had soon painted the apostles, but he had studied long and painfully to get a head of the Saviour to suit him; and he also found it quite difficult to give the proper expression to that of Judas. On the evening previous to the day appointed for its completion, the prior entered the refectory, and perceiving the picture yet unfinished, with hellish triumph taunted the artist for his delay, and hinted that his dismissal from the presence of the Duke would be his just reward. Lionardo eyed the prior with all of an artist's vision while he thus expressed himself, and as soon as he left the room, applied himself to his work, and ere day dawned, completed the whole, and suspended a curtain before it. The next day, the Duke with many invited guests, assembled in the refectory to witness the skill of Lionardo. The artist was pale, and stood immoveable while the Duke ordered the removal of the curtain. The prior, confident from the artist's manner, that the work was unfinished, and eager to enjoy a triumph, hastily pulled the curtain aside, when the complete picture was exposed to view. A murmur of approbation ran through the crowd, when all eyes were alternately fixed upon the prior and upon Judas: "It is he! it is he!" they exclaimed, and to the great confusion of the monk, he saw a portrait of his own head upon the shoulders of Judas. Lionardo was silent; his triumph was complete.

This fine picture, which for three centuries was the chief glory of art in Milan, was suffered by the authorities of the city to become completely destroyed. The refectory in which it was placed was actually changed into a watchhouse, and when the French, under Buonaparte,

says:

had possession of the city, it was used as a prison where French soldiers guarded their prisoners of war. But before the French entered the city, the picture had become so disfigured by damp and smoke, that it was almost impossible to determine what it was. Monsieur Simond "As to those by whom it was done, an old woman who had lived near the refectory.for seventeen years, informed me that she had heard of soldiers firing at the picture before she resided there; that a soldier of the sixth French hussars told her he himself had done so with others, not knowing what it was, when guarding prisoners confined in the hall, and that these prisoners, men of all nations, threw stones and brick-bats against it, by way of amusement. She also stated that when Buonaparte came to Milan, he went to see the picture, and finding the hall still used as a place of confinement, he shrugged up his shoulders and stamped with his foot, and ordering the prisoners away, a door was walled up, and a balustrade or wooden partition was drawn across the room before it."

But long before the French soldiers thus ignorantly mutilated one of the finest pictures ever painted, the monks of the convent had made a door in the wall on which it was placed, through the centre of the picture, merely to make the passage more direct from the chapel where they fasted, to the dining hall where they feasted! Fortunately for the fame of da Vinci, and for the arts, excellent copies of this great picture were made when it was in all the freshness of its original beauty, and the noble art of engraving has scattered copies of these transcripts all over the civilized world. It is a curious fact,

that of all the great works of the masters of this period, none met with so speedy and complete destruction as this, (except by fire,) and of none has engraving scattered beautiful copies in so great profusion.

CHAPTER III.

Painting in Flanders, Germany, and France-Michael Angiolo and his Works-Raffaelle and his Style-Cartoons-Giorgione, Titian, Corregio, and their Works-Patronage of di Medici-Removal of the Seat of the Art to Rome-Other Italian Painters The Brothers Caracci-Guido-Poussin-Holbein, Durer, Rubens, and other Dutch and Flemish Painters-Rembrandt and his Style The Art in Spain-Anecdote of Murillo-Poetical Garland of Julia.

ABOUT the time of Giotto, whom we have already mentioned, the art of painting was carried into Flanders by some Flemmings who had been to Italy to study painting. But they seemed to have carried the art but a few steps farther toward perfection, than Cimabue had left it, yet their efforts had the effect of extending the taste for painting beyond the confines of Italy.

Bartolomeo della Porta succeeded da Vinci as the first painter of the age, and although he did not equal that great master in most respects, yet in some he was his superior. He was the first that gave gradation to colour, form and masses to drapery, and excelled also in the perfect resemblance of flesh. He was a monk, and consequently nearly all his productions were of a religious character. His perspective of the human figure, or foreshortening as it is called, was ad

mirably done, and his figures seemed, to stand out in perfect relief from the canvass. Under him the great Raffaelle studied, and his style was the foundation on which Michael Angiolo reared his mighty fabric of fame. He died in 1541.

About this period, great attention was paid to the art in Germany, France, and indeed throughout all southern Europe, and a numerous list of artists appear during the next half century after Lionardo da Vinci. He, with Michael Angiolo Buonarotti, and Raffaelle Lauzio da Urbino, have been called the great triumvirate in art. They were contemporaries, and by their rivalry advanced the art of painting to such a state of perfection, that their productions have never been excelled.

Angiolo was possessed of a strength of mind, and boldness of spirit, to which the others were comparatively strangers. While da Vinci and Raffaelle sought to please the beholder with the softness and beauty of their work, Angiolo gave a powerful effect by the magnificence of his conception and execution. He was never known to employ oil in painting, but chose rather to pursue the bold style of fresco. He called oil painting the art of females and of idlers. "Michael Angiolo," says Fuseli, "did for painting what Homer had planned for poetry, the epic part of which, with the utmost simplicity of whole, should unite magnificence of plan and endless variety of subordinate parts. His line is uniformly grand: character and beauty were admitted only as far as they could be made subservient to grandeur. A beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of poverty; the hump of his

dwarf is impressed with dignity; his women are moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man; his men are a race of giants. He is the inventor of epic painting, in that sublime circle of the Sistine Chapel, which exhibits the origin, the progress, and the final dispensations of theocracy. He has personified motion in the groups of the cartoon of Pisa; imbodied sentiments on the monuments of St. Lorenzo; unravelled the features of meditation in the prophets and sybils of the chapel of Sextus; and in the Last Judgment, with every attitude that varies the human body, traced the master-trait of every passion that sways the human heart. Though as a sculptor, he expressed the character of flesh more perfectly than all who went before or came after him, yet he never submitted to copy an individual-Julio the Second, only excepted, and in him he represented the reigning passion, rather than the man. In painting he contented himself with a negative colour, and, as the painter of mankind, rejected all meretricious ornament. The fabric of St. Peter, at Rome, scattered into an infinity of jarring parts by Bramante and his successors, he concentrated; suspended the cupola, and to the most complex, gave the air of the most simple of edifices. Such, take him all in all, was Michael Angiolo, the salt of art."

It may not be uninteresting to those who are fond of tracing effects to causes, and especially to the true christian, to know, that Michael Angiolo probably, though unexpectedly, was the instrument of laying the first foundation-stone of the Reformation. His monument to Pope Julius II. demanded a building of corresponding magnificence, and the church of St. Peter was