ay be safe to refer, first to
the Venetian, the Lombard, and then to the Bolognese schools. Not that
the Roman school is altogether to be omitted. Out of his polished
style, Raffaelle is often excellent--both rich in tone, and, where he
is not remarkably so, often sentimental. Some of his frescoes, as the
Heliodorus, are good examples. And in that small picture in our
National Gallery, the "St Catherine," the sentiment of purity and
loveliness is admirably sustained in the colouring. There is in the
best pictures of that school no affected flashiness of high lights--no
flimsiness in the unsubstantial paint in the shadows; there is an
evenness throughout, which, if it reach not the perfection of
colouring, is the best substitute for it.

Power is not inconsistent with modesty--with forbearance. In the
flashy style, all the force is expended, and visibly so; and as in
that excess of power the flash of lightning is but momentary, we
cannot long bear the exhibition of such a power rendered continuous.
In the more modest--the subdued style--the artist conceals as much as
may be the very power he has used, thereby actually strengthening it;
for while you have all you want, you know not how much may be in
reserve, and you feel it unseen, or may believe it to be unseen, when
in fact it is before your eyes, though half veiled for a purpose.

Let not any painter who would be a colourist deceive himself into the
belief that the most vivid and unmixed colours are the best for his
art, nor that even they are the truest to nature, in whatever sense he
may take the word nature. It is easy enough to lay on crude vermilion,
lake, and chrome yellows; yet the colours that shall be omitted shall
be infinite, and by far more beautiful than the chosen, and for which,
since the generality are not painters, nor scientific in the effects
of colours, there are no names. Let a painter who would have so
limited a scale and view of colour do his best, and the first
flower-bed he looks at will shame him with regard to those very
colours he has adopted, as with regard to those thousand shades of
hues, mixed and of endless variety, which are still more beautiful. We
scarcely ever in nature see a really unmixed colour; and that the
mixed are the most agreeable may be more than conjectured, from the
fact that, of the three, the blue, the red, and the yellow, the
mixture of the two will be so unsatisfactory, that the mind's eye
will, when withdrawn, su