Salvator.-Destroying a picture.

his memory, that on his return home he never failed to make the happiest use of it. His skies were warm and full of lustre, and every object is properly illumined. His distances are admirable, and in every part a delightful union and harmony never fail to excite our admiration. His invention is pleasing, his colouring delicate, and his tints have such an agreeable sweetness and variety as to have been but imperfectly imitated by the best subsequent artists, and have never been equalled. He frequently gave an uncommon tenderness to his unfinished trees, y glazing; and in his large compositions, which he painted in fresco, he was so exact, that the distinct species of every tree might readily be distinguished.

SALVATOR ROSA.

This famous painter was born at Naples, in 1614. He was brought up with Francesco Francanzano, a painter to whom he was related; but while with him, was forced, for a livelihood, to sell his drawings about the streets. But after he became celebrated, he would sell none of his paintings but at an exorbitant price. A person of great wealth had been long treating with him for a large landscape, and every time he came Salvator raised the price one hundred crowns. The gentleman expressed his surprise, but the painter told him that with all his riches he could not purchase it, and to put an end to his importunities, destroyed the picture before his eyes.

He lived to the age of 59. In the sister arts of poetry and painting, he was esteemed one of the most excellent masters that Italy produced in the seventeenth century. In the former, his province was satire; in the latter, landscapes, pattles, and seaports with figures. Though the talent of Salvator was principally adapted

Flemish and Dutch schools nearly identical.

to small pictures, he filled one of a large size with strikingly sublime objects, of which the Conspiracy o. Jataline, in the gallery of Florence, is a proof. But his great excellence lay in landscape; and he delighted in representing scenes of desolation, solitude, and danger; gloomy forests, rocky shores, lonely dells leading to caverns of banditti, Alpine bridges, trees scathed by lightning, and skies lowering with thunder. His figures are wandering peasants, forlorn travellers, shipwrecked sailors, or robbers intent upon prey. He also painted sorcerers and apparitions, of which the principal is the Witch of Endor/c

Flemish, Dutch, and Spanish Schools.

THE Flemish school is characterized by splendor of colour, magical chiaroscuro, and learned design; by grandeur of composition, a certain nobleness of air, and strong and natural expression. Such qualities are confined to those artists who devoted themselves to the historical, but as the Flemish school was equally eminent in the subordinate departments, its characteristics, as regards the latter, are nearly identical with the Dutch school, recognizing as their sole guide, individual and common nature-often the lowest and ugliest. In chiaroscuro, and all the requisites of harmony of colour, they equal the excellence of the Flemish and Venetian schools. In impasto, delicacy of touch, contrast, and gradation of tints, exemplified in their treatment of marine-pieces, landscapes, and animals, the Dutch school has not rival.

a

Gallery of Spanish pictures.-Durer.-Neatness.

Until lately, the Spanish school was little known or appreciated. To those who have not had an opportunity of seeing the chefs-d'œuvre of the great masters of Spain, the extensive gallery of Spanish pictures, established by Louis Phillipe, of France, must be particularly interesting. It contains a miscellaneous collection of the different masters, including specimens of Murillo, Morales, Zurbaran, Ribera, Cano, Herrera, Gomez, &c. T'ne moment we enter, we feel that we are among a new people, whose life and character are strongly depicted in the works before us. Every thing bespeaks a grand and solemn nation— the dignified outlines, the monastic saints, the melancholy beauties, the proud forms of the men, the stern severity, the dark and vigorous chiaroscuro-all breathing the sad and solemn legends of history.

DURER.

Albert Durer was born at Nuremburg, in 1471. As an engraver, he is generally allowed to have been the best of his time; but as a painter, it is observed that he studied only nature in her unadorned state, without attending to those graces which that study might have afforded him, by a judicious choice. His imagination, however, was lively, his composition grand, his execution happy, and his pencil delicate. He finished his works with exact neatness, and was particularly excellent in his Madonnas, but Iwould have done better if he had not encumbered them with heavy draperies. Though he surpassed the painters of his own nation, he could not avoid their defects—such as dryness and formality in the outlines, the want of a just degradation of the tints, an expression without agreeableness, and draperies broad in their folds, but stiff in the forms.

Ingenuity.-Colour.-Father of the German school.

"The indiscriminate use of the words genius and talent," says Fuseli,* "has perhaps nowhere caused more confusion than in the classification 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 without remorse tacked deformity and meagreness to fulness, and sometimes to beauty. 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 of handling, as Raphael excels him in every other quality. I speak of easel-pictures. His drapery is broad, though much too angular, and rather mapped 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."

Many of the criticisms on the works of the Old Masters in this volume, are adopted from Fuseli.

Peter Paul Rubens was, according to some accounts, a native of Antwerp; but others say, that his father removing to Cologne, to avoid the calamities of a civil war, his son was born there, in 1577. His family was respectable, and he received a very liberal education. Discovering an early turn for painting, (he attached himself to Otho Venius, or Octavio Van Veen, who was a man of learning, an accomplished artist, and of an amiable disposition. From this preceptor Rubens acquired that taste for allegory which distinguished him so remarkably through life, though it certainly did not constitute his highest merit. After continuing with this instructor for four years, he was told very candidly by him that he could teach him no more, and that nothing remained for his improvement but a journey to Italy.

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 splendor 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 his standard the variety of nature, and once methodized, while his mind tuned the method, shortened or superseded individual imitation.

Rubens is not one of those regular and timid composers, who escape censure and deserve no praise. He produces no faultless monsters; his works abound with defects, as well as beauties, and are liable, by their daring eccentricities, to provoke much criticism. But they have, nevertheless, that peculiar property,