il suo carrattere_, says his biographer; an
observation, by the way, in support of my hypothesis.

Rubens, with all his transcendent genius, had a coarse imagination: he
bore the character of an honest, liberal, but not very refined man.
Rubens painted Virgins--would he had let them alone! fat, comfortable
farmers' wives, nursing their chubby children. Then follows Vandyke in
the opposite extreme. Vandyke was celebrated in his day, for his
personal accomplishments: he was, says his biographers, a complete
scholar, courtier and gentleman. His beautiful Madonnas are,
accordingly, what we might expect--rather too intellectual and
lady-like: they all look as if they had been polished by education.

The grand austere genius of Michel Angelo was little calculated to
portray the dove-like meekness of the _Vergine dolce e pia_, or the
playfulness of infantine beauty. In his Mater Amabilis, sweetness and
beauty are sacrificed to expression; and dignity is exaggerated into
masculine energy. In the Mater Dolorosa, suffering is tormented into
agony: the anguish is too human: it is not sufficiently softened by
resignation; and makes us turn away with a too painful sympathy. Such
is the admirable head in the Palazzo Litti at Milan; such his sublime
_Pieta_ in the Vatican--but the last, being in marble, is not quite a
case in point.

I will mention but two more painters of whose lives and characters I
know nothing yet, and may therefore fairly make their works a test of
both, and judge of them in their Madonnas, and afterwards measure my
own penetration and the truth of my hypothesis, by a reference to the
biographical writers.

In the few pictures I have seen of Carlo Cignani, I have been struck
by the predominance of mind and feeling over mere external form: there
is a picture of his in the Rospigliosi Palace--or rather, to give an
example which is nearer at hand, and fresh in my memory, there is in
the gallery _here_, his Madonna del Rosario. It represents a beautiful
young woman, evidently of plebeian race: the form of the face is
round, the features have nothing of the beau-ideal, and the whole head
wants dignity: yet has the painter contrived to throw into this lovely
picture an inimitable expression which depends on nothing external,
which in the living prototype we should term _countenance_; as if a
chastened consciousness of her high destiny and exalted character
shone through the natural rusticity of her features, and t