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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

says:

"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 Med. ici-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 the ocracy. 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 An giolo 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

erected. To prosecute the undertaking, money was wanted, and indulgences were sold to sup ply the deficiencies of the treasury. Luther, a monk of Saxony, opposed the authority of the church in giving license to such an unholy traffic; and it is singular that the means which were employed to raise the most splendid Christian edifice which the world has ever seen, should at the same time have shaken that religion, as it then existed, to its foundation.

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Next to Angiolo, came the "divine Raffaelle," justly termed the father of dramatic paintingthe painter of humanity. In his conceptions and execution, he was almost the antipode of Angiolo. Mildness was the great characteristic of his pictures, and beauty of delineation and colour, seemed to have been his chief study. His style was not so elevating, but far more winning and delusive than his great contemporary. "M. Angiolo," says Fuseli, came to nature, nature came to Raffaelle-he transmitted her features like a lucid glass, unstained, unmodified. We stand with awe before M. Angiolo, and tremble at the height to which he elevates us-we embrace Raffaelle, and follow wherever he leads us." Raffaelle was modest in the extreme. Francis I. of France, having received a picture of St. Michael from the hand of this artist, which he much coveted, remunerated him for it far beyond what Raffaelle conceived he ought to receive; but the generous artist made the king a present of the Holy Family, painted by himself, which the courteous monarch received, saying, "That persons famous in the arts partake of the immortality of princes, and are upon a footing with them."

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