Painting is the art of conveying thought by the imitation of things through the medium of form and colour, light and shadow. Colour, and light and shadow, can by themselves do little more than excite sensations of harmony and sentiment, independently of action, passion, or story; but if founded upon form, thoughts become clear, expressions of passion intelligible, and actions, gestures, and motions of the human frame defined and decided. Form therefore is the basis of painting, sculpture, architecture, and design of every description.

Any school of painting, therefore, which is established upon a principle different from this, or which makes the subordinate parts of colour, light, and shadow the principal law of its practice instead of a component part, is in opposition to the most celebrated schools in the world; for the most eminent both in Greece and in Italy, were indebted for their celebrity and renown to the strict observance of the doctrine here enunciated. In Greece, the schools of Sicily, Corinth, Athens and Rhodes, and in Italy, those of Pisa, Florence, Rome, and Bologna, were the most important, the most useful, and the most intellectual; and in all these form constituted the great and fundamental law of their practice. But in Venice, colour took the lead; it predominated too in Holland and Flanders; and it has always reigned, to the sacrifice of common sense, in Britain. Yet for sound and philosophical views of art, as a vehicle of passion or of moral national influence, neither of these schools can be referred to, with the same conviction and confidence with which all nations can refer to the former great sources of sense, principle, and genius.

In what country Painting first originated, is nearly as difficult to discover, as it is to find a country where it never existed at all. Design, the basis of painting, must have begun with the very first instrument of necessity which man required. The origin of any art, science, or discovery, is not so much owing to the particular accident which happened to the individual concerned, as to the intellectual adaptation of that individual to receive impressions of a peculiar nature from the particular circumstance which occurred. Thus whether Music was invented by the man, who, listening to the sound of an anvil, instantly composed notes; or whether Painting was discovered by the lovely girl, who, watching the shadow of her lover, as he sat silent at the prospect of parting, traced it upon the wall as a memento of their mutual affection; whether it originated with Philocles in Egypt, or Cleanthes in Corinth, or long before Egypt or Greece were habitable; the principle is the same. Without an inherent susceptibility to the impressions of sound, in preference to all other impressions, in the man, or an inherent susceptibility to the impressions of form equally intense in the girl, the intellectual faculties of either would have never been excited to compose notes, or to define figures. The art originated with the first man who was born with such acute sensibility to the beauty of form, colour, and light and shadow, as to be impelled to convey his thoughts by positive imitation.

When the Spaniards landed in South America, the mode by which the natives conveyed intelligence of their arrival to king Montezuma was by painting the clothes of the strangers, their looks, their dress, and their ships. This certainly must have been the most ancient, because the most simple and obvious mode in the world of conveying thought, after oral communication. But independently of all theory, there cannot be a doubt of the extreme antiquity of painting. The walls of Babylon were painted after nature with different species of animals, hunting expeditions, and combats. Semiramis was represented on horseback striking a leopard with a dart, and her husband Ninus wounding a lion. "And I went in and saw, and beheld every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed on the wall round about." (Ezek. viii. 18.) "She saw men portrayed upon the wall," the images of the Chaldeans portrayed in vermilion, girded with girdles upon their loins, exceeding in dyed attire upon their heads, all of them princes to look at, after the manner of the Babylonians and Chaldeans." (chap. xxiii. 14, 15.) It is inferred from a passage of Diodorus Siculus, that these figures were painted first on the brick before burning, and then vitrified by fire. But before this was done, experience must have been acquired of the liability to decay of painting upon external walls; and considering, too, that great statues were erected in Babylon, the arts must have existed amongst the Babylonians long before the period here referred to.

But a great revolution has taken place in our ideas on this Antiquity subject, from the deciphering of hieroglyphics, and we are of art in now assured of the extreme antiquity of art, in ages hitherto Ethiopia deemed almost entirely fabulous. From Asiatic art we have been accustomed to turn to that of the Egyptians; but it is no longer considered as a matter of speculation that the Ethiopians preceded the latter in knowledge, and that from this ancient people the Egyptians received gradually a knowledge of art. The course of civilisation probably descended from Ethiopia to Egypt; and yet we have evidence of the existence of Egyptian painting and sculpture more than eighteen centuries before Christ, and even then the arts were in the highest condition that the Egyptian school ever attained. From the most ancient records of the Jewish and Greek historians, in which Egyptian and Ethiopian monarchs are mentioned, and their actions narrated, we can now turn to corresponding traces of their existence and exploits commemorated upon the durable materials of the temples, tombs, and palaces which still remain. When therefore it is found that this method of interpreting hieroglyphics has proved to be correct, in all that we know of the Cæsars and the Ptolemies, or see casually alluded to respecting the Pharaohs, we have no right at all to dispute the truth of the same mode of interpretation when it indicates a still higher antiquity, though we have not the means of confirming it by collateral reference. Eighty miles above Dongola, Lord Prudhoe discovered the remains of a magnificent city, which he conceives to have been the capital of Tirhakah mentioned in the Bible; and amongst these ruins he observed two nobly executed lions, specimens of Ethiopian skill. On the shoulders of one is the name of Amenoph III., who was called Memnon by Greek historians. The style and execution of these great works are evidence of the talent of this people. It is now certain that as early as the nineteenth century before Christ, the walls and temples of Thebes were decorated with paintings and sculpture, commemorating personal and historical events; and certainly in comparing the designs on these temples with those of a later period, we must conclude that the Egyptian school of painting never exceeded their merit.

The conclusion to be drawn is, that at this time the Egyp- tian priesthood had not interfered with art or artists; but that the painters were left freely to commemorate the great actions of their employers, to study nature, and to do as they liked. Many of these actions are delineated in a natural manner, and there is a great deal of dignity in the figure of the hero; the sea fights are also well grouped, and there are many of the Trajan-column figures, and not more gross perspective is visible. The colour is a mere illumination, and the composition as a whole infantine; but there is proportion, and not absolute ignorance of the component parts. After this period, art became a mere tool in the hands of the priests; and as the law compelled the son to follow the profession of his father, it may be supposed that painting degenerated into the mere fac-simile of prescribed forms of gods, goddesses, and men, and that in the time of the Ptolemies it was little better than an illuminated hieroglyphic.

The Egyptians appear to have done every thing with reference to form. Their painting was at best but coloured sculpture. They seem to have been aware of the mortality of colours, and to have said, "As colours must go, let us cut out the designs in stone, so that at least form may remain in our granite sculpture and defy everything but the convulsion of the earth." First the designer drew the outline in red, then the master artist corrected it, then the sculptor cut it, then the painter coloured it, gods blue, goddesses yellow, men red, and draperies green and black; and such is the extreme dryness of the climate, that a traveller says, he saw in Nubia, a bas-relief half cut, with the red outline left for the rest, and that he wetted his finger and put it up, and immediately obliterated a part of the red chalk.

The Egyptians would seem to have been a severe people, as hard as their own granite. They had an awful feeling of respect for the wisdom of their ancestors; they hated reform; no physician dared to prescribe a new medicine, and no painter dared to invent a new thought. Plato says, that the pictures of his day in Egypt were just the same as from ages immemorial; and, according to Winkelmann, another cause of their inferiority in painting, was the little estimation in which painters were held, and their extreme ignorance. Not a single painter of eminence has reached us, and but one sculptor, viz. Memnon, author of three statues at the entrance of the great temple at Thebes. In the knowledge of the figure it is impossible they could be great; for there is proof that they dared not touch the dead body for dissection, and even the embalmers risked their lives from the hatred of the populace.

Winkelmann divides Egyptian design into three periods: First, from the earliest times to the conquest of Cambyses; secondly, from the conquest of Cambyses to the subjugation of the Persian and the establishment of the Greek dynasty in Egypt; and thirdly, from that period to the time of Hadrian. When the paintings at Thebes were executed is not known. But they were upon the walls at the expulsion of the Shepherd Kings, and this was the first period of their art, and before Moses. The Egyptians never, in either art, reached the power of making men, as Aristotle said of Polygnotus, better than they were; in other words, they never attained the true ideal beauty, founded on nature, yet above it. Their figures are debased transcripts of what they had about them, and therefore, so far authentic as to character. The Egyptian female heads are far from displeasing; they have a sleepy voluptuous eye, a full and pleasant mouth, high cheek bones, dark brows, and there is something by no means disagreeable in the silent lazy look of their expression. But the very want of ideal beauty gives an assurance that the figures are Egyptian nature, and that every habit, public, private, civil and religious, is laid open to us, by the wonderful discoveries of Belzoni and his followers: it is almost as impossible now for an artist to be incorrect in painting an Egyptian subject, as it would be to err in painting a Briton. In a tomb laid open by Belzoni, the characters of the procession were admirably distinguished; the Jew, the Egyptian, the Negro, and the Chaldean, were as little liable to be confounded as if they had been before us. In their sculpture, however, there is more of science than in their painting. Sculpture was practised by the priesthood, and sculptors were called sacred stonecutters. The great head of Memnon in the British Museum is beautifully cut, the nose and mouth especially; and, considering its remote antiquity, it is really a great wonder.

Upon the whole, it is impossible to believe that the art of painting, amongst other nations, owed much to the Egyptians; they had no colour, and no light and shadow, but only some form, some expression, and some character. The groups of the ruins of Elythia show a great deal of nature and simplicity; the animals are varied, and the cows are lowing and gamboling; yet it is after all but childish work, and as the paintings at Thebes are the best, those of Elythia have not much to boast of.

Whether the Greeks owe their beginnings to Egypt, is more than doubtful, from the simple fact of the early Greek painters using no blue, whilst it was the constant practice of Egyptian painters to use blue in every thing. Athens was founded by an Egyptian colony, and painters might be amongst the emigrants, as well as masons and sculptors; yet in the early state of things, painters were not an article of necessity, and it is problematical if in this alleged emigration, there were any persons of that class. The beginning of art was the same in all nations. They might improve each other; but we do not believe that painting was ever originally brought into one nation by another, or that there ever existed any, where it has not always been more or less known from the remotest period of their history.

After Ethiopian and Egyptian art, that of the Hebrew State of art people must next be examined. That they had sculptors amongst and chasers, is evident; but it is not so certain that painting the Hebrews was practised. Though the cunning work of the curtains in brass and Exodus means tapestry, and for any cunning work of the kind, designs coloured must have been executed; yet there is no proof in any part of the Bible that painting as an art was ever practised by them; and even the designs alluded to were exclusively applied for the purposes of religion. Moreover, thou shalt make the tabernacle with ten curtains of fine twined linen, with blue, and purple, and scarlet; with cherubim of cunning work shalt thou make them." (Exodus xxvi.1.)

"And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying, See, I have called by name Bezaleel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; and I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of timber, to work in all manner of workmanship." (Exod. xxxi. 1—5.) Yet when Solomon wanted artists, he sent to Tyre, which is presumptive evidence of a deficiency of skill at Jerusalem. No allusion is made to the existence of the art of painting amongst the Hebrews; yet it is hardly possible to suppose a people working in stone, and silver, and gold, and timber, designing and weaving a cunning work of cherubims on curtains and bor-

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1 See the French national work on Egypt. 2 Odyssey, lib. xvii. v. 448. 3 De Lacy, lib. ii. p. 367. 4 Col. Leake says there is a remnant of blue on the temple of Theseus; but that may be as applied to architecture. The question is, whether the great painters used it in their art. Pliny says no, and Quintilian confirms him by applying to them the expression simplex color. No colour is simpler where pure blue is used.

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4 Wink. lib. ii. chap. 2. 5 See 2d vol. of Ancient Sculpture, (Dillettanti.) 6 See Description de l'Egypte, tom. i. plates. Painting ders for garments, and having been so long amongst the Egyptians, to have been ignorant of painting; but it is the opinion of one of the greatest living authorities in the church, that the representation of any object by painting was not permitted to the Hebrews.

With respect to the painting of the Phoenicians, Persians, Indians, and Chinese, it was in the earliest ages; and has ever since been, miserable and wretched. Although the Indians and Persians have always been celebrated for their tapestry, yet it is more for the excellence of the material than the purity of their designs. You may know a tiger from an elephant, though scarcely from a monkey, in their tapestry, shawls, and carpets; but in their utter ignorance of the naked figure, their long, barbarous, and cumbersome garments, and their want of science, are so grossly palpable, that they have never been, and never will be, referred to by any nation as authority in design. In their coins, however, the ancient Phoenicians showed more knowledge of the form than the Persians, the Chinese, or the Indians.

From the painting of these Eastern nations, we may now justifiably approach a people, whose origin, history, and science, have puzzled historians more than perhaps the Atlantides themselves. Who the Etruscans were nobody knows; but all agree that they were not aborigines, and this is establishing something. Yet it can scarcely be questioned that in their most remote, as well as their more refined periods, they were indebted for their arts, their language, and their religion, principally to the Grecians. The time when the Etruscans had commercial relations with Egypt and Greece, is hardly known; but as their early style of art is little Egyptian and their subjects Grecian, they were no doubt connected with both, even before the Greeks had settled in Italy. It is not yet decided where they came from, and who they were, and if one consults all who have written on the subject from Herodotus to M. Raoul-Rochette, he is likely to be as open to a new theory as when he began. Their early works prove nothing. These are like the early works of almost all barbarous nations. The gods of the Etruscans are, in point of art, the gods of the Peruvians, the Sandwich Islanders, or the Esquimaux. Idols are idols, in early nations all over the world; and the bandy-legged Apollos, squinting Pan, and Diu indigenes, sixteen heads high, of this mysterious people, would do as well for any of the gods of the South Seas, as the early barbarians of the Mediterranean. When commerce brought them in contact with Greece and Egypt, traces of the art of both nations became apparent; but this is no evidence that they came exclusively from one nation or from the other.

Winkelmann is a person of great genius, and always touches art as if he saw the whole ground. He divides Etruscan art into three epochs, Heyne into five; he goes to leading points, Heyne enters into details. The first epoch was gross; the second exhibited traces of Greek or Pelasgic art; the third had a taint of Egyptian; the fourth was better; the fifth produced ideal beauty and Greek mythology; and this completes the period till decay. Campania was colonized 801 B.C.; but the Euboeans had founded Cuma 1550 B.C. This neighbourhood brought the Etruscans in contact with Greek art, when about the ninth or eleventh Olympiad Greek colonies were established in Sicily; and the intercourse being reciprocal and complete, it cannot be wondered, that the more ignorant of the two nations became fascinated and inoculated by the superior one, and thus rendered Etruscan so like Greek art, that it has ever since produced doubt and confusion.

According to Pliny, the arrival of Demaratus with Cleanthes from Corinth, first brought art into Etruria about 650 B.C.; yet, he says, there were beautiful pictures at Ardea and Lanuvium, which were older than Rome, and Rome was founded 754 B.C. Heyne says, that before Rome was built, casting of metal, sculpture, and painting existed in Etruria anterior to any connection of the Etruscans with Greece; according to Winkelmann the Etruscans were advanced in art before the Greeks, and it was a tradition of the remote ages, that Daedalus flying from Minos settled in Etruria and first sowed the seeds of design. When Etruria became a Roman province, Marcus Flavius Flaccus besieged Volsciam, the etymological meaning of which is, "The town of artists," and brought away two thousand statues from that city alone. An able writer in the "Newcastle Transactions" contends, that it is doubtful if the Etruscans had any art before the arrival of the Greeks. No historian of this nation has reached us; their inscriptions are not yet thoroughly deciphered; and as the Romans destroyed every monument of surrounding nations, there is no fixing their antiquity. It is clear, however, that painting flourished in Italy before it did in Greece; such at least is the opinion of Tiraboschi. Pliny says nothing about it before the 18th Olympiad in Greece, whereas in the 16th there were paintings in the above towns in Italy, and works too showing great refinement; which the Romans admired in their days of splendour, and which their emperors wished to remove, surrounded as they were by the finest productions of Grecian art. Their civil and religious rites not being the same as the Egyptians, and there being no traces of embalming, it may thence be concluded that they were not of Egyptian origin.

All hopes of discovering any of their paintings, any important work which should give us evidence of their talents in art, were given up, till in 1760 Pacciaudi discovered at Tarquinia, tombs decorated with designs; and in 1837 fac-similes of pictorial decorations of other tombs were exhibited in London, with the monumental statues themselves, and in parts were extremely beautiful in taste, design, expression, and drapery. The extremities were correctly and sweetly drawn; and the expression and character of the head, which were very interesting, would not have disgraced any period of Greek or Italian design, though they would not have honoured the finest. It is impossible to judge of the colour of the Etruscan school from these specimens, or from the vases called Etruscan. Fresco, stucco, or distemper are adapted neither for depth nor for tone; oil or encaustic is the only vehicle fit for harmony, and oil or encaustic was never practised by them. With respect to the painted vases called Etruscan, because they are found in Etruria, we might just as well assert, if one discovered in the middle of Yorkshire, a mass of china, that it must be of English manufacture because it was found in Yorkshire. After the Greeks had settled in the south, their vases might be and no doubt were an article of commerce; of course they were imitated, but surely the design and origin are wholly Grecian, whatever the Etruscans might after long intercourse do in the way of imitation. The principles of design and proportion in these beautiful productions, are the same as in the best works of Greek sculpture, with an occasional but trifling variation. Raphael himself could not have exceeded the purity of form expressed by line, in drapery or figure. In the finest vases the artists seem to have been perfect masters of the figure, and to have gone right round with the stylus, till the contour of the part was completely expressed. Nor is there anything wonderful in this, considering the manner in which Greek artists and manufacturers began, proceeded, and concluded their studies. According to Plato, a perfect mastery of the forms We have thus brought down the history of the art to a period, when our information, though imperfect, is more certain; but we can never sufficiently estimate the loss of all the ancient treatises on art, though we ought to be very grateful for what we possess in Plato and Aristotle, Pliny and Quintilian, and other ancient writers, Greek and Roman, down to the middle ages, and till the subject was taken up by Vasari and Lanzi. The continued existence of this glorious art, can always be proved, more or less subject of course, like everything human, to those alternations of splendour and calamity, triumph and misfortune, which are the lot of every thing here below.

The superiority of the Greeks in art is always attributed to the secondary causes of climate and government, forgetting the one important requisite, without which the influence of the most genial climate, or the patronage of the most perfect government could avail little; we mean natural and inherent genius. If the Athenians, the Rhodians, the Corinthians, and the Sicyonians owed their excellence in art to the climate, why did not the same climate produce equal perfection in the Spartans and Arcadians? If climate be the secret, why are not all people under the same latitude equally gifted and equally refined? Climate may be more or less favourable to intellectual development, but is never the cause of its existence. Government may elicit genius by fostering and reward, but can never create it. All the lamentation about the climate of England, Scotland, or Flanders, did not prevent Hogarth's appearance in the first, Wilkie's in the second, or Rubens' in the last of these countries; nor could all the beauty of climate in Greece or Italy, ever have made Mengs a Raphaelle, or David the Titian of modern times. It would be absurd to deny altogether the influence of climate in the extremes. It is not impossible but that genius might melt to indolence under the line, or freeze to apathy within the arctic circle; but even genius there would assert its superiority in something, or in some way. What we contend for is, that Winkelman's theory of limiting the gifts of God, intellectual or corporeal, to latitude or longitude, is not borne out by facts, the great test of all theoretical principles.

The Greeks were idolaters, and their love of beauty was a principle of their religion. The more beautiful a face or form could be rendered in painting or sculpture, the better chance had the artist of the blessing of the gods here, and their immortal rewards hereafter. As beauty was so much prized by this highly-endowed people, those who were gifted with it became ambitious of making it known to great artists, and by them to the world. Artists fixed the fame of beauty in man or woman, and even children who gave promise of being beautiful were allowed to contest for a prize, and the child who won it had a statue erected to him. Many people were complimented by being named from the beauty of any particular part, and Winkelman quotes an instance, where one was called Χαράδρας, that is, "having eyelids where the graces sat." There were games instituted near the River Alpheus, where prizes were adjudged to the most beautiful; and the Lacedemonian women in their bed-rooms kept continually before their eyes the finest statues. Still, this admiration of beauty was but a secondary cause; for though the Lacedemonians showed this love of beauty, they did not produce great artists. The Greeks had a strong sensibility to beauty and an intense acuteness of understanding. Every artist was a philosopher, and every philosopher relished art, and understood it. The artists began by the study of geometry and of form; they analyzed the peculiarities of the form of man, by contrasting it with that of the brutes, and they settled the principles of beauty in that form, and figure. The philosophers recommended to all classes the study of art, as a refined mode of elevating their perception of beauty; and the government seconded the recommendation of the philosophers. The priests found the religious feeling rendered more acute by painting and sculpture; and the authorities discovered, that the emotions of patriotism were doubled by the commemoration of great national events, in temples and in public halls. Now, add climate as adapted for such productions and their preservation, and genius, the gift of God, as the first cause, and no one surely need wonder that all these causes mutually acting on each other produced the miracles of perfection in art which the world has gazed at ever since with an incredulous and bewildered astonishment.

The passion for the beautiful in poetry, painting, music, and nature, led them to abhor the bloody amusements of the Romans. To contest for glory by pictures, poems, or music, to race for the prize of swiftness, or wrestle for the crown of strength, were the innocent and delightful objects of their Olympic games; and during those noble commemorations, war ceased, and all Greece assembled in happiness and joy. Even the harsh Spartans signed a truce of fifty days with the Messenians, that they might keep a fête in honour of Hyacinthus. The greatest men disdained not these contests. Plato appeared amongst the wrestlers at Corinth, and Pythagoras carried off the prize at Ellis. What must have been the effect of all this upon a people of strong susceptibilities and of high natural genius?

Consider the respect which must have been paid to great artists, when such a man as Socrates pronounced them the only wise men. Aesop took the greatest pleasure in lounging in their painting-rooms; Marcus Aurelius took lessons in philosophy from an artist, and always said that the latter first taught him to distinguish the true from the false; and when Paulus Emilius sent to the Athenians for one of their ablest philosophers to educate his children, they selected Metrodorus the painter, and let it be remembered, that amongst the children placed under his care, was one of the Scipios. What must have been the effect on the rising youth of Greece when the Amphictyonic council decreed that Polygnotus, their greatest monumental painter, should be maintained at the public expense wherever he went, as a mark of the national admiration for his greatest work, the Hall at Delphi. The glory and the fortune of a great painter did not depend, as now, upon the caprice of individuals; he was the property of the nation; he was employed by countries and cities; and his rewards were considered as a just portion of the national expenditure. The educated and the high-born were brought up with a conviction of the propriety and justice of this principle; and when they became members of the government, considered this as useful a method of public expenditure, as squandering thousands on matters merely diplomatic, or in vain shows, mumblings, and pageants. And such will yet be the system of our own country, when the people become fully instructed, and are made sensible of the moral and commercial influence of painting.

When we reflect upon the money spent in England by the government, and the consequences which so often attend that expenditure, and when we find in Greece the different results of the same interference on the part of the state, and that the works there produced have been canons of beauty to the world ever since; it is natural to inquire, what was the system by means of which genius was so successfully rewarded? The secondary causes must have been, the competence of the tribunals to which poets, painters, musicians, sculptors, historians, wrestlers, boxers, and philosophers with such confidence appealed. It must have been the taste and knowledge of the members which composed the judgment-boards, and their sincere conviction of the importance of their office. One has only to sit for a moment the nature of their greatest tribunal, that of the Olympian games; one has only to reflect on the deep feeling, the solemn sincerity, the awful piety of their conviction, that what they had to do involved the future prospects of the rising youth of Greece, and that on their moral honesty depended the glory of their country, and that of its painters, sculptors, architects, philosophers, poets, and heroes. Before proceeding to detail the rise and progress of Greek art, and Greek artists, as the painting of every nation is connected with its civil, religious, and scientific institutions (though more must always depend on highly-gifted individual effort to advance the knowledge of mankind, than any given assemblage of inferior individuals); a rapid examination of the principles which guided the decision of one of their most important tribunals, composed of the greatest men the world has seen, ought to form a portion of every history of the art.

Aristotle in his *Politics*, as quoted by Mr Hamilton in his pamphlet on the Houses of Parliament, observes: "All were taught *epocheia* or literature, gymnastics, and music, and many *tev ypocheia*, or the art of design, as being abundantly useful for the purposes of life; but mainly because it enables us to appreciate the merits of distinguished artists, and carries us to the contemplation of real beauty; as letters, which are the elements of calculation, terminate in the contemplation of truth." A people thus educated, to understand the basis of beauty in art, and to believe that their decisions, when they became judges of genius, involved their own intellectual taste and repute, and who gave their decisions in the presence of kings, philosophers, and people, were as little likely to be biased by unjust predilection as human nature could be; though, of course, in the corrupt times of Nero and the emperors, great abuses took place. But in the Marathonian period, if ever partiality was banished from human honours, it was banished from the Olympic games, in those immortal days of glory and patriotism. At this extraordinary assemblage, kings entered the lists, and nations respected the judgment, or if they refused to abide by the decision of a just tribunal, they were excluded by vote till they paid the fine and acknowledged their error. And what was the result? The highest honours were obtained in these contests, because every one gifted in art, poetry, music, or physical strength, knew that if he deserved the olive-crown, no partiality, no nephew of the judge's sister, or first cousin of the judge's wife, would deprive him of his due. Every being did his best, and if that best failed, he had a consoling conscious conviction that he had been honourably, and honestly, and nobly beaten by a better. It is astonishing, if once entire confidence exist between judge and competitor, to what a degree this confidence affects both; what a spring it gives to mind and body, and how honestly every thing is done! And if confidence be, from repeated experience, withheld, it is wonderful how half the faculties of the mind, and the powers of the body and soul, sink under the impression. Napoleon used to say, "that if the moral feeling of an army was in favour of a campaign, it was equal to 40,000 men." If moral confidence be lost in such cases, disgust is generated, and apathy, indifference, and failure are the result.

In order to understand the Greek character thoroughly, the system of excitement that was worked on, and the materials that were used to rouse the energies of competitors, it will conduce to the understanding of the secondary causes of their perfection, if the nature of the Olympic games be examined. They are universally acknowledged to have subsisted before the rise of chronological dates and records; and the record of the Olympic conquerors after their restoration, is the first known chronological date. Pausanias says they were celebrated every five years, that is, they were celebrated on the fifth year after the fourth had passed; and Sir Isaac Newton is of opinion that they were originally instituted in celebration of victories. Why the Olympic games had always the preference, there is no knowing; but the grand statue of Jupiter at Elis, must no doubt have had considerable influence.

The privilege of presiding at the Olympic games was attended with such dignity and power, that the Eleans who had been in possession of it from the earliest times, were more than once obliged to maintain their right by force of arms. After various disputes about the number of presidents or hellanodics, they remained at the original number of ten; and Pausanias says, that for ten months preceding the games, they dwelt together in a house appointed for them, and called from them, hellanodiceum. By the most scrupulous attention, they did everything to qualify themselves for being deservedly the judges of all Greece; to which end they were patiently instructed by officers called guardians of the laws, and they attended every day in the gymnasium, upon the preparatory exercises of all those who were admitted as candidates, and who entered their names also ten months before, and exercised during a part, not the whole, of this time, in preparing themselves for the combat. Being exposed to the severest scrutiny, the judges had by these means frequent opportunities of trying the skill of the combatants, and also of exercising their own judgment; and both prepared themselves for the praise or censure of an awful tribunal, and a numerous assembly, whose censure could only be escaped by the most exact impartiality on the part of the judges, and the most sincere and earnest efforts for superiority on that of the competitors. In addition, the judges swore a solemn oath before the statue of Jupiter, upon their finishing the examination, to act according to the strictest equity and to all these precautions against human frailty, liberty of appeal to the senate at Elis was allowed to any one who felt aggrieved. The judges had also the power of excommunicating whole nations. Once an Athenian found guilty of corruption was fined, and refused to pay. The Athenians sanctioned his refusal, and were instantly excluded from all the games, till they repented and paid the penalty. When the Laconians were impertinent, other nations took up arms, and compelled them to submission. Such power had a wonderful effect on all the nations of Greece.

As the time approached, the candidates were rigorously examined as to their virtuous descent, and their own moral life; and when they passed in public review down the stadium, a herald demanded with a loud voice, "Is there any one who can accuse this man of any crime? is he a robber? is he a slave? is he wicked or in any way depraved?" Themistocles once stood up at the ceremony and objected to Hiero, king of Syracuse, because he was a *tyrant*, a name odious to the democracies of Greece; and there could not be a stronger evidence of their utter detestation of the name, than refusing to admit a king to contend because he was a *tyrant*; thus placing him upon a level with a slave, who could not by law be admitted. The candidates having passed in public review with honour, were then sworn, that they had done all which was required by law; and marching to the stadium, attended by their friends, connexions, and families, who encouraged them to do their best, and appealed to the gods to smile on their exertions, they were left for the fight. And being thus thought worthy of the contest, even defeat was considered by them as an evidence of their honour. The olive crowns and palm branches were placed before their eyes on beautiful tripods, to excite their utmost exertions, and when victorious it was announced by proclamation; they were crowned by the heralds, and then led along, preceded by trumpets, their names being shouted aloud throughout the vast assembly; and on their return to their native city, they entered through a breach in the wall, drawn in a chariot. And such was the high feeling engendered by these judicious excitements, that even Alexander himself was refused permission to contend, because he was a barbarian, nor was he allowed until he had proved his ancient descent at Argolis. "In the republic of the fine arts," says the catalogue to the designs for a National Gallery, "competition is the great source of excellence; but so to frame institutions, and invite competition as to secure all the attainable talent, and so to form a tribunal as to derive all benefit for the public, and to do justice to the competitor, have been matters of great difficulty in all ages and all countries."

The whole history of ancient art shows the estimation in which the unsophisticated judgment of the public was held. Aristotle says, "If the multitude is the surest judge of the productions of art." If you do not get the applause of the public," says some one else, "what celebrity can you attain?" and Cicero makes the public the supreme judge. Thus then, no one ought to wonder at the perfection of Greek genius in every thing, stimulated as it was by these secondary causes, and the one acting upon the other, in a climate adapted in every way for comfort, for health, and for convenience. The Greeks were men like ourselves, not larger as their arms prove, and not handsomer, for there exist as fine forms in either sex, in Great Britain, as ever graced the atelier of Zeuxis; indeed Cicero complains of the plainness of the Athenians. When genius and secondary causes unite, as they sometimes do, then such men as Pericles and Alexander, and Polygnotus, Zeuxis, and Apelles, are the result; for all the Olympic games, and Greek tribunals, could never have made Hudson Apelles, nor Caligula the benevolent Howard. "If any thing were wanting," says Flaxman, "to convince us of the high estimation painting was held in by the Greeks, the facts alone, viz. that Plato studied it, and Socrates was a sculptor by profession, are enough. But nothing is wanting."

In ancient painting, we certainly owe more to Pliny than to any other author; though in point of exquisite tact for hitting at once the characters of the great geniuses in art, he is not to be compared to Quintilian. There is more discrimination in the short account Quintilian gives of the painters and sculptors, than in all the delightful connoisseur chit-chat for which Pliny must ever be the leading favourite. Yet certainly his gossip and anecdotes are sometimes underrated by learned critics; for in two instances of gossip, about the partridges and grapes of Zeuxis and Protogenes, and the contest of Apelles and Protogenes very deep principles of Greek form and Greek imitation may be settled. Painting is said by Pliny to have existed before the foundation of Rome in Italy, as illustrated by designs on the walls at Ardea, Lanuvium, and Coree. This is always mentioned with a sort of doubt by antiquarians, who suspect that to the arrival of Decius from Corinth, the father of Tarquin, king of Rome, Italy owes her first knowledge of painting; but it has been shown that this cannot be so, if pictures were executed in Italy before Rome was founded. Pliny sneers at the Egyptians for boasting of the antiquity of their painting; whereas the Greeks equally deserve a sneer for believing that they had invented design.

The Greeks painted tabular pictures on wood, and mural pictures on walls. The materials were either encaustic or wax painting, and distemper or glue-painting. In encaustic on wood, they painted with a metal point called stylus; in distemper they painted with brushes, and in encaustic on walls they also used brushes. Tabular pictures were prepared with a ground of wax, and the composition was drawn in with a stylus or point as we draw upon an etching ground with a needle. At a sale of antiquities in London there was a regular Greek tablet with a wax ground, a stylus attached to it as boys hang slate-pencils to their slates, and a sentence of Greek actually half-cut. The word γραφειν being used for painting, design, or writing, makes the instrument the same in either case. This tablet was like a slate; the middle had been planed smooth, and the frame was left round it. The progress of the Greeks is very interesting, and shows how the mind gradually advances to the imitation of reality, and rests impatiently on mere outline, as a representation of nature. After a certain time, the early artists, when they had drawn an outline, ventured to colour it inside with black. This mode of imitation was called σκηνογραφία, and the paintings σκηνογραφία, or skiamgrams, from σκηνή shade, and γραφεῖν to draw. Our black profiles and whole figures seen in shop windows, are the skiamgrams of the ancient Greeks. This was hailed as a great step, and the painter who could fill up a face or a figure with black was regarded as a man eminent in art. After a little came the genius with more extended views, who invented the πολυγραφία or monogram from πολύς only, and γραφεῖν to draw; that is, to define by line only, an outline without a shade. Next came the man who had the nerve to try a positive colour. Pliny has preserved his name, Cleophaetus of Corinth; he ground up a red brick, and therefore the Greeks claimed the invention of colour; although the Chaldeans had painted men red on the walls of Babylon, and so had the Egyptians on their tombs, nearly a thousand years before them. This discovery was called μονοχρωμα, or monochrom, single-coloured from μόνος alone and χρώμα colour, and this was their first attempt at imitating flesh. Next came the white ground (the gesso of the Italians and lime and plaster of the Egyptians) covered with wax. From one colour, naturally enough came the others; for if brick produced red, earths, burned or natural, would produce other colours, and polychrom, from πολύς many, and χρώμα colour, was formed.

The art having now discovered its materials, soon advanced steadily and gloriously to excellence. "How long the brush assisted only the cestrum, and when it superseded it," says Fuseli, "cannot be ascertained; it cannot be proved, that it ever entirely superseded it, and there is every reason to believe they were always combined." It has been contested that painting was not known in Homer's time, because he speaks not of art; but what would be said of any man who argued that painting was not known in Milton's time, because he did not speak of it. Homer speaks of painting ships, and Milton alludes to "the painted stone;" but colouring and design must have been known from the shield of Achilles, and the tapestries of Helen and Andromache, if the walls of Thebes and those of Babylon had not settled the question. Troy was taken 1184 before Christ; but painting flourished in Egypt 1500 years before our era, that is, 716 years before Troy was taken, and 993 years before the era of Homer.

The nature of distemper and encaustic painting amongst the Greeks involves one or two questions interesting to artists. Their distemper was our tempera, and consisted in dissolving colour in water, and mixing it with glue; and though in Pliny, glue is only mentioned once, and that in conjunction with (τέκτονες) plasterers, it is evidently to be inferred from the brushes used in its practice, that tempera intensely varnished was the general practice of the tabular painters, and encrustics the exception. On all encaustic pictures, the Greeks put (στεγανοποιοί) "burnt in;" and what justified them in doing so? Merely the general application of fire to melt wax, or a particular mode of practice. Was the cestrum or stylus heated, whilst finishing the work, after the wax had been laid on? or was any actual Painting heat applied to amalgamate the colour in the conclusion, which justified such a term? or was the wax actually melted and used whilst boiling? Pliny says, that there were certain colours which would not stand without varnish; and that after they were laid on walls and dry, they were varnished with a mixture of warm pine wax and oil. Every Greek artist had his chafing-dish or cæterium; and when the varnish was dry, it was heated by fire from the chafing-dish "usque ad sodorem," until it seceded, when it was rubbed with wax candles, and polished with white napkins. This method the Greeks called σορός or the burning mode; and why might it not be applied as well to encaustic pictures, when finished either on wood, copper, walls, or stone, thus harmonizing and judiciously amalgamating fine execution distinct touches, and authorising the word ἐνεκαστικός being put after the artist's name?

All the artists in Europe know well how often they use a vehicle for a varnish, and a varnish for a vehicle in practice; and hence it is too absurd to doubt for a moment, that any Greek painter who had once used oil and wax as a varnish, would not use it as a vehicle at the first opportunity. Pliny infers, that "ceris pingere," to paint with waxes (coloured) and "picturam inurese," to burn in the picture, were the same methods. "There were anciently," he adds, "two methods, one ceris, with wax, and another on ivory with a cestrum; then came a third, boiling the wax and painting ships at once with it, which was a lasting mode, so that neither sea, wind, nor sun destroyed it." It appears from another passage, that the ships were painted in the same way as pictures which were burnt in. "Waxes are tinted with these colours for pictures which are burnt in; a different manner of painting from that employed on walls, but like that (of waxes tinted) employed for painting ships." Were tinted waxes applied hot? From this it may be inferred that they were.

Encaustic painting may be divided into four methods: 1st, mixing the colours with wax, and thinning them at the moment of painting with a liquid; 2d, placing wax in colours on the ivory, distinctly like mosaic, and uniting them by working them over with a heated cestrum; 3d, boiling the wax and using it hot; and, 4thly, softening the whole picture after completion, by heating it with a chafing-dish or cæterium. Both Pliny and Vitruvius describe this last method of varnishing; and it is curious to contrast their relative descriptions. Pliny is rapid, careless, general, desultory, as if talking at a party; Vitruvius, accurate, mathematical, careful, and architectural, as if every word was a brick, that must be poised and balanced. Pliny says you must liquefy punic wax with oil, and rub it with a candle and napkins. Vitruvius says, after your wall is dry and smooth, liquefy punic wax, pandol, a little by fire, then temper it with oil. In Pliny the pandol is left out, and so is the fire; but Vitruvius guides you to the degree, which is every thing in the practice of the art of painting. The pandol, therefore, is invaluable; do not boil, but heat your wax, then liquefy it, then varnish, then when dry heat it with a chafing-dish and rub it smooth. To artists this practice is beautiful, and though oil-painting was supposed to be unknown to the Greeks, this was very near the point, and if used by Polygnotus at Delphi or Thespia, would have justified the term burnt in, without the use of the cestrum.

It is not settled by Pliny who first discovered encaustic painting; it is not known, he says, whether Aristides may have invented it, or Praxiteles completed it. But there existed on the walls encaustic paintings by the old painters Polygnotus and Nicanor; Lysippus at Ægina put his name to his tabular works with ἐνεκαστικός; Pamphilus the great master of Pausias, did not practice it exclusively; and Pausias was the first in this art. Pausias, Pliny adds, repaired the walls of Thespia; painted by Polygnotus, but being obliged to use the brush, failed, because he handled an instrument which he was not accustomed to. It appears, however, that the walls of Thespia were painted in encaustic by Polygnotus, and with the brush; or Pausias, the greatest encaustic painter, would not have been employed to repair them, nor would he have gone out of the way to use the brush, if Polygnotus had used the cestrum. But Pausias failed, because the brush was not his instrument; therefore encaustic on walls was not worked with the cestrum, as it was on tablets, and the burning in on tablets was not of the same nature as that on walls. That the brush and the cestrum were totally different in practice there is no doubt; but that there was ever a time when the brush was not used in painting is absurd; and Pliny is evidently wrong in saying it was the last method.

It stands to reason that to paint ships was the earliest necessity of navigation. The ark was pitched inside and outside (Gen.vii.14). Pitch melted is in fact like wax or oil; and how was it to be equally spread over so vast a surface except by brushes? In fact, amongst the Egyptian antiquities imported of late years, brushes have been abundant. Thus the Greeks painted on walls, wood, stone, ivory, copper, and canvass; on walls it was mural painting, and on either of the other materials, tabular painting.

There is another question which remains to be settled before touching on the great artists and their works: Did the Greeks paint in fresco? The belief has been that they did. Vasari affirms it; but Letronne certainly establishes the suspicion that they did not, except in a few ornamental parts of architecture, and that stucco was more in practice. In fresco the colours are placed on wet mortar, and become a part of it. In stucco the colours do not become a part, and can be separated. Certain colours are destroyed by contact with lime, and yet those colours which fresco would have ruined, are always found on ancient painted walls.

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1 It is clear that fire was always an important part in an encaustic painting, because Philiscus painted a painter's room (atelier) with a little boy blowing the fire. (Pliny, xxxv.)

2 Vehicle, as distinct from varnish, means the liquid you paint with; varnish, the liquid you put over the work, when done, to preserve it.

3 Cæterum tincturæ idem coloribus, ad cas punicum, quæ immortant, alioque paribus genere, sed clasibus familiaris.

4 That Reynolds introduced wax into British art from this passage, there is no doubt.

5 Not many years ago a dispute raged in France and Germany whether tabular painting was or was not the principal practice of the ancients, and whether it was ever practised to any great extent. Letronne says cloth was not used anciently to paint on, and that Pliny thought the man mad who painted Nero on cloth one hundred and twenty feet high; but the madness instigated does not apply to the truth or cause, but to the absurdity of a portrait one hundred and twenty feet high in cloth. Why should canvas not be used in antiquity, and never before or after till the middle ages? Is this likely? As a curious specimen of the blind violence of party, the friends of one of the combatants, Letronne, wrote to him from Athens, that when the temple of Theseus they discovered by candle-light round the upper part of the wall, actual contours of the works of Polygnotus cast on its plaster with the cestrum, the colours having been picked out by the early Christians; thus proving that Letronne was decidedly right as to his theory of painting on walls. Yet would it be believed, that the friends of his opponent, Rosal-Rochette, wrote him in turn that they did not see a single contour cut in, but that they discovered a sinking in of the plaster as if fitted to receive tabular works which were let into the walls, and thus the theory of Rosal-Rochette, is right, whilst the former gentlemen assert that there are contours on the walls. But the theory of M. Letronne is also right; for the ancients painted on walls as well as on wood; and though Pliny says that the greatest glory was obtained by easel pictures, he affirms that there were also pictures on walls, because in giving one of his reasons for preferring tabular pictures, he says pictures on walls cannot be saved in case of fire (ex incendio rapi non possent), and that he prefers tabular pictures. If pictures had not been painted on walls as well as on wood, how could he have illustrated his preference? Letronne says, that there does not exist a well authenticated evidence of fresco except as mere ornament in ceilings.

Having thus laid before the reader the different modes of Greek practice, without which no subsequent account of their arts or artists would have been intelligible, it is time to say something of the artists themselves, who practised these various modes of imitating nature. Of their different methods, their white grounds descended to them from the eastern nations, and have come to us through the middle ages. Some of their colours we use now, and for some we have substitutes as good. If their principles were as easily attainable as their colours, we should have very little to desire.

In the earliest state of Greek art, Philocles from Egypt, and Cleantes from Corinth, were the inventors of outline, and Ardices from Corinth, and Telephanes from Sacyon, the first who put it in practice, without any colour. To this early period may be applied the accusation of Elian, that the artists were obliged to write underneath their wretched illustrations, "This is a bull, this is a horse, this is a tree." The next were single-colour painters, or monochromatists, as Hygionom and others. Now the sexes began to be distinguished, when Cimon the Cleonese had energy to attempt the imitation of every thing. He it was who invented foreshortening, and drawing things at an angle. He it was who had courage to vary the characters and forms of heads, to make them looking up, looking down, and looking behind; he articulated his joints, shewed the veins and muscles, and gave undulation and folds to his draperies. Panormus, Phidias's brother, painted the shield of Minerva at Elis, and also the battle of Marathon; and so much had the knowledge of colour and art advanced, that portraits of the great leaders, Miltiades, Callimachus, and Cynegryas, on the part of the Greeks, and of Datis and Artaphernes, on that of the barbarians, were introduced, and known by the spectators. It was at this period that the glorious contests for victory in art were begun at Corinth and Delphi; and Panormus was conquered by Timagoras of Chalcis, who commemorated his victory by a poem; "though I doubt not," says Pliny, "there is some chronological error."

The Greek national and monumental painter Polygnotus, flourished at this period or before it. He seems to have been really a great man, and to have possessed a mighty soul. He was born in Thasos, an island in the Ægean Sea; and his works seem all to have been national, votive offerings of cities and his country. He was worthy of the finest period of Greece, and met his noble patrons by a suitable return; he was one of those beings who are born for the time or beyond it, and of whom the time is in want, or for whom it is not enough advanced. He first clothed lovely women in light and floating draperies, adorned their beautiful heads with rich turbans, and thus advanced the art immensely. In expression of face he ventured to make the mouth of beauty smile, and thus softened, by shewing the teeth, the ancient rigidity of his predecessors. He painted gratuitously the Hall at Delphi, and the Portico at Athens, called Hekate, thus offering a contrast to Micon, who was paid. Such conduct was immediately judged worthy to be commemorated by the highest authority in Greece, the Amphictyonic Council, who ordered that Polygnotus should henceforth be maintained at the expense of Greece. Pliny has certainly not said enough of Polygnotus, whose great work at Delphi, described by Pausanias, proves him to have had colour in a high degree, imagination in the highest, and all which, according to Aristotle, forms the most important requisite in the language of painting. His work at Delphi was executed by order of the Cnidians, who had a treasure there, and had also built a stadium. Besides this building, they employed Polygnotus to adorn the great Hall, leaving him the choice of subjects; and as Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, was murdered and had a tomb near the spot, these subjects related to the Trojan war.

It is supposed that because Pausanias describes one thing as above another, composition was little known, and that there were several subjects in one plane. But any one might describe the Cartoons at Hampton Court in the same way, and make a reader, who had never seen them, believe that one figure was above another, and several subjects too. Might not one say, "Above Pythagoras in Raffaelle's School of Athens, is Alcibiades listening to Socrates;" but because they are above one another, that is no proof that they do not retire. Aristotle settles his high rank better than Pliny or Quintilian. "Polygnotus," says he, "made men better than they are, Pauson worse than they are, and Dionysius the same as they are." Polygnotus, therefore, expressed the leading points of the species man, and cleared the accidental from the superfluous. Cinabre did not do this, nor Masaccio, nor Giotto; but Raffaelle and Michel Angelo did; and when this is done, in painting or sculpture, the component parts of art must be equally advanced. Besides, when did Polygnotus flourish? Between the 84th and 90th Olympiad. The Parthenon must have been built; the beauties of Phidias's immortal hand must have been executed, such as we see them in the Theseus, Ilyssus, metopes and frieze of the Elgin marbles. And could any painter be a Goth in composition, when such knowledge of the art is visible in these perfect wonders? Polygnotus put the names to many of his figures; Annibale Caracci put "genus unde Latinum" to Venus and Anchises; Raffaelle gilded his glories; but what argument is that against the genius of either? The power of Polygnotus in painting the daemon Eurynome, with a skin the colour of a blue-bottle fly, shows the truth of his imagination, as well as his power of observation and imitation. Polygnotus was a great genius, worthy of his age; and the "simplex color," applied by Quintilian to his works, only proves the purity of his taste in using it.

Simplicity is not barbarism, any more than gorgeousness is true taste. About the 90th Olympiad the light began to dawn and to give promise of a glorious sunrise. Aglaophon, Cephalodonos, Phrylius, and Evenor, the father of Parhasius, and preceptor of the greatest painters, appeared. These were all celebrated in their day; but one of the most important reformers was Apollodorus the Athenian, who flourished in the 93d Olympiad. He was the first, according to

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1 Elian, lib. x. chap. xii. 2 Catalographa invexit, hoc est, obliquas imagines et varie formarum volutas, respicientesque, suspicentes vel despicientes. Fuseli says catalographa means profiles; but how could he invent profiles when profiles are the characteristics of the earliest art? At first all art is profile; but Cimon was a reformer. To draw downwards he invented oblique views, and varied the views of the head and face, looking behind, looking up, and looking down. Fuseli says catalographa means profile; but profiles are not oblique representations but sections of the figure and face, in the same sense as architectural sections, that is, equal halves. The "obliquae imagines" are angular views, seeing things at an angle; the passage is directly illustrated by the circumstances, that he made his heads looking behind, &c.; and how can a head looking behind be a profile? In some places it may mean so; in Pausanias, σταυρός in radical meaning is downwards, as if the eye looked at the top of the head to the feet, which is foreshortening. 3 Aristotle, Poetics. 4 Hardouin's Plays, lib. xii. c. 10, p. 893. Clari Pictores fuisse dixerunt Polygnotus, atque Aglaophon; quorum simplex color tam sum studium adhibebat. etc. Now the simplex color of Polygnotus and Aglaophon was not one colour, like monochrome, but modesty in the arrangement of the three colours, red, yellow, and black, without blue. How then could the monochrom apply to Polygnotus, whose works at Thebes, Delphi, and the Poikile at Athens, were painted in all the variety these three colours could produce, and not confined to one colour? Pliny, who expressed the species; and he was also the first who did honour to the glory of the pencil. But, after Phidias, Paeonius, Micon, and Polygnotus, one is inclined to question whether he was the first who expressed the species. Phidias, in the opinion of the ancients, was the greatest artist in sculpture. Plato says that Phidias was "skilled in beauty;" but to be skilful in beauty, argues the power of expressing the species, and a perfect knowledge of the construction; for beauty is the last operation, and is based upon the first. How then Apollodorus could have expressed the species better than Phidias or Polygnotus, it would perhaps have puzzled Pliny to explain. However, let us take what the gods have spared, and be grateful. "His, is the adoring priest," says Pliny, "and Ajax defying the lightning at Pergamus; nor was any tablet worth looking at before." That may be. The previous works were monumental, national, or mural, painted with brushes, and bold in execution. Tabular painting may have been a more delicate workmanship; but it is not to be compared with the true epic, any more than the highly-wrought easel pictures of Raffaelle, are to be compared with his frescos.

"The doors," says Pliny, "that Apollodorus had opened, Zeuxis boldly marched through, about the 95th Olympiad; daring every thing the pencil could do, and carrying it to the greatest glory." Some place him in the 98th Olympiad; but this is a mistake. Demophilus or Naseas was his master. Apollodorus became envious of Zeuxis, because the latter improved upon the style he had introduced, and wrote a lampoon. Zeuxis became very rich, grew very haughty, and always appeared at the Olympic games in a purple robe, with his name in gold letters on the border. So high was his opinion of his own pictures, that, thinking no money could equal their value, he gave them away. From this feeling, he presented an Alcmena to the Agrigentines, and a Pan to Archelaus; he also painted a Penelope, in which her moral beauty of character was visible, and an athlete, so much to his own delight, that he wrote underneath, "It is easier to criticise than to execute." His great works were Jupiter and all the gods, and Hercules strangling the serpents. He was censured for large heads and violent markings, but otherwise he was strictly correct. Pliny varies his history with current stories, and we can almost get at the principles of Greek art from them as well as from the account of the art itself. Current stories and proverbs should never be disregarded; for, if not true, they may be taken as inventions characteristic of the parties, or they would never have been believed. The Agrigentines, says Pliny, ordered a picture for a temple of Juno Lucinia, and they allowed the painter to select the finest girls as models. Cicero says it was the Crotoniates who employed him; and as Zeuxis always studied nature, the most beautiful girls were ordered by government to come to him, and having selected five, he then painted his Helen. Zeuxis made his sketches in black and white (pinxit et monochromata ex albo) or of a single colour heightened by white. His contemporaries and rivals were Timanthes, Androclydes, Eupomps, and Parrhasius. The contest of the last with Zeuxis, in which the one deceived the birds by grapes, and Parrhasius Zeuxis himself by his curtain, contains the great principle of Greek art, viz. That the most perfect imitation of reality was not incompatible with the highest style. Antiquaries are disposed to laugh at these stories as beneath the dignity of belief; but artists know well enough, that, so far from being unworthy of credit, all the stories of Pliny and Ælian tend more or less to illustrate a principle. Zeuxis painted a boy and grapes, and the birds flew at the fruit; but his rival observed that, if the boy had been equal to the grapes, the birds would have been frightened. Zeuxis was a great painter and discovered the principles of light and shadow.

After Zeuxis came Parrhasius, "liquidis ille coloribus," who was born at Ephesus, and celebrated for great excellence. Painting. He first gave correct proportions to painting; airs to the head, elegance to the hair, and beauty to the countenance. By the acknowledgment of all artists, the manner in which he lost the contours of his forms, was exquisite. Many people can execute the parts of which the middle of things is composed; but few can finish the boundaries of objects as if the substance was round, and did not end with the contour which defined it; thus giving one an idea as if something was concealed, and exciting the imagination to conceive what the eye did not see. This excellence Xenocrates, and Antigonus, who wrote on painting, conceded to Parrhasius; and not this excellence alone, but also many others. The best idea than can be given to the moderns of the works of Parrhasius, is by referring them to the pictures of Corregio, of which this is the great excellence. Parrhasius appears also to have had the same defect; for he softened the centres of his figures, and gave them too much pulchness for the heroic. There remained, in Pliny's time, sketches of subjects, and of hands and feet, from which artists learned a great deal. He contrived in a picture to paint the people of Athens, and to give a true idea of their variable character; humble yet vain-glorious, timid yet ferocious—and all these contrasts he expressed with great power. But Parrhasius disgraced his genius by yielding to what Johnson calls "the frigid villany of studied lewdness," and sacrificed his noble art to pander to the beastly appetites of the debauched; in fact, Tiberius kept one of his licentious pictures in his bed-room, namely, that of Meleager and Atalanta. But whatever may have been the habits of antiquity, and however indecencies may have been connected with religion, it is clear the greatest men did not approve of such prostitution of talent. Aristotle censures the practice, and warns tutors to guard their pupils from such corruptions.

Timanthes followed, the great painter of the sacrifice of Iphigenia in Aulis. No picture had more reputation for touching art and delicacy than this. After exhausting expression in all the principal agents, the artist covered the face of the father, not daring to trust his hand to attempt imitation, and leaving every spectator to imagine an agony of his own. As Euripides has the same incident, Fuseli thinks the honour of being the first inventor is due to Timanthes. In the death of Germanicus, Poussin hid the face of his wife. Timanthes seems to have been ingenious in his inventions; to give the idea of great size to a sleeping Cyclops, he introduced two satyrs trying to span his thumb. Pliny adds, that there was a head painted by him in the Temple of Peace at Rome, and which was a perfect specimen of art.

Euxenides taught Arsitides, the great master of expression, and Eupomps taught Pamphilus, who was the master of Apelles, a name synonymous with perfection in finish, but not for invention like Zeuxis, monumental commemorations like Polygnotus, composition like Amphion, or expression like Arsitides. No; Apelles was the deity of tabular pictures, the greatest glory of the art in Pliny's mind, but not in the minds of those who see beyond the range of a dining-parlour. Eupomps painted a victor with a palm branch in his hand; and such was his influence in Greece, that he was allowed to divide painting into three schools, viz. the Ionian, Sicyonian, and Athenian. Pamphilus was a Macedonian, who combined literature with painting and made it a principle of tuition, that no man could be great in either who was not a mathematician; for he denied that without geometry art could be perfected. He taught nobody under a talent, which both Apelles and Melanthus paid. So great was the influence of this distinguished man, that first at Sicily, and afterwards in all Greece, he got it established as a principle of education, that all clever boys should be taught on tablets the art of delineating, which is the foundation of painting. He considered this art as the first that should be taught in a liberal education. Slaves were prohibited the exercise of design; which was an absurd law, because in literature it would have prevented Æsop or Terence from developing their genius. What right have any creatures, who are obliged to eat and sleep like the meanest slave, to pass a law to prohibit the exercise of any natural talent, if the Almighty has not disdained to think one worthy of being so gifted? The consequence of this was, that no slave ever distinguished himself in the arts.

About the 107th Olympiad, after Echion and Theramenes, came the god of high finish and grace, Apelles. His style is always the precursor of decay. First came a race in art, amongst whom invention, expression, form, colour, and execution, in a series of pictures intended to illustrate a principle were enough, provided the principle was expressed. These were the monumental geniuses. But when the art becomes national and glorious, the noble and the opulent become ambitious to share the glory with their country; and the art sinks to the humble office of adorning apartments. As is the demand, such will be the supply; and the genius of a country is thus turned from national objects and public commemorations to private sympathies and domestic pleasures. At this period of Greek taste appeared Apelles; refined, accomplished, delicate, devoting his whole soul to single perfections equally adapted for a temple or a palace, and patronised equally by his sovereign and the people. Educated by Pamphilus, he was grounded to the very foundation, and consequently drew, as Burke says to Barry, with "the last degree of perfection." Apelles, Aristides, Nichomachus, and Protagenese, were the most distinguished artists of Alexander's time.

Apelles wrote copiously on his art, and explained its principles. His treatises were extant in Pliny's time, and even in that of Suidas, who speaks of them; and as they were probably illustrated with designs, the loss is much to be deplored. Beauty was the leading feature of his style, as well as that of the greatest painters of the same period. In grace he defied competition; and this explains the secret of his triumph. "I know when to leave off," said he, "which is a great art; Protagene does not. Over-working is injurious." He was a very generous man, and acknowledged when others were superior to him; observing that Amphion was a better composer, and Asclepiadorus more correct in proportion. Amongst all the stories of Pliny, the most delightful is that of Apelles and Protagene, which seems to be an authentic fact; and even if it were not, it would illustrate the principles of Grecian art. Protagene lived at Rhodes and Apelles sailed to see him. Having landed, he called, and found the artist "not at home." Being shewn by an old woman into his painting-room, he found a tablet with its wax ground ready for a picture, and taking up a brush, drew an exquisite line in colour down the tablet. Protagene having returned, was shewn what had happened; and, contemplating the beauty of the form, he said it must be Apelles, as nobody else could draw so perfect a work. He then took the brush and drew another still more refined, saying, if the stranger call again, shew him this, and say that that is what he is seeking. Apelles returned, and blushing to see himself outdone, again took a brush and drew a third, leaving nothing to be exceeded in refinement, (nullum relinquens amplius substitutati locum.) Protagene when he saw this immediately sought his visitor, saying that he could carry the line no further. The tablet with these lines upon it, was considered by all the Greek artists as a miracle of drawing. After the death of Apelles and Protagene, and the conquest of the Romans, it was preserved in the palace of the Caesars on the Palatine hill, where it was seen by Pliny containing nothing but three reflecting lines (tres lineae effluientes) and yet superior to all that was to be found in the finest works. Unfortunately it was burned at the destruction of the palace.

Now comes the question, what were these lines which could thus speak to artists who had never seen each other, the common language of a common code of law for design. "Secuit linearis" does not mean actually to cut the lines in two, but in the technical idiom of English artists, to strike a line. It was not the metal cestrum, but the hair brush, and therefore cut in this sense could not have been meant. To cut with a brush means to design with an air of power. Three lines varied in shape would mean nothing, if nothing was expressed; but if some known contour of the body was taken in repose, three variations of its position without alteration would be as much as could be expected in the contour. Suppose that Apelles drew a line from the clavicle A to the pubis B of a body in profile, shaping all the parts as he went correctly like fig. 1. Next, suppose that Protagene having come in saw the line, and knew that in finely-formed men, the stomach, from great exercise and temperate living, becomes small; the contour would curve in at C, so that that portion of the rectus muscle would retire, as in many of the Greek statues. He would then take the same contour, draw it again on the wax tablet, and make this variation. Again, suppose that Apelles returned and on seeing himself vanquished, took the brush and drew the same contour, allowing the variation of Protagene, but remembering that in powerful men, the pyramidalis D, fig. 3, arising from the pubis and going into the rectus, makes another and the last variation. Then Protagene returning, and seeing that nothing more could be done unless the body was altered in position, he would acknowledge the line to be completed.

In Conduci's Five Dialogues, it is stated that Michelangelo thought it must have been a contour of some part of the body. Now, this singular contest would be felt by all artists as one of the greatest utility. It would be wondered at by connoisseurs, and would illustrate a great principle; namely, that a knowledge of construction was the basis of correct design and the foundation of all beauty.

It was the continual practice of this eminent man to do something every day, whatever happened; and hence the proverb, "No day without a line." If artists were to write

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1 About the year 1100 of our era. 2 Junius (De Pictura Veterum) only finds Amphion mentioned twice in ancient authors, and it is hence supposed that Echion would be a better reading. Painting: this over their painting-room doors, it would not be without advantage. Rubens rose at four, and was in his painting till five in the afternoon, with occasional variations. All the greatest men of antiquity and of modern art, have been the most diligent and the most industrious. And here is the most celebrated of the tabular painters of antiquity afraid to let a day pass without the use of the pencil. Apelles used also to hide himself behind his works to hear the remarks of the public. This deference to the public voice evinced by sculptors, painters, and statesmen, is a beautiful proof of the sense and understanding of the time. Nothing was done in defiance of public taste, but every thing in conformity to its dictates; and though this does and often did lead to great injustice in political matters, in art the maxim is infallible.

Apelles of Cosm excited envy enough, and notwithstanding his graceful manners, his tender heart, and his accomplished mind, when driven by stress of weather into Alexandria, the courtiers of Ptolemy, hating his superiority, and fearing his probable fortune, sent him a pretended invitation to sup with the king. Apelles went; the king felt astonished at the liberty, and sending to demand explanation, discovered the imposition. On inquiring if Apelles knew the person who had given him the invitation, he immediately sketched his face on the wall, and the king recognised the culprit. Courts, kings, and people can only judge of results. The infinite number of repeated acts, the nulla dies sine linea, the failures, the recoveries, the musings, the thinkings, that had taken place with the "cestrum cum lumine," they had not witnessed; therefore, knowing their utter incapacity to do as Apelles did, they concluded that he was a wonder, and he of course became a favourite. As an evidence of that peculiar tact by which such men are sure to please kings and nobility, namely, by the power of seizing the most agreeable expression of any sitter's face, however ugly, and rendering his very defects a cause of elegant concealment; he painted Antigonus, who had lost one eye, in profile, concealed his defective eye, and made him as graceful as if he were Alexander. This was the great secret of his fortunes, as it was that of Titian's, Van-dyke's and Reynolds'; and though not to be compared in point of taste or knowledge of the art, this was also the secret of the popularity of Lawrence, mere portrait painter as he was, and nothing more.

Polygnotus, Paassias, Aristides, Timanthes, Zeuxis, Parrhasius, Pamphilus, Euphranor, and Timotheus did not so completely gratify the vanity of their contemporaries, and were not such personal favourites as Apelles; for there is no gratitude equal to the gratitude of being successfully painted. Kings bow to the unknown power of having their momentary expressions observed, seized, transferred, and fixed for ages, and whilst colours and canvas last, carried on, for the admiration of a distant age, when the existing one is past and forgotten. What can equal the gratitude of a woman to have her beauty preserved, whilst she is in her bloom, for the admiration of her children when age has shrivelled her form, or misfortune destroyed her happiness? The world may be elevated, excited, roused, by the commemoration of the great deeds of ancestors or heroes; but no sympathy is ever excited, and no personal vanities are ever so happily gratified by any class of painters, as by the great portrait-painter. The degree of imagination required is not of that irresistible kind which forces him to leave the model before him, using it only to realise his own burning conceptions, so that all likeness of the individual is lost; he requires no more than to retain in his mind the best expression of the individual before him to identify it upon canvas. But it must be exactly like, or it is nothing. After the likeness is completed, the sitter will have no objection to the highest degree of embellishment. There the great portrait-painter shows the degree of fancy wanted, and he that embellishes most, without losing resemblance, will be the most welcomed, as Apelles was, by the world.

To put Apelles in comparison with Polygnotus is out of the question. Highly-wrought individual figures, little more than portraits of beautiful nature, cannot rank so high in the judgment, though they may in the delicate sympathies of the world. But that single terrific conception of the demon Eurynome, for which no prototype in nature could be found, that momentary blush which crimsoned his Cassandra, Aristotle's praise that he made men better than they were, and Plato's ranking him with Phidias, settles the question of his greatness; and as a portrait expression must be seen before it can be done, and must be like or it is nothing, there is an end of the highest quality of human genius, invention. Indeed, whatever the vanity of the world may be inclined to feel, the greatest portrait painter is but an inferior artist.

The age of Polygnotus and Phidias was the meridian age of Greek art; and that of Apelles was the setting glory. From the latter period it sunk gradually as if nature had been exhausted by the previous effort. Such ages have never since been seen; such perfection had never been realized before, and never will be again; for in order to become such sculptors and painters, men must also become idolaters. But to return and conclude the notice of Apelles, this court-favourite of antiquity. Notwithstanding the education of Alexander by Aristotle, notwithstanding that ἐπιστολή was a portion of his education, Alexander was little more than a glorious barbarian in art. He talked so absurdly in the painting-room of Apelles, that the artist was obliged to request that his majesty would be cautious, lest the boys should laugh as they ground their colours. Apelles may be considered as the Titan of Greek art, with the addition of all that vast knowledge of form, which every painter and every school was obliged to master. But the disposition to perfect single figures, and the acknowledgment that others exceeded him in composition, clearly point out the extent of his fertility. Though Pliny describes many beautiful pictures, his greatest are single figures. His Venus Anadyomene was the most celebrated of all his works; but being painted upon wood, it was destroyed by insects in the time of Augustus. He began another, and having completed it as far as the bosom, died; but although the contours were completed for finishing, nobody would venture to touch it, such was the extreme veneration entertained for him. By this description we see the nature of the Greek process; first, the ground, then the drawing in, next the impasto preparation, and then the completion part by part. He had got the picture finished as far as the bosom; and therefore to finish highly by degrees was his system. He was not deficient in expression, for he painted persons dying with great power. His imitation must have been perfect, for his painted horses are said to have made real horses neigh; and his colour must have been exquisite, for he glaced like the Venetian school. Pliny mentions him as one of those who painted with four colours; but this is a mistake; for it was in the age of Polygnotus that blue was not used. From a passage in Cicero, it appears that that age was famous for "form and contour;" whereas, according to the same writer, all things were perfect in the works of Protogenes, Nichomachus, Echion, and Apelles.

Pliny is therefore right in saying that pictures which constituted the opulence of towns, were painted with four colours only; but he is not as clear as usual in regard to the period to which this observation applies. Quintilian, calling the colour of Polygnotus "simplex color," seems to indicate the absence of blue; whilst red, yellow, black, and white did not produce such gorgeous splendour as in the age of Apelles. Thus Quintilian, as well as Cicero, collaterally proves Pliny to be in part right. It is extraordinary that Reynolds did not Painting allude to the absence of blue in the enumeration of Pliny.

Great depth, fine tone, simplicity, and modesty, can be obtained without blue; but never that tremendous magnificence produced by the contrast of the deep and awful azures of Titian. Though Polygnotus did not use blue, his black was made from vine-stalks and wine-lees, which render black more blue than the ivory black of Apelles, which was discovered by him, and is used to this hour in Europe. There were several of the same name, but Apelles Cous distinguishes the great Apelles, as Aristides Thebanus does the great Aristides.

After this long account of the courtly, accomplished, and highly-wrought Apelles, there may be something interesting to allude to Aristides the "great master of expression," as Fuseli calls him. He was the first who painted deep human emotions, fierce passions, and distressing perturbations; but he was hard in colour, says Pliny, and not so harmonious as Apelles, probably like Raphaelle, the great Italian master of expression, in comparison with Titian. His finest picture was that of a mother dying from a wound which she had received in the sacking of her native city. Her infant was trying to reach the nipple with its boneless gums, whilst the mother, faint and exhausted, appeared struggling to save it from sucking, lest blood might mingle with its nourishment; a tender and affecting thought. Alexander was so touched by this picture at Thebes, when the city was taken, that he sent it to Pella.

Protogenes was another of the great men of this time. It is indeed extraordinary to reflect how genius in art and literature seems always to come in clusters in every country. He was born at a small town on the coast of Asia Minor, subject to the Rhodians; and he got his living till he was fifty years old, in great poverty, painting beautiful ornaments for the prows of ships. He was not a man of fertile invention, and spent years over single works, which induced Apelles to say that he never knew when he had finished. His celebrated work was Talissus, which occupied him seven years. Titian took eight to paint the Pietro Martyre, and seven to finish the Last Supper for Charles V.; yet in Titian's works there is no appearance of over diligence. Pliny says he painted his pictures four times over, so that if one picture was destroyed another might be ready. Nothing shews so completely the exact degree of knowledge which Pliny had of art as this absurd conclusion from an admirable practice. Protogenes proceeded with his works as Titian did, by stages; and each stage was a separate impasto of colour, which helped the next till completed. Of this artist the story is told of his flinging his sponge at a dog's mouth in a rage, because he had vainly tried to hit breath coming out of it, and by that accident succeeding; a circumstance which shews that it was tempera painting, for a sponge would not have done for wax. Such a habit of daily application had Protogenes, that when Demetrius besieged Rhodes, he would not leave his painting-room, but proceeded daily in his studies amidst the noise of battering rams and catapultae. The king came often to visit him; and that part of the town where he worked was spared, and the picture thus finished was said to have been done at the point of the sword. Protogenes painted the mother of Aristotle; and the philosopher urged him to execute the battles of Alexander; but he was not a man of rapid conception or fertile invention for a series, and could not be moved.

It is curious to reflect, that all the great painters painted portraits; which proves that they thought it essential to that truth which was the foundation of their ideal beauty. Indeed, every great painter should paint a portrait a month; and if, like the Greeks, he has always nature for his works, he never can degenerate into manner.

Of the other painters, Asclepiodorus was celebrated for proportion; Nicomachus for rapidity of hand, and Theon for wild conceptions, "quas Graeci vocant Ἀναρτοίς." Pliny places Theon amongst the herd, whilst Quintilian and Ælian place him amongst the illustrious, where he ought to be. He painted a single warrior dashing forward on the spectators; and collecting the public, he kept the picture behind a curtain, when in the midst of a blast of trumpets, the curtain was dropped, and the wonderful figure terrified the people. He also painted Orestes, distracted and insane, and proved himself a great and wild inventor. The three remaining great men of the fine period, were Paussias, Euphranor, and Timonachus. No passage has excited so much discussion as the well known one in Pliny, where he says, "nulla gloria artificium est, nisi qui tabulas pinxerit," as if he meant that the only glory in art consisted in tabular pictures, "πανοικοί," on wood, and that there was but little in monumental and mural efforts. Pliny, however, does not here contrast the tabular pictures of Apelles with the mural paintings of Polygnotus, but with the works of one Ludius, a Roman, a mere ornamental landscape-painter upon walls, like our Bond Street paper painters. This was much the fashion in Pliny's time, which he laments; and many examples of the same species may now be seen in Pompeii.

Having thus described the fancies and caprices by which the art had been degraded, Pliny turns to the highly beautiful tabular works of Apelles, and observes naturally enough; "This is not the thing; the glory of art and of artists consists in the Venus of Apelles, the mother of Aristides, the Ialysus of Protogenes, and not in this mechanical whim, which is not the glory and the end of painting." This, perhaps, is the explanation which he would give if he were alive and able to answer us. Is it not unjust then to take up such ground as M. Raoul-Rochette has done in France, and Payne Knight in England, and infer that there was no real glory in any other mode of painting? The ancients estimated mural painting at Delphi, as the Italians do in the Vatican. But they did not undervalue tabular painting, small pictures, encaustic, landscapes, or humour; they painted in every style and they excelled in all.

Pliny now proceeds to the encaustic painters, of whom Paussias and Euphranor appear to have been the greatest. Paussias was a master of foreshortening, as we learn from Pliny's description of a bull which he painted in front and projecting beyond the tablet. After Paussias came the Isthmian Euphranor, who wrote on symmetry and colour, painted great and small works, and delineated statues and animals. He said of his Theseeus, that "it was real flesh, whilst that of Parrhasius had fed on roses." Then came Nicias who painted women beautifully, understood light and shadow, and was another pillar of art. Metrodorus was both a philosopher and a painter; and when the victorious Paulus desired Perseus to send him a philosopher to educate his children, and a painter to arrange his triumph, Metrodorus was despatched as a person capable of executing both tasks. Timonachus is the last of this splendid list whom it is necessary to mention. He died, like Apelles, leaving an important work unfinished.

Such were the most illustrious men of the three finest periods of Greek painting. The first period of Greek art decline of was that before Pericles; the second, or that of Pericles Greek art itself, was the finest, the highest, and the purest in painting, sculpture, and architecture; the third was the epoch

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1 See Pliny, lib. xxxv. The sea in the Venus Anadyomene is quoted as a proof that blue must have been used. But where is there any blue in Vandervelde? We do not think that a picture exists with blue in his sea.

2 Raffaelle imitated this in his plague, where a fine youth is putting away an infant from a dying mother's bosom; but the utter want of taste in making the boy hold his nose for fear of infection, renders the sentiment not pathetic but at once disgusting and ridiculous.

3 See, in Ridolph, Titian's letter to the emperor. of Alexander, the most refined, but prophetic of the corruption which followed; then came the subjugation of the Romans, when the noblest works of the Greeks were seized as tribute, or matters of right, and Italy was inundated by the productions of Greek talent.

This influx of foreign productions entirely suffocated native Italian genius. Greek productions became matters of property; and dealers sprung up who manufactured originals to supply the market of the rich collector. Galleries were formed to produce genius, which had sprung up from national demand without a single gallery or a single collection of any works, except the productions of their native soil. The most celebrated works were copied and re-copied by the Greeks in all parts of the Mediterranean. Horace alludes to this; and there can be no doubt whatever that the effect was to render all native attempts of the Romans and Etruscans no longer available. For not one great artist is named during the whole period of progressive decay from the Caesars to Constantine; and the Romans or Latins never produced any talent worth consideration till the revival of art in Italy, after so many ages, in the fifteenth century. Then, the same principle operating, and the church and state demanding art as an assistant, outpouring an abundance of native talent, because there was a vent, as there had been before, in Greece, Egypt, and Chaldea; and the genius of Rome, Florence, Pisa, and Venice, vindicated their long suppressed claims to originality. Amongst the illustrious Romans, Julius Caesar seems to have been a magnificent collector; but whether, like Napoleon, he was also a magnificent patron of the talent of his time is not known. He bought Greek pictures, and presented them to Roman temples; but one work of native art, produced by native patronage, is more honour both to patron and to artist than a gallery of foreign pictures be they ever so divine.

Upon the whole, before tracing art from its decay to its revival, we cannot but acknowledge as evident, that a period of dearth in genius has generally succeeded in the world to one of prolific production. In painting and sculpture, secondary causes, such as the nature of the government, or the circumstances of the two arts being required for political purposes, may considerably facilitate the development of genius. But it is not so with the poet. He can give vent to his immortal thoughts in poverty or wretchedness, independently of the taste of the times, or the patronage of the state. Milton, in obscurity and blindness, wrote Paradise Lost; and Savage, in poverty and wretchedness, composed his Bastard in the streets, begging bits of paper as he walked, when he had more thoughts than his mind could contain, and thus, as effectually preserved them as if he had been bred in a palace, or had sheets of the finest hot-pressed to receive his lucubrations.

After the conquest of Greece, and the removal of art and artists to Rome, the genius of painting seems to have left man school the world. The Roman school of painting and sculpture is scarcely worth a single thought. In the last years of the republic the art sunk rapidly. Augustus tried to revive it; but though the pupils and descendants of the illustrious dead attempted to second his views, and though the writings of Apelles, Euphranor, and Pamphilus, were all in existence, and their principles known and acted upon, genius was nowhere to be found. That divine spark with its attendant whisper, unseen but not unheard, which ever attends the gifted who are born for great objects, whether it supported Columbus amidst the storms of the Atlantic, Alexander as he plunged into Asia, Napoleon as he rushed into Italy, Wellington at Waterloo, Michel Angelo when he painted the Sistine Chapel, Raffaello when he entered the Vatican, or Phidias when he adorned the Parthenon; that supernatural, incomprehensible something, which inspires hope, "when the whole world seems adverse to desert," was gone from the earth like the glory which had blazed in the temple. All that the savage, splendid, imperial Romans could do, all the honours and riches they had to confer, were bestowed in vain. Architecture suited their savage vastness of mind better than painting; therefore architecture flourished, and Augustus was said "to have found Rome thatched, and left it marbled."

Claudius built a superb aqueduct, and Nero burnt and rebuilt a golden palace; but he could not replace the lines of Apelles and Protogenes, or the miracles of Timanthes and Aristides, which perished in the conflagration. Galba, Otho, and Vitellius were hurried through life and empire too rapidly for art; whilst Vespasian and Titus bewildered the Romans with their Cyclopean masses. Hadrian, himself an artist, endeavoured to recover art by indiscriminately encouraging Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans; "but such a medley of principle as their works displayed," says Agincourt, "hastened the decay of art, and rendered the emperor hopeless of reviving it." The art thus went floundering until Diocletian, with all the gorgeous splendour of an eastern monarch, mingled together Roman, Greek, and oriental art, and corrupting all tasted led to its extinction. It was between the reign of Commodus and that of Constantine, that those causes were generated which undermined the empire, and brought art, science, and literature into the chasm. Of forty emperors who, from the second to the fourth century had struggled for the diadem and obtained it, twenty had been murdered by the army and the people. "Ainsi," says Montesquieu, "comme la grandeur de la république, fut fatale au gouvernement républicain, la grandeur de l'empire le fut à la vie des empereurs." Constantine's removal of the seat of empire did not so much begin the destruction of art as complete it; for previous causes, domestic and political, had been preparing the ruin for centuries before.

Agincourt thinks that as far as art is concerned, too much age has been attributed to this removal of the empire. But yet Constantine the first epoch of what may be called modern art in opposition to ancient, must date from the introduction of Christianity as a state religion, when the whole moral feelings of Greek and Romans took another turn in painting and sculpture. Although Constantine only grafted Christianity on Paganism, and founded more catholicism than Christianity, by meeting and uniting the prejudices of both Pagans and Christians; yet surely if genius could ever be created by patronage, the age of Constantine, and those of Charlemagne, and Louis XIV., ought to have rivalled those of Pericles and Julius. Such was the rage for splendour in this reign, that the quarries of Phrygian marble and of the isle of Proconnesus, were almost destroyed to furnish palaces for the emperor, his sons, and his ministers. Temples, palaces, forums, triumphal arches, colossal statues, an hippodrome, and eight public baths were built and adorned at once; and in addition, splendid commissions were given to the painters for pictures of Christ, the Virgin, the prophets, and the apostles. Rome, Naples, Capua, Antioch, Tyre, Jerusalem, and even Bethlehem, felt the effects of this mag-

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1 See Johnson's Lives of the Poets, art. Savage. 2 In this beautiful passage, the immortal author has made the pesent syllable of Serapis short, whereas it is in reality long, Serapis; an error which could scarcely have been expected in one who was a great scholar as well as a great poet. 3 Tacitus does not seem altogether to believe it. 4 Agincourt, Histoire de l'Art, tom. I. 5 Déradeuse des Romains. Painting.

nificent employment; but what were the results to painting? Nothing, absolutely nothing, to guide anybody except the antiquary; and if any evidence were wanting to show that the genius and the patron must exist together, or the result will be nothing, the end of Constantine's splendour would abundantly supply it.

The moral character of ancient Greece was gone; the instinct of public glory was passed; their olive crowns, the adequate reward of talent on a great principle, were sneered at; and "Lucian," (as the author of the *Discours Historique* observes) "had already ridiculed this tribunal," which had listened with rapture to Herodotus, and crowned Aëtion for a fine picture, and which in its days of Marathonian glory, had done more than ever was done before or since in rousing human effort, mental and bodily, to its highest pitch of excellence. Luxury, indecency, vice, fanaticism, cant, sophistry, intrigue, and imposture, had supplanted the pure aspirations of patriotism and glory. "The great and the opulent," says Pliny and Vitruvius, "were fonder of gold and glitter than purity of design or pathos of expression, or perfection of form;" overwhelmed with colours from all the countries of the earth, with double the advantages of Polygnotus, and Zeuxis, and Aristides," who painted with four only, "nulla nobilis pictura est." Of course, this is always the end, when the moral and national importance of painting is undervalued. When native art is despised, and spurious foreign productions are preferred; when connoisseurs of what is past abound, and connoisseurs of what is passing exist not; when painting is considered as a bauble or bit of furniture, and painters share dignity with upholsterers and gilders, what wonder if "nulla pictura" is the cry?

Gold and vermillion being thus introduced upon the walls of palaces and preferred to beautiful art, in came arabesques. Claudius had before introduced Indian patterns and mosaic pictures, which had hitherto been kept for pavements, till Commodus, for the sake of a new sensation, had a portrait in his palace of Piscennius Niger, painted in mosaic, which may be considered as the first picture of this description. When painting was in this staggering condition, Justinian gave it a final blow by ordering encaustic and distemper designs, as vulgar, to be banished from ceilings and walls, and mosaic, marble, and gold, to be preferred. Though mosaic was perhaps one of the means of preserving art and of introducing it into Italy, yet it should only be used in pavements, or to preserve the works of great masters. The anti-pagan zeal of the early Christians is well-known. They used to put ropes round the necks of Apollos and Venuses to try them publicly, like criminals, find them guilty, and pound them to dust. But human nature is always the same. A thousand years afterwards a similar scene was acted in Scotland by John Knox and the reformers, nor had England escaped the fury of iconoclasm. Eusebius informs us that in the empire whole towns rose and destroyed the temples in which they had just worshipped. The air echoed with the noise of hammers, the crashing of pediments, the breaking of pillars, and the shouts of a madened and frenzied populace. The finest works of Phidias, Scopas, Polyclitus, and Praxiteles, and all that was left of Polygnotus, Apelles, Zeuxis, or Euphranor, were demolished or burned, like wretches who had infected religion, and their ashes were danced on with fanatical exultation. So great indeed had been the destruction, that when Arcadius and Honorius issued a fresh edict to go on destroying, they added, as well they might, "Si qua etiam nunc in templis famisque consistent," "If any pictures or statues are still left." During this frenzy was introduced into art, *painting without nature*, and after producing a race of monsters down to Golzius and Spranger, there began the cant of "nature putting an artist out." What Zeuxis did not dare to do, what Apelles never thought of, what Phidias never permitted to be mentioned in his school, a parcel of painters brought into practice by the very mysticism of their impossible theories. Man was corrupt, being born in sin and vicious in practice; to take him as a model therefore when painting holy subjects, was to act under the influence of Satan. Man was banished, and so was woman, and nature in every thing; till at last all painters painted in one way, and in came manner into the great art of nature, and like a "leperous distillation" stained her garment and poisoned her beauty. Yet the traditional maxims of the ancient fathers, on beauty and art, give one a very good idea of what were the maxims of the finer Pagan periods. "Art is nothing but an imitation of nature," says St. Athanasius, (*Orat. contr. Gent.* c. xviii. p. 18.) "Ancient artists sought to surpass each other by faithful imitation," (Arnob. *Advers. Gent.* lib. vi. fol. 68.) "Nature is the archetype, art the image; every image has a model, and painters imitate what they see," (Theodore.) "Imitation is the merit of painting; be not seduced by an illusion," (St. Clement.) "When begging the people not to be seduced by pictures and statues as if they were gods, tell them that pictures and statues are imitations of nature, and therefore cannot be gods." These maxims of the fourth century had clearly descended from a nobler era. Besides the treatises of Apelles, Euphranor, and Pamphilus, were all in existence, and were read by the educated and accomplished; and we see how skilfully the fathers of the church tried to save fine works from destruction, by assuring the people that they were mere *imitations of life*, for such was the principle of artists. Are not these quotations then collateral evidences of the practice of the Greeks, if we had known nothing of the girls of Crotona sitting to Zeuxis?

But Christianity was at first the ruin of art, by making impurity of heart every thing, and physical ugliness, or deformity, nothing; by teaching that as all beautiful works of art on were remnants of idolatry, they ought to be destroyed; and the arts, by inculcating that mankind being corrupt and born in sin, no Christian painter ought to look at the naked figure whilst he was painting it. Add to these prejudices, the predilection of eastern nations for gold and silver, the preference of eastern dresses to the simplicity of Greek clothing, the controversies which took place as to whether our Saviour was ugly or handsome, and the vehemence with which Pagans and Christians both entered into them; and no one can wonder at the state into which painting declined.

The division of opinion about the person of Christ, and the dread of the early Fathers to expose the cross to Pagans, who, familiar with golden-locked Apollos and perfumed Venuses, could not comprehend that suffering and majestic pains were founded upon a higher philosophy, so embarrassed the painters, that to avoid collision they painted Christ as an allegory thus lingering with their Greek feelings about the form of beauty and of grace. It must be interesting to all readers thus to trace the progress of feeling relating to the head of Christ. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, beauty and youth still predominated; and he is painted youthful and handsome, crushing the lion under his feet, or as a young shepherd with his flock. With allegory the beauty of our Saviour ended, whilst the Fathers of the church, like the priests of Egypt, interfered, and issued an edict ordering him to be represented in agony on the cross. But here the order was evaded. The Greeks still struggled for the beautiful, and as if it were the never-dying principle of their souls, painted our blessed Saviour dying upon the cross, but smiling with triumphant glory as if re-

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1 Spartan, *In Vita Pisc. Nip.* cap. 6. 2 St. Augustin declares that in his time no faces of Christ or the Virgin were known, and that no pictures were painted of them before the council of Ephesus; yet there are seven reported originals, four of which are by St. Luke's own hand, now in Rome. Painting.

Joicing in his sacrifice. In whatever the Greeks were compelled to do, beauty seemed still to be the basis of their art. By degrees, however, the poor descendants of Apelles and Polygnotus finding no employment except on the conditions prescribed, the person of Christ became gradually degraded in art; and at the separation of the Latin church, to paint him ugly, bloody and agonized, was the settled principle of representation, and has more or less influenced his representation ever since. There seems to be some doubt as to the extent of the devastation committed by the Goths. Alaric stayed but three days in Rome, and Attila had himself painted in one of his Milan palaces seated on a throne, and receiving the homage of a Roman emperor. Theodoric seems to have had a very good feeling for art. He laments, in a letter to Symmachus, the ruins of works of genius, begs their preservation, and concludes with observing that Rome has still a population of statues with herds of bronze horses. The expulsion of the Goths and the invasion of the Lombards, again afflicted the art; but it had found its way into France, and the churches of Paris, Tours, Bordeaux and Clermont, were ornamented by native painters.

Though the popes had begun to adorn the churches, and art in the earliest times had been kept alive with considerable talent in the catacombs in Rome; though Europe had been astonished by the splendour of the ecclesiastical patronage of painters; yet the next great epoch after Constantine originates in the efforts of the illustrious Charlemagne. He formed the plan of renovating art, science and literature; and he would have accomplished his object, if the genius of the age had been worthy of the emperor. The ancient practice of painting churches, kept alive by previous popes, he confirmed by a law; and agents every year visited the provinces to see that the law was observed. If a royal church was to be painted, the bishops and abbots were responsible. If, in the midst of a campaign, an order was issued for a church, one to paint the walls was included; and no church was considered as finished till that was done, the object of the emperor being to obliterate the remembrance of the splendid altars of the Pagans, by still more magnificent Christian ornaments. "Repair your church," says the archbishop of Trieres; "you know the decision of the emperor."

Two monkish painters of the time are celebrated; and France and Britain began even at this early period, to take an interest in the arts. Biscop, abbot of Weremouth, had brought pictures from Italy. Charlemagne had invited king Offra to protect painting, with but little effect; yet though the walls of English churches were whitewashed, the English began to adorn the ceilings and the windows, and hung tapestry upon the walls.

In Spain, the Arabians had introduced their art, such as it could be, under the prohibition of Mohammed; and miniatures or manuscripts were so eagerly bought all over Europe, that the artists in France, Germany and Italy, devoted themselves to this production; though here again it was acknowledged by all, that they were beaten by the Greeks. In spite of all this, the art continued to decay; and at the second Council of Nice the members gave evidence of the state to which monks and bishops had reduced it. "How can painters be blamed?" say they; "the painter invents nothing. Invention and composition belong to the Fathers; the art alone is the painters." Inadvertently, too, the emperor injured the art by altering the dress of his cavalry and foot. The women as usual followed the example, and having relinquished the pure taste of the Greeks, dress has in consequence become an annual novelty and change. The Paladin and his horse were covered with iron and mail; angles and straight lines predominated; the naked form was more than ever concealed, and the artist deprived of his materials.

Though the art suffered at the death of Charlemagne, yet Palatino was kept alive by monks and by bishops. At Rome, at Palermo, and at Milan, religious painters preserved it from decay; they sprung up all over Europe, and even St. Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, is spoken of as a skilful painter and maker of instruments.

It is curious, after all that has been written about oil painting, and the discovery made by John Van Eyk, to find a writer of this period called Eraclius, in a treatise on painting, speaking of oil painting: "De omnibus coloribus cum oleo distemperatis." Another monk wrote a treatise, in which he says, "he will tell the world how the Greeks mixed their colours." Now, as according to Suidas, the writings of Apelles and Euphranor, were in existence in the tenth century, and these people lived about that time, there is reason to believe that they were aware of oil painting having been practised in ancient Greece, and that subsequent discoveries were but different revivals.

Whilst the art feebly struggled on in the west, the court of Constantine Porphyrogenitus was the rendezvous of artists, and in 997 St. Mark was built at Venice by Greeks. In contrasting Greek with Roman art at this time, the Greek is still superior. The Greek composition did not want dignity, whilst in the Roman, all sound principle seemed dead. The most ignorant Greeks shewed taste in their draperies, and their heads have character, and in the arrangement of hair, they remind one of the Panathenaic procession; whilst the Romans, with their large heads and long limbs, evince a gross ignorance of beauty.

In the tenth century, tapestry for a time superseded painting; though in Germany, France, Italy and England, many painters flourished. In England, historical commemorations were in fashion, and the Duchess of Northumberland adorned Ely Cathedral with a series of pictures illustrating the deeds of her distinguished lord. When William the Conqueror came, he introduced a new style of architecture; but both at York and Canterbury, paintings then adorned the walls. In 1013, a head of Christ was executed in mosaic, and is still considered as the wonder of the middle ages.

After so many vicissitudes of fortune, painting now began to show symptoms of revival. Frescos had been executed in of reviv. Rome in 498, and in 795; and there was a head of Christ painted in St. John Lateran, and still to be there seen, which gave evidence of great feeling. But the grand impulse was given in the year 1066, when St. Didier sent for Greek artists to adorn Monte Casino at Subiaco. The example was followed. Pisa, Venice, Amalfi, Genoa, and Milan, all municipal corporations rivalled each other; and when Pisa sent to Greece to collect as many splendid remains of art as could be obtained to adorn the dome of the city, Buschetto, a celebrated Greek architect, was engaged to superintend their embarkation, to accompany them during the voyage, and to land them safely for the purchasers. Buschetto was received with so much enthusiasm, that he founded a school of sculpture, which existed for two hundred years; and ultimately out of this very Greek school, came the great artist Nicola Pisano, the head of the Italico-Pisan school. From this moment art, after having sunk to the lowest barbarism, went on improving till the taking of Constantinople by Mahomet II., an event which scattered the Greeks collected at that court all over Europe. Hundreds went to Italy as painters, sculptors, chasers, and mosaic painters; and by their struggles for existence, inoculated Italian artists with some remnant of their taste for beauty, decayed as it was. Cimabue was their pupil, and Giotto was his. The Catholic church wanted artists, and genius again began to show itself. One man of genius appeared after another, till Michel Angelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, and Corregio, were the glorious results. And though it cannot be denied that the high aspirations of Christianity, by placing everything human on its proper level on earth, in comparison with eternal happiness, had justly prostrated the splendid beauty of Pagan art, by exposing its idolatrous tendencies; though the sufferings, and the agonies of its founder and its martyrs had revived its pathos with higher objects than mere beauty of form or face, and saved painting and sculpture from extinction; yet it must be acknowledged, that the beauty of Christian art has never rivalled the indisputable perfection of the Pagans. To their enthusiastic overestimate of the religious value of physical, as emblematic of moral beauty, is their perfection attributable; but if it can only be revived by some similar delusion, the result will in our opinion more than alone for anything that seems doubtful or questionable in the principle.

The most eminent pictures of the middle ages, setting aside the cemeteries or catacombs, which cannot legitimately be referred to the middle ages, but to the earliest ages of Christianity, are to be found in Rome. The greatest works of the middle ages are the series of Popes, begun in the fifth century, and continued down to the present time. The next, which was executed in the year 1011, is the painting of the church of St. Urbano, where some of the acts of the Apostles are represented on the walls. Though the mosaics of St. Mark's, executed by Greeks, were earlier, and kept art alive, yet, according to Lanzi, nothing in reality appeared which gave symptoms of the approach of any thing extraordinary, till about the thirteenth century; and this revolution of style was entirely owing to sculpture.

The glory of this art belongs partly to the Tuscan, the legitimate descendants of the ancient Etruscans, but most especially to the Pisans, who first had the courage to burst the yoke which Greek art in its fallen state had imposed upon them, and to go at once to the antique; and this glory belongs to Nicolo Pisano, a pupil of the school originally founded by the Greek Buschetto. There were in Pisa several ancient sarcophagi, but especially one, containing the body of Beatrice, mother of the Countess Matilda, with a bas-relief in good style, which served as the model of Nicolo; on this he formed his style, in which there is something of the antique, especially in his heads and draperies. Many artists who had not done so before, immediately devoted themselves to sculpture; and Nicolo Pisano must be considered as the first Italian, who opened the eyes of his contemporaries to the true principle of using the antique, that is, keeping nature in view at the moment of practice. In 1231 he cut an urn in Bologna, whence he was called "Nicolo of the urn;" and he produced two stories of the last judgment at Orvieto, and another work at Pisa, which convinced the world that he was born to found an epoch. He executed other great works, and was really the head of the illustrious school which produced Orcagna, Donatello, and the famous Lorenzo Ghiberti, who made the beautiful bronze doors of which Michel Angelo said, that they were worthy to be the gates of paradise.

Many other eminent men came from his school. All Italy was more or less affected by Pisano's genius; and though a sculptor, his effect on design was so great, that he must be considered as having had a material influence on painting. Painting remained behind sculpture, and even mosaic; and Vasari exaggerates the effect of Cimabue's appearance in the year 1240; for Lanzi proves that there were Pisan painters of talent before that period, and that the early art does not in the first instance owe so much to the Florentines as Vasari has asserted. At Assisi there is a crucifixion by Guinta Pisano, who, according to an inscription, learned his art from the Greeks in 1210. This was before Cimabue; but Lanzi says that the work is not inferior to Cimabue, and in drapery, colour, light, and shadow, composition and expression, very like the contemporary Greeks. Guinta disappeared and died, nobody knows where or how. Guido di Siena was another name of this early period. In the Louvre there were some exquisite heads of angels with gilt glories, full of beauty and expression, executed by this artist. Then followed Margaritone, who painted on canvas, covered with size and plaster for a ground; which the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, had done long before his time.

During the time that the neighbouring cities had founded a new style, Florence had no painters; but when the authorities called in some Greeks in 1250, it is asserted that there was a painter called Bartolomeo. Vasari wishes of course to infer that Cimabue was the first Italian painter who gave the impulse; but Lanzi proves the contrary. Although there is no city we owe so much to as Florence, yet the Florentines ought not to be allowed to deprive their old enemies of the honour of having produced earlier painters, besides Pisano.

Cimabue, who was both architect and painter, was honourably descended. That he might have been the scholar of Guinta is probable, because the Italians knew more than the Greeks of that time; but there is every reason to believe that he learnt of those Greeks who had been called to Florence, and whom, according to Vasari, he stood whole days, when a boy, watching as they painted in Santa Maria Novella. From this moment indeed may be dated the excitement which impelled him to become a painter. At Assisi his genius seems to have been put forth with most power. Lanzi concludes the notice of him by saying, that Cimabue was the Michel Angelo, and Giotto the Raffaelle of his age. In the Louvre there were one or two large examples of Virgins, staring and Gothic, and which the French, still more Gothic, were absolutely repainting. Vigorous in his colour, and colossal but ill-proportioned in his figures, Cimabue first gave indications of attempting something new in painting; indeed, his watching the Greeks all day is so like an infatuated youth, that it bears truth on the face of it. Florence was often in commotion when his works appeared; and although he was not actually the oldest painter, he was the first of that series which ended in Raffaelle. His style was meagre, his drapery sharp, and his colour a species of illumination; but though he had no light and shadow or perspective, he was a great man for his time; and in some of his heads there are both character and expression.

Men of genius assist to call forth men of genius. In the Giotto neighbourhood of Florence, Cimabue accidentally found a youth tending sheep, and trying to draw one upon a slate. After some conversation with the boy, finding the youth ambitious to become an artist, he consulted his father, took him immediately under his own tuition, and advanced him rapidly. Cimabue was amply repaid for his generous conduct, as the innocent youth was Giotto, afterwards one of the great men of the time. No man can judge of Giotto's genius in England, because fragments of single heads or bits of altar pieces, are no fair criteria of a genius like his. His series of pictures in the Campo Santo are admirable, if allowance be made for the taste and simplicity of the age; but there are many actions and positions of Giotto, as fine as can be conceived, and which other artists by aggrandising in form, have rendered models of imitation. He was the friend of Dante, and painted the portrait of the great poet. He seems to have been a facetious and amiable man as well as a genius, and was indisputably the greatest painter till Massaccio. He

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The writer of this article, who saw a Frenchman solidly repainting a large picture of Cimabue in the private rooms of the Louvre, where he was admitted by Denon, asked the Frenchman who it was by: "Monsieur," said he, "je ne suis pas peintre, je suis restaurateur." Painting went about Italy scattering seeds everywhere, and when the Papal See was moved to Avignon, he went with the court. Giotto was the greatest of the Florentine school. He was the father of painting, as Boccaccio was the father of literature. He was sought for at Ravenna, and at all the great towns of Italy, and was patronised by all the first families. He was an object of study and admiration, until the time of Raffaello, and that of the Caracci, and is so even at the present time. There are in Giotto instances of pathos and expression, which would do honour to any period. Thus the greater part of the merit belongs to the Florentines, but not the whole. Giotto died in 1336, when painters had increased immensely. In 1290, the first society of artists in Venice was established, under the protection of St. Luke. They were not academies, but associations of artists, composed of engravers, painters, sculptors, and orifici. Their object was to advance design in all arts; and had they always continued to act on this honest and simple principle, we should not now have had to lament in Europe a race who are synonymous with everything weak, mannered, and absurd in art.

The next distinguished artist was Buffalmaco. Although totally independent of Giotto, he was also intimate with Boccaccio. He was very capricious, and worked only when he liked, yet he was inferior to no one. He painted the Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, and Creation of the World in the Campo Santo; in fact, the Campo Santo seems to have been a receptacle for all the distinguished geniuses as they appeared in that age. In it there are things as fine in conception as were ever imagined; and the foundation of some of Raffaello's best compositions in the Vatican may be there found. Vasari's life of Buffalmaco is exceedingly entertaining, as indeed all his lives are.

The two Orcagnas, Andrea and Bernardo, were the next artists of this early school. Andrea painted the Judgment and the Inferno, in the Campo Santo. He was full of invention, but not equal to the Giotto school, though he first gave evidence of perspective. Lanzi thinks that the art did not advance so quickly after Giotto's death as it ought to have done. Taddeo Gaddi, his best pupil, was to him what Julio Romano was to Raffaello. Vissari, who saw his pictures in good condition, says, that he excelled his master in fleshiness and colour. Agnolo Gaddi the son of Taddeo, was a humble imitator of Giotto and his father, and had as his pupil Gemino Cemini, whose treatise on the mechanical preparations of the art is very valuable. Fortunate would it have been had the treatises of Apelles and Euphranor also reached us.

Pisa now began to decline, and the Florentines took possession of that city in 1406. Hated and detested by their conquerors, the spirit of the citizens sunk into the greatest depression; the artists left the city, and the school entirely decayed. The Florentines now rose in the ascendant. The Medici began to appear. Cosmo, the father of his country and the protector of genius, gave fresh energy to art, science, and public affairs. Lorenzo followed, and their house became the refuge and resort of all who were celebrated in painting, poetry, sculpture, architecture, and philosophy. Massaccio, the two Piselli, the two Lippi, Binozzo, Sandro, and Ghirlandaio, received from the Medici protection and employment. The pictures of the time have perpetual portraits of the Medici. The citizens became animated with the same spirit; frescoes covered the churches, and smaller works filled the houses. Up sprung, too, that host of painters, marble-cutters, bronze-casters, and chasers, by which the principles of design passed from Pisa to Florence; and out blazed before the world Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti. The most exquisite productions of sculpture, marble, and bronze followed. The youth became inoculated; sound design became the first necessity of manufacture; and though the finest works of Italy at this or any period cannot be compared to the finest works of Painting Greece, yet a good style of design was established, but unequal to those refined forms of beauty, so palpable in the merest fragments of the works of the school of Phidias, which have all the look of life without any of its vulgarities, all the essential details, without a single superfluous one. This cannot be said of the naked figures of the period in question, or of any period of Italian art, not even of the art of Michel Angelo and Raffaello. There was a want which Greek forms only supplied; there was an absence of refinement, and a want of something which the Greeks possessed. Michel Angelo and Raffaello were educated without system. There was no school in Italy like the schools of Sicyon and Rhodes, Athens, and Corinth, where all the hidden secrets of perfect form were taught, that is, the secret of beauty. Michel Angelo and Raffaello owed their greatness to their own genius; and their art died with them. There has been nothing in the world like the art of Phidias, except the poetry of Shakespeare. The intellectual powers and perceptive senses of the Greeks must have been several degrees more refined than those of all preceding or subsequent nations.

The followers of Giotto had advanced their art from infancy Massaccio in colour, composition, and expression; but in perspective, and light and shadow, they left it as they found it. Uccello had given symptoms of perspective, and Massolino da Panicale of light and shadow, until the appearance of Masso di S. Giovanni, a youth so immersed in study, so utterly absorbed in his divine art, that he neglected dress, health, food, sleep, and seemed only to be conscious of life when he touched a pencil. For this entire neglect of the humanities and comforts of life, the Italians, whose satirical turn is ever apparent, added accio to Masso (accio affixed to any word exciting associations of dirt or ugliness), so that Massaccio meant a dirty and neglectful man. Neglectful as he was, however, he was the immediate precursor of Raffaello; and all the great subsequent painters studied him. Raffaello borrowed from him Paul in Elymas, the Adam and the Eve in the Loggia, and other entire figures. Like Apollodorus, he opened the doors; and Raffaello having passed through, never forgot his obligations. Ghiberti and Donatello formed his style; from Brunelleschi he learnt proportion; and though the finest antiques were not known in his time, he improved himself by studying such as were in existence. The airs of his heads are Raffaellesque, says Mengs; yet, would it not be more just to say, that Raffaello's heads are Massaccesques? Raffaello died the favourite of a court, loved, lamented, and in competence. Massaccio so excited the envy of his inferiors, that it is suspected he was poisoned at the age of twenty-eight, before he had fairly taken his ground. Surely, then, when Massaccio is praised for what must have been his own, it is not quite fair to term his excellence, that of a man who came after him, and perhaps owed it to him. His works are at S. Ambrogio and del Carmine in Florence, and St. Catherine in Rome. His heads are full of character, his drapery is beautifully composed, and his composition is unaffected, but his knowledge of the naked form is feeble and vulgar. Some of the heads of del Carmine are full of character like Holbein, with the same look of rigidity in expression; but he was a true genius, benefitting by his predecessors, going beyond them, and enabling those who studied him to carry the art to the highest point it ever reached in Italy. Pietro Perugino, Leonardo, Raffaello, and Michel Angelo, all studied and all were benefited by him. In the Palazzo Pitti there is a portrait of a young man who looks alive.

After several names of great merit, we reach one who ad-Ghirlandaio advanced towards the great era; we mean Domenicho Ghirlandaio, the master of Michel Angelo, a circumstance which alone is a passport to immortality. Fuseli says, that he was the first Florentine who added truth to composition by truth of perspective. The abolition of gold fringes in drapery may Painting, be dated from him; though his historical figures are little more than portraits well selected. The last important name of the first epoch of Italian art was that of Luca Signorelli, who had glimpses of real grandeur. His dome at Orvieto, where he painted the Last Judgment, has bold foreshortening, with absurdities of an earlier date mixed up in it; but Michel Angelo adopted many of his ideas, as well as Dante's; and certainly the absurd assertion that he "disdained to look abroad for foreign help," is successfully refuted by this fact.

One can see how gradually art sunk after its decay into Gothicism; how gradually it advanced again to nature and common sense, and from common sense to elevation. During this first period the approaches to ideal beauty, imperfect as it was in Italian art, were gradual, and would have been longer in coming had not the discovery of the Apollo, and other ancient works, opened the eyes of all the great men living, and a spring taken place from Perugino, Ghirlandaio, and the Bellini, which was soon visible in the works of Raffaelle and Michel Angelo. Leonardo seems not to have been smitten by the ancients to the same degree as the other two were. There is less obligation to any nation in him; and unquestionably few as are left of the effusions of his genius, they are more original than the Vatican or Sistine Chapel. What was there in the world to put us in mind of the Standard struggle or Last Supper of Da Vinci?

But before proceeding, it may be as well to allude to the question of oil painting. It was long a supposition that Van Eyk discovered it, and that it was not known before; whereas, it was used in England in 1230, long before the time of Van Eyk. Cennino Cennini wrote a treatise on the technical practice of the Italian painters; he was a pupil of Angolo Gaddi, who was a pupil of Taddeo Gaddi, who was a pupil of Giotto, who was a pupil of Cimabue, who was a pupil of the Greeks. There can be no question that from the mixture of oil with panic wax as a varnish, the use of oil was known to the ancient Greeks, and that it was carried on to the tenth century, when the monk Theophanes wrote his treatise. He positively describes how to mix the colour with oil instead of water, and how to boil the oil; and then we can prove its existence by actual documents in the rolls of the Exchequer in England (1239), and by the 23rd of Henry III., wherein the king issues an order to "our treasurer Odo the goldsmith and his son, to be paid 117 shillings for oil, varnish, and colors bought, and for pictures made in the chamber of our Queen at Westminster," nearly two hundred years before Van Eyk. There can be no doubt that oil painting has never been unknown, even to the Egyptians; it has been forgotten and revived, but none of the periods of revivals are entitled to the honour of discovery. "Chaque nation a ses avantages, et ses désavantages," said a Frenchman to us, whilst shrugging his shoulders as a spout of water from a roof drenched him to the skin in Paris; and "ogni nazione ha le sue virtù, ha i suoi vizi," says Lanzi. Every nation which confesses its vices, is sure to have justice done to its virtues. There is no Italian school, however good, which has not its errors, and none which has not its excellencies as well as its mistakes.

Florence was distinguished for fresco more than for oil painting. The Florentine style of design, in its best days, was always peculiar; the figures were long in proportion, their feet were small, and so were their knees; there was always a look, in Florentine design, as if the muscles of the body were suffering from a temporary knotted cramp; they were, in design, too circular, too elliptical, or too angular, and never seemed to have hit the exact medium between all three, like Phidias. Their colour was not rich, like the Venetians; their draperies clung too closely to the limb as if they were wet; they made an ostentatious display of the limb underneath; in fact their system degenerated into manner, and beauty seems not to have been a primary object in the Florentine school, any more than in that of their ancestors the Etruscans. At Fontainebleau, though the designs of Primaticcio were full of talent, yet they gave a very good idea of the excess of the Florentine manner. The two great luminaries of Florence were Da Vinci and Michel Angelo. Da Vinci was less of a mannerist than the other great man. He was, in fact, the link between the meagreness of the first period of design, and the vulgar swing of the second.

Leonardo was born in 1452. He was a natural son, and Leonardo da Vinci had all the eccentricity, sloth and fire, weakness and energy, idleness and diligence of that class. A poet, a musician, a mathematician, an hydraulicist, a mechanic, a modeller, and a painter; he excelled in all. Keen, eager, minute, searching and indefatigable, handsome in face, beautiful in person, tall in figure, athletic and skilled in manly exercises, a graceful dancer, a splendid horseman, and an harmonious singer; he equally delighted the people, infatuated the women, and bewitched the sovereign. And yet with all this vast power, the gift of his Creator, he was so deficient in concentration of mind, that he seemed to have no power of collecting its rays sufficiently long to make discoveries in any thing. He was the scholar of Verrocchio, by whom he was infected with a lazy love of design in preference to the vigorous energy of using the brush. He passionately loved geometry, horses, and soldiers; and in his horses he never left nature like Raffaelle, Julio Romano, or Michel Angelo, but gave them their natural characteristics of fleshy nostrils and projecting eyes.

His two greatest works are his Last Supper, and his Battle of the Standard. The beautiful humility of Christ, the tender amability of St. John, the powerful expressions of all the apostles wavering to and fro in their attitudes, as if disturbed in their feelings, by the remark of Christ, that "one of them should betray him," prove the extent of his genius, and the depth of his perceptions. But even here, the bane of his existence, that disposition to experiment, has ruined the work, more from the consequences of his own preparations, than either time or damp. Such men are never regarded as steady lights by posterity; painting was only a portion of his occupations, and not the end of his life. One quarter of the lives of such men is spent in experiments; another quarter in putting them in practice; a third in lamenting their failure; and the last amidst the bitterest remorse, devoting themselves to their real pursuit, to satisfy the cravings of conscience and the reproach of the world. What has Leonardo left us in all his various pursuits to compensate us for the loss which accrued to painting? Geometry was as much a caprice of his extraordinary mind, as any other science. What has he left us in poetry, which poets could look up to? What in mechanics, that Watt could have founded on? What in music, that would have benefited Mozart? What in hydraulics, that would improve our shares in canals? The genius that composed such works as the Standard and Last Supper, need not to have shrunk from competition with Michel Angelo, young as he was. There is no doubt the world is always delighted to pull down an established artist by pushing up a younger rival in his face; but if you become irritable, and desert your

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1 Reynolds' note. 2 Pliny, lib. xxxiv. Cern pumice cum oleo liquefacta. 3 Leh. i. c. 18. Accipe semen linii et exsicca illud in sartagine super ignem sine aqua, &c. Again, "cum hoc oleo tere minium, super lapisdem;" and again, "accipe colores quos impone volvens, texens eos diligentius cum oleo linii." (De omnib. Scientia Artis Pinacothec.) 4 Rot. Claus. 23rd Henry III. Walpole's Works, vol. iii. p. 16. 5 In 1814, the writer saw the remains. There was a naked youth over one of the gateways, which had all the peculiarities of this school. country from disgust, men only laugh; whereas the sound principle is, Laugh at the world, stay in your country, and work harder than ever.

The fact is, that such men as Leonardo are great geniuses, but not the greatest. The evidence of superior genius is the power of intellectual concentration. Such powers had Newton, Milton, Bacon, Locke, Watt, Michel Angelo, Napoleon, Raphaelle, Titian, Rubens, Vandyke, and our own Reynolds. Such men only are examples, and not beacons; such men only are blessings to their species. As a specimen of his extraordinary caprice of character, his want of perseverance and his notions of the most elaborate finish were at least equal; he took four years in painting one face, and then said it was not done. His children are exquisite; but his women have an air of modesty to conceal meritriciousness, and his oil-works are far from models of excellence, the over-wrought finish being hard. There is always in his expressions an air as if they were set in enamel, and could not relax. The picture, in our national gallery, of Christ and the Doctors, is a celebrated work; but why should Christ, who disputed with the doctors at twelve years of age, be larger in person and head than the doctors who are sixty? And why should Christ be like a woman in men's clothes, and look out of the picture, and talk with his fingers to the spectators, instead of being, as he was, a fine boy of twelve years old, handsome, intellectual and angelic? We should like to have heard Leonardo's reasons, if he had any, for such an apparent absurdity.

In design, and tempera or fresco-painting, Da Vinci was great; but in oil pictures he is false in taste, petty in execution, and unskilful in backgrounds. By his depth of light and shade, and also of colour, which gave an impulse to all Italian art, he had a sense of beauty which greater steadiness might have brought out to perfection. But when a man flies off from painting to make a lion, which will walk by machinery, to meet the king of France who approached Milan, to stand upon his hind legs without human help, to open his own belly, and show the king of France his arms inside it, what could be expected from his talents, great as they were? Nowhere does his character show itself more conspicuously than in his treatise on painting; in fact it is not a treatise, but a collection of separate disjointed thoughts, like the recipes of a cookery book. It is very easy to put down your thoughts as they occur without arrangement; but the difficulty is, to collect them for the illustration of a principle like Fuseli or Reynolds. Every man can put down separate thoughts, but every man has not the power so to arrange them as to throw light upon an art. Leonardo dissected and drew finely; but there was a meagre common-model style in his figures, a want of perfect construction, as if men had never worn clothes. On the whole, this illustrious man cannot be referred to as the head of an epoch. He was a component part of it, but not like Michel Angelo or Raphaelle the great engineer. What he did in painting made one lament that he had not done more. "An artist," says Reynolds in his letter to Barry, "should bring his mind to bear on painting, from the moment he rises till he goes to bed; and if his mind be calm and undisturbed by other objects, he will find it quite enough to fill up life, if it was longer than it is."

No man could be more opposite to Leonardo than his great successor Michel Angelo, patient, laborious, virtuous and indefatigable, painter, architect and sculptor; he left a work in each art that advanced the rank of his country. To turn to such a character, is a relief and a blessing. In him the aspiring youth contemplates the result of conduct totally the reverse of that we have been considering. Solitary, and highly gifted, despising the subterfuges of society, he lived alone; and in addition to his genius he was a great moral being. Brought up by the liberality of Lorenzo de Medici, admitted freely to his table with the illustrious men of the day, Michel Angelo had every advantage in early education. He came, too, when he was wanted; when ancient literature and ancient art were breaking through the obscurity which had overwhelmed them, and the discovery of printing was scattering their beauties throughout Europe. Men's minds were roused up with wonder and delight at every fresh discovery. Painting, architecture, poetry, and science were hailed with a gusto which nothing can account for but the misery of the ages that had passed.

Michel Angelo, after his day's study in the gardens which Lorenzo had opened for the youth of Florence, retired to the coins, cameos, and fragments of the palace. With his acuteness, energy, and perception, it is not wonderful that he soon perceived the inferiority of the forms of his master, in comparison with the full beauty of the form, the result of perfect construction in the antique. He corrected with his boyish hand the narrow meagreness of Ghirlandaio; and announced, thus early, that self-will and vigorous decision, which enabled him subsequently to accomplish whatever he undertook. Here was the germ of that mighty power which placed the Pantheon in the air, as he predicted and realized in the dome of St. Peter's. Here was the embryo fearlessness, that brought him through the vast ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in fresco, though when he began it, he had never painted in fresco before. Michel Angelo was one of those rare beings who are wanted when they come, and have opportunities put in their way adequate to develop the powers with which they are gifted. Julius II. was as wonderful a man as Michel Angelo; and they mutually inspired each other. What Julius wished, Michel Angelo was as ready to perform; and what the inspirations of Michel Angelo's genius suggested, the vigorous pope, whose fine old venerable head a helmet would have suited better than a tiara, had comprehension to value. They were both fierce, both self-willed, both proud and haughty, both independent and ungovernable. If Julius wished what Michel Angelo was in no humour to do, he would not do it; and if Michel Angelo wanted to execute, on sound principles of art, what the aged pontiff did not comprehend, he would do it, in spite of denunciations of banishment, or threats of displeasure. They were made for each other, they understood each other, and they were attached to each other; they quarrelled, became friends, and quarrelled again. "When will the ceiling be finished?" said Julius, as he trod on the scaffolding with a stamp that made the boards tremble, after climbing to the top, where the great artist lay on his back on a mattress, hard at work, painting with vigour. "When I can," said Michel Angelo, irritated at the interruption. "When thou canst," thundered out the pope; "Art thou minded to be hanged?"

This was the man for Michel Angelo. Conscious of his age, conscious that death followed him wherever he went, he began, proceeded with, and finished all he undertook, as if he had not an hour to live. By his perpetual watching, he hurried Michel Angelo through the ceiling of the chapel in twenty months, a time by no means equal to that which ought to have been devoted to it. The hurry is visible in the fierce, rapid execution; and that which was entirely owing to the impetuosity of his old patron, has been attributed as a merit and a principle to the great painter. Such is the inflation of praise when a man is really great. Of this astonishing work, it seems that enough can never be said; though language has been exhausted to do it justice. Fuseli was the first who cleared up the mystery of the composition, in a style that places the commentator on a level with the inventor. "It exhibits," he says, "the origin, the progress, and the final dispensation of theocracy." But Fuseli's character of Michel Angelo is overdone. It is an effort to express the deepest feelings in the strongest language; and in all such efforts the language invariably becomes inflated and turgid. In comparing this illustrious sovereign of modern design with Phidias, or the Greeks generally in the naked figure, he must unquestionably yield to them the palm. Michel Angelo often perplexed his limbs with useless anatomy; it must not be denied, and cannot be refuted, that he did not always clear the accidental from the superfluous. If the principle be a sound one, namely, "that any two parts of a body bearing comparison must keep a consistency throughout, similar in essence and similar in development," then is Michel Angelo grossly inconsistent; because if the spine of the ilium in front be covered fully by the muscles around it, so ought the spine of the scapula behind to be equally covered. If the former be, and the latter be not, then the figure is inharmonious and inconsistent, and what Phidias would never have tolerated. Now the figure of Michel Angelo's Christ standing with a cross, has the spine of the scapula prominent and bony, and all the muscles shrinking from it, the characteristics of a thin man; whilst the spine of the ilium of the same figure in front, is entirely covered by the muscles around it, the marks of a muscular and fleshy man. What authority had Michel Angelo in nature or antiquity for such inconsistency? These are the excesses which bring dissection into contempt, and which induce anatomists to doubt whether the Greeks dissected or not, because they were never guilty of such absurdities, and because they had too much self-control to make that an end of art which was but a means of the perfection of art. And yet Vasari calls it "mirabilissima." This figure and the Lazarus in Piombo's, as well as several figures in the Last Judgment, are justifiable grounds for asserting he was not equal to the Greeks in the naked figure; though in the conception and arrangement of a vast whole to illustrate a grand principle, he approaches but does not surpass the Parthenon in its glories. In the form he must not be compared to the Greeks; gigantic as he is, he was decidedly inferior.

Michel Angelo's line is by no means "uniformly grand," and his women may be "moulds of generation," but certainly not of love. His infants may "teem with the man," but they have nothing of the infant. His men may be a "race of giants," but they are brutal in expression, fierce in action, and distorted in position. It is useless in a rapid and general view of art to go over ground which has been so often gone over before; to talk about the prophets and sibyls, after three hundred years' enthusiasm, is worse than useless. Europe knows the awful grandeur of one or two of them, looking like beings to whom God has spoken, and who have never since ceased meditating on the awful voice.

The style of Michel Angelo has been called the style of the gods; but if majesty without pretension, humility without feebleness, power without exertion, and an awful presence without vulgar assumption, be the characteristics of a god, what figure of Michel Angelo's deserves that appellation? Is it in the bullying defiance of Moses? the twisted tortures of Jonah? the cramped agonies of the sleeping Adam? or the galvanized violence of the ornamental figures at the tombs? It must be admitted, that the Penitent Dancer is majestic and silent; but this is an exception, not an habitual characteristic. "Michel Angelo's mind," says Reynolds, "was so original that he disdained to look abroad for foreign help." Disdained! Why there is not a prophet, a sibyl, or a naked figure in the whole chapel where the torso cannot be traced. And what are the works of both Michel Angelo and Raffaelle, but improved completions of all that their predecessors had done for a thousand years in barbarism and obscurity? Shakespeare's plots are all borrowed; Lady Macbeth is not his own; that hideous expression "I know Macduff was from his mother's womb untimely ripped," is Hollingshead's. But what of that? It is the new thoughts he puts into them, which give him claim to the sympathy of the world. Phidias and Raffaelle have one great and decided beauty in their works; their figures, whether in action or expression, always look as the unconscious agents of an impulsion they cannot help. You are never drawn aside from what they are doing by any appearance in them, as if they wished to make you consider how very grand they were, or how very gracefully they were moving. They seem impelled by something they cannot control; their heads, hands, feet, and bodies immediately put themselves into positions the best adapted to execute the intentions wanted; whereas often in Michel Angelo, and always in his imitators, there is a consciousness as it were in his arms and limbs, which destroys all idea, as if his figures were the unconscious agents of an impulsion they could not help, and which acted by means of the will on the muscular system.

It is an inherent principle of life never to disturb itself for grace, or for any other object either in action or repose, not immediately the natural consequence of the impulsion which moved the body. Style in design is a result and not a cause. Whatever object is represented in painting or sculpture, the intentions of God in its bodily formation should be ascertained; the means which God has bestowed on it to enable it to execute its only will or gratify its own instincts, should be investigated; and then the aberrations produced by time, accident or disease, or other causes, will be clearly known, so that he who takes upon himself to represent any object in painting, will be able to distinguish accident from essence, and shew the object in its essential properties of body as God first created it. The external form in that body will then be essential, and the result of its completion in art will be style in design. There are certain inherent principles of our common nature to which all bodies must yield, viz. that compression and extension must have different effects, and so must repose and action. If a great artist represents a figure and makes its parts the same in either case, he must be ignorant of nature or above its simplicity. No doubt, the conception of an idea may be so grand, the beauty of a character may be so angelic, the pathos of an expression may be so deep, that errors or inadequacy in the mode of representation may be overlooked or forgiven; but in order to bring the art to the perfection to which the Greeks brought it, there must be nothing to forgive or to overlook. An idea or conception being the nobler part of the art, we may, in our common conviction of human frailty, overlook any inadequacy in the means of imitation; but the very admission proves there must be something to be overlooked and something which, we have a notion, has not been adequately represented.

An art the modes of which to convey thoughts, being the imitation essentially of natural objects, ought surely to have the imitation perfect, because the imperfection of the means has always detracted from the impressions of the thought. Poets are not endured if their grammar is bad, or their language defective; and why should drawing, form, colour, or light, shadow, and surface, the grammar of art, be excused more than the poets'? Because the simplest imitation is at once recognised as the imitation of the prototype, why should facility of imitation be any excuse for defect? Ah, but it's the grand style. Yes, the grand style of Europe for the last three hundred years; but was it the grand style of the Greeks? Certainly not; their grand style was nature elevated not violated, with none of her inherent bases of life altered a hair's point, none of her essential details omitted, and none of her essential principles overwhelmed by useless detail.

When you see an outline like iron, that is the grand style. When hands were twisted, heads distorted, one leg up, and the other so far removed from the body, that you may question if it will return, that is the grand style. All this absurdity originated with Michel Angelo; and though he is not answerable for the excesses of his admirers, there must be Painting, something erroneous if every imitator has led to such extravagance from Goltzius downwards. Michel Angelo was a tremendous genius, and his effect on the art was vital; but he did not like the Greeks suffer the unalterable principles of life to keep in check his anatomical knowledge. This was an error, because we can imagine no beings, and no world where malleable matter is not influenced by the common principles of the solar system, or where any creatures composed of bones, muscles, tendons, and skin, must not yield to the laws which God instituted for their government when he created them.

Thus Michel Angelo often overstepped the modesty of truth, and gave a swaggering air to his figures. Every figure of his looks as if he was insulted and preparing to return a blow. If they sleep they seem as if they would kick; if they move when they are awake, they seem as if all their muscles were cracking. We allude particularly to the naked figures; Jeremiah and the Duke are exceptions, but they are only exceptions. Fuseli observed that Michel Angelo was the salt of art; but it would have been more just to have called him the pepper, because very little indeed will do for a seasoning. In poetry of sentiment the Medici tombs would perhaps have competed with Phidias; for Michel Angelo being a painter as well as Phidias, he combined in his sculpture a knowledge of effect. In selection of subject and during execution of hand, perhaps the Sistine Chapel might equal the great works of painting amongst the ancients; but in naked representations it cannot be compared to it. The Elgin marbles had not then enlightened the world. The due subordination of all science to nature had not then been so exquisitely seen; the due combination of life without meanness, and of abstraction without losing sight of life, were not so apparent in the great works of ancient art which were found before this period. Had Michel Angelo seen the Theseus and Hyssus, Jupiter's breast and horse's head, he would have felt the difference between the muscular swing of a blacksmith, and a hero naturally born powerful, without his muscles being distorted by manual labour; and that a hero might be elevated and yet simple, fleshy without fatness, and muscular without being skinny. Michel Angelo has been called the Deity of design; but he was rather the Devil. One can imagine the consternation of Phidias and his pupils, if suddenly at Olympian the galvanized figures of the tombs had been let down through the roof, whilst they were preparing the Olympian Jupiter, with his quiet, solemn, steady, thinking, peaceful, awful look.

Reynolds says he prepared the way for the sweeping outline of Rubens; but how many thousands has he ruined? What is the excellence of the Last Judgment? Is there any evidence of power in arranging a whole, like Rubens, Titian, or Tintoretto? Is there any application of any principle of our nature by the due combination of variety and repose? Is it not a mass of separate groups, vulgar in design, academic in action, and demoniac in expression? Is the Christ worthy of Goltzius? Surely it would have disgraced him; and then what devils! Are these the fallen angels of heaven? they are the legitimate offspring of hell. Are these the beings whose glory was obscured, not extinguished? whose majestic forms existed, though in ruin? whose beauty was only disturbed by passions, not destroyed? who were the same grand, heroic, terrific beings as ever, but scarred by lightning, singed by fire, dingy from darkness, lacerated by thunder, their splendour sparkling through the horrid obscurity, in which they meditated revenge? To give them mouths like wolves, ears like asses, noses like pug-dogs, and tails like monkeys, with feet cloven and misshapen, was not to represent a fallen angel, but a deformed monster. Though evil, they were beautiful.

Their forms had not yet lost all their original brightness.

"What matter where, if still I be the same?" says Satan. Painting. Could such a sentiment have ever been uttered by the wretch who is dragging a figure down to the bottomless pit, in a way delicacy forbids one even to think of, much more to write or to paint? Michel Angelo's demons would not only torture the damned, but feed upon their bodies.

It is clear, however, that there was a time when he was not so exaggerated. The holy Family, in sculpture, brought by Sir George Beaumont from Italy, is playful, natural, simple, and beautiful; it is in fact a divine work. Perhaps the violence of Julius in hurrying him through the Sistine Chapel, and the necessity of painting with tremendous exaggeration, on so large a space, got his hand into a fierce power that it never lost. Painting on grand ceilings is like talking in large theatres. He never entirely finished anything; he left no grand pupils, like Raffaelle; he assisted the humble, but never instructed the gifted. The figure of Lazarus in our national picture, especially the hand and thumb that press the shoulder of the attendant on the left side, is certainly by him; and if it be compared to the timid painting of the Christ, the spectator will be convinced of it. In fine, Michel Angelo was a great genius; but let the students of Europe be assured that his style has been grossly overrated; let them banish his works from their eyes, and substitute the Theseus and Hyssus, and the real grand natural style of Phidias will soon exclude the satanic Etruscan, and violent anatomical distortions of Michel Angelo. He may be and was a giant in art; but Raffaelle was an angel, and Phidias a god.

The next Florentine of power was the monk Bartolomeo. Bartolomeo studied under Rosselli, and Leonardo aroused and excited him; he was grand in colour, light and shadow, and execution, surface, and character. In the Louvre there were works worthy of any hand, any competitor, or any genius. He had the honour of advancing Raffaelle; he invented the lay figure, and made the proper use of it; he never put drapery on it till he had drawn the naked figure first, so that the naked parts affected the forms of his folds; he had great depth, grandeur, and a certain wildness of air; he drew finely, and his tones were solemn and elevated. Willie speaks with the highest enthusiasm of his Assumption of the Virgin. It is impossible not to feel the deepest interest in Bartolomeo, and not to be astonished that he did not found a school, and head an epoch. Such things, however, are never done by the mere influence of talent; the character of the man is principally thought not wholly the cause. He painted a S. Sebastiano, which was so beautiful, that it became a favourite of Italian ladies. He was ordered to adorn the great hall of council at Florence, as Da Vinci and Michel Angelo had done before; but as if a fatality attended that hall, he died without going further than the designs. This is curious. Da Vinci designed the Standard struggle; Michel Angelo the group of soldiers alarmed by the trumpet, and dressing themselves; and now Bartolomeo began his designs, and died in 1517, without completing them. Bartolomeo was a great artist. His method was first to draw the naked figure, then clothe it, then paint the whole picture in light and shade in oil, and then tone and colour, guided by the tremendous depth of his first impasto painting.

Andrea del Sarto is another name enthusiastically overrated by Vasari. He might be called Andrea senza errori; Sarro, but what genius "senza errori," ever enchanted the world? Give us the vigour of Michel Angelo, with all his violence, the dash of Tintoretto with all his caprice, the colour of Titian with his want of drawing at first, the sweetness of Correggio with his namby-pamby men, the composition of Rubens with his flabby women, the expression of Raffaelle with his hardness of effect; but spare us from that poet, painter, musician, or moral character, who is so perfect that he must be admired without the gusto of finding fault; above all, spare us from the Grandisons of art. Andrea was one of those to whom talent is more applicable than genius; whatever excellence he attained, he would have never attained to that degree, but for the existence of his superiors. The greater part of the works attributed to him in England, are copies by his pupils which he retouched.

After these great men, it would be useless to detail the decay of the Florentine school; it yielded to the circumstances of the time, and the misfortunes of the Medici. The continual political squabbles turned men's minds from art as in ancient Greece; but the great want of course was the want of genius, which no efforts have since been able to rear. Though the style of the Florentine school was not so pure as that of the Roman, it led the way in a noble manner, and kept side by side with it; they benefited each other. Leonardo gave an impulse to art; and though from the caprice of his character, he did not complete the impulse he had given, and was more the cause of greatness in others, than the man who established his own, yet the art is indebted to this highly-gifted man, who had an effect on Georgione, Bartolomeo, Raffaello, and Michel Angelo himself; and gratitude is due to his genius. This great school was brought to utter ruin by what Lanzi calls the Cortoneschi, or pupils of Cortona, where art had degenerated into mechanism, and thoughtless, endless, and sprawling groups. The descendants of the Medici breed had more disposition than power to patronise till Leopold reigned in 1765. The academy was renovated in 1785, and once more in 1804; but these renovations end in nothing. The great men were passed without these conventional distinctions; the little ones who came after, live only by their embellishment. Boys are educated to draw tolerably well, to colour with tolerable harmony, to invent tolerably insipidly, to become intolerable painters, accomplished academicians, to die, be buried, and decay; and thus leave room for another race as intolerably imbecile in art, as their illustrious performers before them. It is quite absurd to read in Lanzi, always at the end of the epochs of a school, "Decadenza dell' arte, e fondazione dell' academia per avviarla;" "decay of art, and foundation of an academy, to give it life." But after a few galvanic twitches it stretches out its feeble legs, gasps with an expiring quickness, gives a trembling of its eyelids, which it opens once more, stares with a fixed look, sighs deeply, and drops its jaw for ever. Then come the vain efforts to restore circulation, then the delusive assurances that it is still living; then doctors and nurses dress up its helpless head with laurel, and put some abracadabra on its cold breast; but all won't do for it's gone and there is no hope. Such have been the results of the academies. Genius fled at their foundation, and left them useless bodies without soul, life, or circulation. The sovereigns of Europe will at last find out that no academies should go further than schools; and till they do, the end of art will be forgotten, in a vain contemptible struggle for its conventional distinctions.

The three leading lights of art as schools, are the Florentine, the Roman, and the Venetian. The Parmenian must in spite of all the beauty of Correggio, be considered as the beginning of corruption. The other schools, the Modenese, the Cremonese, the Ferrarese, Genoese, and the Piedmontese, are but different branches.

The glory of Italian art is Raffaello. Had he been born in Greece, and qualified by a Greek education, he would have been as great in painting as Phidias was in sculpture; but the education of all the Italian artists was imperfect, and they seemed to be grounding themselves, (even Raffaello himself) on the meagre style of the early painters. The discovery of ancient statues in some degree opened their eyes, but they were not, like the ancients, gradually prepared for such perfection, nor was Raffaello himself ever skilled in those perfect principles of beauty, as applied to the naked figure, which distinguished the Greeks. Wonderful, amiable, and gentle creature as he was, the reverse of Michel Angelo in every way, who proved himself decidedly the inferior man. In all his endless inventions, a single repetition of himself, even in the folds of a drapery, is not to be found; he was not like Titian, an exquisite colourist, but his colour is always agreeable, though not distinguished for light and shade; and his groups are never obtrusive, though not remarkable for aerial perspective. Every object keeps its place; though no face of his can compete with the beauty of the ancients, his women always enchant; his great power was character and expression, and telling a story by human passions and actions; in these he was univalved in modern art, and not surpassed by the ancients. His father being a painter, he was bred up in the art; and his master Perrugino, was a great man in his way, though somewhat of a Goth. In style, therefore, Raffaello lost time with him; but could he have grown in early life to such a school as Sicyon, there is no knowing to what a pitch of perfection he might have carried the art. His latter excellence is entirely owing to his own sense, based on the antique; for most of what he learnt from Perrugino he had afterwards to unlearn. He entered the Vatican at twenty-five, and died at thirty-seven. What then must have been his diligence, his devotion, and his genius. In any history of painting, at this time of day, to talk of the subjects of the Vatican, or the Madonnas, so often copied, so often engraved, so often seen, so often praised, would be trespassing on the temper of the reader. His character, as well as that of his art, was the very converse of Michel Angelo. Michel Angelo envied his equals, was kind to his inferiors, and always insulting to his superiors; whilst Raffaello was kind to all, and the idol of the society in which he moved. Michel Angelo associated with no men but admirers. The consequence was that his life was written by his flatterers Condivi and Vasari, a great portion, perhaps, delicately insinuated by himself; and, as might be expected, they have sacrificed Raffaello to the Dagon of their idolatry. Vasari insinuated that Raffaello was greatly indebted to Michel Angelo; and Reynolds following Vasari and Condivi, goes farther than either, asserting that Raffaello owed his existence to Michel Angelo. Was there ever such gratuitous assumption? If it means any thing, it means that but for Michel Angelo, his genius would never have been developed. Is such an absurdity worthy of Reynolds understanding? Surely not, and in fact it can be made clear that Raffaello did not owe his existence to Michel Angelo. If he owed anything to that great artist, he owed the corruption of his own pure style. After the Capella Sistina was opened, Raffaello, bit by every body else by its heavy, cumbrous, vulgar, broad, and circular design, immediately tried it; but it did not suit his beautiful nature any more than it would have suited the elliptical beauty of the heroic forms of Greece.

What does Reynolds mean when he says, that "Raffaello had more taste and fancy, Michel Angelo more genius and imagination?" If genius be nothing more than the ordinary faculties of men carried to a greater pitch of intensity than ordinary men possess them, wherein had Michel Angelo more genius than Raffaello? Their geniuses were both equal; but the road which each took for the exercise of his genius was different. Raffaello excelled in expressing the passions; Michel Angelo in sublimity of character, independently of all passion and emotion. Though the materials of Raffaello's art are generally borrowed, are they more so than Michel Angelo's? Is not Michel Angelo as much indebted to Luca Signorelli and the Campo Santo, for his choice of subjects in the Sistine, as Raffaello is in the Vatican? This does not invalidate their genius; whilst their predecessors were the root, the stem, the leaves, and the bud, they were the full blown flower. Michel Angelo was a great genius, and so was Raffaello; but each owed his genius to a power totally independent of the other. Their geniuses were equal, their temperaments different. Raffaello was at the mercy of pleasure; Michel Angelo disdained it: Raffaello was made for society; Michel Angelo despised it. In Raffaello's works there is a geniality of soul with which every man's and woman's heart beats in sympathy; whilst we have no sympathy with the characters of Michel Angelo who overwhelms our imaginations, but never touches our hearts. We are awed by his sibyls, but we could never think of loving them; and his demons are surely unworthy of the fiery solitudes of hell. How could Ariosto say of him,

"Michel, più che morte, Angel divino,"

and then herd up Raffaello with Sebastian and inferior men; Michel Angelo was perhaps the more moral man of the two, but not the greater painter.

Vasari and Condivi would never have been allowed to publish their falsehoods, as Lanzi says, had Raffaello been living; but where were Julio Romano, Luca Penni, and Polidoro, whom Raffaello had raised from a mason's boy to a great painter? Where were they? where were his "dear pupils"? "Let no man," says Johnson, "look for influence beyond his grave." Vasari asserts that Michel Angelo, in flying to Florence, when he quarrelled with Pope Julius II., left the keys of the Sistine Chapel, which he was then painting, to Bramante, Raffaello's uncle, who dishonourably let in Raffaello; and that the latter, on seeing the grand design of the prophets, changed his whole style. This absurdity was current in Europe for two hundred and fifty years, till Lanzi, with his usual acuteness, opened the eyes of the world. Would any one believe, that when Michel Angelo fled to Florence, it was in 1506, years before Raffaello ever entered Rome, and four or five before the chapel was ever begun or painted? It may be presumed that Raffaello did not surreptitiously derive any advantage from works four years before they were conceived or painted; and we conceive that Bramante could not give Raffaello the keys to open a door which was never locked, especially as Michel Angelo did not leave any keys, if ever he left them at all, till four years after the time Vasari dates as the period. The prophet Esaias which Vasari says showed an alteration of style in consequence of the stolen views of works which were not in existence, was painted one or two years before Michel Angelo touched this very chapel. So much for Vasari's sacrifice of Raffaello to the great Dagon of his idolatry; and so much for Reynolds' absurd and unthinking assertion, that "but for Michel Angelo, Raffaello would never have existed." Vasari's is a delightful book, and all his principles of art are sound, for they are the result of conversations with the greatest men; he was most intimate with Michel Angelo, and Titian, and all the great artists of the day, and constantly in their painting-rooms, at their tables, and in their society.

In the first years of Raffaello, his feeling was so completely Perrugino's, that it was almost impossible to distinguish their works; though there is a difference in feeling, and that difference is in favour of the pupil. In the Louvre were three of his early works of cabinet size. The Annunciation was one of these; and more grace, innocence, or sweetness, were never put on canvas. Raffaello's pencil seemed always to melt when he approached a woman or an angel. What an age of genius this was, and how nearly all the great men seemed to come together. Da Vinci was born in 1452, Bartolomeo in 1469, Michel Angelo in 1474, Titian in 1480, and Raffaello in 1483.

In a rapid and concise history of art to detail the inferior names, who gradually by little and little, conduce to the ultimate expansion of genius, is impossible. A historian of this description has only time for leading points, or headlands in the voyage; he has not leisure to dive into every little cape, bay, and projection, which by degrees push the mainland into the ocean. The older painters of the Roman school will not add much to the interest of the art; and a fair estimation of Raffaello and his glorious school, is much more likely to benefit the student, and instruct the general reader. It is not, on the whole, morally just; but many eminent men become thus swallowed up in the blaze of their successors. As Shakespeare nearly deadens all feeling for previous excellence, so does Raffaello, though Shakespeare, Michel Angelo, Raffaello, and Titian were all indebted to their predecessors.

If Julius was adapted for Michel Angelo, Leo X. was peculiarly so for Raffaello; though Mengs says that the honours and indulgences he received from Leo, made him luxurious and idle, and that he was not so industrious as during the short reign of his first patron Julius. Yet his rapid advance from the first picture he painted in the Vatican, to the Heliodorus, is extraordinary; and, as according to Vasari, he sent artists to draw for him in Greece, there is no doubt that he had a sketch of the pediment of the Parthenon, before it was blown up, and that the Heliodorus is but a skilful adaptation of the Iliysus. He was so much overwhelmed by employment and honours, that his latter works in the Vatican were wholly placed in the hands of his pupils, and carried on with the spirit of a manufactory. He was then appointed architect to St. Peter's at the death of St. Gallo, which distracted his thoughts. Incessant application, and incessant thinking of course weakened his delicate frame, nor did the capricious and harassing attendances on such a court increase his strength; added to which the maddening love of women for one so highly gifted and so handsome, his own devoted passion for Fornarina, and the endless demands on his brain, brought him to the grave at thirty-seven, absolutely borne down, like Byron, by excitement of every description, nervous, bodily and mental. This is the way with the world; they kill a favourite by kindness, and an offender by cruelty.

In some life of him an attempt was made to prove that he caught cold by hurrying from his work to the palace at the Pope's order, and standing while in a profuse perspiration in a draught. But that is no refutation of the previous causes; the question is, what prepared him to be killed by such a cause? Incessant work and dissipation; no painter can do both. Of course princes must be obeyed at any expense; they seem to feel little for their dependants, as it's revenge for being themselves deprived of so many enjoyments by ceremony and etiquette. Napoleon used to take great delight in never suffering old German maids of honour with fifty quarters in their arms to sit in his presence.

His last work, according to Mengs, was his Transfiguration in oil, a work deficient in masterly execution, and having a laboured look of smoothness. In drapery, in character, and in expression it was fine; but in the Louvre it looked small. By the side of Corregio, it seemed hard; by that of Titian, raw; by that of Tintoretto, tame; and the Christ's head was not equal to Corregio's at the National Gallery. It was not an example to hold forth to a young man as faultless. The Cartoons at Hampton are finer in point of execution alone; they are his finest works for all the requisites of art. He was not restrained by designing for tapestry; his genius was put forth with a Venetian power of brush; and there are heads equal to any, especially the frightened woman's head in the Ananias, in these wonderful works.

In beauty he was far inferior to the Greeks; in form he could not approach them; in composition he was perfect; in expression, deep; and in telling a story, without a rival. Taking into consideration all the great men in modern art, this young man, not highly educated like Rubens, must be placed on the throne, till one arises who shall have what he had not, in addition to his own perfections; and that young man will probably arise in Britain. He was an extraordinary creature; modest, timid, and amiable; affectionate to his equals, and gentle to the highly-born, his premature death gave a shock to Rome, which those only can estimate, who know the depth of Italian sensibilities. But did he die too young? Not at all. He might have decayed, or he might have become more luxurious and more neglectful. No man dies too young who dies with all the sympathies of the world unexhausted about him. The favor Raphaelis is the best species of fury that can seize a young student. He has no manner, no affectation, no vice, no grand style; all is simple, natural, and unaffected. His women are creatures of gentleness and love, though none are perfectly handsome. Perhaps he was more adapted for the characteristic heads of apostles than the naked forms of Greece; in fact he was a great Christian painter, and seemed born to extend the influence of Christianity by his art.

His father being a painter, he began early of course, and at sixteen, had painted a picture at Castello, the composition of which was in advance of the age. At seventeen he painted another of the Virgin and Child. In the Sacristy, at Sienna, he assisted Pinturicchio with designs; in 1504, he went to Florence, where Michel Angelo and Da Vinci were making a great noise with their cartoons for the hall; he studied both, and improved his perspective and colour, in connexion with Bartolomeo. When Bramante, his uncle, who was architect to the Pope, advised his Holiness to send for Raffaelle, the pope consented; and in April 1508, Raffaelle entered Rome, and was admitted into the Vatican.

From the continual occupations of Raffaelle in his art from boyhood upwards, he could not have had a classical education to any great extent. He knew a little Latin, as all Catholics did; but he was intimate with Bembo, Castiglione, Ariosto, and Aretino; and these men must have helped him in historical or philosophical knowledge, or moral allegory, for the completion of his great works. Raffaelle left a noble school; and as soon as grief for the loss of their master had subsided, his pupils set about completing the works he left unfinished. The battle of Constantine was done by Julio Romano and Perino del Vaga. As Raffaelle lay in state, the Transfiguration was placed at the head of his coffin.

Julio Romano was the most eminent of his pupils. With vast poetry of mind, he did things in a style of execution, which renders him the purest poet in his art. His sun setting, and moon rising over our heads, in the Palazzo del T, is nowhere equalled or approached. Though he put forth his genius at Mantua, he was a Roman in practice, and to Raffaelle owed the elements of his art. His colour was crude and his execution harsh; yet no one can fail to see in his works, the real poetry of painting. Polidoro was another great man of the same school. He was originally a mason's boy, and used to prepare the walls for fresco; but he got interested in seeing the young men at work, tried to draw himself, and Raffaelle having assisted him, he became an eminent painter.

It is interesting to reflect on the affection with which Raffaelle was surrounded. He never went to court without being attended by fifty gallant artists. Little must he have made others feel his superiority; and for once a man of genius seems to have made envy smile. Though there is an instinct in the world, the moment a man of genius appears, yet it depends upon himself whether he is received as a blessing or an annoyance. Mankind will assault the man who attempts to command by superiority, instead of leading by courtesy; but they will hail him let his superiority be what it may, who seems willing to help his inferiors with kindness, or supply their want of knowledge, as if they were doing him a favour to listen. The whole of this is based on goodness of heart, tender sympathies, and a consciousness without the appearance of conceit.

The glory seems to have gone from the Eternal City after the Roman Raffaelle's death. In 1527, Rome was stormed and taken by foreign soldiers. The savages bivouacked in the Vatican, and injured the frescoes by their smoking and fires. Sebastian del Piombo attempted to repair them after the soldiers were gone; and Titian, when in Rome, not knowing Sebastian, actually asked him who had been spoiling those beautiful heads? The art went on sinking rapidly till 1595. Raffaelle had been dead seventy-five years; Giorgione, eighty-four; Correggio, sixty; Michel Angelo, thirty; and Titian, nineteen. When the usual apprehensions of getting on a lee-shore seized the patrons and the artists, and the usual signal of distress was hoisted, Muziano, a pupil of Titian, founded St. Luke's Academy in order to raise a new batch of Raffaelles and Correggios, and save the noble vessel. The only man who since dazzled for a moment, was Michel Angelo Caravaggio. He had great and original talent, though founded on common nature, without any abstract notion of form, any conception of beauty of women, or any refinement in anything. With a sledge-hammer for a pencil, he seemed resolved to batter down all opposition; and by fierce extremes of light and shade, bearded men, dead Christs, and Transtevene beggars for apostles, he founded a school, got a character, and raised a name, which cannot be forgotten in the art of Europe.

Lanzi seems to class in the Roman school every body who practised there for the last three hundred years, but that is not fair. On this principle, all the Flemings, Dutch, Germans, Russians, Spaniards, and English, may be of the school, because they studied there; and Rubens, Vandyke, Velasquez, the Caracci and their pupils, as well as our Reynolds, were, on the same principle, of the Roman school. About the seventeenth century, this eminent school, in spite of the academy of St. Luke, went on declining. Birth, destruction, and reproduction seems to be the principle of everything physical, but not of moral or mental powers. Lanzi attributes this decay to any cause but the right one; namely, the absence of genius, the great primary cause, and which no academy can ever supply.

Cortona, Bernini, and Sacchi, were the heroes of this day; Cortona, and at a later period appeared Carlo Maratta. Raffaelle be Bernini, came to him a substitute for nature; though in 1689, he gave and Sacchi sufficient tone to art, to induce Clement XI. to employ him. But here, as well as elsewhere, genius was wanting. Carlo was as heavy as the lumbering folds of his own drapery; and so insipid are his large pictures, that it is a question whether they did not generate in Europe a contempt for large scripture subjects, which has lasted ever since. However, imbecility had not done spawning; and in a faint struggle for offspring against nature, out came Pompio Battone, and Raphael Mengs. To complete the farce, academies began to be founded in France and in the rest of Europe; and Pompeo Battoni, and Raphael Mengs may be looked upon as a very fair sample of what academies can produce, have produced, and will probably produce to the end of time. Mengs was everything but a man of genius. He was a bad painter and a deep critic; and his predicting that we had not the works which the ancients esteemed the most, was verified, in a most astonishing manner, by the discovery of the Elgin marbles. The prediction does honour to the sagacity of Mengs. Thus end two great schools of form, conception, expression and composition; the Florentine and the Roman. But of these the Roman was unquestionably the greater.

We now come to the Venetian, a great school of colour, light and shadow, impasto, and execution, completing the imitation of reality; and in summing up the character of Italian and Greek art, we shall see that these components of imitation, each of which characterised an Italian school, were combined in all schools, as a necessary requisite in the perfection of Grecian imitation.

The most ancient work of Venetian art known, is in Verona, in the cellar of a monastery, (Santi Nazario e Celso). It is inaccessible to the public, but can be seen in the woodcuts of Dionisi. In the part which formed the oratorio of the faithful, has been painted the mystery of redemption; it is a work of 1070, when the Doge Silvo invited Grecian mosaic painters to adorn St. Mark; men who though rude in art, could nevertheless paint. Thus commenced the art in Venice, whither, after Constantinople was taken by the Venetians in 1204, Greek painters and sculptors, as well as orifici, flock ed in crowds.

In the thirteenth century, painters had increased so much, that a company was formed, like the English constituency body to which Hogarth belonged, and laws and constitutions were made. Things were proceeding in this train when Giotto, returning from Avignon, painted at Verona and Padua. Nothing of his, however, is left in Verona; but at Padua the remains of his works are still quite fresh in fresco, and full of grace and vigour. Such was the early beginning of this great school, in which it will be seen that Greeks, as usual, had the first hand. Various names sprang up in this period, but the Bellinis are the most important. One of them was engaged by Mohammed II. and by his talents upheld the honour of the Venetian name; another was the master of Titian and Giorgione, two of the greatest names of the Venetian school.

Giorgione was a great genius; and his execution was entirely above vulgar prejudices. He saw and seized the leading points of leading objects, and hit them with a touch and an impasto, of which he had no previous example even in Leonardo. His breadth and tone were beautiful; and he first opened the eyes of Titian to the superior value of breadth and touch, as compared with over-wrought labour and smooth finish. Giorgione died in the vigour of his life, to the great loss of the art; for there is no knowing how much farther he would have carried his principles, or how successfully he would have disputed the crown with Titian. Lord Carlisle has a small picture by this eminent man, of a youth buckling on the armour of a knight, which is exquisite in tone, brilliancy, depth, and feeling; and had he not been cut off by the plague, there is no knowing how far he might have gone. He certainly first opened Titian's eyes to the value of breadth, and that comprehension of mind required to seize the leading characteristics of objects by a touch, leaving the atmosphere to finish at a given distance. After his death, Titian was without a rival. This great painter began, of course, like all Venetians, to paint directly from nature, without having previously dissected or drawn; nor was he sensible of this error of the Venetian school, till coming to Rome and seeing the works of Michel Angelo, Raffaelle, and the antique, he, like a great genius, set about remedying his deficiency; and the perfection of this union of form and colour is seen in his greatest work, Pietro Martyre, any attempt to move which from Venice, the Venetian senate decreed should be punished with death. This picture occupied him eight years; and eight years were well spent in such a production. The terrific gasping energy of the assassin, who has cut down the monk; the awful prostration of the monk, wounded, and imploring heaven; the flight of his companion, striding away in terror, with his dark mantle against a blue sky; the towering and waving trees, the entrance, as it were, to a dreadful forest; the embrowned tone of the whole picture, with its dark azure and evening sky, the distant mountains below, and splendid glory above, contrasting with the gloomy horrors of the murder; its perfect, though not refined drawing, its sublime expression, dreadful light and shadow, and exquisite colour; all united, render this the most perfect picture in Italian art. Why does not one perfect work entitle a man to rank as highly as a series of imperfect works, like the Capella Sistina? The answer is, because there is greater range of capacity shown in a series of conceptions to illustrate a theory, than in the completion of one work alone, although all the component parts may be perfect; and Raf-

faelle, and Michel Angelo, will ever rank higher than Titian, as Polygnotus will rank higher than Protogenes or Apelles. Prolific thinking, is surely of more value than intensity of imitation, though intensity of imitation must be added to realize the idea of a perfect painter.

Titian began in the style of his master Bellini, with the most minute finish; a capital basis for future practice, if a man have comprehension to know when to leave it, as Titian did. To show the young artist that it is never too late to improve, let him compare the Bacchus and Ariadne in our National Gallery, when he could not draw finely, with the Pietro Martyre when he could. In modern art, he was the only painter who hit the characteristic of flesh. Every great painter's flesh is paint; Titian's had real circulation of blood under the skin. On comparing the Ganymede, in our National Gallery, fine as it came from Titian's pencil, with the Theodosis by Vandyke, which is close to it, as fine a specimen of Vandyke's fire of brush as can be seen, the heavy leathern look of Vandyke's colour excited astonishment. In the flesh of Ganymede, colour, oil, brush, and canvas, were all entirely forgotten; it quivered, it moved with the action of the limbs. In Vandyke, the materials of art are uppermost; you think of them, you wonder at the touch, you forget the subject, the expressions as it were scenting of the painter's room and the easel. And so you do with all the Flemings, but never with Titian. Though we have fine Titians in England, the Diana being at Lord Egerton's, and a head at the Duke of Sutherland's; yet it must be confessed, that the Louvre possesses Titians more perfect, especially the entombing of Christ. In Josephine's collection at Malmaison, there were a Venus and Cupid, as perfect as our Ganymede, and not injured by restoring, the fatal propensity of the French. In Titian whenever you see the blues sober and in harmony, the picture is uninjured; whenever you see them harsh and too brilliant, they have been rubbed, and the last tone has been taken off.

In colour, he was never equalled; in execution of the brush, he was quite perfect; and in character and expression of portrait he was like Reynolds elevated and sublime; but the dullness which portrait, if perpetually practised, engenders in the capacity to idealise and elevate, rendered his conception of poetical characters defective. Nothing can exceed his Aretino, his senators, and his popes; nothing can exceed Sir Joshua's Lord Heathfield and Mrs. Siddons; but nothing can be meaner than some of Titian's attempts, like Raffaelle, at high poetical expression, except some of Reynolds' heads in the Beaufort. The nerve and beauty of the colour in Diana and Acteon are so touching, that one can almost fancy one hears the water ripple and the leaves wave. Glazing was the great feature in his tone, as it was in that of Apelles; and there is no perfect colour without it.

The first requisite in fine colour is the ground or preparation spread over the canvas to receive the colours. It is either of a nature to absorb the oil, or to resist the absorption. If it resist the absorption of the oil out of the colour put on it, it is an oil-ground; if it absorb the oil, it is a water-ground. And it has long been an interesting question, whether the Venetians used an oil-ground or an absorbent ground; whether, like the Greeks, they worked in tempera, and varnished out, or whether they judiciously mingled both oil and tempera together. One would think that Vasari, living as he did with all the great painters, could not be ignorant of their various methods of practice. In 1567 or 1568, he called on Titian, saw him, stayed with him, was in his painting-room, and must have talked on art, and perhaps dined or supped with him. But Vasari distinctly says, in a sort of recipe-introduction to his lives (edition 1568) that the ground on wood was gesso, plaster of Paris; that

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1 All the great painters seemed to prefer supper. In Tichozzi, Titian seems to have been a sociable man, and there are extracts from Titian's and Aretino's letters, alluding to feasts, and presents of birds for the next supper. then they mixed three colours, white, yellow, and amber, and spread them equally over the white ground; and that after tracing their cartoons, they painted their pictures." A more abominable ground never was mixed; to those who have an organ of colour it is an absolute emetic; and though it might have been Vasari's and the Florentines' ground, it never could have been endured by the eye of a Venetian.

"This was the method," says Vasari, "for pictures on wood; but when canvas became the fashion, gesso being likely to crack in ceiling, they made a ground of flour (glutina), white lead, and nut-oil, after the canvas had been smoothed by size."

Now when this was published, Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese were alive and all at work; and it is but common sense to conclude, that had it been false, they would have contradicted it. Vasari concludes with saying, "So are painted all the great works in St. Mark's Place, Venice." In that place was the Miracle of the Slave, by Tintoretto, afterwards seen by every body in the Louvre. Lanzi says, that the Venetians preferred canvas, but that at first they painted in tempera, and then came oil-painting, which the Venetians first adopted. On the arrival of the Bacchus and Ariadne in England, a little bit chipped off at the corner showed the ground underneath to be of the purest white. Now, if a white ground is absorbent, it sucks the oil out of the oil colours, and becomes the colour of oil. Sir Humphry Davy said to the author of this article in 1823, that in process of time oils become varnishes; and it is not impossible that the white ground of Titian may have been absorbent, and though it had sucked out the oil in the course of three hundred years, it may have recovered its original whiteness. The author's experience extends only to thirty years, and in that period an absorbent ground which sucked out oil has never recovered its whiteness.

But, if the Venetians painted first in tempera upon the white ground, and finished in oil, the tempera intervening between the last painting and the ground would preserve the ground white; and as Titian's method of proceeding was gradual and progressive in successive layers, like that of Protogenes, so that each layer became a help to the succeeding one, there is no reason to doubt that tempera might have been the first impasto. In parts of the Pietro Martyre, there certainly was the crude look of tempera preparation, softened by a glaze, especially about the projecting leg of the assassin. That the basis of Venetian pictures was a white ground, there can be no doubt; like the intonacos of Apelles, and the plaster-grounds of the painted mummy-coffins of Egypt. Tintoretto and Bassano used dark grounds to save trouble; but they are ruinous. They come through the thin half-tints of the picture, and render it distinct masses of dark and light, like most of the Lombard school. Many of the works of Paul Veronese, who painted one hundred years before, were in perfect preservation in the Louvre, whilst a number of the Lombard pictures were gone. The white ground was the "luce de dentro" of the Italians, "the light within." Upon this beautiful white ground they placed their colours purely and crudely, and then by spreading thin transparent tones, took down the rawness, without losing the force of the tint. This was the practice of the Greeks, and is also the present practice of the British school.

When Cicognara, the president of the Venetian academy, was in England, he remarked to the author on the singular fact, that the British was the only school of colour left in the world, though our climate was the worst; and such was the state of Venice some years since, that an English consul could get nobody to paint the king's arms for him, and being the son of a painter, he was actually obliged to paint them himself.

As an example for the student, Titian is perfect. His execution never attracts by itself alone, but as the vehicle of the object it imitates. In colour he is never gaudy, never black in light and shadow, never forced or affected, and in drawing, latterly, grand. In composition he was not so perfect nor so fertile as Raffaelle; but in the imitation of flesh, no other artist in the world, except Apelles perhaps, could rival him. As a painter of portrait and landscape, no one has surpassed him. He did not grace his senatorial heads with the beauty of the backgrounds of Reynolds or Van dyke; but the absence of all gaiety behind the heads, perhaps added to the sublimity of their expression. It is curious to read in Boschini's little work, that young Palma, who had it from old Palma, a pupil of Titian, told him that Titian very often finished with his thumb. Palma distinctly says, that he has seen Titian put on with his thumb and fingers masses of colour which gave life to a picture.

In a word, neither of the great Italian schools showed the sense of the ancients. The Romans omitted colour and imitation from sheer accident; the Venetians drawing and form; and Reynolds, without going into the causes of these mutual deficiencies, laid it down as a principle, that colour and reality were incompatible with high art; whereas, when each school found out its deficiency, each endeavoured to correct its peculiar defect.

The giant of Titian's school was Tintoretto, who gave Titian such early indications of self-will and genius, that Titian, mean and jealous, turned him out of the house. Raffaelle would not have done this; he did not turn out Julio Romano. But Tintoretto was not to be crushed by the bad passions of his envious master; and took it very properly as an evidence of his talent. And what did Titian get by his paltry meanness? Nothing but pity. Tintoretto, young as he was, immediately formed a plan of his own, for combining the drawing of Michel Angelo with the colour of Titian. He devoted the day to the one, and many parts of many nights, and often whole ones, to the other. In a few years, the result was the Miracle of the Slave and the Crucifixion. Although the execution of Tintoretto looked daring and impudent by the side of the modest, senatorial dignity of Titian, yet there was a grand, defined dash about it. The original sketch of the Miracle of the Slave, formerly in the possession of Rogers the poet, is a very fine thing. Everybody speaks of the Crucifixion as a wonderful instance of power. But in colour it is lurid and awful; in expression, character, and delicacy of feeling, discordant and offensive. His pictures seem to be a mass of fore-shortenings, affected twistings, dashing darks, and splashing lights, with a hundred horse-power of execution; bearded heads, Venetian armour, silks, satins, angels, horses, architecture, dogs, water, and brawny-armed and butcher-legged gondoliers, without pathos, passion, or refinement. He used to put little models in boxes, and light them in different holes for effect. Like all Italians, he was accustomed to model and hang up his models by threads for fore-shortening. His style of form was a mixture of the pulpiness of the Venetian, and the long, anatomical, bony look of the Florentine school. He cannot be depended upon for correctness of proportions, but he was a grand and daring genius; and his conduct, when oppressed by Titian, should ever be held up as an example for the aspiring youth, when trodden upon by his elders.

Whilst Tintoretto was astonishing the Venetians by his Paul Veronese, the other great contemporary, was mildly pursuing his azure and beautiful course. Of a nature the reverse of Tintoretto, and not equal to him in sublimity or terror of conception, he yet gave equal evidence of being run away with by his brush. Ceilings, canvas, halls, walls, and palaces, were so many proofs of his power. His greatest work is at Paris. It is the Marriage of Cana, a wonderful instance of executive power;

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1 This is Vasari's account, pp. 51, 52, 53, Firenze, volume i. 1568. but here all story, sentiment, and pathos, are buried in the noise, bustle, eating, drinking, and fiddling of a Venetian city feast. Paul Veronese was certainly the most corrupt painter of the time.

Cannaletti. After these great men, the art began to decay; and Paul Veronese and Tintoretto gave symptoms of a conventional mode, which, when taken up by inferior men, hastened its ruin. Down to the present age, with the exception of two or three mannerists, no name occurs worthy of eminence or selection. Cannaletti was a genius in his way. Sebastian Ricci, and Marco Ricci, were much employed in England to disfigure ceilings and palaces by wholesale, with gods and goddesses, in subjects allegorical, poetical, mythological, and nonsensical, to understand which it required pages of explanation, and to see which a nine-feet telescope by Dolland, Montague, Burlington, and Bulstrode houses, are signs of the infatuation of the English nobility at that time; an infatuation, however, which showed a disposition to employ art as it had been employed in Italy, and if the genius had been equal to the opportunity, the result would have been different.

The next school of any importance is the Lombard school, which comprehends the Mantuan, the Modenese, the Cremonese, and the Milanese. Andrea Mantegna is the hero of the Mantuan school, and Vasari says, that his masterpieces are the tempera designs which we have at Hampton Court. They are fine things; Rubens used them; and they are a mine of costume, though the forms have too much the look of the model. Julio Romano's great work is at Mantua, yet he must be considered as a Roman. The works of Mantegna were, as Lanzi says, the greatest effort of the last style before Leonardo da Vinci introduced a new one, which overturned the Gothic. After Julio Romano, the art decayed, and then of course came the old story, "Una accademia per avviavila." This academy has been splendidly kept up by Austria, and, as usual, has not produced a single man of great genius in three hundred years.

Contiguous to the Modenese school is the Parman; and now we come to the most unaccountable and delightful of all painters, Correggio. When it had been determined to ornament the great cupola of St. John, Correggio, though then a young man, was selected to paint it; and, like Raffaelle, his genius expanded with the opportunity. After Raffaelle, Titian, Michel Angelo, Da Vinci, and Bartolomeo, who would have thought that another style, independent of either, and unlike anything else in the world, could have burst out? But so it was. Of all the painters that ever lived in the world, there is no accounting for Correggio. Unlike Greeks, Romans, and Italians, but he came into the world, in colour, drawing, light and shadow, composition, expression, and form, like nature, and unlike everybody else, who ever studied nature at all. Michel Angelo, Raffaelle, Titian, we can trace; we see upon whom they were grafted, when they budded and burst forth. But who is Correggio? Nobody is certain. One swears he was poor, another that he was well off; another says he died in consequence of a fever which he caught by carrying all his money in copper, the price of a picture; another protests it was no such thing. Mengs' account is the best, and Vasari's mostly without authority.

There is no certainty that his portrait is in existence; in fact there is as much dispute about it as there is about Shakespeare's; and here are his beautiful works, his Notte, his Catherine, his Christ in the Garden, his Magdalene, his Venus and Mercury, and his Ecce Homo in the National Gallery, the only head of Christ in the world. This head of Christ ought to be reverenced as the identification of the character, as much as the head of Jupiter by Phidias was in the Pagan world. There is no Christ's head by Raffaelle which at all approaches it, either in the Transfiguration or in any other work; and the head by Leonardo da Vinci in the gallery cannot be endured after it. Of all painters, he astonishes one the most. If any fault is to be found with him, Painting, his men have a touch too effeminate. His colour is exquisite; his light and shadow are enchanting, but his forms defective; his composition is simple and infantine; his expression unimpassioned, but sweetness itself; and when sorrow or suffering was to be represented, who ever did it more tenderly than Correggio? Let any man who doubts this, dwell for a moment on the gentle suffering, and the feminine yet manly beauty of the Christ above mentioned. It is the very Christ who commanded by submission; without weakness beautiful, without effeminacy tender; without taint the personification of love. His hands, his shoulders, his beard, his hair, belong to that divine being who vanquished sin, by yielding to torture. It does not seem painted, but as it were spread upon the canvas by an angel's breath. His men look as innocent as girls; his women as guileless as infants; and his infants as if they had just come from the skies.

In the cupola at Parma, the great wonder is the foreshortening; and in the mouths of the vulgar this is technical perfection; whereas there is nothing more purely mechanical, nothing in fact you can so easily teach. One single smile of Correggio's angels, one touching look of Raffaelle's apostles, the sentiment of the Duke de Lorenzo by Michel Angelo, one crimson tone by Titian, are worth all the foreshortening on earth. The greatest excellencies of Signorelli, Buonarotti, and Correggio, are said to be their foreshortenings; whereas the greatest excellencies of Buonarotti and Correggio are not their foreshortening at all.

In spite of the perfections of this wonderful man, he founded as it were the decay, "le commencement de la fin." His breadth in fresco produced Lanfranco, Cortona, and Giordano, who covered Italian palaces with the sweeping brush of our patent chimney-cleansers, beginning it in the morning, finishing it by the evening, standing on the floor, and disdaining a scaffold, previous study, or previous thinking; and others came who bedaubed the palaces of Europe with clouds like feather-beds, cornucopias and Jupiters, till one's brain aches in thinking of them.

Reynolds was immensely indebted to Correggio; for Rembrandt and Correggio are certainly the bases of his style. One of the most beautiful works in the Louvre was the Marriage of St. Catherine, which when once seen haunts us in after life in dreams. In a word, Correggio was an angel that passing this earth in its flight, drooped its wings and dropped upon it, to give us a foretaste of the smiles which welcome a happy spirit in a purer sphere.

Parmigianino is the next important name in this school, Parmigiano who grated the grace of Correggio on the affectations of ano Michel Angelo. His greatest work is in our National Gallery; the Vision of St. Jerome. The Christ is a beautiful boy, but affected; the Virgin is Michel-Angelesciose, having the Glumdaditch look of his Brodiognagian women. St. John is finely drawn, but not unexceptionable; and the St. Jerome is sleeping in a position as if he had got into a cramp in the first part of the vision, and could not get out till it was over. It is raw in colour, skimmed in construction, and spoils the composition altogether. His small pictures are beautiful but long in proportion. His fingers seem always to move to music; and his limbs to be conscious how gracefully they are disposed. He has often been a fatal example to the young. Nor is his Moses, whatever Gray may say of it, an instance of the sublime. The expression is mean, and the form overdone. Parmigianino died, like Raffaelle at the age of thirty-seven, when all that was expected of him had not been realized, and when, if he had lived longer, perhaps he would have done worse.

In 1570, the best Correggeschi were grown old or dead, and the school of Parma began to give way to that of Bo-Bologna, the truly great academical school. This was not an academy in the modern sense of the word; it was a school, and nothing but a school, without distinctions, and managed Painting by directors; and it is the only academy which has ever produced any genius. Dominichino, Guido, and other names of the second period, came between unrivalled excellence and approaching destruction, and stopped for a little time the decay of the art.

Of the Cremona school, there is no great name. In the Milanese school, Da Vinci seems the hero; he founded an academy which, according to Lanzi, was the first in Europe that reduced art to rules; the works of Leonardo being the canon. His great work is in the refectory. But fifty years afterwards Aramini says that it was spoiled; in 1642 Scannelli writes, that it was with difficulty made out; and Barry ultimately saw it destroyed by a restorer. When Eugene Beauharnois was viceroy of Italy, he drained the refectory and had it paved with tiles; and it is said in a report, that the colours began to revive. Da Vinci's academy having produced no talent, Maria Theresa founded another, which, though full of casts of every description, has nevertheless proved equally unsuccessful.

The Caracci and their pupils were the last crop of genius which Italy threw up, and though they were second-rate, they came of the breed of the great who were no more. The style of Michel Angelo seems to have taken early root in Bologna, perhaps from his executing in that place the statue of Julius II. Giotto, in the first instance, excited emulation by flying about Italy; but he seems to have scattered everywhere the seeds of art, and Tibaldi, after having studied in Rome, certainly founded this style at Bologna. The first school formed was by Bagno Cavallo, and Primaticcio. It failed in 1564; upon which Primaticcio went to France, and Tibaldi to Spain, and the art was of course neglected.

The Caracci succeeded them and were extraordinary men; but what would they have done if Raffaelle, Michel Angelo, Titian, and Correggio had never lived? They saw nature only by the help of their great predecessors. Whatever the Caracci did had the appearance of labour; whilst whatever was done by their great predecessors, had an air as if there was something that no labour could attain. Ludovico had more feeling than his brothers, and had the honour of being instructed by Tintoretto. They were the sons of a tailor, and founded an academy in their own house. Agostino principally engraved, and Annibale principally painted; but they each contributed instruction to the school in which were formed Dominichino, Guido, Lanfranco, Guercino, and Albano.

Guido, Guercino, and Albano.

The greatest genius of the school was Guido; but he was envied by the Caracci; and even in this school the vices of an academy began to appear. We did not find Raffaelle sowing discord amongst his pupils by putting one against the other. Albano was opposed to Guido. Dominichino was an eminent but heavy genius; and his communion of St. Jerome is a fine thing though dull. There was a vulgar grandeur about Guercino, and an insipidity about Albano. The great work of Annibale Caracci is the Farnese gallery, which is excellent in every thing, but nerve and genius. Say what you will about the Caracci, there is a want in their art, which affects the pen of him who is attempting to do them justice. They lived together, did not marry, and were ill paid and ill-tempered; like all old bachelors they were discontented, they did not know why, and fidgety, they did not know for what; they envied the talents they were desirous of bringing forward, called the art their "wife," and were never satisfied, living in a perpetual fret of teaching, and painting, and complaining. Annibale became dissipated and died early. It is an extraordinary feature in the moral character of the Italian artists, that the greater part did not marry, and hence came the cant "of the art being their wife," with the natural consequence, that girls who had been models generally ended by being mistresses.

The Caracci kept up this affectation, they said the art was their "cara sposa;" and to all the confusion of a bachelor's house, added the slang of a mere painter's habits. At the dinner-table, crayon and paper were always at hand to catch attitudes, actions, and expressions, and groups; as if expressions and attitudes could not have been remembered in the solitude of the study, and kept till wanted with just as much effect as this vulgar intrusion on the usages of society. A great artist is always a man of the world; an inferior one a man of the palette. Raffaelle, Titian, Angelo, Rubens, and Reynolds, would have passed a twelvemonth in any society without being discovered to be artists; but the Caracci would have talked of tone and touching during the first half-hour. A genteel woman, accidentally travelling in a coach with three artists who were palette-men, expressed afterwards her wonder and suspicion as to the state of their intellects. For after the usual dead silence, one of them said, with an air of vast profundity: "How finely the white sheet in the hedge carries off the colour in the sky." "And look at that old woman's cloak taking up the brick-wall," said another. "Yes," said the oldest of the set, "how finely it was done yesterday by a red night-cap in a pretty bit of Sir George." Johnson used to say, "Sir, we were reduced to talk of the weather." But even the weather is preferable to this detestable affectation. Though the deepest principle of the ancients was the preservation of beauty in everything, they never sacrificed beauty to expression, but always combined the two; whereas Guido, by an eternal repetition of the expression of the Niobe in Christs and Virgins rendered the preservation of beauty at such an expense insipid. The beauty of the Helen and Paris was truly exquisite; but hundreds of Herodias's daughters with St. John's heads, "have a look," as Lord Byron says, "of bread and butter." His grace was the grace of theatres; his pencil light, airy, and beautiful, though rather careless than masterly. Dominichino, on the other hand, obedient, slow, and timid, imitated everybody and fell short of all. But Guercino was the most original of the school; his finest manner is his candlelight manner, yet still there is a vulgarity in his forms.

None of the Caracci or their school, had they been born at an earlier period, would have advanced the art one iota beyond their predecessors, so entirely dependent were they upon the great who had gone before. "Such was the state of art," says Fuseli, "when the spirit of machinery destroyed what was yet left of meaning;" when contrast and grouping meant composition and thinking, and a mass of rapid, thoughtless, empty, impudent frescos disgraced the walls, palaces, and churches of Italy. Pietro of Cortona and Luca Giordano are the heroes of this inundation of splashesness; and yet what artists they were! The decay which it announced, was the decay of the giant Italian fresco-hand that still struggled to do its duty, whilst the head was fast approaching imbecility in thought. The meanest pupil of the meanest machinist would have swept the first-rate British artist that has ever yet existed into the earth, with his tiptoes and exhibition-glare.

Thus, with the Caracci and their school, ended the greatness of Italian art; nor has there been one single painter of Italian art such genius since, from Andrea Sacchi to Camuccini, the present hero of the Romans. Rubens, Van Dyke, and Rembrandt turned it into a new channel in Flanders; Velasquez and Murillo kept it alive in Spain; Teniers, Ostade, and Jan Steen preserved it from extinction in Holland; the Poussins, Claude, and Salvator, meanwhile revived it in Italy; whilst the old Gothic masters in Germany, with their colour, and most of them with great invention but in bad taste, were an absolute dung-hill of diamonds and pearls, which everybody has considered himself as having a right to plunder, not even excepting Raffaelle himself. Whilst the art was sunk to the lowest depths in Europe, Reynolds in England broke forth with a brilliancy of colour which has rendered it no longer a hopeless attempt to rival the gorgeousness of Venetian splendour. If ever there was a refutation of Reynolds' own theory, that "genius was the child of circumstances," he was a living one; in spite of all circumstances, in spite of the utter want of all education as a painter, in spite of all the apathy of the nation, and the extinction of art in Europe, out he came with a vigour and beauty which have ever since defied rivalry in portrait and children.

The Germans are an extraordinary nation, but always more or less under the influence of a wrong taste. Their early painters are full of thought; and as a proof of what Raffaelle's estimation of them must have been, he adopted almost to the letter, in his famous Spasino in Spain, Shoengar's magnificent composition of Christ bearing the cross. The hand leaning on the stone, with the momentary action of the drapery, is in Shoengar. The brute pulling Christ, in an old German dress, Raffaelle has taken and improved; and he has also placed the Marys in the fore-ground which Shoengar placed in the back-ground; but the whole of the composition is Shoengar's, though Raffaelle of course has added to it its own perfections.

Albert Dürer is considered the greatest man of the German school; but there is nothing which he has ever done that can compete, in expression and composition, with this fine production of Shoengar's. Fuseli says, "Albert Dürer was a man of great ingenuity, but not of genius. His proportions of the human figure are on a comprehensive principle founded on nature, and the result of deep thinking." He had sometimes a glimpse of the sublime, but it was only a glimpse. The expanded agony of Christ on the Mount of Olives, and the mystic conception of his figure of Melancholy, are thoughts of sublimity, though the expression of the latter is weakened by the rubbish he has thrown about her. His Knight, attended by Death and the Fiend, is more capricious than terrible; and his Adam and Eve are two common models shut up in a rocky dungeon. "If he approached genius in any part of his art, it was in colour; his colour went beyond his age, and as far excelled in truth, and breadth, and handling, the oil colour of Raffaelle, as Raffaelle excelled him in every other quality. I speak of his easel-pictures; his drapery is broad though much too angular, and rather snapt than folded. Albert is called the father of the German school, though he neither reared scholars nor was imitated by the German artists of his or the succeeding century. That the exportation of his works to Italy should have effected a temporary change in the principles of some Tuscan who had studied Michel Angelo, as Andrea del Sarto, and Jacopo da Pontorino, is a fact which proves that minds as well as bodies may be at certain times subject to epidemic influences."

Lucas von Leyden was the Dutch caricature of Albert Dürer; and ere long the style of Michel Angelo was adopted in the same way as by Pelegrino Tibaldi, and being spread by the grave of Giorgio Mantuanio, provoked those caravans of German, Dutch, and Flemish students, who, on their return from Italy, introduced at the courts of Prague and Munich, in Flanders and the Netherlands, that preposterous manner, that bloated excrescence of swampy brains, which in the form of man left nothing human, distorted action and gesture with insane affectation, and dressed the gewgaws of children in colossal shapes, in the style of Golzius and Spranger. But though content to feed upon the husks of Tuscan design, they imbibed the colour of Venice, and spread the elements of that excellence which distinguished the succeeding schools of Flanders and of Holland. At this moment out blazed upon the world that giant of execution and brute violence of brush, and brilliant colour, and daring composition, Rubens; and another mysterious and extraordinary being, Rembrandt, who seemed born to confound all theory but that of innate genius, confirmed it for ever. Rubens glowed in the splendour of the rainbow, whilst Rembrandt enjoyed only the poetry and solemnity of twilight; when the evening star glittered, and the sun was down, then was the hour of his inspiration.

The scholar of Otho Venus, Rubens, imbibed from his Ruben master an emblematical taste; he spent eight years in Italy, hurried back at the death of his mother, and painted that wonder of art the Elevation of the Cross, before he was thirty. It is the perfection of a fearless hand and daring brush, conscious of its principle; and though the sweep of Michel Angelo's contours, applied to butchers' backs and coal-heavers' legs, rather increased their vulgarity than added to their refinement, yet the dashing power of that astonishing picture, in spite of its Flemish, pallid, and ugly wretches for women, renders it the bloom of his powers. Rubens was a man of such general knowledge, that the Marquis of Spinosa said, that painting was his least qualification. He was ambassador to Spain and England, and adorned the banqueting ceiling at Whitehall, the centre portion forming an amazing picture. Educated classically, he carried classical feeling into everything but his art; and after spouting Virgil with enthusiasm, he turned to his canvas and painted a Flemish butcher with handy legs (if he happened to have such) for Aeneas. How extraordinary it is that, relishing as he did, Homer, Virgi, and Livy, he should give Dutch Helens, Flemish Junos, and German Diomeds, for classic art. His greatest work is the Luxembourg Gallery; and for once he hit a sweet female expression in the mother of Mary de Medicis, after accouchement. One of his finest pieces, the Rape of Proserpine, is at Blenheim, where the Arethusa, as a water nymph, is putting up her hand, with her back towards you. That a man who could occasionally paint with such delicacy, should so often disgust us with his flabby vulgarity, is not to be accounted for. He painted portrait finelly, landscape sweetly, and animals with great power, except the lion, whose straight shaggy mane he always curled like the ancients, and lost its noble look. He was a great man, and painted wherever he went. He was diligent and religious; he rose at four, heard mass, and went to his painting-room, where, with little intermission, he painted till five; he then rode, and returned to his friends, many of them the most celebrated men of the day, who were assembled to meet him at supper; at eleven he retired, and again proceeded to work at day-break. It is interesting to contrast this virtuous course of so great a man, with the vulgar fidelity which alone distinguishes the most incompetent in the art; and it is impossible not to conclude, that those whom God has most endowed with gifts, are the most sensible of their own imperfections. Rubens was thrice married, and educated his children highly; one of them wrote a very learned work, De lato Claro, which shews research and learning.

Nowhere did Rubens shine so effectually as in the Louvre. In all the world, perhaps, there never was such a splendid opportunity for studying to perfection the principles of the great men in the art, as was afforded in the Louvre in its full glory; and injurious as the formation of that collection had proved to the cities of Italy, yet Napoleon gave a dignity and an importance to the art, which it has not since lost, by making the productions of its great men subjects of treaty, and receiving them as equivalent to territory or treasure. There you rushed from the Romans to the Venetians, from the Flemings to the Spaniards, from Titian to Raffaelle, from Rembrandt to Rubens, and settled principles in half an hour, which it took others months, perhaps years, to accomplish. It cannot be denied, that in force of effect, Rubens bore down all opposition, from his breadth, brightness, and depth; and let every painter be assured, that if he keep these three qualities of effect, the leading qualities in the imitation of nature, he will defy rivalry in the contest of exhibition. Rembrandt, with all his magic painting on too confined a principle, lost in power, and looked spotty and individual. Paul Veronese and Tintoretto had not that solidity, which is the characteristic of Rubens; Titian seemed above contest, and relying on his native majesty of colour, exhibited a senatorial repose, which gave to Rubens a look almost of impertinence; but still you could not keep your eyes off the seducer, and even if you turned your back, you kept peeping over your shoulder. Here all peculiarity suffered. The silvery beauty of Guido looked grey; the correctness of Raphael looked hard; Rembrandt failed most by the brightness of Rubens, the magic of Correggio, or the sunny splendour of Titian; and after wandering about for days, you decided that he suffered most who had most peculiarity. With all his grossness, want of beauty, and artificial style, Rubens' brightness and breadth carried the day, as far as arresting the eye, and forcing you to look at him, hate as you might his vulgarity, and his Flemish women, and his Flanders breed of horses.

Rembrandt van Ryn was next to Rubens, in point of art, and more than equal to him in originality. Whether in portrait, landscape, or historical pictures large and small, he was like nobody; as wonderful as any, and sometimes superior to all. His bistre-drawings are exquisite, his etchings unrivalled; his colour, light and shadow, and surface, solemn, deep, and without example; but in the naked form, male or female, he was an Esquimaux. His notions of the delicate form of women, would have frightened an Arctic bear. Let the reader fancy a Billingsgate fish-woman, descending to a bath at a moment's notice, with hideous feet, large knees and bony legs, a black eye, and a dirty night-cap,—and he will have a perfect idea of Rembrandt's conception of female beauty. Though his historical pictures are often remarkable for pathos and expression, his characters are sometimes absolutely ridiculous. His Abrahams are Dutch old clothesmen; and yet, his Jacob's Dream is sublime beyond expression. Whatever he painted, he etched; his surface was a mass of genius, and his colour a rainbow, darkened by the gloom of twilight. In portrait, sometimes, his dignity was equal to Titian; but the characters he painted were inferior.

These two wonderful men, each a perfect contrast to the other, revived art; Rubens on the principles of the Venetians, and Rembrandt in defiance of all principles. But the latter sacrificed too much to a peculiarity, and he was punished for it in the Louvre by the side of others.

Rubens produced Vandyke, Snyders, and Jordaeus, and a whole host of pupils. Vandyke had more elegance, but not so much imagination; Jordaeus more vulgarity, with equal power. Snyders was a mere animal painter, and he carried the touch necessary to execute the hairy skin of an animal, into every thing he did. Vandyke by his splendid portraits, certainly generated a love of art in England, which has never left us, after the destruction of historical painting at the Reformation.

Rembrandt had pupils, who were by no means equal to himself. David Teniers the elder was a pupil of Rubens. These two extraordinary men were certainly the founders of the Dutch school; and the great principles of their works were carried by David Teniers the younger, Jan Steen, Ostade, and Carpi, into smaller and more delicate productions. A man of the highest ambition and noblest views in art can study with the greatest benefit the dead fish and bunches of turnips, servant girls and drunken boors, for beauty of handling and effects in art. He who looks down on the excellencies of the Dutch school, does so from a narrowness of understanding, and not an enlargement of views; and if an historical painter can see nothing to learn in their little beautiful works, he will not learn much from the greater productions of Titian.

Directly after the Flemish comes the Spanish school, which, not so vulgar as the former, was equally unideal. The Spaniards painted the people about them for all sorts of subjects and all sorts of characters; and they are only more refined than the Flemings because the Spaniards are a more cultivated people. The long possession of the Moors prevented the Spaniards from advancing as soon as Italy. The great schools in Spain have been those of Madrid, Seville, and Valencia. In 1446 Antonio Rincon abandoned the Gothic of the European artists; in 1475 Gallegos was so like Albert Dürer, that he is suspected to have been a pupil; in the sixteenth century riches flowed in, patronage was liberal, and what is most important of all, genius existed in Spain. Becerra de Baeza, pupil of Michel Angelo, painted in fresco, at Madrid, Salamanca, and Valladolid; and in the Trinità del Monte in Rome, there is also a picture of his. Various painters follow of course in all the schools, till the coming of the real hero of Spanish art.

Velasquez was born at Seville in 1599. He became a pupil Velasquez of Herrera, and left Seville in 1622, to seek his fortune in the metropolis; where he succeeded so completely as a portrait painter, that he got to court, and having become acquainted with Rubens, often visited his painting-room. Rubens must have been of the greatest use to him. Velasquez then visited Italy, but could not bear the Roman school after the Venetian. In masterly execution and life he surpassed Rubens and Van Dyke. Of all the great painters, he seems to have despised the most the vulgar appetite for what is called finish, that is, polished smoothness. Every touch from Velasquez is a thought calculated to express the leading points of the thing intended to convey it. Masterly beyond description, and delightful beyond belief, he conveyed the impressions of life as exquisitely as if his imitation breathed. But so utterly decayed is the present Spanish school, with its pompous academy, that Spaniards when asked how they can reconcile their hideous polish with the freedom of Velasquez, have answered that Velasquez was always in a hurry.

After Velasquez ranks Murillo, a man of a tenderer genius, Murillo, but equally alive to life. He has the surface of Correggio and colour peculiarly his own; and he was what the Italians call a Naturaliste, indeed, the whole school was of that species. Like Rembrandt and Rubens, the heroes of history are always the countrymen of the Spanish painter. The Prodigal Son is one of the finest works in the Duke of Sutherland's collection; it is beautiful in execution, light and shadow, and colour, but Spanish in character and expression. They never got beyond their model or their country; and this may in a great measure be owing to their masters having been Venetians, though Tibaldi and Torrigiano had visited Spain. Murillo was an exquisite painter, and if he had been soundly educated like the Greeks, would have been as refined a character and form as he is now in colour and handling. He first got an insight into painting from Moya, a pupil of Vandyke. Having sold his pictures to hawkers for what they would bring, he saved money and went to Madrid, and, with the frankness of genius, at once introduced himself to Velasquez, who received him like another Raphaelle. After three years of continued kindness, he returned to Seville, founded an Academy, and for his great work of St. Anthony at Padua, he received ten thousand reals. It is said that he covered more canvas than any body else; but after the acres of Rubens in the Louvre, that assertion is questionable. Velasquez and Murillo, of course, came like the rest, before academies. One now exists in Madrid, and no genius has appeared since its institution. It is quite ridiculous to see the same results all over the world; and it is still more ridiculous, to find the kings of Europe still continuing to found and embellish these useless establishments.

In France, throughout all the middle ages, the art of design was never extinct, either in mosaic, glass, tapestry, fresco, school miniature, or tempera. Though the learned author of the "Discours Historique" says, that the French were the first who presumed to personify the Almighty in the form of Painting.

man; yet nothing worth remembering occurred till the death of Leonardo, in the arms of Francis I. in 1518, and the employment of Primaticcio, Rosso, and Nicolo del Abbate. Jean Cousin in 1462, and Vouet in 1582, were the first French painters of any importance in this latter period. Simon Vouet, the younger, was the master of Le Sueur, Le Brun, Mignard, and Dufresnoy; he lived in 1600, and the best period of French art was from that time until 1665, the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV. They, as usual, founded an academy, ten years before Poussin's death; and Coy- pel, Jouvenet, and Rigaud, were the produce of the institution; whilst Poussin, Le Sueur, and Le Brun, had flourished and obtained their reputation before it was founded. Van Loo and Boucher succeeded Jouvenet and Rigaud, and gave additional evidence of the utter incompetence of the academic system. About 1770, flourished Greuze, who began to evince a better taste, and was persecuted by the Royal Academy for his independence, till the Revolution of 1790 put an end for the time to all imposture. Down went the Royal Academy in an instant; and all the conventional distinctions in art, which are generally the cloak of imbecility, were fluttered off in the whirlwind. The people, long prevented from seeing fine works in the great galleries, now broke into these galleries with brutal exultation. Bloody and dreadful as were the consequences of the first burst of the French Revolution, one of its most beneficial effects consisted in throwing open all matters of art and science to the people. Naigeon, the conservator of the Luxembourg, said, in 1814, that nothing was opened to the people before the Revolution; and we ourselves in England are now enjoying our Museums, entirely in consequence of the effect produced upon Mr. Fox and the English, who visited Paris in the year 1802, and who were astonished at the noble frankness with which the Louvre was exposed.

The academy being swallowed up in the whirlpool of political revolution, the Institute supplied its place. Napoleon, on becoming first consul, sent immediately for David, who had been a furious republican during "le temps de la terreur;" a man of great talent, but of abominable taste. Napoleon made him his court-painter, and gave such preponderance to his influence, that the detestable style of David became everywhere but in England the style of European art. Gros, Prudhom, Guérin, deviated from the rigidity of David's style. Prudhom was a man of genius. Hideous as was the style of David, in fact painted Roman sculpture, it had some foundation in reason. This was, if possible, to bring the French back to classical art, after the flutter of Boucher, and the pomposity of Coyppel; but, like all reformers, he went to excess.

The materials for assiating them are so deficient, that the greatest artists have arrived at anything like an imitation of nature only by the greatest science and skill. It is much easier to paint a button and a chair, than a human face; therefore the great artists dwelt upon the face with all their dexterity, and touched off the button and chair with less anxiety and care. The French used to say, that theirs was the system of the ancient Greeks, and that it was our prejudice to disapprove of it. But before we have done, we shall show that it was not the system of the ancient Greeks; and as we pay all due deference to the Italians, Flemings, Dutch, Spaniards, and Greeks, and to their own Poussin and Claude, they have no right to accuse us of prejudice because we disapprove of David. We do not deny David's talent, because it must have required talent to mislead the continent of Europe. In art David's expression was taken from the theatre, and his actions were borrowed from the opera house; his forms were Roman and not Grecian, and his colour was hideous enough to produce ophthalmia. If he and his pictures, with all he ever designed, and all he ever invented, had not appeared in the world, or having appeared, had been utterly rooted out of it, the atmosphere would be purer. He is a plague-spot, a whitened leprosy in painting, that haunts the imagination with disgust. This he had the impudence to say of Rubens. But since the peace, and from the connection with England, a better school of colour has sprung up in France; and La Roche gives evidence of having in some degree got rid of the furniture look of David, though it still poisons a French pencil.

Horace Vernet is a distinguished name; indeed, he may be called the first light-infantry grenadier of European art. He paints a head in five minutes, a whole imperial family in ten minutes, and an historical picture in twenty; and he paints all three with talent and skill. Though the French are not yet sound in art, they are the best educated artists in Europe; and if the English would combine their own colour with the careful habits of French early study, and if each school could supply the deficiencies of the other, they would make out a very good school between them.

In thus suffering ourselves to be led away to the modern state of the French school, we have omitted to do justice to the great men of former times; Poussin, Sebastian, Bourdon, and Le Sueur. Poussin is the hero of French art. His Death of Germanicus is very fine, as a specimen of history; and his Polyphemus sitting on the top of a mountain, and playing his pipe, with his back towards you, is a pure specimen of the poetic. He studied the ancient Romans so much, that he became Roman in his faces, drapery, and figures; and in his naked forms, the common model is too apparent. His finest works are in England; but though distinguished for expression, there is always an antique heartlessness, as if copied from the masks of an ancient theatre.

Bourdon's Return of the Ark is a high proof of his conception; and Le Sueur's St. Bruno is pure in taste, but bad in colour. The Battles of Alexander by Le Brun show the latter to have been of the family of machinists. His colour is bronzed and disagreeable. Le Brun was a court-favourite, and his Greeks, as well as barbarians, have an air of the opera at Versailles. His composition is artificial; and he is not a fit example for youth. The only man who coloured with exquisite feeling was Watteau, whose touch and delicacy of tint may be studied with great profit by any artist.

In a word, it is extraordinary that the French as a nation, have never been right in art. Poussin was the only man who could have set them right, and they persecuted him so, that he settled in Rome. Claude Lorraine can hardly belong to them; and though Louis Philippe employed them by hundreds, nothing very eminent appears to have proceeded from such encouragement.

The Germans are taking higher ground than any other Progress of nation, and are making rapid advances, particularly at Munich. They have begun again fresco painting; and the liberality of their king has rendered Munich the most flourishing city in Europe for arts and artists; but as Canova said when he was in England, there is very little grand art left in the world. It is extraordinary to reflect on the little original thinking that is to be found. This was more apparent in the Louvre than anywhere else; and one could not help being amused at seeing the way in which Rubens, who, like Michel Angelo, is supposed to have never looked out of himself, had plundered the old Gothic painters; the Fall of the Damned, by an old German, being the complete basis of the same subject by Rubens.

When incessant demands are made on the genius of a favourite, every aid to thinking is grasped at and improved. Raffaelle did this; so did Rubens; and even Reynolds used to have portfolios brought him to look over at breakfast, and select what would help him, saying, "It will save me the trouble of thinking." This involves a very serious question in art. The utmost merit that can be allowed is that of skilful adaptation. "Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit" may be said of all these; and surely a good thought badly done is justifiable food for a superior mind to render it better. We come now to the British School, which, though the last founded in Europe, is inferior to none in variety of power.

There is no doubt that the art would have advanced in Britain side by side with the continental nations, if we had continued Catholics; in fact, we were doing so, when Wickliffe's opposition to the Catholic priests roused up the people to hate and detest every thing connected with their system. Painting of course came under this furious denunciation, and through successive ages went on till the period of the Reformation.

In Edward the Confessor's time, there were executed bas-reliefs as good as anything done at that time in Europe, and by no means deficient in grace, though disproportioned, and unskilful in composition. In one of these there is a king in bed, and leaning upon his hand; which in an improved style might be made a fine thing. In Alfred's reign and before, York and Canterbury were adorned with pictures and tapestry; and in the tenth century, Ethelred adorned Ely Cathedral with a series of historical pictures in memory of her famous husband Birthwood. As this is recorded, says Strutt, the practice must have existed before; and that it continued to exist and be the fashion down to the Edwards and Henrys, there is good evidence; for in the time of Henry III. mention is made of the immortal Master Walker's painting in Westminster, the no less renowned John Thornton of Coventry, painter there, and the east window of York. In the reign of Henry VIII., there was a chartered society of painters; and in the seventeenth of Elizabeth it was moved in the House by Sir G. Moore, "that a bill to redress certain grievances in painting be let sleep, and be referred to the Lord Mayor, as it concerned a controversy between painters and plasters" and Sir Stephen Jones stood up and desired that the Lord Mayor "might not be troubled, and it seemed to go against the painters."

The painters who complained that the plasterers used their colours, and took the bread out of their mouths, go on to say, that in the nineteenth of Edward IV., that is in 1480, there were orders issued "for the use of oil and size," and that the "painters' only mixture was oil and size, which the plasterers do now usurp and intrude upon." In their petition they observe with the greatest simplicity: "Workmanship and skill is the gift of God, and not one in ten proveth a workman, and that none who cannot attain excellence must live by the baser part of the science." They add that "painting on cloth is decayed;" that this art is a curious art, and requireth a good eye, and a stedfast head, which the infirmity of age decayeth, and then painters go a-begging;" and then they conclude the petition to the House by this remarkable passage: "These walls thus curiously painted in former ages the images so perfectly done, do witness our forefathers care in cherishing this art of painting." "This bill," said Sir Stephen Jones, "is very reasonable and fit to pass," and so it did.

The above extract, proves that in Elizabeth's reign the historical attempts were alluded to, as belonging to former ages, viz. from the tenth century downwards; that the House of Commons praised the wisdom of those times in cherishing painting; and that this wisdom the Reformation had obviously discarded.

In 1538, Henry issued an order against the use of pictures and statues to impose on the people; yet pictures are called "hokes for unlearned people." In 1542, in his letter to Cranmer, the king tries to restrain the destruction of pictures; but it was too late. In the reign of Edward VI., the Duke of Somerset fined and imprisoned all those who possessed pictures of religious subjects. To such excess had the fury of the people been excited, that the recorder of Salisbury, Mr. Henry Sherfield, was fined L500, and imprisoned in the Fleet for not breaking a painted window in Salisbury Cathedral. Walpole says that one Bleese was employed at 2s. 6d. a-day to break windows at Croydon; and in Charles I.'s reign it was ordered, "that all pictures having the second person of the Trinity should be burnt, and that all pictures having the Virgin should share the same fate." Cromwell stopped this barbarity, and it was owing to the self-will of this extraordinary man that the Cartoons of Raphael were bought in for L300, at the sale of Charles's effects.

Thus it is clear the art was stopped by the Reformation. In St. Stephen's Chapel, before the alterations made some years since, there were figures painted on the walls, as excellent as any figures in the Campo Santo, and perhaps executed about the same period. In Elizabeth's reign, as we have seen, historical art is referred to with sorrow in the House, as a thing past but which had existed; and in the same reign, says Hillier, "men induced by nature," to pursue high art, "have been made poorer, like the most rare English drawers of story works." Now, Hillier would not have said this, if it had not been true that the drawers of story works were principally natives.

In Henry VII.'s time, Torrigiano, the same youth who had felled Michel Angelo to the ground in the gardens of Lorenzo and shattered his nose, was in England, and executed important works. In the time of Henry VIII., commissions for high art being over, Holbein devoted himself to court portrait-painting, though in the city he painted some large pictures. Rubens' and Vandyke's visit excited Dobson, a capital painter of a head; but although Oliver was distinguished as a miniature painter, and although there are designs at Oxford, by English painters, no one genius seemed to arise till after Lely and Kneller had succeeded Vandyke. Cooper was the first English painter employed in foreign courts as a miniature painter. Thornhill, a man of talent,

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1 It is a curious fact, that the art seems to have been in an advanced state in England, while it is doubtful whether there was a painter in Florence in 1296. In 1250 the authorities in Florence sent for some Greeks because there was no painter; yet at that period in England, and long before, historical painting seemed quite the fashion amongst the upper classes. All the king's rooms, as well as his chapel, were panelled. In the 29th of Edward III., in the rolls of the Exchequer, 26th September 1331, there is a charge to "William of Padrengton, for making two angels to stand in the tabernacles by task-work, at 6s. 8d. for each image, L6, 13s. 4d." In 1530, were begun the beautiful pictures and designs in St. Stephen's Chapel; and it is curious to see, in all the accounts, the continual allusions to oil-painting. The artists employed must certainly have been men of distinguished talent, who had the power of ordering inferior artists to assist them. The name of one of these numbers appears to have been Hugh de St. Alban's, who was appointed by the king as his principal painter. The following document, dated 16th March, 1530, contains his appointment. "The king to all and singular, the sheriffs, mayors, bailiffs, officers, and his other lieutenants, well known likewise to whom he granteth, know ye, that we have appointed our beloved Hugh de St. Alban's, master of the painters, required for the works, as he is appointed in our chapel, at our palace at Westminster, to take and choose as many painters and other workmen as may be required for performing those works, and to place there it may seem expedient, either within liberties or without, in the counties of Kent, Middlesex, Essex, Surrey, and Sussex, and to cause those workmen to come to our palace aforesaid, there to remain in our service, at our wages, as long as it may be necessary. And therefore we command you to be counselling and assisting this Hugh, and completing what has been stated, as often and in such manner as the said Hugh may require." (See Britten's West. Pol. p. 170.) The illustrious Hugh seems to have been a designer; for in the books (25 Edward III.), there is the following entry, "to H. de St. Albans, ordering or designing the drawings for the painters, one day, Ls."

2 See Carter's Etchings.

3 See Sir W. Monson's Account of the Acts of Elizabeth, 1632, British Museum.

4 See Journals of the House, 23rd July 1645. and a member of the House, forms the link between one race and another; and then sprung up Hogarth, Gainsborough, Wilson, West, and Barry. As usual, when Reynolds and Hogarth had for ever rescued Britain from all doubt as to her genius, without an academy of any description, a royal academy was founded to produce more genius, just as had been done all over Europe; and no man equal to Reynolds and Hogarth has since appeared. After the academy was founded at Milan by Leonardo, no genius like his appeared. After that of St. Luke was founded at Rome, Raphaelle and all being dead, no one came forth. After an academy had been founded at Parma, Corregio being gone, nobody appeared. After a national academy was founded at Venice, and royally endowed, genius fled. The same thing happened in Ferrara, Modena, Florence, and Naples; and also in France, Spain, and England. Need further evidence be sought of the uselessness of such institutions?

In 1711, there existed a school, of which Kneller was the head, whilst Vertue the engraver drew in it. After 1724, Sir James Thornhill opened a school in his own home Covent Garden, and so did the Duke of Richmond at Whitehall Privy Gardens. Sir James proposed to Lord Halifax to found a royal academy, but without success. At Sir James' death, the school was broken up, and the artists were again left without instruction; when, for the purpose of studying the living model, they hired a room in Greyhound Court, Arundel Street, and Michael Moses was the conductor of it. Here they were visited by Hogarth, who was so well pleased, that a union of the whole body took place, and they removed to Peter's Court, St. Martin's Lane. The number of members amounted to a hundred and forty-one, each paying an annual subscription. There was at the time a great deal of happy fellowship amongst the artists. Reynolds, who was a member, with Hogarth and others, adorned the Foundling Hospital; and the public were so interested, that the society thought they might venture on a charter, which was obtained, and there was established by law a government of twenty-four directors, annually elected, including the president, by the whole body and out of it. An united exhibition having begun (the constant source of irritation, for every man cannot have his works in the best places), squabbles arose; and the directors finding the benefit of being able to hang their own works and those of their friends in the best situations, intrigued to keep their places another year. This was foolishly granted; and every subsequent year finding themselves becoming a match for the constituency, they kept their places for eight years, in defiance of law; so that at last it was found that the men elected to preserve order and law, had been the grossest violators of both. With the feelings of independent freemen, the constituencies resolved to endure this no longer; when, to prevent collision, it was agreed to refer the point to the Attorney-General. De Grey, both parties pledging themselves to abide by his decision. De Grey gave it against the directors, and these honourable men then refused to keep their word. The constituency met, and violently expelled sixteen of them; but before resigning, these gentlemen met secretly, and fearing exposure, tore out and destroyed the minutes from the 19th November 1764, to the 11th March 1765, and from the 17th of June 1765, to the 21st of March 1766. They then went to the king, George III., whom they persuaded that the chartered body was republican; and that there was no hope unless a royal academy was founded, with the number of members and voters limited to forty. The king, without inquiry, foolishly yielded to their cunning suggestions, and founded an academy with forty members; the other eight directors resigned directly, and the whole twenty-four were made R.A.'s. Thus by this limited number were framed the present exclusive law and constitution, and all the obnoxious regulations passed, which had been checked by the sense of a constituency; and thus the art of England received a blow more fatal than at the Reformation. The weakness of the nation has been gratified to an excess by this interested assembly, to the ruin of their taste and judgment; high art has gone back, and is going back further every year, by the struggles of these men to keep up their monopoly, in defiance of the increasing intelligence of the people, which they fear, and which will yet be their utter destruction. In this affair Reynolds behaved with great meanness. He promised to stand by the constituency; yielded at the offer of a knighthood; was afterwards justly punished, by being compelled to resign; and foolishly complained of ingratitude which he had deserved.

In order that the state of art in Great Britain may be rightly understood, this authentic detail, taken from pamphlets published at the time, especially that of Sir Robert Strange, has been thought necessary; and it will not appear tedious, if it be considered that, for the sake of the art of our own country, it is but just that particulars should be ascertained. The effect of the academy has been pernicious. Imitating the example, all the eminent provincial towns have established exhibitions instead of schools; and every year the annual exhibition in the metropolis is repeated in the provinces, with but little addition to that which proved unsaleable in the London show. Hogarth opposed such a conclusion, and from the beginning predicted its effect, which has happened to the very letter; and when Reynolds began to perceive the truth, he acknowledged his error, and said to Sir George Beaumont, that "a party was gaining ground which would ruin the art." If the detail of every other academy in Europe could be thus laid open, the same intrigues, the same despotism, the same injustice, and the same want of principle would be found at the bottom; and Europe would no longer wonder that academies never have produced a Raffaelle.

The honest and straightforward constituency being thus deserted as it were unprotected by the king, it was soon deserted by the nobility and the public, and shortly escaped notice altogether; though such a man as Hogarth had improved his knowledge by drawing in its schools. The literary splendour with which Reynolds was surrounded, gave glory to the Academy which has not yet lost; and the genius of Reynolds spread a halo around it, which the artists still fancy they see, though it vanished the moment he expired. Reynolds was really a great artist; gorgeous in tone and colour, unimpeachable in composition, deep in light and shadow, beautiful in character, and the purest painter of children and women that ever lived in the art, Greek or Italian. His ignorance belonged to the period; his beauties were entirely his own; and though he overrated Michel Angelo, and has done injury to taste, by his sincere conviction that he was right, yet had he lived to see the Theseus or Ilyssus, he would have been equally candid in saying he was in error. Lord Heathfield is a portrait that need not fear any work of Titian's for men; and Mrs. Parker, a tender, sweet picture of a woman, was never equalled in sentiment or delicacy by any work of the Venetian and Roman schools. Where were children ever so completely hit as in the Infant Academy? who surpassed the propriety of his back-grounds as well as their splendour? His eye, or rather his organ for colour, was exquisite; nor is there in the whole of his works a heated and offensive tint. He did not combine essential detail and breadth so beautifully as

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1 See Sir Robert Strange's pamphlet, and another published in the year 1771, by Dixwell, St. Martin's Lane, entitled "On the Conduct of the Royal Academicians," in the British Museum.

2 This was told the author by Sir George; and has since been confirmed by his pamphlet, "Concise Vindication," &c. in British Museum. Painting: Titian; but place one of his finest portraits by the side of any picture of Titian's, see them at the proper distance, and Reynolds would keep his station. Here, however, the praise must stop. Reynolds could have no more painted Pietro Martyr than he could have revived the martyr after he was dead. He was not so great a man as Titian, because he did not like him remedy his ignorance, when he found it out at a much earlier age. He was always talking of what he would do if he began the world again. Sir Joshua loved society; he was the deity of his coteries; he liked a glass of wine and a game at whist; and he never lost his temper because he was successful in the world, but the first time he was thwarted he got in a passion. Reynolds was a great genius in painting, but not a great man. He raised English art from the dust, and gave English artists an oplomb in society which they never had before, and he first reduced the art to something like system by his discourses; but not having moral courage to resist the formation of an academy, which he could have done by his influence and his genius, he compromised the art, and was indirectly the means of throwing it off its balance, which it will yet take half a century more to remedy, as Hogarth predicted.

As an inventor, Hogarth is by far the greatest of the British school; although in aim and object, colour, surface, and all the requisites of a great painter, infinitely below Reynolds. It would be useless to detail the perfections of a man so admired all over the earth, and who will only cease to be a delight with its existence. It is astonishing how hereditary is the hatred of academies. The painters in revenge for Hogarth's opposition, swore that he was no painter, and swear so to this hour. The absurdity of this criticism can be proved by the Marriage à la Mode, whilst the picture of the husband and wife after a rout, is as beautifully touched as any in that class of art can be. He has not the clearness of Teniers, nor the sharpness of Wilkie; his touch is blunt, and his colour deficient in richness; but you feel not the want whilst looking at him; and although his expression is often caricature, yet in the above picture it is perfection. Hogarth unfortunately believed himself infallible; but hisretched beauty of Drury Lane for Pharaoh's daughter at the Foundling, his miserable Sigismunda, and his Paul before Felix, we hope convinced him of his forte. If he was serious in these pictures, which we very much doubt, he deserved a strait waistcoat and a low diet as the only treatment for his hallucination.

Gainsborough was another painter of great genius in portrait and landscape; but Wilson was a greater. His touch and feeling were comprehensive, though too abstracted for the vulgar, who always like polish and to put up their fingers. He used to say to Sir George Beaumont, "When somebody is dead somebody's pictures will sell better." From neglect he got into foolish habits of drinking and died librarian to the academy. A miserable dauber called Lambert was the fashion, and his character as a landscape painter was hit by poor Wilson. He said "his trees and foliage were eggs and spinach, and nothing more;" yet Lambert got hundreds when Wilson could hardly get shillings. But where are now the immortal Lambert's works? Making fire-screens for garrets, whilst "somebody's pictures" adorn the houses of the great. Gainsborough was a great portrait painter and ran Reynolds hard. West's Wolf and La Hogue are the triumphs of his talent; but his great sacred subjects are inferior works. The writer of this observed to Canova in England, "Au moins, il compose bien." "Monsieur," replied the Italian, "il compose pas; il met des figures en groupe." He was a skilful machinist; and though thereare bits of colour in his small works, rich and harmonious, his portraits are detestable, his handling unfeeling, his drawing meagre and common. He was deeply versed in nothing, though possessing great acquired knowledge of his art without being an educated man. With respect to his being the greatest man since the Caracci, with Rembrandt, Rubens, Vandyke, and Dominichino, Guido, and Guercino since, or a little after, the idea is ridiculous and absurd. The king hated Reynolds on account of his devotion to Burke and Fox, and puffed West from sheer irritability. The king said to Hopper, "Why does Reynolds paint his trees red and yellow?" who ever saw trees that colour?" Hopper, who said what he pleased, replied, "Then your majesty never saw trees in autumn."

Romney, a second-rate man, had great patronage, whilst Barry, Barry, a man of great grasp of mind, had none whatever. Barry joined the Academy to oblige Reynolds, against his own convictions; was soon at issue with its selfish monopoly; opposed it; urged the propriety of devoting a portion of its funds to establish a school of colour; exasperated the intriguers by his fearless attacks; and was expelled of course as an obnoxious man, the king having been persuaded to sanction it, under the deadly hint that Barry was a radical. Barry was the protege of Burke, and his Adelphi pictures, shewing the progress of society, though deficient in drawing, colour, and delicacy of touch, were the first work in England on the comprehensive principle of the ancients. Having neglected Burke's repeated entreaties to dissect, he suffered the consequence. His forms at the Adelphi are such as can be got by general drawings from the antique, but there is no refined knowledge of construction in them.

As a man of genius, however, Barry is not to be compared Fuseli. To Henry Fuseli, the friend of Reynolds and Lavater, and one of the most distinguished and accomplished men of his time. Fuseli was undoubtedly the greatest genius of that day. His Milton gallery shewed a range of imagination equal to the poet's; his Satan bridging Chaos, his Uriel watching Satan, his Shepherd's Dream, his Fairies from Shakespeare, and his Ghost in Hamlet, announce him as having conceived, like Theon, phantasias, and as being the greatest inventor in art since Julio Romano. But in the modes of conveying his thoughts by form, colour, light, and shadow; and above all, nature, he was a monster in design; his women are all strumpets, and his men all banditti, with the action of galvanized frogs, the dress of mountebanks, and the hue of pestilential putridity. No man had the power like Fuseli of rousing the dormant spirit of youth; and there issued from his inspirations a nucleus of painters, who have been the firmest supporters of the British school.

But Fuseli, as a painter, must be a warning to all. Had he taken the trouble to convey his thoughts like the great masters, his pictures would have risen as time advanced; yet as time advances, his pictures, from having no hold on our feelings like the simplicity of nature, must sink. His conceptions however poetical, are not enough to satisfy the mind in an art, the elements of which are laid in lovely nature; and great as his genius was in fancy and conception, inventor as he was in art of fairies and ghosts, he will never be an object to imitate, but always to avoid by young men, who are more likely to lay hold of his defects than his beauties. The finest conception of a ghost that was ever painted, was the Ghost in Hamlet on the battlements. There it quivered with martial stride, pointing to a place of meeting with Hamlet; and round its visored head was a halo of light that looked sulphureous, and made one feel as if one actually smelt hell, burning, cinders, and suffocating. The dim moon glittered behind; the sea roared in the distance, as if agitated by the presence of a supernatural spirit; and the ghost looked at Hamlet, with eyes that glared like the light in the eyes of a lion, which is savagely growling over his bloody food. But still it was a German ghost, and not the ghost of Shakespeare. There was nothing in it to touch human sympathies combined with the infernal; there was nothing at all of "his sable, silvered beard," or his countenance more "in sorrow than in anger;" it was a fierce, demoniacal, armed fiend reeking from hell, who had not yet expiated "the crimes done in his days of nature," to qualify him for heaven. His next finest works were the two fairy pictures in the Shakespeare gallery, some diving into barebells, some sailing in Bottom's shoe; but beautiful as they were, indeed the only fairies ever painted, still your heart longed for nature in colour, form, action, and expression. Such an union had the Greeks, and no art in the world will be perfect until it appears again. These pictures are evidences of the highest conception of the fanciful and supernatural. His Lazar House is an evidence of his power of pathos; his Uriel and Satan of the poetical; his Puck putting on a giraffe, of the humorous and mischievous. But when Fuseli attempted the domestic, as in the illustrations of Cowper, his total want of nature stares one in the face, like the eyes of his own ghosts. Never were the consequences of disdaining the daily life before your eyes, or of affecting to be above it, so fatally developed as in this series of design; though in comparing with him another eminent artist, namely, Stothard, who, in sweetness and innocence, was his decided superior, Fuseli surpassed him in elevation and reach of mind. In the pictures of Stothard, who painted equally well without life before him, there is not the same extravagance, yet there is almost equal want of nature in another way. Flaxman, Stothard, and Fuseli, are the three legitimate designers of our school, and yet not one of them was perfect master of the figure.

Flaxman's designs from the Iliad and the Greek tragedies are his finest works; and when first they appeared in Italy, they were denied to be the invention of an Englishman, as it was supposed to be impossible that any Englishman could have an imagination. But yet of some of these designs it really may be said, "Il n'y a qu'un pas du sublime au ridicule." It is extremely difficult to say whether they are in the highest degree sublime or extremely absurd. In all attempts to express the passions, you will perceive extravagance; but in comparing him with Canova, in this part of the art, Canova must yield the palm as much as Flaxman was inferior in the perfection of working up a single and beautiful figure. Though this eminent man talks pompously of Greek form and anatomical knowledge, he in reality knew very little of either; and though there is a great deal of useful matter of fact in his lectures, yet on the whole they display a wretched poverty of thinking. His book of Anatomy for students is not deep enough on the separation of muscle, bone, and tendon, and can help a young man a very little way to correct notions. The value of Fuseli's and Opie's lectures in comparison with Flaxman's or Barry's is evident; and the superiority of Reynolds to all, except Fuseli in his lecture on Greek art, needs not to be dwelt on.

Stothard, as an inventor in composition, was equal to all, but as a painter, certainly inferior to all. In fact he could not paint; he had no identity of imitation; he did not and could not tell a story by human passions; and his style of design showed great ignorance of the constituent parts of the figure. But there was a beautiful and angelic spirit that breathed on every thing he did. He seems in early life to have dreamed of an angel, and to have passed the remainder of his days in trying to endow every figure he designed, with something of the sweetness that he had seen in his sleep. Peace to his mild and tender spirit. It was impossible to be in Stothard's painting-room for ten minutes without being influenced by his angelic mind. He seemed to us always as if he had been born in the wrong planet. He had a son whose etchings from our ancient tombs are an honour to the country. He fell from a great height, in pursuing his designs from some tomb in a country church, and was killed. This ill-fated artist was in every respect worthy of his father.

Never were there four men so essentially different as West, Fuseli, Flaxman, and Stothard. Fuseli was undoubtedly the man of the largest capacity and the most acquired knowledge; West was an eminent artist in the second rank; Flaxman and Stothard were purer designers than either; Barry and Reynolds were before all the others. In Barry's Adelphi there is a grasp of mind, as Johnson said; yet as a painter he was inferior to all. Though Fuseli had more imagination and conception than Reynolds, though West put things together with more facility, and Flaxman and Stothard did what Reynolds could not do; yet as a sound, great, and practical artist, in which all the others were deficient, Reynolds must be considered the head of the British school as a painter and handler of his brush.

Opie must not be omitted, nor Northcote his imitator and Opie's contemporary, both of them men of talent. Opie, a man of Northcote, great and powerful genius, issued from Cornwall at once on Wilkie's town. Northcote was six years with Reynolds; and his Arthur and Hubert, and Children in the Tower, are fair specimens of his talents. He was a malicious man, and tried to injure his greatest protector, Reynolds, and Dr. Mudge who introduced him, by allowing Hazlitt to print his (Northcote's) Conversations. There never was a deeper scheme for malignant defamation. Northcote always said that he did not print them, and Hazlitt that he did not talk them; and each vented his spite on a mutual friend, and shifted the blame to the other. Reynolds was succeeded by West, and the art sunk to the lowest depth, containing only Sir Joshua's humble imitators, when a genius broke forth, David Wilkie, who rendered our domestic school, the first in Europe; and the feeling for art has been rapidly advancing amongst the people ever since. This many circumstances unite to prove.

In consequence of the perpetual complaints from the Parliament body of artists, the government granted a committee meeting in 1835, to examine the cause of the superiority of France in inquiry manufacturing design, as well as the condition of high art, and to ascertain if the accusations against the Royal Academy were true or false. Never in the world were the consequences of a monopoly on the perceptions of respectable men so ludicrously developed. The president and body first denied the right of the House of Commons to examine them at all; and when the persuasions of their friends showed them their folly, their appearance before the committee presented a scene never to be forgotten in the history of English painting. On all questions of finance, they proved satisfactorily the honour of their transactions; but on all questions of art more was proved against them than ever had been suspected. The resignation of Reynolds, and the expulsion of Barry; the loss of a million of money to the art on the Waterloo monument, in consequence of their not replying to Lord Castlereagh's committee; their refusal to let the artists also support their exhibition, and have the same opportunities of fitting their works for the public as at the British Gallery; and, to crown all, their rendering the school of design lately established of no avail to the mechanic, by establishing a law, that the study of the figure is not necessary for his education, though it was proved that this study at the Lyons academy for mechanics, was the real cause of their superiority to us; are such indisputable evidence against their protestations of sincerity, that it has rendered the nobility and the nation more than suspicious of the truth of all the accusations which have been made against them.

In Scotland the art is in a promising condition, and the Scottish school in purer taste than the English. Living as Was Italian art equal to Greek art? Certainly not. In the finest Italian there is a want of beauty in form and face, which Greek art could only supply. Poussin said, that Raphael was an angel in comparison with the moderns, but in comparison with the ancients he was an ass. Though this is vulgar, it is in our opinion true. The ancients combined the Venetian and Roman schools; they considered form, colour, light and shadow, surface, expression, and execution, as all equally component parts of imitation, and all necessary to perfect that imitation which was to be employed as an instrument to convey thought. They combined the drawing and the colouring of the two great Italian schools; as these illustrious schools tried to do when they found out their error, in pursuing one at the expense of the other.

Reynolds, from the defective practice of each school, laid it down that colour was incompatible with high art; and he also laid it down that the ancients could not be great painters in a whole, though they might be in a solo, from the pictures on the walls of Pompeii. We do not wonder at any man so concluding before the Elgin marbles arrived; but we do marvel at Reynolds taking the works in the private rooms of a provincial Roman city as justifiable grounds on which to estimate the extent of genius in Greek art at its finest period, five hundred years before. But after all, what are the pictures of Pompeii? Very probably the designs in Pompeii would rank about as high in ancient art, as the designs of our paper-stainers in Bond Street would in British art. The pictures at Pompeii are no more criteria of what the art of Apelles and Polygnotus really was, than any sculpture dug up there would be a criterion of what the art of Phidias was. Reynolds undervalues contemporary praise; but Quintilian, Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Strabo, Polybius, Pausanias, Valerius Maximus, Ælian, and Pliny, were not contemporary; and, therefore, the praises of Aristotle or of Plato who were, justify the enthusiasm of those who were not.

Since the works of Phidias arrived in England, we have positive evidence that the Greeks knew the great principles of composition and grouping, as applied to painting; because the metopes are instances of arrangement of line, that will do exactly in a picture, if the Laocoön had not shown it before. Having now seen the Elgin marbles, which the Greeks estimated as their finest work, and having found all the enthusiasm of the ancients more than borne out, have we not a justifiable ground to argue from what we do see in one art, that what we do not see in another was equally excellent? Will any man, after seeing the Theseus and Ilyssus, doubt that the ivory Minerva and Olympian Jupiter were equally, if not more beautiful? Why should the ancient critics have faith placed in all their decisions except those on painting? Why should they lose their perspicacity of understanding only when they talked of this art? After Aristotle and Plato had admired the Minerva inside the Parthenon and the sculptures outside, they might admire the pictures; and nobody will deny them the power of making comparisons. Had the Elgin marbles and the old antique never been seen, would not the same sophistry have been put forth to question the merit of their sculpture as well as to deny that of their painting? "Nothing can be more perfect than Phidias," says Cicero. "You cannot praise him enough," exclaims Pliny. "He made gods better than men," says Quintilian. "He was skilful in beauty," says Plato. You believe all this, because you cannot contradict it; but the moment Quintilian says, "Zeuxis discovered light and shade; Parrhasius was exquisite for subtlety of line; Apelles for grace; Theon for poetical conceptions (ποιητικός); Pamphilus for mathematical principle; Polygnotus for simplicity of epic arrangement in colour and form; Protogenes for finish;"—when Pliny commends Aristides for expression, and Amphion for composition, and speaks of the grand assemblage of the gods by Zeuxis, as well as the single figures of Apelles, Reynolda Painting replies, "Admiration often proceeds from ignorance of higher excellence; I will not believe contemporaneous praise." We answer, that admiration oftener proceeds from knowledge of superior excellence; that the most enthusiastic admirers of Greek painting were not contemporary; and that Reynolds' conclusions against Greek art are founded upon data which are altogether erroneous.

Taking the Elgin marbles as a standard, we cannot but suppose that the finest great works of Greek art had the finest drawing, the most wonderful knowledge of form, the finest grouping, and the finest expression. To this may be added, colour from Pliny, light and shadow from Quintilian; perspective from Vitruvius; fore-shortening, dwelling on the leading points, like Vandyke, and touching off the inferior parts from Plutarch; and, what was never suspected, execution with the brush from Horace, on the leading principles of the Venetians. The French used to affirm, that David's principle was the same as that of the Greeks, namely, obtruding on the attention all the superior parts, and neglecting the inferior ones. In Plutarch's life of Alexander, at the very beginning, he describes to his readers his plan of writing his lives, and concludes with this extraordinary passage: "Like painters that paint portraits, who dwell on the face, caring little about the remaining parts." His meaning is, that he would, like painters, dwell upon the leading points in the history of great men and lightly touch off the inferior parts. Could he have made such an allusion for the general reader, if this had not been the practice of the great Greek painters? Again, Horace says in the art of poetry,

Ut pictura poesis est: qua si propria stes, Te capiat magis; quaedam si longius absces.

That is, some pictures are painted for a close, others for a distant inspection. The former, of course, are wrought up; but in the latter, the leading points are seized by a touch, leaving the atmosphere to unite. As to mere handling of the brush, this is conclusive, and shows that it was done on the same system as by Titian, Tintoretto, and Velasquez. Reynolds has quoted Pliny's description of glazing, that is, spreading a thin transparent tint over the crude colours to bring them into harmony, which was the practice of the Venetians. Another passage completes the conviction: "Adductus est splendor, alias hic quam lumen, quia quia inter hoc et umbram esset, appellaverunt tonum." (Lib. xxxv. c. 5.)

"Now was added splendor, a different thing from light, and which splendor, because it was between light and dark, was called tone." To the mind of an artist this is exquisite in distinction; first, the colours on the tablet were fresh, unmixed, and raw; then was spread over a transparent glaze to take off the crudeness; then this crudeness being reduced, it was called splendor, glowing, rich, and deep, but different from light, which is cold and white; and this splendor the Greeks called tone, as both the Venetians and the British denominate it. But the circumstance of tone being the characteristic of any school, is proof of an age for colour.

As to their perspective, let any man consult Vitruvius, (lib. vii.). Agatharcus composed a treatise on the subject; and from this hint, Democritus and Anaxagoras wrote on perspective, explaining in what manner we should, in appearances agreeable to nature, from a central point make the lines to correspond with the eye and the direction of the visual rays, and render the scene a true representation of buildings, that those objects which are drawn on a perpendicular plane, may appear some retiring from the eye, and some advancing towards it. From a passage in Plato, it is clear, that the Greeks carried the illusions of theatrical perspective to a much greater extent than, in consequence of Painting, some bad landscape discovered in Herculaneum has been supposed. That they foreshortened is clear, from Pliny's description of a bull coming out of a picture frontways.

The inferences to be drawn from all this, are, first, from Plutarch and Horace, that the Greeks had execution like Titian and Vandyke; secondly, from Pliny, that they must have had fine colour (lib. xxxv.); thirdly, from Quintilian, that the principles of light and shadow were understood (lib. xii.); fourthly, from Vitruvius (lib. vii.), that they had sufficient perspective to make objects recede and advance; and fifthly, from the Elgin marbles, executed by and in the school of Phidias, who was first a painter, that they had expression, form, and composition. If the three most important can be proved, as they can, and colour, light and shadow, and execution, more than inferred; what right has an eminent English portrait-painter, grossly deficient as a painter of high art, to assert, that they could not be great in extensive compositions, because the painted walls of a provincial city gave no evidence of such excellence in their private houses? forgetting that these were executed five hundred years after the era of Greek perfection, when Greece was a Roman province, when her cities had been sacked, and her art was talked of as a wonder that had passed away.

The principle laid down for high art has been, that the Conclusion lower addresses the eye and the higher the mind, and that the union of the two was incompatible; whereas, the true principle surely is, that both styles address the mind through the eye, but in different ways; the lower walk making the imitation of the actual substance the great object of pleasure only; and the higher walk making imitation the means of conveying a beautiful thought, a fine expression, or a grand form with greater power. The imitation though more abstracted must not be less real or effective. Sir Joshua Reynolds affirmed, that the look of truth which fine colour, light and shadow, and reality gave, distracted the eye from the poetry of the conception or the depth of the expression. But it may be maintained, that in an art, the elements of which are laid in imitation, the beauty of an expression, the grace of a motion, and the sublimity of a conception, will be increased in proportion to the look of reality in the objects; and the practice of all the great Greek painters, and of Raffaelle and Titian in their later works (the Transfiguration, and Pietro Martyre), proves that they had come to the same conclusions. Yet Reynolds, with his usual sagacious policy, appears to waver lest he should be wrong. "There is no reason," says he, "why the great painters might not have availed themselves with caution and selection of many excellencies in the Venetian, Flemish, and Dutch schools; there are some not in contradiction to any style, a happy disposition of light and shade, breadth in masses of colour, the union of these with their grounds, and the harmony arising from a due mixture of hot and cold tints, with many other excellencies which would surely not counteract the grand style." And then he concludes that "a subdued attention to these excellencies must be added to complete a perfect painter." This is all that is contended for. So far from these excellencies being incompatible with grandeur of style, they are essential to it, they are the elements and the basis of it, they cannot be left out, or if they are, the style is deficient, absurd, and not founded in nature. There is not the least doubt that the Greek painters considered the power of imitating natural objects by colour, and light and shadow, as necessary and requisite in preparatory study as drawing or composition; and the greatest painters in the grand style in ancient Greece, were

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1 ὁμοῦ τῶν ἀπὸ τῆς Ἀλεξανδρείας ἐκ τῶν προσώπων, ἀναλημματικῶς, ἀλάχιστα τῶν λοιπῶν μερῶν ἔργων Ἐλευθέρου.

2 Theatre of the Greeks, p. 262, 3d edition, Cambridge. Painting. Just as capable of imitating still life as the possessors of it now.

It may, therefore, be fairly deduced, that the Greeks possessed all parts of the art, and none particularly to the exclusion of others; that, therefore, all parts of the art, in due subordination, may be considered as essential to an artist of the highest walk, as also in the more humble department; and that the system of Reynolds, which excludes identity and power of reality from judicious imitation of the objects painted, combining colour and light and shadow, as well as expression and form, is false, and should be exploded from all systems where art is considered as a matter of importance to the dignity or glory of a nation.

(B. H.)

Since the foregoing article was written not more than twelve years have passed, but in that short space the art of painting has undergone such changes in theory and practice that many opinions then unhesitatingly proclaimed, and received without a doubt, if propounded now, would be thought ridiculous; for, while it may be confidently stated as an admitted fact, that modern art in this country is at present much more generally appreciated, and receives far higher encouragement than it ever did at any former time, it is equally true that this favourable state of matters has arisen under a system founded on principles in many respects directly opposed to those that not many years ago were generally laid down as indisputable. In place, then, of altering the foregoing article by striking out or modifying such statements as were based on notions formerly held regarding art, but which are now untenable according to those now entertained, it has been thought a preferable course to endeavour to point out some of these changes, and to show how they have operated; and so, to some extent, the soundness of the opinions given in the first portion of this article will be tested by an examination of the practical results of the art of painting at the present day.

Within these few years several questions that agitated the British school from its commencement have received a trial, and to a considerable extent may be considered as settled. Art, therefore, having greater freedom of action, has assimilated itself more to natural tastes, and opened resources of pleasure and enjoyment that at one time, from notions now deemed false and pedantic, were not thought to be within its proper province. The invention and rapid development of photography within this period has also operated powerfully in the settlement of these questions.

The following were the chief points so long and so vehemently put forward:—1. It was maintained that art would never reach a high position in this country till it was patronized by the church and the state; that our art was crushed by the Reformation; that pictures were excluded from churches by bigotry and ignorance, for as they tended greatly to excite devotional feeling, they might be beneficially employed in religious services; that the old masters of Italy, Germany, and Spain were always engaged on Scripture subjects; and that the British school of art never would rival or approach the schools these great painters founded till its artists received similar employment.

2. It was pointed out that little or nothing was done publicly for the encouragement of art; and it was said that the only way in which this could be carried out was by government ordering the execution of large works illustrating the history of the country, such works to be placed in palaces and national buildings, to which access should be afforded to the public. 3. Fine-art academies, of which the Royal Academy is the exemplar, were strongly condemned. The opponents of academies declaimed loudly against such bodies asking and receiving grants from government in the shape of money or accommodation for their schools and exhibitions. "Are they not," they said, "close corporations for accumulating funds with which they pension aged members or the families of deceased members?" while in their exhibitions they appropriate the chief places, favourably to display their own works, and give only inferior situations to the works of artists who have not had the good fortune to have been elected into their body. Academies and exhibitions ought to be put down."

As before stated, all these questions may now be considered as in a great measure set at rest. At the present day paintings for churches used by Protestants are rarely commissioned; and though the decoration of churches engrosses much attention, painting, except in the limited and conventional mode as applied to glass for windows, is never resorted to; the unsatisfactory result of the efforts lately made by government to encourage art by competitions for frescoes and historical paintings has set at rest the point of government patronage of art; and academies and exhibitions never were so popular and flourishing as they are at present.

Glancing hurriedly over the pages of the history of the Government school from its commencement, one cannot fail to notice how much the founders deemed it an almost incontrovertible principle, that encouragement of art by the church or by government was necessary for the growth of a national school in Britain. Sir Joshua Reynolds spent much valuable time in inculcating this principle and in trying to prove it practically. Barry devoted his whole life to what has been styled high art; and from his time till within a few years of the present period, this has formed the theme of numerous writers on art, and has guided the practice of various British artists, the chief among whom were Benjamin West, Stothard, Hilton, and Haydon. The last of these saw accorded in some measure what they, and he himself, the most eloquent and energetic of them all, had so long contended for,—namely, a trial (with reference to the Houses of Parliament), given by the government to their cherished notions, that church or state employment was the only true patronage for art; and he, the only remaining representative of these opinions, was at last borne down by bitter disappointment at finding that the benefits to art so long and so confidently predicted were not realised by that trial.

It is manifest that the result of this trial has been beneficial to art. The slavish adherence to rules and precedents founded on what has been done in former ages, without consideration of the important fact, that the wants and the enjoyments of the people of these past ages were very different from those of the public now, has been abandoned; and art now flows for the use of the public in its natural course, unobstructed by those impediments to the vigour and originality of a national school.

No doubt it was natural that at the foundation of a new school the rules and precedents of celebrated schools in former times should be greatly relied on; childhood requires support, and youth needs guidance and restraint. And this accounts for what is often noted as extraordinary conduct on the part of Reynolds,—namely, his having constantly impressed on artists the necessity of attending to the rules of the old painters, and having held up the style of the Caracci, and of Ludovico in particular, as a safe model for the artist to study. He formed this notion from the consideration that the style of the Caracci was based on rules and precedents; and therefore he reckoned their works as well fitted to exemplify what he reverenced. It has been most unjustly alleged that Sir Joshua strongly urged his brother artists and his pupils to follow out historical painting on a grand scale, or on what were called high-art principles, not from his having any faith in those notions himself, but from the unworthy motive of diverting their attention from the field of portrait-painting, where he gathered riches and Painting. This is absurd; he is entitled to full credit for the sincerity of his opinions. As a member of a school at that time in its infancy, when lecturing and theorizing on art, he was to a great extent trammeled by being obliged to refer to the maxims and examples of ancient schools; for it was by reference to the works produced in them that he was to direct theoretically the members and pupils of the rising school. In this respect he was not able, or had not confidence enough, to go much beyond the opinions of his day. And we cannot doubt his sincerity; because he misspent much valuable time in trying to put these very theories into practice in the form of large historical compositions and allegorical figures,—for example, those executed for the windows of New College, Oxford;—and he freely offered still further to waste his talents, and paint a Scripture subject to be placed in St Paul's. As a writer or lecturer on art, Sir Joshua was no doubt the first in his time; but his theories were just the theories adopted generally by the world at that period,—clearly and elegantly given forth, and mixed here and there with such opinions bearing on the practice of art as only an able artist could enunciate. But it was by his pictures that he gained a name for himself, and contributed so greatly to the glory of the English school. The opinions in his time inclined to a certain style of art as alone worthy of notice; he was carried along by these notions to the extent, not only of theorizing on them, but of wasting time in practising them; but his genius, as it were, in spite of himself, carried him beyond what, walking by rule and measure, he thought the proper line, and he executed works which, though then little esteemed in comparison with what were called his historical compositions, are those on which his fame now chiefly rests. What the public now prize are his portraits,—admirable embodiments of distinguished men and lovely women,—and his simple and natural representations of the freshness and purity of childhood. His laborious efforts to emulate the Caracci in depicting the "Death of Dido," or the "Continence of Scipio," attract but little sympathy now; and, as property, would be valued far lower than his portraits of Lord Heathfield or Nelly O'Brien, or his "Girl with a Mousetrap," "Strawberry Girl," or "Shepherd Boy." It is recorded that the former works cost him many months of toil and trouble; that the latter were hit off with little effort. The same rules that hampered but could not restrain the genius of Reynolds, operated, however, very differently on men like Barry and others, who were gifted with considerable talent, but not genius to give them courage to step out of what they looked on as the circle of established art. Barry was ardent, and had high aspirations and much determination and self-will. His friends, and he himself, mistook these for the elements of great genius; but what was the result?—works that, looked on in the most favourable way, must be pronounced to be merely imitations or reflections, or as got up on the model of those executed in countries at former periods by painters who very probably responded to, or worked in unison with, the feelings of their own age and country, but whose productions are chiefly to be distinguished by qualities which were not cared for, and elicited no sympathy from the English public in Barry's time. The dilettanti and the writers on art of the period vehemently maintained the necessity of working as the old masters worked; and the English school, being then but recently instituted, and most of the artists of the time having been indoctrinated with these notions, could not at once cast them off. Indeed, men like Reynolds and Gainsborough, and even Hogarth, with all his originality, could not entirely free themselves from such influences; but their genius eventually, by the works they executed, carried them beyond every such bias. Since then the English school has been getting gradually out of these trammels, and assimilating itself more and more to the tastes and feelings of the times. Wilkie, Turner, Raeburn, Bonington, Constable, Etty, and many others, and their painting successors, the artists of our own time, are producing, and have produced, works of such importance that the artists of the British school, in place of looking on the works of the old masters as unapproachable examples, can show works, some rivalling those of the old masters in many of their best qualities, and others executed in successful opposition to rules and principles formerly considered as beyond dispute.

It is remarked in Cunningham's Lives of the British Painters, that Reynolds "had amassed a fortune, and obtained high fame in abiding by the lucrative branch of the profession, whilst he (Barry) had perched upon the unproductive bough of historical composition, and had not been rewarded with bread." But it is needless to occupy more time in showing that Reynolds, when he talked learnedly on high art, did so honestly and sincerely, from convictions formed in his mind by education and imbibing the opinions of those with whom he came in contact, and not for the purpose of leading Barry away from that road along which he himself was impelled by his genius, in spite of all conventional theories. What had he to fear in competition with Barry? In his own proper walk he ranks with the greatest artists the world has produced. Among the chefs d'œuvre in the Manchester Exhibition by Titian, Rubens, Vandyck, and Velasquez, were there any superior to Sir Joshua's "Nelly O'Brien"? In his day poor Barry, perched on his "unproductive bough," doubtless looked down with great contempt on such works as Sir Joshua's "Nelly O'Brien" or "Robinetta," and consoled himself with the reflection, that posterity would do justice to his claims, and confirm the plaudits of the scanty knot of dilettant admirers who gazed up at him. And all the painters since Barry's time who have perched on the same bough have experienced similar treatment, varied merely in degree. West had a larger number of admirers than Barry; among these was George IV., who commissioned him to execute various works; and the artist acquired considerable riches and a certain temporary popularity, but this barely lasted his lifetime. His works are held in little estimation now. Some of Fuseli's fanciful compositions, when transmitted through the medium of engraving, attracted for a time a degree of notoriety. Stothard's fame will rest entirely on his designs and small compositions. Etty can scarcely be classed among those who maintained the claims of high art; his fame rests on other grounds,—namely, his having most powerfully aided in increasing the strength of the English school in an art element that has always entered largely into it; and his works now rank with those of the greatest colourists. Haydon may truly be considered the man who, by his paintings, and especially by his writings and lectures on art, made the chief efforts to uphold those notions as to art, and government patronage of art, which led to the trial and settlement of the question. There can be no doubt that his energetic appeals had great influence. The extraordinary facilities afforded by the erection of so vast and magnificent a pile as Westminster Palace and the Houses of Parliament were taken advantage of by government, and a fair trial was given to the artists of the country. But though there was no lack of talent displayed, the results have not justified expectations. It is now seen that all that government will do, or can ever be reasonably expected to do, must weigh as nothing in comparison with the encouragement annually given by the public, which is patronage of the healthiest kind, and rapidly increasing year by year; that painting on walls does not suit the style of the buildings in this country, being often at variance with those notions of comfort and convenience which prevail in our arrangements; that fresco-paintings encounter great risk of damage, from their surface affording so slight a resistance to anything coming in contact with it,—those on the walls of the Painting arcades of the public gardens at Munich, for instance, require so often to be patched up with tempera colours, that, though only executed about twenty years ago, they can scarcely be called fresco-paintings now. Besides, paintings are objects which bear great value; and in a mercantile community like ours, when money is invested in that way, facilities for disposing of such property are necessary. Few would think of laying out ten or twenty thousand pounds on pictures attached immovably to the walls of a mansion, while many invest such sums in pictures that are portable; and these investments are often very profitable, while the capital employed may speedily be realized by sale or transfer. The chief arguments in favour of large pictures for public buildings were drawn from the example of foreign states, particularly France. But public taste in this country does not run in a channel similar to that in which it flows in France. With us art is to a great extent domesticated; in France it is government, on whom the people rely for many of their enjoyments, that has generally made use of its services. But now, even in France private employment is preferred by the principal artists to government patronage; they find that they are better remunerated by private purchasers or by publishers than by government. Artists like Vernet, Scheffer, Delacroix, and others, now see that their works of moderate size are eagerly sought after; and it is a great loss to them, not only in money, but in fame, to engage on large government works. Although great numbers go to look at their pictures in public buildings, those executed for private individuals are seen by many more, for they are exhibited all over the world. That the remuneration is greater for pictures of moderate dimensions is proved every day: for example, at the sale of the Duchess of Orleans' collection of modern works of art, a cabinet picture by Delaroche, about 3½ feet by 2 feet, brought L2300,—more than double the sum paid to him for two years' labour on cartoons for pictures for the church of the Madeleine. Government patronage, too, often involves elements distasteful to a high-minded man conscious of the position his talents entitle him to. For instance, when Delaroche was labouring in Rome at his cartoons for the Madeleine, by court influence another painter was associated with him in painting this church, although there had been an understanding that the whole work was confided to Delaroche. Indignant at such treatment, he threw up the commission, and returned the money that had been advanced to him when he was engaged on the cartoons. Thus was the labour of two years of a man of high talent entirely lost. In that time he might have executed several works of great importance, which, exhibited in various countries, and circulated by engraving, would have yielded him money and reputation, besides spreading the taste for art. Even in France it seems likely that art will soon rely very little on government support.

The notions of Haydon and others, that the future of art in England depends on government employment for artists, and that if pictures are painted for private patrons only, they will sink to the level of mere decoration, will be assented to when it is admitted that no artist can be a great painter who does not paint subjects from Scripture, heathen mythology, or Greek and Roman history—the figures either nude or in conventional drapery, and at least 7 feet in height; and that the only competent tribunal for deciding on works of art is a committee, the members of which are selected on account of their rank, official status, or reputed dilettantism.

The cry against academies, and against exhibitions, which are the chief features and supports of academies, has, of course, in a great measure gone down with the one that was simultaneously raised,—namely, government patronage and high art. Can anything better be devised than the open arena of an exhibition, on which every artist competes before, and is judged by, the public? No doubt, it may be said, this would be all very well if every one had the same chance; but some works are hung where they are seen to great advantage, while others are so placed that they cannot be fairly appreciated. But really, is there any human institution that is perfect? Every work cannot be put in an equally good place, and some sort of classification is necessary. Of course, the best works should have the best places; but difference of opinion may arise here. The works of artists who have attained a reputation will naturally first be attended to; that is but fair. These artists, in their early days, were obliged to struggle for their position. But is it not evident, that to the rising artist the opportunity of having his works in a public exhibition is an advantage of the highest kind; while to the more advanced artist it must operate as a spur to continued exertion. If the works of the former evince improvement, they will gradually make way; if those of the latter become less attractive, they must give place. In exhibitions public opinion is a ruling element. In one of his lectures Haydon gave a graphic account of a meeting in Wilkie's apartment on the morning of the day on which the exhibition of the Royal Academy was opened. On the previous day, at the private view, Wilkie's picture of the "Village Politicians" had been very much noticed; large offers were made for it; and a most favourable criticism had appeared in the newspapers. Haydon had seen the criticism, and had rushed to Wilkie's to inform him of his success. The road to fame and fortune was now opened to the hitherto unknown artist; and how? By means of the exhibition. Wilkie's picture had been commissioned by a noble patron; when nearly finished, it had been shown to this patron, but he had demurred to the price. If there had been no exhibition to which Wilkie could send his picture, he probably would have been obliged to have lowered his price; at all events, he would only have been paid grudgingly the very low sum he asked; and though he had been fully commissioned to go on continually at similar prices, he would barely have made enough to maintain himself in the small lodging he then occupied. But by the exhibition he was enabled to bring his productions before the public; contrasted with the works of established artists who were handsomely remunerated for their pictures; and by this comparison the high qualities of Wilkie's picture were fairly estimated, and a much higher value put on and offered for it than he had ventured even to think of. In opposition to all Haydon's objections to academies and exhibitions, could any argument stronger be brought forward than the simple narrative of the above anecdote? In truth, it is by our annual exhibitions of modern works that art is maintained in force in this country; for they are in every way calculated to lead to the best of all results—originality, variety, and adaptation to the feelings and requirements of the age.

But though it cannot be denied that art is in a prosperous condition, and that this state of matters has arisen just at a time when public exhibitions and academies are more encouraged than they ever were; yet by some people academies and exhibitions of modern art are opposed and decried. It is not very likely that these institutions will be at all damaged by such assaults; they will probably be benefited by them. Their strength and importance will thus be made still more evident; and by those who conduct them reforms and improvements will be adopted to make assurance doubly sure. Haydon, and objectors of his class and time, denounced academies and exhibitions because they interfered with their favourite plan of government patronage; but when it came to be seen that government commissions were as nothing compared with what was expended on art by the public, these objections fell to the ground. They also opposed the Royal Academy for reasons of a personal kind. They felt sore that they were not elected members of that body. No doubt Haydon, John Martin, and some others of that time, Painting, possessed higher qualities as artists than many who shared the honours and privileges of academicians; yet, on the other hand, there were many other members of the Academy, who, as artists, ranked much above Haydon and Martin, who submitted to the ordeal of election, and did not get up a feeling of indignation because they were not elected on their first application. It is scarcely to be expected that the academicians, who are the electors, are never to err in their judgment. Judges and juries sometimes err; but, with all its drawbacks, to this mode of election most of the greatest artists of this country have submitted. No better mode has yet been devised,—at least none better has been successfully practised; at all events, it is a preferable mode to that of allowing a competitor to be the judge of his own claim, which, in plain words, is just what the objectors demanded.

Objections now-a-days are raised chiefly by cognoscenti,—namely, such as consider themselves, by education and taste, better qualified than artists to decide on art, and all matters that bear on it; but the flimsy attacks of such can cause but slight annoyance. The elements necessary to give a title to be classed as an art-connoisseur in the days of good old Sir George Beaumont seem to have been various and important. He painted landscapes, he had formed a collection of ancient pictures, and he commissioned modern works. But now-a-days the title of connoisseur is assumed on very slight qualifications. There are few amateur painters now. The uselessness of such an occupation is demonstrated by photography, for since that discovery, no sketchy or conventional mode will be tolerated as a representation of nature. If a man is to paint, he must devote his life to it. An hour snatched from business or pleasure for such a purpose is just so much time thrown away. Hence many who have that sort of liking for art that impels them to dabble in it,—pushed aside by the photographer, have no vent for their tastes and feelings but in criticising artists and telling them how to paint. And as a glance at some of the continental collections, and a few months' residence in Rome, are thought undoubted qualifications, this class of connoisseurs is large, and supplies most of the objectors to modern art and modern exhibitions. Again, touching the title to connoisseurship on the ground of possessing a collection of ancient pictures, the acquisition of genuine works of celebrated painters of former schools is within the reach of few. When such occur for sale, they are purchased for public galleries, and nations compete for them. A sum exceeding £20,000 was lately given for one specimen of Murillo for the Louvre, and more than £13,000 for a work by Veronese (a purchase that has received the full approval of the public) for the National Gallery of London. The ridiculous notion that possesses some people of a chance of purchasing at sales Correggios, Rubenses, &c., of marvellous value, at marvellously small prices,—in truth, a species of gambling,—is fast going out; and the facility with which picture-dealers can supply the most extensive demands for works of the old masters has led purchasers, by making a very simple calculation with reference to the average ages of painters, the time necessary to paint a picture, and the number of works ascribed to every artist of name, to arrive at the conclusion that not one in a hundred—in some instances, perhaps, not one in a thousand—of the pictures ascribed to old painters could have been executed by them. Hence, in these times of practical men and measures, the possessor of a collection of the old masters is not, without considerable scrutiny and hesitation, admitted to rank as a connoisseur.

The patronage that Sir George Beaumont and other kindred spirits bestowed upon British art, though highly honourable to them, was very different from that now accorded by our merchant princes. In the early days of art in this country our artists scarcely knew their own powers. If they ventured to compose works in any way differing from those of the old masters, they were not only accused of heresy, but took guilt to themselves. Sir Joshua Reynolds held up Ludovico Carracci as a model, though he himself was a much superior painter. Wilson constantly referred to Claude; and before he died the name of Van Dyck was among the last words Gainsborough uttered. At the beginning of the century this feeling still prevailed. Patronage of modern art was only hesitatingly given, and occasionally the patron accompanied the commission with directions how to execute the work required by him. It is recorded that Sir George Beaumont deemed no landscape completed till a brown tree, in the manner of the ancients, was introduced, and could scarcely preserve his equanimity when Constable bluntly questioned the soundness of the maxim. Now, however, the extent and value of the various collections of modern art in London and the other emporiums of manufacture and merchandise is quite marvellous. The collections of Wells of Redleaf; Barnard; Arden; Bicknell; Ditton of London; Miller of Preston; Eden of Leatham; Newsham, Preston; Fairbairn, Hull; Ashton, Manchester; Naylor, Houldsworth, and J. Miller, Liverpool; Gillot, Birmingham; Houldsworth and Denniston, Glasgow; Graham, Lancefield; Wilson, Banknock; Caird, Greenock, are all very important, several of them of immense value. And these and similar collections for the most part have been formed, not with the view of qualifying their possessors to be ranked as connoisseurs,—though certainly the frequent exercise of judgment must lead to knowledge,—but on the sound principle of making art the means of imparting to themselves and their friends pleasure of a highly intellectual kind; while from the exercise of those large but keen views that enter so much into the mercantile character, the sums invested on art-property are in most cases at any time capable of being turned to good account. Thus the great vigour displayed by art in this country, and the enormous patronage bestowed on it by the public within these few years, must be set down to the circumstance of its being now admitted by artists, and the public generally, to be a settled principle, that in a community socially and politically constituted like ours, art cannot and ought not to depend for encouragement on government patronage. Freed from the notions of government employment that obstructed so many of our painters some years ago, the artist can now give his whole attention to produce a work that will interest the public, from its attracting sympathy by touching the feelings, or by recalling and illustrating past events of importance, or by perpetuating momentous occurrences of the times, or by placing before the eye scenes of beauty or grandeur; and when this is done, he knows his efforts will not pass unnoticed, for in the exhibitions now opened in all our large cities, his productions, if up to a certain standard, will be admitted and brought before an assemblage eager to find out works evincing talent, and, by praising and purchasing them, to reward the artists by whom they are executed.

What is called the pre-Raphaelite movement is one of Pre-Raphaelites, the results of the change in the notions of our artists regarding the study of the old masters and high art, though it must be admitted that the invention and development of the science of photography greatly aided it.

The question so frequently put,—namely, What is it that distinguishes the style of art called pre-Raphaelitism from other styles of art?—is answered in so many different ways that it is manifest the ideas of most people regarding it are quite undefined. Some say that it is a style of art modelled on that of the artists who painted before the period of Raphael, in whose time the classic element which shortly before had been superinduced on the Gothic, had entirely superseded it; that, though by this, art gained many high qualities, it lost several of greater importance, particularly truth. and simplicity; and that pre-Raphaelitism aims at returning to the purity and simplicity of the style of these old painters. Others allege that it is an attempt to represent nature as truly and faithfully as the means employed will allow, neither omitting, nor adding, nor changing anything. But the explanation oftentimes given is, that it means a style of painting involving great labour and careful and minute execution, or what, technically speaking, is called finish.

Now, though in each of these attempts to define what pre-Raphaelitism is, some of the elements that enter into it are pointed out, yet by none of them is a complete explanation given of it, while a combination of all these definitions would involve contradiction. For instance, the very name the followers of this style have adopted implies an assimilation to the style of the art before Raphael's time; but though in the works of many of these old painters we find several high qualities, a very close resemblance to nature assuredly is not one of them. We no doubt see that an effort is made to attain it, and that may be pointed at as a sufficient motive; but again, these old painters knew nothing of breadth, and not much of light and shadow; and pre-Raphaelites constantly aim at these qualities (particularly the latter) in their works. Then, as to its being merely a faithful representation of what the artist sees, that would be putting his work on a level with one produced by machinery; this notion is evidently based on exaggerated ideas raised by too much reliance on photography, which, though extremely useful, is only an auxiliary to art. While to make minute finish the distinguishing feature of pre-Raphaelitism would be assigning to it by no means a high position; and, indeed, in the works of several painters we find many of the faults which pre-Raphaelites strongly censure united to very high finish.

But, indeed, pre-Raphaelite art has even already undergone modification; and what has lately drawn forth bitter ridicule from some, and inflated praise from others, is rather an excrecence on a style which is entitled to high praise as one of the many vigorous efforts by which British art, emancipated from the notions and prejudices that so long have clogged it, has established its claim to originality and power.

On reviewing the state of painting in Great Britain, it may be truly said that our artists, freed from conventional rules, having cast aside vain notions of government patronage, and aided by those appliances (photography chiefly) that science has put within their reach, now study nature with the greatest earnestness and success. And the numerous opportunities afforded by exhibitions, of bringing their efforts before the public, rapidly improving in taste and in ability to appreciate and reward art,—has led to such results, that many of the works of the British school, even in our own day, will compete successfully with those of the most celebrated ancient schools that have conferred honour on the countries where they flourished.

(W. B. J.)

PAISIELLO,1 Giovanni, a very distinguished Italian musician, was born at Taranto, in the Neapolitan States, on the 9th of May 1741. His aptitude for music having been early remarked, he was admitted, in May 1754, as a pupil of the Conservatory of St Onofrio at Naples. There he received lessons from Durante, and afterwards from Cottani and Abati. In 1759 he obtained the place of assistant master. He finished his studies in 1763, and the fame of an intermezzo which he then composed, obtained for him an immediate engagement to write two operas for Bologna. The success of these was so great that his reputation at once spread through all Italy. In 1777 he was, at the same moment, offered engagements at Vienna, at London, and at St Petersburg. In June 1777 his opera Dal finto al vero was represented at Naples; and on the 25th of July following he set out for Russia. He resided eight years at St Petersburg, where he received a large salary, and composed some of his finest works; among others, his opera Il Barbiere di Serigia. On his way back to Italy, he stopped at Vienna, and composed there twelve symphonies for a large orchestra, and the opera buffa Il Re Teodoro, which contains a septuor that became celebrated throughout Europe. During his stay at St Petersburg, Paisiello had made some changes in his style of composition; and at Rome, in 1785, when he brought out his opera L'Amor ingegnoso, he found that his countrymen loudly disapproved of these changes. He then settled at Naples, where he had no rival, Guglielmi and Cimarosa being absent. For the next thirteen years he composed for the Neapolitan theatres, and produced, during that time, some of his best operas. Ferdinand IV. appointed him his chapel-master, with a salary of twelve hundred ducats per annum. In 1788 the King of Prussia invited Paisiello to visit Berlin; but this invitation was declined, as well as a second one to St Petersburg, and a first one to London. In 1797 General Bonaparte opened to competitors the composition of a funeral march in honour of General Hoche. Paisiello and Cherubini each sent a march; and Bonaparte, very unjustly, decided in favour of Paisiello. In consequence of the revolution at Naples in 1799, and of his own political tergiversation, Paisiello lost his royal appointments for two years. Soon after their being restored, Bonaparte, then First Consul, requested the King of Naples to send Paisiello to Paris, in order to direct the consular chapel; and he was accordingly sent thither in September 1802. His treatment by Bonaparte was munificent, while Cherubini was quite neglected. (See the article Cherubini.) The opera of Proserpine, composed by Paisiello in 1803, was ill received by the Parisians; and this check, and his failing imagination, induced him to request leave to retire, under pretext of his wife's ill health. Bonaparte unwillingly granted the request, and Paisiello returned to Naples and to his former service. Afterwards, under Joseph Bonaparte and Murat, Paisiello retained his appointments until a new revolution reduced him to indigence. He died on the 5th of June, 1816, aged seventy-five years. He was a member of the French Institute, and of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences at Naples, and was president of the directors of the new Neapolitan Conservatory of Music. It appears that he was excessively jealous of all musical rivals, and that he used unworthy means of intrigue to injure Guglielmi and Cimarosa, and also Rossini, when the latter began his brilliant career. The charm of Paisiello's style consists in sweet and graceful melody, and great simplicity of structure. His compositions were very numerous. He himself believed them to amount to two hundred. In published lists of his works we find ninety operas and four cantatas; an oratorio (La Passione), and eighteen masses, requiems, &c.; eighteen instrumental quartets; two volumes of harpsichord sonatas, &c.; six pianoforte concertos; funeral march for General Hoche; a collection of figured basses for the study of accompaniment.

(P.A.S.I.E.L.L.O., the principal town of Renfrewshire, Scotland, is finely situated on the banks of the White Cart, about 3 miles S. of the River Clyde. The ancient and principal part of the town occupies the summit and slopes of a beautiful declivity, the eastern base of which is washed by the

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1 Dr Burney, in his Tour and History, Signor Perotti, in his Dissertations, and some other writers, spell the name "Paisiello." Paisley, river, which divides the burgh into two parts, that on the east side being styled the New Town, from its more recent erection. Paisley is generally considered as the ancient Vanduara of Ptolemy, and as having been a Roman town or station during the presence of these invaders in the northern part of Scotland. As late as the beginning of the last century, considerable vestiges remained of a Roman camp on the western side of the hill on which Paisley is built; but these have long since been obliterated by the progressive extension and improvement of the town. The latitude of Paisley is 55° 51' N., and the longitude 4° 26' W. The climate is temperate, but humid. In former times infectious diseases were of rather frequent occurrence. In 1645 a pestilence committed great ravages in this place; and in 1765 dysentery prevailed to an alarming extent. In 1771 pleurisy carried off numbers of the inhabitants; and virulent influenza has visited it at various times. Paisley, however, has never been considered unhealthy; and the registrar-general's returns for the years 1855, 1856, and 1857, show, that in regard to mortality it occupies a medium position among the large towns of Scotland. During these years the rate of mortality in Paisley has not been so high as in Greenock or Glasgow; it has been very nearly the same as in Dundee, and it has been higher than in Aberdeen or Edinburgh.

Whether the Roman town or station called Vanduara was a place of any size or importance is unknown. A cloud overshadows the history of Paisley till about the year 1163, when Walter, the first Stewart, founded a monastery on the eastern bank of the Cart, opposite to what is now termed the Old Town of Paisley. At this period there does not appear to have been a village or hamlet, however small, in existence; but the protection which the monastery afforded in those rude times, and the multitude of pilgrims, travellers, and persons of distinction who frequented it, gradually induced a population to assemble in its vicinity; and a village of some extent made its appearance on the western bank of the river, and began slowly to clamber up the gentle slope of the hill on that side. In 1220 the monastery was elevated to the dignity of an abbey, and many valuable privileges were subsequently conferred upon it by the Pope, and by its founder and successive patrons. Its jurisdiction and revenues were very extensive, extending to, and being derived from, localities at a great distance; its abbot was commonly men of the highest family connections, and appear frequently as prominent actors on the stage of Scottish civil and ecclesiastical history. After the Reformation, the revenues and privileges of this ecclesiastical establishment were bestowed upon Lord Claud Hamilton, and have since become the property, though greatly reduced, of the noble family of Abercorn. A considerable part of the ancient abbey still remains, and is in excellent preservation. The skeleton of a beautiful window, 35 feet in height by 18 in breadth, almost the only fragment of the more ancient part of the building, has been much admired for its size, lightness, and fine proportions. The external architecture of the remaining portion is perhaps scarcely equal to that of some other ecclesiastical edifices in Scotland; but the appearance of the nave, which is occupied as a parish church, is grand and striking in no ordinary degree; and some few fragmentary remains of the old monastery exhibit fine specimens of the purest Gothic. Before the accession of the Stuart family to the throne of Scotland, their burying-place was in the abbey; and even after that event two of its members were interred there, viz., the queen of Robert II., in 1387, and Robert III., in 1406. The tomb of Marjory Bruce, daughter of Robert I., is still to be seen in the famous sounding aisle, now occupied as a burial-vault by the Abercorn family.

Notwithstanding the wealth and manufacturing importance of Paisley, it is only a burgh of barony; but its privileges are so very considerable as almost to equal those of Paisley, a royal burgh. Previously to 1770 the burgh had a voice in the election of a member of Parliament for the county. Now, by the Scottish Reform Act, Paisley sends a member to represent it in Parliament. The constituency in 1857 was 1349. Formerly the government of the town was vested in a provost, three bailies, and seventeen councillors; but by the Scottish Burgh Reform Act there are now a provost, four bailies, a treasurer, and ten councillors.

In 1553 John Hamilton, the last abbot, conveyed by a deed the revenues and privileges of the abbacy to Lord Claud Hamilton, then a child of ten years of age. He was afterwards deprived of the latter on account of his adherence to the fortunes of Queen Mary; but in 1591 they were restored, with the title of Lord Paisley. In 1653 the second Earl of Abercorn disposed of his interest in the abbacy to the Dundonald family; and in 1658 the magistrates and council purchased this superiority. Since that time Paisley has held directly of the crown. In 1857 the real annual rent of all the property within the burgh was £99,628.

The topography of Paisley and its vicinity is not very remarkable. Previously to the year 1736 the whole of this district was included in one parish, known by the name of the parish of Paisley; but since that time the burgh has been divided into three parishes—the High, the Middle, and the Low. The Abbey parish now comprehends the New Town, which, with a trifling exception, is separated from the burgh by the River Cart, and the populous villages of Johnston, Elderslie, Thorn, Quarrelton, Nitshill, Hurlet, and Dovecot Hall, with the country districts. To the north, and affording a noble view from the eminence on which Old Paisley is chiefly built, extends the great plain of the lower valley of the Clyde, anciently called Strathclyde. On the south the Gleniffer, or Paisley Braes, distant about 3 miles, swell gently up to the height of 760 feet above the surface of the Cart. The soil is of a mixed character, but in many places rich and fertile. From the heights just mentioned descend a variety of minor streams, of great utility to the agriculturist and manufacturer, and adding to the richness and beauty of the scenery. The surface of the country in the neighbourhood, with the exception of that to the north, which is flat, is agreeably diversified, and broken into gentle swells and soft declivities, which, with the mixture of gentlemen's seats, farm-houses, bleaching-fields, and other public works, confers a picturesque and animated character upon the entire vicinage. Valuable minerals abound in the parish, such as coal, limestone of the coal formation, and ironstone. In the strath to the north-west of the town, extending towards Linwood, valuable blackband ironstone has recently been discovered, and is now being extensively worked by Messrs Merry and Cunningham, and others. A great mining population is rapidly collecting in that district. There are also very extensive coal-pits wrought in the neighbourhood, chiefly at Johnston; and in that vicinity, and at Hurlet, the chemical works of the Messrs Wilson and others are on a very large scale. Very fine freestone is also obtained in the neighbourhood.

As it is chiefly, however, to its being one of the principal manufacturing stations in the kingdom that Paisley owes its celebrity, we shall now present a brief sketch of the history, progressive improvement and increase, and present extent of its principal manufactures. There is no certain account as to the precise period when the art of weaving was introduced. It appears, however, that the manufacture of linen was carried on to a considerable extent during the last century. Shortly after the Union the spirit of manufacturing enterprise sprang up in the west of Scotland, and Paisley was not slow in availing itself of the general impulse. Craufurd, describing the state of Paisley in 1710, That which renders this place considerable is its trade of linen and muslin, where there is a great weekly sale in its markets of those sorts of cloth, many of the inhabitants being chiefly employed in that sort of manufacture." From 1744 to 1784 the linen manufacture increased in amount from L18,886, 15s. 10d. to no less than L184,385, 16s. 6½d. About the year 1722 the manufacture of linen thread was introduced into Paisley, and carried on to a large extent. For several years it reached the amount of L100,000 annually. Cotton thread, having superseded that made from linen yarn, is manufactured to a very considerable extent, and forms one of the principal manufactures of the place. Besides the establishment of the Messrs Coats, which is said to be the most extensive, the most valuable, and the most magnificent of the kind in the world, there are now about ten others, some of which are very extensive. The value of the thread annually manufactured in Paisley at the beginning of the present century was estimated at L60,000. It is now about L400,000. In 1760 silk gauze began to be manufactured in Paisley; and in a short time the skill and ability with which this manufacture was prosecuted caused its abandonment by the manufacturers of Spitalfields, the original seat of the silk manufacture in Great Britain. This manufacture flourished extensively until near the close of the last century. From 1772 there existed also a considerable manufacture of ribbons and other articles in silk. In 1744 the value of the manufactures of Paisley was L579,185, and in 1769 it amounted to L660,385. In 1744 only 867 looms were employed in the weaving of linen; and forty years afterwards no fewer than 5000 looms were engaged in the manufacture of silk, the produce of which amounted to L350,000.

Towards the end of last century the making of silk goods declined rapidly; but a new species of manufacture sprang up, which has since been carried to a much greater extent. The manufacture of shawls, of cotton, silk, and fancy woollen fabrics, has now become the staple trade of Paisley. In little more than forty years after its introduction (in 1834) this manufacture produced about a million sterling; and since then it has increased considerably.

Previously to the present century fine shawls had been manufactured in this country chiefly at Norwich and Stockport in England, where they were made in imitation of the rich India shawls. The latter, from their high price, were beyond the reach of all but a few wealthy individuals, when the manufacturing skill and enterprise of Paisley embarked in the manufacture, and, by successive inventions and improvements in the loom, and in the kind and quality of the materials, prosecuted for a long series of years, succeeded in realizing a nearly perfect imitation of those oriental fabrics in colours, texture, and design, and at a mere fraction of the cost. Besides the extraordinary cheapness, the variety of new and beautiful fabrics and designs which have been introduced into the shawl manufacture have largely contributed to its extent and success. The manufacture of shawls is almost wholly confined to Paisley; but a considerable proportion of these find their way to the Glasgow markets for home and foreign sale. The kinds produced are various in quality and cost, and there is a great variety in the styles and fabrics. Some are wholly made of silk, but these are not now much in demand; others of silk and cotton, and a great many of Persian and fancy wools mixed with both or either. Thibet cloth shawls, a very rich and fanciful fabric; Chenille shawls, a beautiful imitation of silk velvet; Canton crane shawls; and various other and newer kinds, of every possible variety in size, texture, pattern, and price, are produced from the looms of Paisley, with a rapidity and abundance which, whilst it tends occasionally to overload the market, affords satisfactory evidence of the manufacturing skill and resources of Paisley. The present annual amount of the trade and manufactures of Paisley has been roughly calculated at nearly two millions sterling. To give anything like a view of the various inventions and improvements in the art of weaving, by means of which Paisley has attained its present eminence as a chief seat of the silk and cotton manufactures in Scotland, would swell this article beyond all due bounds. The hasty sketch which we have supplied affords some general data to the reader, who may consult, if he wishes for more minute information, Wilson's Survey of Renfrewshire; Craufurd's Description of the Shire of Renfrew, with Robertson's continuation; and the New Statistical Account of Scotland. The spinning of cotton yarn is also extensively carried on by Paisley manufacturers in the town and parish, but there are no data to be relied on for ascertaining its annual amount. Bleaching and dyeing, as might be expected, are prosecuted to a very considerable extent. Soap-making is a trade of some antiquity and importance; and malting, the distillation of raw spirits, and silk-throwing, have also a considerable capital embarked in them. Owing to the frequent and severe depressions that have recently occurred in connection with the weaving trade of Paisley, a considerable number of those formerly engaged in that line have transferred their industry to other employments. By this means some branches of business, formerly existing in the town, have been very much extended, and others entirely new have been introduced. Among the branches thus increased or introduced, the principal are the thread manufacture already mentioned, shade-printing, soap-making, iron-founding, engineering, and iron ship-building.

Thursday is the market-day in Paisley, and there are four fairs annually, which last three days each. The races at St James' Day Fair were long well known in the west of Scotland, and attracted great numbers from the surrounding districts. For many years they were much frequented by the sporting world; but after the close of the races, on the last day of the sport in August 1857, a serious and disgraceful riot occurred on the course. A number of the inhabitants memorialized the burgh trustees, and the provost and magistrates, against the continuance of the races. After several meetings, the burgh trustees and the town council agreed to discontinue the races. The grounds, including the course, were let for agricultural purposes; and the Paisley race-course, one of the best in the kingdom, is now a ploughed field.

Paisley is abundantly supplied with the means of external communication. The Glasgow and Greenock, and the Glasgow and South-Western railways, both pass through it. There is a railway to the Clyde near Renfrew; and although the Glasgow, Paisley, and Johnstone Canal has ceased to carry passengers, it is still available, and largely used, for the conveyance of goods.

The yearly returns of the post-office show the growing prosperity of Paisley. In 1720 the amount was only L28, 13s.; 1769, L223, 3s. 8d.; 1809, L2814, 17s. 4d.; 1834, L3194. Since the introduction of the penny postage, the delivery of letters from the Paisley post-office has risen to about 676,000 in a year. In the money-order department there are about 14,000 transactions in a year.

The river Cart is navigable to Paisley for vessels of from 60 to 80 tons burthen. The river dues in 1835 amounted to L260, and at the present time they are about L600.

Paisley is well supplied with the means of religious instruction. There are 8 congregations in connection with the Church of Scotland, 6 with the Free Church, 6 with the United Presbyterian Church, and about 16 of various other denominations. There is, therefore, on an average, one congregation for every 1350 of the burghal population. The number of scholars attending the different Sabbath schools in Paisley during the year 1857 amounted to 6614. The grammar school of Paisley was established by King James VI. The charter of erection is dated at Halside House, 3rd January 1576, but the oldest date on the tablet in front of the building is 1586. Besides the grammar school, there are three other burgh schools, and a number of private or adventure schools. Within the last few years large sums have become available for the education of the poor. The late John Neilson bequeathed a sum for this purpose, which is supposed to have accumulated to about £30,000. He died in 1839; and the school was opened in 1852. Other sums of smaller amount have been bequeathed for similar purposes. At present, active preparations are being made for opening an institution for reclaiming youthful offenders. The late Miss Kibble, some years ago, bequeathed for that purpose a sum now amounting to £10,000.

The Educational Association supports several schools which supply education to a great number of pupils at a very cheap rate; and the Ragged School furnishes a home and education to the houseless and the destitute. Hutcheson's Charity, though possessed of very scanty means, gives gratuitous education to a large number of children; the General Session educates gratuitously 100 pupils; and several of the congregations support schools in which education is given either gratuitously or at nominal fees, in some cases as low as one penny a week. In addition to all this, the Committee of Privy Council on Education have at different times granted considerable sums to assist in building schoolhouses; and large sums are annually received from the same source to supplement teachers' salaries, and to pay for pupil teachers for the education of the poor. The amount received in Paisley in 1857 for these purposes, together with the sum required for reducing the price of schoolbooks, could scarcely be less than £1,000. In future years this sum will be very considerably increased.

The town is well lighted with gas, and there is an abundant supply of excellent water collected from the neighbouring heights in two large reservoirs, from which it is conveyed into the town by gravitation. The assessment for the poor in the three town parishes for the year ending May 1858 was £5,200; and in the Abbey parish for the same year the assessment was £5,000.

There are few public buildings of importance in Paisley. Besides the Abbey, may be mentioned St George's parish church, the Free High church, the Episcopal church, and also the Oakshaw Street and Abbey Close United Presbyterian churches. The county buildings are of considerable extent and elegance, in the castellated style; and the news-room at the Cross is also a handsome building. The John Neilson Institution is in itself a very fine building, and occupying, as it does, by far the best situation in Paisley, it appears to great advantage. There are three bridges over the Cart, connecting the Old and the New Town of Paisley, but none of them is remarkable. The most important public charity in Paisley is the infirmary, supported by voluntary subscriptions.

The civil history of Paisley affords little to interest or deserve the attention of the general reader. Its ecclesiastical history is curious and interesting, but supplies few points sufficiently salient and compact to be entered upon in so brief a sketch. The famous "Black Book of Paisley," which was long supposed to have been a history of Paisley and its monastery, has been ascertained to be the Scotichronicon of Fordun, a monk of the fourteenth century. The inhabitants of Paisley early embraced the doctrines of the Reformation, notwithstanding the naturally adverse influences of the great monastic establishment; and displayed their attachment to these on various occasions during the civil wars and prelatical persecutions of the seventeenth century. In 1715 and 1745 they showed equal zeal for the House of Brunswick; and the burgh had to pay a fine of £500 to the Young Chevalier at the latter period, as a composition for its anti-Jacobite predilections. The magistrates afterwards memorialized government for compensation, but they never obtained it. In 1597 the queen Palaeologa of James VI honoured the inhabitants with a visit to their town, when it would appear that the royal entertainment fell so heavy on the burgh funds, that in 1617, when her royal consort also visited it, the civic dignitaries prudently forbore so costly a welcome, but in lieu thereof employed "a prettie boy, a son of a Sir James Scemple of Beltrees," to make him a speech, which was judiciously spiced for James's royal ear.

In 1695 the population of the town of Paisley, exclusively of the Abbey parish, where there were then very few houses, was only 2,200. In 1755, sixty years after, it amounted in the town and Abbey parish to 6,799; and in 1781 to 11,100 in the town alone, the population of the Abbey parish not being given in the register. In 1791 the total population was 24,592; 1801, 31,179; 1811, 36,722; 1821, 47,003; 1831, 57,466; 1841, 60,487; 1851, 60,352. In 1851 the population of the parliamentary burgh was 48,026; and in 1858 the same was estimated at 48,302.