mmon
face, reveal the painter's want of feeling for mythological grandeur.
The Titans are a confused heap of brawny, sprawling nudities--studied,
perhaps, from gondoliers or stevedores, but showing a want of even
academical adroitness in their ill-drawn extremities and inadequate
foreshortenings. It was essential in such a subject that movement
should be suggested. Yet Longhi has contrived to make the falling rocks
and lurid clouds look as though they were irremovably wedged into their
places on the walls, while his ruining giants are clearly transcripts
from naked models in repose. Here and there upon the ceiling we catch a
note of graceful fancy, especially in a group of lightly-painted
goddesses,--elegant and natural female figures, draped in pale blues and
greens and pinks, with a silvery illumination from the upper sky. But
the somewhat effeminate sweetness of this episode is ill-combined with
the dull and impotent striving after violent effect in the main subject;
and the whole composition leaves upon our mind the impression of "sound
and fury, signifying nothing."

III.

It is singular that Longhi should have reached the age of thirty-two
without discovering his real vocation. The absence of brain-force in the
conception, of strength in the design, and of any effective adaptation
to architecture, which damns the Sagredo frescoes, is enough to prove
that he was here engaged on work for which he had no faculty and felt no
sympathy.

What revealed to him the true bias of his talent? Did he perchance,
just about this period, come across some prints from Hogarth? That is
very possible. But the records of his life are so hopelessly meagre that
it were useless to indulge in conjecture.

I am not aware whether he had already essayed any of those domestic
pieces and delineative scenes from social life which displayed his
genuine artistic power, and for the sake of which his name will always
be appreciated. He is said to have been of a gay, capricious
temperament, delighting in the superficial aspects of aristocratic
society, savouring the humours of the common folk with no less pleasure,
and enjoying all phases of that easy-going Carnival gaiety in which the
various classes met and mingled at Venice. These inclinations directed
him at last into the right path. For some forty years he continued to
paint a series of easel-pictures, none of them very large, some of them
quite small, in which the Vanity Fair of Venice