The aim and style of the Roman school deserve little further notice here, till the appearance of Nicolas Poussin[50] a Frenchman, but grafted on the Roman stock. Bred under Quintin Varin, a French painter of mediocrity, he found on his arrival in Italy that he had more to unlearn than to follow of his master's principles, renounced the national character, and not only with the utmost ardour adopted, but suffered himself to be wholly absorbed by the antique. Such was his attachment to the ancients, that it may be said he less imitated their spirit than copied their relics and painted sculpture; the costume, the mythology, the rites of antiquity were his element; his scenery, his landscape, are pure cla.s.sic ground. He has left specimens to show that he was sometimes sublime, and often in the highest degree pathetic, but history in the strictest sense was his property, and in that he ought to be followed. His agents only appear, to tell the fact; they are subordinate to the story. Sometimes he attempted to tell a story that cannot be told: of his historic dignity the celebrated series of Sacraments; of his sublimity, the vision he gave to Coriola.n.u.s; of his pathetic power, the infant Pyrrhus; and of the vain attempt to tell by figures what words alone can tell, the testament of Eudamidas, are striking instances. His eye, though impressed with the tint, and breadth, and imitation of t.i.tiano, seldom inspired him to charm with colour; crudity and patches frequently deform his effects. He is unequal in his style of design; sometimes his comprehension fails him; he supplies, like Pietro Testa, ideal heads and torsos with limbs and extremities transcribed from the model. Whether from choice or want of power he has seldom executed his conceptions on a larger scale than that which bears his name, and which has perhaps as much contributed to make him the darling of this country, as his merit.

The wildness of Salvator Rosa[51] opposes a powerful contrast to the cla.s.sic regularity of Poussin. Terrific and grand in his conceptions of inanimate nature, he was reduced to attempts of hiding by boldness of hand, his inability of exhibiting her impa.s.sioned, or in the dignity of character: his line is vulgar: his magic visions, less founded on principles of terror than on mythologic trash and caprice, are to the probable combinations of nature, what the paroxysms of a fever are to the flights of vigorous fancy. Though so much extolled and so ambitiously imitated, his banditti are a medley made up of starveling models, shreds and bits of armour from his lumber-room, brushed into notice by a daring pencil. Salvator was a satyrist and a critic, but the rod which he had the insolence to lift against the nudities of Michael Angelo, and the anachronism of Raphael, would have been better employed in chastising his own misconceptions.

The principle of t.i.tiano, less pure in itself and less decided in its object of imitation, did not suffer so much from its more or less appropriate application by his successors, as the former two. Colour once in a very high degree attained, disdains subordination and engrosses the whole. Mutual similarity attracts, body tends to body, as mind to mind, and he who has once gained supreme dominion over the eye, will hardly resign it to court the more coy approbation of mind, of a few opposed to nearly all. Add to this the character of the place and the nature of the encouragement held out to the Venetian artists. Venice was the centre of commerce, the repository of the riches of the globe, the splendid toy-shop of the time: its chief inhabitants princely merchants, or a patrician race elevated to rank by acc.u.mulations from trade, or naval prowess; the bulk of the people, mechanics or artisans, administering the means, and in their turn fed by the produce of luxury.

Of such a system, what could the art be more than the parasite? Religion itself had exchanged its gravity for the allurements of ear and eye, and even sanct.i.ty disgusted, unless arrayed by the gorgeous hand of fashion.--Such was, such will always be the birth-place and the theatre of colour: and hence it is more matter of wonder that the first and greatest colourists should so long have foreborne to overstep the modesty of nature in the use of that alluring medium, than that they yielded by degrees to its golden solicitations.[52]

The principle of Correggio vanished with its author, though it found numerous imitators of its parts. Since him, no eye has conceived that expanse of harmony with which the voluptuous sensibility of his mind arranged and enchanted all visible nature. His grace, so much vaunted and so little understood, was adopted and improved to elegance by Francesco Mazzuoli, called Il Parmegiano,[53] but instead of making her the measure of propriety, he degraded her to affectation: in Parmegiano's figures action is the adjective of the posture; the accident of att.i.tude; they 'make themselves air, into which they vanish.' That disengaged play of delicate forms, the 'Sueltezza' of the Italians, is the prerogative of Parmegiano, though nearly always obtained at the expense of proportion. His grandeur, as conscious as his grace, sacrifices the motive to the mode, simplicity to contrast: his St. John loses the fervour of the apostle in the orator; his Moses the dignity of the lawgiver in the savage. With incredible force of chiaroscuro, he united bland effects and fascinating hues, but their frequent ruins teach the important lesson, that the mixtures which antic.i.p.ate the beauties of time, are big with the seeds of premature decay.

Such was the state of the art, when, towards the decline of the sixteenth century, Lodovico Carracci,[54] with his cousins Agostino[55]

and Annibale, founded at Bologna that eclectic school, which by selecting the beauties, correcting the faults, supplying the defects and avoiding the extremes of the different styles, attempted to form a perfect system. But as the mechanic part was their only object, they did not perceive that the projected union was incompatible with the leading principle of each master. Let us hear this plan from Agostino Carracci himself, as it is laid down in his sonnet[56] on the ingredients required to form a perfect painter, if that may be called a sonnet which has more the air of medical prescription. 'Take,' says Agostino, 'the design of Rome, Venetian motion and shade, the dignified tone of Lombardy's colour, the terrible manner of Michael Angelo, the just symmetry of Raphael, t.i.tiano's truth of nature, and the sovereign purity of Corregio's style: add to these the decorum and solidity of Tibaldi, the learned invention of Primaticcio, and a little of Parmegiano's grace: but to save so much study, such weary labour, apply your imitation to the works which our dear Nicolo has left us here.' Of such advice, balanced between the tone of regular breeding and the cant of an empiric, what could be the result? excellence or mediocrity? who ever imagined that a mult.i.tude of dissimilar threads could compose an uniform texture, that dissemination of spots would make ma.s.ses, or a little of many things produce a legitimate whole? indiscriminate imitation must end in the extinction of character, and that in mediocrity,--the cipher of art.

And were the Carracci such? separate the precept from the practice, the artist from the teacher; and the Carracci are in possession of my submissive homage. Lodovico, far from implicitly subscribing to a master's dictates, was the sworn pupil of nature. To a modest style of form, to a simplicity eminently fitted for those subjects of religious gravity which his taste preferred, he joined that solemnity of hue, that sober twilight, the air of cloistered meditation, which you have so often heard recommended as the proper tone of historic colour. Too often content to rear the humbler graces of his subject, he seldom courted elegance, but always when he did, with enviable success. Even now, though nearly in a state of evanescence, the three nymphs in the garden scene of St. Michele in Bosco, seem moulded by the hand, inspired by the breath of love. Agostino, with a singular modesty which prompted him rather to propagate the fame of others by his graver, than by steady exertion to rely on his own power for perpetuity of name, combined with some learning a cultivated taste, correctness, though not elegance of form, and a corregiesque colour. Annibale, superior to both in power of execution and academic prowess, was inferior to either in taste, and sensibility and judgment; for the most striking proof of this inferiority I appeal to his master-work, the work on which he rests his fame, the gallery of the Farnese palace: a work whose uniform vigour of execution nothing can equal but its imbecility and incongruity of conception. If impropriety of ornament were to be fixed by definition, the subjects of the Farnese gallery might be quoted as the most decisive instances. Criticism has attempted to dismiss Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto from the province of legitimate history with the contemptuous appellation of ornamental painters, not for having painted subjects inapplicable to the public and private palaces, the churches and convents, which they were employed to decorate, but because they treated them sometimes without regard to costume, or the simplicity due to sacred, heroic or allegoric subjects: if this be just, where shall we cla.s.s him, who with the Capella Sistina, and the Vatican before his eye, fills the mansion of religious austerity and episcopal dignity with a chaotic series of trite fable and baccha.n.a.lian revelry, without allegory, void of allusion, merely to gratify the puerile ostentation of dauntless execution and academic vigour? if the praise given to a work be not always transferable to its master; if, as Milton says, 'the work some praise and some the architect,' let us admire the splendour, the exuberance, the concentration of powers displayed in the Farnese gallery, whilst we lament their misapplication by Annibale Carracci.

The heterogeneous principle of the eclectic school soon operated its own dissolution: the great talents which the Carracci had tutored, soon found their own bias, and abandoned themselves to their own peculiar taste. B. Schidone died young in 1615. Barto. Schidone, Guido Reni,[57]

Giovanni Lanfranco, Francesco Albani, Domenico Zampieri, and Frances...o...b..rbieri, called Guercino, differed as much in their objects of imitation as their names. Schidone, all of whose mind was in his eye, embraced, and often to meaner subjects applied the harmony and colour of Correggio, whilst Lanfranco strove, but strove without success, to follow him through the expanse of his creation and ma.s.ses. Grace attracted Guido, but it was the studied grace of theatres: his female forms are abstracts of antique beauty, attended by languishing att.i.tudes, arrayed by voluptuous fashions. His male forms, transcripts of models, such as are found in a genial climate, are sometimes highly characteristic of dignified manhood or apostolic fervour, like his Peter and Paul, formerly in the Zampieri at Bologna: sometimes stately, courteous, insipid, like his Paris attending Helen, more with the air of an amba.s.sador, by proxy, than carrying her off with a lover's fervour.

His Aurora deserved to precede a more majestic sun, and hours less clumsy--his colour varies with his style, sometimes bland and harmonious, sometimes vigorous and stern, sometimes flat and insipid.

Albani, chiefly attracted by soft mythologic conceits, formed nereids and oreads on plump Venetian models, and contrasted their pearly hues with the rosy tints of loves, the juicy brown of fauns and satyrs, and rich marine or sylvan scenery. Domenichino, more obedient than the rest to his masters, aimed at the beauty of the antique, the expression of Raphael, the vigour of Annibale, the colour of Lodovico, and mixing something of each, fell short of all; whilst Guercino broke like a torrent over all academic rules, and with an ungovernable itch of copying whatever lay in his way, sacrificed mind, form and costume, to effects of colour, fierceness of chiaroscuro, and intrepidity of hand.

Such was the state of art when the spirit of machinery, in submission to the vanities and upstart pride of papal nepotism, destroyed what yet was left of meaning; when equilibration, contrast, grouping, engrossed composition, and poured a deluge of gay common-place over the platfonds, panels and cupolas of palaces and temples. Those who could not conceive a figure singly, scattered mult.i.tudes; to count, was to be poor. The rainbow and the seasons were ransacked for their hues, and every eye became the tributary of the great but abused talents of Pietro da Cortona, and the fascinating but debauched and empty facility of Luca Giordano.[58]

The same revolution of mind that had organized the arts of Italy, spread, without visible communication, to Germany, and towards the decline of the fifteenth century, the uncouth essays of Martin Schon, Michael Wolgemuth, and Albrecht Altorfer, were succeeded by the finer polish and the more dextrous method of Albert Durer. The indiscriminate use of the words genius and talent has perhaps nowhere caused more confusion than in the cla.s.sification of artists. Albert Durer was in my opinion a man of great ingenuity, without being a genius. He studied, and, as far as his penetration reached, established certain proportions of the human frame, but he did not invent a style: every work of his is a proof that he wanted the power of imitation, of concluding from what he saw, to what he did not see, that he copied rather than selected the forms that surrounded him, and sans remorse tacked deformity and meagerness to fulness, and sometimes to beauty.[59] Such is his design; in composition copious without taste, anxiously precise in parts, and unmindful of the whole, he has rather shown us what to avoid than what to follow. He sometimes had 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 last 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 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 Raphael, as Raphael excels him in every other quality. I speak of easel-pictures--his drapery is broad though much too angular, and rather snapped 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 Tuscans who had studied Michael Angelo, of Andrea del Sarto, and Jacopo da Pontormo, is a fact which proves that minds at certain periods may be subject to epidemic influence as well as bodies.

Lucas of Leyden[60] was the Dutch imitator of Albert; but the forms of Aldegraver, Sebald Beheim, and George Pentz, appear to have been the result of careful inspection of Marc Antonio's prints from Raphael, of whom Pentz was probably a scholar; and ere long the style of Michael Angelo, as adopted by Pelegrino Tibaldi, and spread by the graver of Giorgio Mantuano, provoked those caravans of German, Dutch, and Flemish students, who on their return from Italy, at the courts of Prague and Munich, in Flanders and the Netherlands, introduced that preposterous manner, the bloated excrescence of diseased brains, which in the form of man left nothing human, distorted action and gesture with insanity of affectation, and dressed the gewgaws of children in colossal shapes; the style of Golzius and Spranger, Heynz and ab Ach: but though content to feed on 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.

This frantic pilgrimage to Italy ceased at the apparition of the two meteors of art, Peter Paul Rubens,[61] and Rembrandt Van Rhyn; both of whom disdaining to acknowledge the usual laws of admission to the temple of fame, boldly forged their own keys, entered and took possession, each, of a most conspicuous place by his own power. Rubens, born at Cologne, in Germany, but brought up at Antwerp, then the depository of western commerce, a school of religious and cla.s.sic learning, and the pompous seat of Austrian and Spanish superst.i.tion, met these advantages with an ardour and success of which ordinary minds can form no idea, if we compare the period at which he is said to have seriously applied himself to painting, under the tuition of Otho Van Veen, with the unbounded power he had acquired over the instruments of art when he set out for Italy; where we instantly discover him not as the pupil, but as the successful rival of the masters whose works he had selected for the objects of his emulation. Endowed with a full comprehension of his own character, he wasted not a moment on the acquisition of excellence incompatible with its fervour, but flew to the centre of his ambition, Venice, and soon compounded from the splendour of Paolo Veronese and the glow of Tintoretto, that florid system of mannered magnificence which is the element of his art and the principle of his school. He first spread that ideal pallet, which reduced to its standard the variety of nature, and once methodized, whilst his mind tuned the method, shortened or superseded individual imitation. His scholars, however dissimilar in themselves, saw with the eye of their master; the eye of Rubens was become the subst.i.tute of nature: still the mind alone that had balanced these tints, and weighed their powers, could apply them to their objects, and determine their use in the pompous display of historic and allegoric magnificence; for _that_ they were selected, for _that_ the gorgeous nosegay swelled: but when in the progress of depraved practice they became the mere palliatives of mental impotence, empty representatives of themselves, the supporters of nothing but clumsy forms and clumsier conceits, they can only be considered as splendid improprieties, as the subst.i.tutes for wants which no colour can palliate and no tint supply.

In this censure I am under no apprehension of being suspected to include either the ill.u.s.trious name of Vandyck,[62] or that of Abraham Diepenbeck. Vandyck, more elegant, more refined, to graces, which the genius of Rubens disdained to court, joined that exquisite taste which, in following the general principle of his master, moderated, and adapted its application to his own pursuits. His sphere was portrait, and the imitation of t.i.tiano insured him the second place in that. The fancy of Diepenbeck, though not so exuberant, if I be not mistaken, excelled in sublimity the imagination of Rubens: his Bellerophon, Dioscuri, Hippolytus, Ixion, Sisyphus, fear no compet.i.tor among the productions of his master.

Rembrandt[63] was, in my opinion, a genius of the first cla.s.s in whatever relates not to form. In spite of the most portentous deformity, and without considering the spell of his chiaroscuro, such were his powers of nature, such the grandeur, pathos, or simplicity of his composition, from the most elevated or extensive arrangement to the meanest and most homely, that the best cultivated eye, the purest sensibility, and the most refined taste dwell on them, equally enthralled. Shakspeare alone excepted, no one combined with so much transcendant excellence so many, in all other men unpardonable faults--and reconciled us to them. He possessed the full empire of light and shade, and of all the tints that float between them: he tinged his pencil with equal success in the cool of dawn, in the noon-day ray, in the livid flash, in evanescent twilight, and rendered darkness visible.

Though made to bend a steadfast eye on the bolder phenomena of Nature, yet he knew how to follow her into her calmest abodes, gave interest to insipidity or baldness, and plucked a flower in every desert. None ever like Rembrandt knew to improve an accident into a beauty, or give importance to a trifle. If ever he had a master, he had no followers; Holland was not made to comprehend his power. The succeeding school of colourists were content to tip the cottage, the hamlet, the boor, the ale-pot, the shambles, and the haze of winter, with orient hues, or the glow of setting summer suns.

In turning our eye to Switzerland we shall find great powers without great names, those of Hans Holbein[64] and Francis Mola only excepted.

But the scrupulous precision, the high finish, and the Tizianesque colour of Hans Holbein, make the least part of his excellence for those who have seen his Designs of the Pa.s.sion, and that series of emblematic groups, known under the name of Holbein's Dance of Death. From Belinzona to Basle, invention appears to have been the characteristic of Helvetic art: the works of Tobias Stimmer, Christopher Murer, Jost Amman, Gotthard Ringgli, are mines of invention, and exhibit a style of design, equally poised between the emaciated dryness of Albert Durer and the bloated corpulence of Golzius.

The seeds of mediocrity which the Carracci had attempted to scatter over Italy, found a more benign soil, and reared an abundant harvest in France: to mix up a compound from something of every excellence in the catalogue of art, was the principle of their theory and their aim in execution. It is in France where Michael Angelo's right to the t.i.tle of a painter was first questioned. The fierceness of his line, as they call it, the purity of the antique, and the characteristic forms of Raphael, are only the road to the academic vigour, the librated style of Annibale Carracci, and from that they appeal to the model; in composition they consult more the artifice of grouping, contrast and richness, than the subject or propriety; their expression is dictated by the theatre. From the uniformity of this process, not to allow that the school of France offers respectable exceptions, would be unjust; without recurring again to the name of Nicolas Poussin, the works of Eustache le Sueur,[65]

Charles le Brun, Sebastien Bourdon, and sometimes Pierre Mignard, contain original beauties and rich materials. Le Sueur's series of pictures in the Chartreux exhibit the features of contemplative piety, in a purity of style and a placid breadth of manner that moves the heart. His dignified Martyrdom of St. Laurence, and the Burning of the Magic Books at Ephesus, breathe the spirit of Raphael. The powerful comprehension of a whole, only equalled by the fire which pervades every part of the Battles of Alexander, by Charles le Brun, would ent.i.tle him to the highest rank in history, had the characters been less mannered, had he not exchanged the Argyraspids and the Macedonian phalanx for the compact legionaries of the Trajan pillar; had he distinguished Greeks from barbarians, rather by national feature and form than by accoutrement and armour. The Seven Works of Charity by Seb. Bourdon teem with surprising pathetic and always novel images; and in the Plague of David, by Pierre Mignard, our sympathy is roused by energies of terror and combinations of woe, which escaped Poussin and Raphael himself.

The obstinacy of national pride,[66] perhaps more than the neglect of government or the frown of superst.i.tion, confined the labours of the Spanish school, from its obscure origin at Sevilla to its brightest period, within the narrow limits of individual imitation. But the degree of perfection attained by Diego Velasquez, Joseph Ribera, and Murillo, in pursuing the same object by means as different as successful, impresses us with deep respect for the variety of their powers.

That the great style ever received the homage of Spanish genius, appears not; neither Alfonso Berruguette, nor Pellegrino Tibaldi, left followers: but that the eyes and the taste fed by the substance of Spagnuoletto and Murillo, should without reluctance have submitted to the gay volatility of Luca Giordano, and the ostentatious flimsiness of Sebastian Conca, would be matter of surprise, did we not see the same principles successfully pursued in the platfonds of Antonio Raphael Mengs, the painter of philosophy, as he is styled by his biographer D'Azara. The cartoons of the frescoes painted for the royal palace at Madrid, representing the apotheosis of Trajan and the temple of Renown, exhibit less the style of Raphael in the nuptials of Cupid and Psyche at the Farnesina, than the gorgeous but empty bustle of Pietro da Cortona.

From this view of art on the Continent, let us cast a glance on its state in this country, from the age of Henry VIII. to our own.--From that period to this, Britain never ceased pouring its caravans of n.o.ble and wealthy pilgrims over Italy, Greece, and Ionia, to pay their devotions at the shrines of virtu and taste: not content with adoring the obscure idols, they have ransacked their temples, and none returned without some share in the spoil: in plaister or in marble, on canva.s.s or in gems, the arts of Greece and Italy were transported to England, and what Petronius said of Rome, that it was easier to meet there with a G.o.d than a man, might be said of London. Without inquiring into the permanent and accidental causes of the inefficacy of these efforts with regard to public taste and support of art, it is observable, that, whilst Francis I. was busied, not to aggregate a ma.s.s of painted and chiselled treasures merely to gratify his own vanity, and brood over them with sterile avarice, but to scatter the seeds of taste over France, by calling, employing, enriching Andrea del Sarto, Rustici, Rosso, Primaticcio, Cellini, Niccolo; in England, Holbein and Torregiano under Henry, and Federigo Zucchero under Elizabeth, were condemned to gothic work and portrait painting. Charles indeed called Rubens and his scholars to provoke the latent English spark, but the effect was intercepted by his destiny. His son, in possession of the cartoons of Raphael, and with the magnificence of Whitehall before his eyes, suffered Verio to contaminate the walls of his palaces, or degraded Lely to paint the Cymons and Iphigenias of his court; whilst the manner of Kneller swept completely what yet might be left of taste under his successors: such was the equally contemptible and deplorable state of English art, till the genius of Reynolds first rescued from the mannered depravation of foreigners his own branch, and soon extending his view to the higher departments of art, joined that select body of artists who addressed the ever open ear, ever attentive mind of our Royal Founder, with the first idea of this establishment. His beneficence soon gave it a place and a name, his august patronage, sanction, and individual encouragement: the annually increased merits of thirty exhibitions in this place, with the collateral ones contrived by the speculations of commerce, have told the surprising effects: a ma.s.s of self-taught and tutored powers burst upon the general eye, and unequivocally told the world what might be expected from the concurrence of public encouragement--how far this has been or may be granted or withheld, it is not here my province to surmise: the plans lately adopted and now organizing within these walls for the dignified propagation and support of art, whether fostered by the great, or left to their own energy, must soon decide what may be produced by the unison of British genius and talent, and whether the painters' school of that nation which claims the foremost honours of modern poetry, which has produced with Reynolds, Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Wilson, shall submit to content themselves with a subordinate place among the schools we have enumerated.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] See the account of this in Vasari; vita di P. Brunelleschi, tom.

ii. 114. It is of wood, and still exists in the chapel of the family Gondi, in the church of S. Maria Novella. I know that near a century before Donato, Giotto is said to have worked in marble two ba.s.so-relievoes on the campanile of the cathedral of Florence; they probably excel the style of his pictures as much as the bronze works executed by Andrea Pisani, from his designs, at the door of the Battisterio.

[28] Masaccio da S. Giovanni di Valdarno born in 1402, is said to have died in 1443. He was the pupil of Masolino da Panicale.

[29] Andrea Mantegna died at Mantoua, 1505. A monument erected to his memory in 1517, by his sons, gave rise to the mistake of dating his death from that period.

[30] Luca Signorelli died at Cortona 1521, aged 82.

[31] Lionardo da Vinci is said to have died in 1517, aged 75, at Paris.

[32] The flying birds of paste, the lions filled with lilies, the lizards with dragons' wings, horned and silvered over, savour equally of the boy and the quack. It is singular enough that there exists not the smallest hint of Lorenzo de Medici having employed or noticed a man of such powers and such early celebrity; the legend which makes him go to Rome with Juliano de Medici at the access of Leo X., to accept employment in the Vatican, whether sufficiently authentic or not, furnishes a characteristic trait of the man. The Pope pa.s.sing through the room allotted for the pictures, and instead of designs and cartoons, finding nothing but an apparatus of distillery, of oils and varnishes, exclaimed, _Oime, costui non e per far nulla, da che comincia a pensare alla fine innanzi il principio dell' opera!_ From an admirable sonnet of Lionardo, preserved by Lomazzo, he appears to have been sensible of the inconstancy of his own temper, and full of wishes, at least, to correct it.

Much has been said of the honour he received by expiring in the arms of Francis I. It was indeed an honour, by which destiny in some degree atoned to that monarch for his future disaster at Pavia.

[33] Fra Bartolomeo died at Florence 1517, at the age of 48.

[34] Michael Angelo Buonarotti, born at Castel-Caprese in 1474, died at Rome 1564, aged 90.

[35] Like Silanion--'Apollodorum fecit, fictorem et ipsum, sed inter cunctos diligentissimum artis et inimic.u.m sui judicem, crebro perfecta signa frangentem, dum satiare cupiditatem nequit artis, et ideo insanum cognominatum. Hoc in eo expressit, nec hominem ex aere fecit sed Iracundiam.' Plin. l. x.x.xiv. 7.

[36] When M. Angelo p.r.o.nounced oil-painting to be _Arte da donna e da huomini agiati e infingardi_, a maxim to which the fierce Venetian manner has given an air of paradox, he spoke relatively to fresco: it was a lash on the short-sighted insolence of Sebastian del Piombo, who wanted to persuade Paul III. to have the Last Judgement painted in oil.

That he had a sense for the beauties of oil-colour, its glow, its juice, its richness, its pulp, the praises which he lavished on t.i.tiano, whom he called the only painter, and his patronage of Fra Sebastian himself, evidently prove. When young, M. Angelo attempted oil-painting with success; the picture painted for Angelo Doni is an instance, and probably the only entire work of the kind that remains. The Lazarus, in the picture destined for the cathedral at Narbonne, rejects the claim of every other hand. The Leda, the cartoon of which, formerly in the palace of the Vecchietti at Florence, is now in the possession of W. Lock, Esq.

was painted in distemper (a tempera); all small or large oil-pictures shown as his, are copies from his designs or cartoons, by Marcello Venusti, Giacopo da Pontormo, Battista Franco, and Sebastian of Venice.

[37] Raphael Sanzio, of Urbino, died at Rome 1520, at the age of 37.

[38] Giorgio Barbarelli, from his size and beauty called Giorgione, was born at Castel Franco, in the territory of Venice, 1478, and died at Venice, 1511.

[39] t.i.tiano Vecelli, or, as the Venetians call him, Tizian, born at Cador in the Friulese, died at Venice, 1576, aged 99.

[40] The birth and life of Antonio Allegri, or, as he called himself, Laeti, surnamed Correggio, is more involved in obscurity than the life of Apelles. Whether he was born in 1490 or 1494 is not ascertained; the time of his death in 1534 is more certain. The best account of him has undoubtedly been given by A. R. Mengs in his _Memorie concernenti la vita e le opere di Antonio Allegri denominato il Correggio_. Vol. ii. of his works, published by the Spaniard D. G. Niccola d'Azara.

[41] Pelegrino Tibaldi died at Milano in 1592, aged 70.

[42] Sebastiano, afterwards called Del Piombo from the office of the papal signet, died at Rome in 1547, aged 62.

[43] Daniel Ricciarelli, of Volterra, died in 1566, aged 57.

[44] Now the first ornament of the exquisite collection of J. J.

Angerstein, Esq.--Since purchased for the National Gallery.--EDITOR.

[45] Giorgio Vasari, of Arezzo, died in 1584, aged 68.

[46] Julio Pipi, called Romano, died at Mantoua in 1546, aged 54.

[47] Francesco Primaticcio, made Abbe de St. Martin de Troyes, by Francis, I., died in France 1570, aged 80.

[48] Polydoro Caldara da Caravaggio was a.s.sa.s.sinated at Messina in 1543, aged 51.

[49] Michael Angelo Amerigi, surnamed Il Caravaggi, knight of Malta, died 1609, aged 40.

[50] Nicolas Poussin, of Andely, died at Rome 1665, aged 71.