore called antagonistic muscles) appear soft and flaccid. Thus, for example, the biceps and the brachialis internus labour when when the arm is to be bent, and become more prominent than usual; while the gemellus, the brachius externus, and the anconeus, whose office is to extend the arm, continue, as it were, flat and ill. The same happens respectively in all the other motions of the body. When the antagonist muscles of any part operate at one and the same time, such part becomes rigid and motionless. This action of the muscle is called tonic.

Michael Angelo intended to give the public a complete treatise upon this subject; and it is no small misfortune, that he never accomplished so useful a design. This great man, having observed, as we are told in his life by Condive, that Albert Durer was deficient on the subject, as treating only of the various measures and forms of bodies, without saying a word of their attitudes and gestures, though things of much greater importance, resolved to compose a theory, founded upon his long practice, for the service of all future painters and statuaries. And, certainly, no one could be better qualified to give anatomical precepts for that purpose, than he who, in competition with Da Vinci, designed that famous cartoon of naked bodies, which was studied by Raphael himself, and afterwards obtained the approbation of the Vatican, the greatest school of the art we are now treating of.

The want of Michael Angelo's precepts may, in some measure, be supplied by other books written on the same subject by Moro, Cefo, and Tortebat; and lately by Boucheron, one of the most famous statuaries in France. But nothing can be of equal service to a young painter, with the lessons of some able dissector; under whom, in a few months, he may make himself master of every branch of anatomy which he need to be acquainted with. A course of osteology is of no great length; and of the infinite number of muscles discovered by curious myologists, there are not above 80 or 90, with which nature sensibly operates all those motions which he can ever have occasion to imitate or express. These, indeed, he should closely study, these he should carefully store up in his memory, so as never to be at the least loss for their proper figure, situation, office, and motion.

But there is another thing, besides the dissection of dead bodies, by which a young painter may profit greatly; and that is anatomical casts. Of these we have numbers by several authors; nay, some which pass under the name of Buonarroti himself. But there is one in which, above all the rest, the parts are most distinctly and lively expressed. This is the performance of Hercules Lelli, who has perhaps gone greater lengths in this kind of study than any other master. We have, besides, by the same able hand, some casts of particular parts of the human body, so curiously coloured for the use of young painters, as to represent these parts exactly as they appear on removing the integuments; and thus, by the difference in their colour as well as configuration, render the tendinous and the fleshy parts, the belly and the extremities, of every muscle surprisingly distinct; at the same time that, by the various direction of the fibres, the motion and play of these muscles become very obvious; a work of the greatest use, and never enough to be commended! Perhaps, indeed, it would be an improvement, to give the muscles various tints; those muscles especially which the pupil might be apt to mistake for others. For example, though the mamillos, the deltoides, the pectorius, the fascia lata, the gastrocnemii, are, of themselves, sufficiently distinguishable, it is not so with regard to the muscles of the arm and of the back, the right muscles of the belly, and some others, which, either on account of the many parts into which they branch, or of their being interwoven one with another, do not so clearly and fairly present themselves to the eye. But let the cause of confusion to young beginners be what it will, it may be effectually removed, by giving, as already hinted, different colours to the different muscles, and illumining anatomical figures; in the same manner that maps are coloured, in order to enable us readily to distinguish the several provinces of every kingdom, and the several dominions of every prince.

The better to understand the general effect, and remember the number, situation, and play of the muscles, it will be proper to compare, now and then, the anatomical casts, and even the dead body itself, with the living body covered with its fat and skin; and above all things, with the Greek statues still in being. It was the peculiar happiness of the Greeks, to be able to characterize and express the several parts of the human body much better than we can pretend to do; and this, on account of their particular application to the study of naked figures, especially the fine living ones which they had continually before their eyes. It is well known, that the muscles most used are likewise the most protuberant and conspicuous; such as, in those who dance much, the muscles of the legs; and in boatmen, the muscles of the back and arms. But the bodies of the Grecian youths, by means of their constant exertion of them in all the gymnastic sports, were so thoroughly exercised, as to supply the statuary with much more perfect models than ours can pretend to be.

There are a great many exercises, which a young painter should go through while engaged in the study of anatomy, in order to make himself more thoroughly master of that science. For example: The thighs of any figure, a Laocoon for instance, being given, he should add to them legs suitable to that state in which the muscles of the thighs are represented, that is, the muscles which serve to bend and extend the legs, and to effectuate in them such a precise position and no other. To the simple contour of an anatomy, or a statue, he should add the parts included by it, and give it a system of muscles conformable to the quality of that particular contour; for every contour denotes some one certain attitude, motion, exertion, and no other. Exercises of this kind would soon establish him in the most fundamental principles of painting, especially if he had an opportunity of comparing his drawings with the statue or cast from which the parts given him to work upon were taken, and thereby discovering and correcting his mistakes. This method is very like that used by those who teach the Latin tongue; when, having given their scholars a passage of Livy or Caesar already translated into their mother-tongue, to translate back into Latin, they make them compare their work with the original text. Sect. II. Of Perspective.

The study of perspective should go hand in hand with that of anatomy, as not less fundamental and necessary. In fact, the contour of an object drawn upon paper or canvas represents nothing more than such an intersection of the visual rays sent from the extremities of it to the eye, as would arise on a glass put in the place of the paper or canvas. Now, the situation of an object at the other side of a glass being given, the delineation of it on the glass itself depends entirely on the situation of the eye on this side of the glass; that is to say, on the rules of perspective: a science which, contrary to the opinion of most people, extends much farther than the painting of scenes, floors, and what generally goes under the name of quadratura. Perspective, according to that great master da Vinci, is to be considered as the reins and rudder of painting. It teaches in what proportion the parts fly from, and lessen upon, the eye; how figures are to be marshalled upon a plain surface, and foreshortened. It contains, in short, the whole rationale of design.

Such are the terms which the masters best grounded in their profession have employed to define and commend perspective: so far were they from calling it a fallacious art, and an insidious guide; as some amongst the moderns have not shunned to do, inferring that it is to be followed no longer than it keeps the high road, or leads by easy and pleasant paths. But these writers plainly show, that they are equally ignorant of the nature of perspective, which, founded as it is on geometrical principles, can never lead its votaries astray; and of the nature of their art, which, without the assistance of perspective, cannot, in rigour, expect to make any progress, nay, not so much as to delineate a simple contour.

When a painter has formed a scene in his mind, and supposed, as it is customary, that the capital figures of this scene lie close, or almost close, to the back of his canvas, he is, in the next place, to fix upon some point on this side of the canvas, from which he would choose his piece should be seen. But in choosing this point, which is called the point of sight, regard should be had to its situation to the right or left of the middle of the canvas: but, above all things, to its distance and its height with respect to the lower edge of the canvas; which edge is called the base line, and is parallel with the horizontal line that passes through the eye. For by assuming the point of sight, and consequently the horizontal line, too low, the planes upon which the figures stand will appear a great deal too shallow; as, by assuming it too high, they will appear too steep, so as to render the piece far less light and airy than it ought to be. In like manner, if the point of sight is taken at too great a distance from the canvas, the figures will not admit of degradation enough to be seen with sufficient distinctness; and if taken too near it, the degradation will be too quick and precipitate to have an agreeable effect. Thus, then, it appears, that no small attention is requisite in the choice of this point.

When a picture is to be placed on high, the point of sight should be assumed low, and vice versa; in order that the horizontal line of the picture may be, as near as possible, in the same horizontal plane with that of the spectator; for this disposition has an amazing effect. When a picture is to be placed very high, as, amongst many others, that of the Purification by Paolo Veronese, engraved by le Fevre, it will be proper to assume the point of sight too low, that it may lie quite under the picture, no part of whose ground is, in that case, to be visible; for, were the point of sight to be taken above the picture, the horizontal ground of it would appear sloping to the eye, and both figures and buildings as ready to tumble head foremost. It is true, indeed, that there is seldom any necessity for such extraordinary exactness; and that, unless in some particular cases, the point of sight had better be rather high than low: the reason of which is, that, as we are more accustomed to behold people on the same plane with ourselves, than either higher or lower, the figures of a piece must strike us most when standing on a plane nearly level with that upon which we ourselves stand. To this it may be added, that by placing the eye low, and greatly shortening the plane, the heels of the back figures will seem to bear against the heads of the foremost, so as to render the distance between them far less perceptible than otherwise it would be.

The point of sight being fixed upon, according to the situation in which the picture is to be placed, the point of distance is next to be determined. In doing this, a painter should carefully attend to three things: first, that the spectator may be able to take in, at one glance, the whole and every part of the composition; secondly, that he may see it distinctly; and thirdly, that the degradation of the figures and other objects of the picture be sufficiently sensible. It would take up too much time to lay down certain and precise rules for doing all this, considering the great variety in the sizes and shapes of pictures; for which reason we must leave a great deal to the discretion of the painter.

But there is a point still remaining, which will not admit of the least latitude. This is, the delineation of the picture, when once the point of sight has been fixed upon. The figures of a picture are to be considered as so many columns erected on different spots of the same plane; and the painter must not think of designing any thing, till he has laid down, in perspective, all those columns which are to enter his composition, with the most scrupulous exactness. By proceeding in this manner, he may not only be sure of not committing any mistake in the diminution of his figures according to their different distances, but may flatter himself with the thoughts of treading in the steps of the greatest masters. It is to the punctual observance of these laws, that we are to attribute the grand effect of some paintings by Carpazio and Mantegna, so careless in other respects; whereas a single fault against them is often sufficient entirely to spoil the works of a Guido, in spite of the sublimity and beauty of his superior style.

Now, as the demonstration of the rules of perspective depends on the doctrine of proportions, on the properties of similar triangles, and on the intersection of planes, it will be proper to put an abridgement of Euclid into the hands of the young painter, that he may may understand these rules fundamentally, and not stand confined to a blind practice of them; but, then, there is nothing in this author relative to the art of painting, which may not be easily acquired in a few months. For, as it would be of no use to a painter to launch out into the anatomical depths of a Monro or an Albinus, it would be equally superfluous to perplex himself with the intricacies of the higher geometry with a Taylor, who has handled perspective with that rich profoundness, which we cannot help thinking does a great deal more honour to a mathematician, than it can possibly bring advantage to a simple artist.

But though a much longer time were requisite to become a perfect master of perspective, a painter, surely, ought not to grudge it; as no time can be too long to acquire that knowledge, without which he cannot possibly expect to succeed. Nay, we may boldly affirm, that the shortest road in every art is that which leads through theory to practice. From theory arises that great facility, by means of which a man advances the quicker, in proportion as he is surer of not taking a wrong step: whilst those, who are not grounded in the science, labour on in perpetual doubt; obliged, as a certain author expresses it, to feel out their way with a pencil, just as the blind, with their sticks, feel for the streets and turnings, with which they are not acquainted.

As practice, therefore, ought in every thing to be built upon principle, the study of Optics, as far as it is requisite to determine the degree in which objects are to be illuminated or shaded, should proceed hand in hand with that of perspective: And this, in order that the shades, cast by figures upon the planes on which they stand, may fall properly, and be neither too strong nor too light; in a word, that those most beautiful effects of the chiaro-oscuro may run no risk of ever receiving the lie from truth, which sooner or later discovers itself to every eye.

Sect. III. Of Symmetry.

The study of symmetry, it is obvious, should immediately follow that of anatomy: for it would avail us little to be acquainted with the different parts of the human body, and their several offices, were we at the same time ignorant of the order and proportion of those parts in regard to the whole in general, and to each other in particular. The Greek statuaries distinguished themselves above all others, as much by the just symmetry of their members, as by their skill in anatomy; but Polycleitus surpassed them all by a statue, called the Rule, from which, as from a most accurate pattern, other artists might take measures for every part of the human body. These measures, to say nothing of the books which treat professedly of them, may now be derived from the Apollo of Belvedere, the Laocoon, the Venus of Medicis, the Faunus, and particularly the Antinous, which last was the rule of the learned Poufain.

It is the general opinion of painters, that the ancients were not as happy in representing the bodies of children, as they are allowed to have been in representing those of women and men; especially those of their gods; in which they excelled to such a degree, that with these gods were often worshipped the artists' symmetry, who had carved them. Yet the Venus of Gnidus by Praxiteles was not more famous than her Cupid, on whose account alone people flocked to Thebes. To &c., in children, say they, the ancients knew not how to impart that softness and effeminacy which Fiammingo has since contrived to give them, by representing their cheeks, hands, and feet, swelled, their heads large, &c., and with scarcely any belly. But such critics seem to forget, that these first sketches of nature very seldom come in the painter's way, and that this puny and delicate state has not in its form even the least glimmering of perfection. The ancients never undertook to represent children less than four or five years old; at which age the superfluous humours of the body being in some measure digested, their members begin to assume such a contour and proportion as may serve to point out what they are afterwards likely to be. This observation is confirmed by the children which we meet with in ancient taffo-reliefs and paintings: for they are all doing one thing or another; like those most beautiful little Cupids in a picture at Venice, who are playing with the arms of Mars, and lifting up the ponderous sword of that deity; or that little urchin in the Danie of Caracci, who empties a quiver of its arrows in order to fill it with the golden shower. Now, what can be a greater blunder in point of costume, than to attribute actions, which require some degree of strength and judgment, to infancy, to that raw and tender age so totally unable to govern and support itself?

Let a young painter consider the Greek statues ever so often, of whatever character or age they may be represented, it is impossible he should ever consider them without discovering new beauties in them. It is therefore impossible he should copy them too often, according to that judicious motto placed by Maratti on his print called The school. This truth was acknowledged by Rubens himself; for though, like one bred, as he was, in the foggy climate of the Low Countries, he generally painted from the life; in some of his works he copied the ancients; nay, he wrote a treatise on the excellency of the ancient statues, and on the duty of a painter to study and imitate them. As to the satirical print, or rather paquinade, of the great Titian, in which he has represented a parcel of young monkeys aping the group of Laocoön and his sons; he intended nothing more by it than to lash the dulness and poverty of those artists, who cannot so much as draw a figure without having a statue before them as a model.

In fact, reason requires, that an artist should be so much matter of his art, as seldom to stand in need of a pattern. To what other purpose is he to sweat and toil from his infancy, and spend so many days and nights in studying and copying the best models; especially the finest faces of antiquity, which we are still possessed of; such as the two Niels, mother and daughter; the Ariadne, the Alexander, the young Nero, the Silenus, the Nile; and likewise the finest figures; for instance, the Apollo, the Gladiator, the Venus, and others; all which (as was said of Pietro Fetta), he should have, as it were, perfectly by heart? With a stock of excellencies like these, treasured up in his memory, he may one day hope to produce something thing of his own without a model; form a right judgment of those natural beauties which fall in his way; and, when occasion offers, avail himself properly of them.

It is very injudicious to send boys to an academy to draw after naked figures, before they have imbibed a proper relish for beautiful proportions, and have been well-grounded in the true principles of symmetry. They should first learn, by studying the precious remains of antiquity, to improve upon life; and discern where a natural figure is faulty through stiffness in the members, or clumsiness in the trunk, or in any other respect; so as to be able to correct the faulty part, and reduce it to its proper bounds. Painting, in this branch, is, like medicine, the art of taking away and adding.

It must not, however, be dissembled, that the methods hitherto laid down are attended with some danger: for by too flaxen an attention to statues, the young painter may contract a hard and dry manner; and by studying anatomies too fervently, a habit of representing living bodies as stripped of their skin: for, after all, there is nothing but what is natural, that, besides a certain peculiar grace and liveliness, possesses that simplicity, ease, and softness, which is not to be expected in the works of art, or even in those of nature when deprived of life. Poussin himself has now and then given into one of these extremes, and Michael Angelo very often into the other: but from this we can only infer, that even the greatest men are not infallible. It is, in short, to be considered as one instance, among a thousand, of the ill use those are wont to make of the best things, who do not know how to temper and qualify them properly with their contraries.

But no such danger can arise to a young painter from confining himself for a long time to mere design, so as not to attempt colouring till he has made himself master of that branch. If, according to a great master*, colours in painting are in regard to the eye what numbers in poetry are in regard to the ear, so many charms to allure and captivate that sense; may we not affirm, that design is in the same art what propriety of language is in writing, and a just utterance of sounds in music? Whatever some people may think, a picture designed according to the rules of perspective and the principles of anatomy, will ever be held in higher esteem by good judges, than a picture ill designed, let it be ever so well coloured. Hannibal Caracci set so great a value upon the art of contour, that, according to some expressions of his which have reached us, he considered almost every thing else as nothing in comparison with it. And this his judgment may be justified, by considering, that nature, though she forms men of various colours and complections, never operates in the motions contrary to the mechanical principles of anatomy, nor, in exhibiting these motions to the eye, against the geometrical laws of perspective: a plain proof, that, in point of design, no mistake is to be deemed trifling. Hence we are enabled to feel all the weight of those words in which Michael Angelo, after he considered a picture drawn by a prince of the Venetian school, addressed Valari: "What a pity it is," said he, "that this man did not set out by studying design!" As the energy of nature

* Poussin, in his Life by Bellori.

shines most in the smallest subjects, so the energy of imitation art shines most in imitating them.

Sect. IV. Of Imitation.

When you consider art as the imitation of nature (says Mengs), it is not to be understood that nature which is the object, is more perfect than art which imitates it. Nature, it is confessed, offers some views of which the imitation must for ever remain imperfect, as in the instance of the claro-obscuro; but, on the other hand, in every thing relative to beauty of form, imitation may even surpass nature. Nature, in her productions, is subject to many accidents. Art, labouring on passive and obedient materials, renders perfect the objects of its creation, chooses every thing in nature the most excellent, and collects the different parts and the different beauties of many individual into one whole. It is seldom that we find in the same man greatness of soul and the due proportions of body, vigour, suppleness, firmness, and agility, joined together. Art constantly represents what is rarely or never to be met with in human nature; regularity in the outlines, grandeur in the forms, grace in the attitudes, beauty in the members, force in the breast, agility in the limbs, address in the arms, frankness in the forehead, spirit in the eyes, and affability over the whole countenance. Let an artist give force and expression to all the parts of his subject, let him vary this force and expression as different circumstances make it necessary, and he will soon perceive that art may surpass nature. But although this be granted, the artist is not to imagine that art is actually arrived at this supreme degree of perfection, and can proceed no farther. The moderns seem never to have perceived the tract pointed out by the ancient Greeks: for, since the revival of painting, the true and the agreeable, instead of the beautified, have been the objects of cultivation. Still, however, imitation is the first part of the art of painting, though not the most excellent or beautiful. It is a necessary step in the progress which leads forward to greater perfection.

A painter ought attentively to consider, compare together, and weigh in the balance of reason and truth, all the different styles of the great masters; but he ought likewise carefully to guard against too great a fondness for any one of them in particular that he may think proper to adopt; otherwise, to use the expression of a first-rate master**, instead of the child, he would become the grand-child of nature.

Besides, his imitation must be of generals, and not of particulars. Whatever a young painter's natural disposition may be, whether to paint boldly and freely like Tintoret and Rubens, or to labour his works like Titian or Da Vinci, let him follow it. This kind of imitation is very commendable. It is thus that Dante, at the same time that he carefully avoided adopting the particular expressions of Virgil, endeavoured to seize his bold and free manner, and at last caught from him that elegance of style which has done him so much honour.

As to the rest, nothing should hinder an able master from making use now and then of any antique, or even modern figure, which he may find his account in employing. Sanzio, in a St Paul at Liffra, crucified... not to avail himself of an ancient sacrifice in basso-relievo; nor did Buonarroti himself disdain to use, in his paintings of the Sextine chapel, a figure taken from that famous cornelian which tradition tells us he wore on his fingers, and which was lately in the possession of the most Christian king. Men like these avail themselves of the productions of others in such a manner as to make us apply to them, what La Bruyère said of Defreux, that one would imagine the thoughts of other men had been of his own creation.

In general, a painter should have his eye constantly fixed on nature, that inexhaustible and varied source of every kind of beauty; and should study to imitate her in her most singular effects. As beauty, scattered over the whole universe, shines brighter in some objects than in others, he should never be without his little book and crayon, in order to make drawings of every beautiful or uncommon object that may happen to present itself; and take sketches of every fine building, every situation, every effect of light, every flight of clouds, every flow of drapery, every attitude, every expression of the passions, that may happen to strike him. He may afterwards employ these things as occasion offers; and in the mean time will have the advantage of acquiring a grand taste.

It is by carefully studying the best masters, and imitating nature, that a painter arrives at the style of perfection which the Italians call gusto grande, the French le beau ideal, and the English the great style.

"A mind (says Sir Joshua Reynolds), enriched by an assemblage of all the treasures of ancient and modern art, will be more elevated and fruitful in resources in proportion to the number of ideas which have been carefully collected and thoroughly digested.

"The addition of other men's judgment is so far from weakening, as is the opinion of many, our own, that it will fashion and consolidate those ideas of excellence which lay in their birth feeble, ill-shaped, and confused; but which are finished and put in order by the authority and practice of those, whose works may be said to have been consecrated by having stood the test of ages.

"When we speak of the habitual imitation and continued study of masters, it is not to be understood that I advise any endeavour to copy the exact peculiar colour and complexion of another man's mind; the success of such an attempt must always be like Lis who imitates exactly the air, manner, and gestures of him whom he admires. His model may be excellent, but he himself will be ridiculous; and this ridicule arises not from his having imitated, but from his not having chosen the right mode of imitation.

"It is a necessary warrantable pride to disdain to walk servilely behind any individual, however elevated his rank. The true and liberal ground of imitation is an open field, where, though he who precedes has had the advantage of starting before you, yet it is enough to pursue his course; you need not tread in his footsteps; and you certainly have a right to outstrip him if you can.

"Nor, whilst I recommend studying the art from artists, can I be supposed to mean that nature is to be neglected: I take this study in aid, and not in exclusion of the other. Nature is, and must be, the fountain, which alone is inexhaustible; and from which all colouring excellencies must originally flow.

"The great use of studying our predecessors is to open the mind, to shorten our labour, and to give us the result of the selection made by those great minds of what is grand or beautiful in nature: her rich stores are all spread out before us; but it is an art, and no easy art, to know how or what to choose, and how to attain and secure the object of our choice.

"Thus the highest beauty of form must be taken from nature; but it is an art of long deduction and great experience to know how to find it. I cannot avoid mentioning here an error which students are apt to fall into.

"He that is forming himself must look with great caution and wariness on those peculiarities or prominent parts which at first force themselves on view, and are the marks, or what is commonly called the manner, by which that individual artist is distinguished.

"Peculiar marks I hold to be generally, if not always, defects, however difficult it may be wholly to escape them.

"Peculiarities in the works of art are like those in the human figure; it is by them that we are cognizable and distinguished one from another; but they are always so many blemishes, which, however, both in the one case and in the other, cease to appear deformities to those who have them continually before their eyes. In the works of art, even the most enlightened mind, when warmed by beauties of the highest kind, will by degrees find a repugnance within him to acknowledge any defects; nay, his enthusiasm will carry him so far as to transform them into beauties and objects of imitation.

"It must be acknowledged, that a peculiarity of style, either from its novelty, or by seeming to proceed from a peculiar turn of mind, often escapes blame; on the contrary, it is sometimes striking and pleasing; but it is vain labour to endeavour to imitate it, because novelty and peculiarity being its only merit, when it ceases to be new, it ceases to have value.

"A manner, therefore, being a defect, and every painter, however excellent, having a manner, it seems to follow, that all kinds of faults as well as beauties may be learned under the sanction of the greatest authorities."

Sect V. Of Colouring.

Colouring, though a subject greatly inferior to many others which the painter must study, is yet of sufficient importance to employ a considerable share of his attention; and to excel in it, he must be well acquainted with that part of optics which has the nature of light and colours for its object. Light, however simple and uncompounded it may appear, is nevertheless made up, as it were, of several distinct substances; and the number, and even dose, of these ingredients, has been happily discovered by the moderns. Every undivided ray, let it be ever so fine, is a little bundle of red, orange, yellow, green, azure, indigo, and violet rays, which, while combined, are not to be distinguished one from another, and form that kind of light called white.