adopting the Italian method of more generally solid painting and after
glazing; but he returned to the Flemish method, and as it certainly
was the more expeditious, it may have better suited his hand, and the
demands upon it. Now, here it may be remarked, that even for the first
essential--agreeability of colouring, that is, of the substance of the
paint--it is necessary that it should be rich, really a substance, not
a merely thin wash: such was the positive depth of even the shadowy
parts in the back grounds of Corregio; the paint itself is a rich
substance, with the lustrous depth of precious stones. So that it
would appear that there is in Rubens' style of colouring an original
incompleteness, destructive in part of the naturalness he would aim
at; it is a mannerism, very tolerable in such light works as those
lucid and charming pictures by Teniers where all is light and
unlaboured; but becoming a weakness where the other labour and the
subject are important.

Now, with regard to this celebrated excellence of his, in colouring
the nude, (and here it should be observed, that it is almost
exclusively in his female figures,) however natural it may be, is it
nature in its most agreeable, its most perfect colouring? It has been
said, and intended as praise, that the flesh looks as if it had fed
upon roses; but is it a praise? I should rather say it would not
unaptly express the thinness, the unsubstantialness of it, as of a
rose leaf surface merely. In form, indeed, the figures are any thing
but thin and unsubstantial: but I am considering only the colouring;
it is not rich; it has indeed the light and play of life, but it has
not the glow; it is a surface life, not life, warm life to the very
marrow, such as we see in the works of Titian and Giorgione. They did
not, as Rubens did, heighten the flesh with _pure white_; they
reserved the power of that for another purpose, preserving throughout
a lower tone, so that the eye shall not fasten upon any one particular
tint, the whole being of the character of the "_nimium lubricus
aspici_." Their _white_ and their _dark_, they artfully placed as
opposition, the cool white to set off the warmth, the life-glow of the
flesh, and the dark to make the low tone shine out fair; so that in
this very excellence of flesh painting, they were more perfect, that
one only approach to excellence, by which it should seem Rubens had
acquired his title as a colourist. But these painters, as wel