tists ventured upon the composition of pictures,
intended to represent engravings as well as oil paintings, and that
there are several such works, representing even historical subjects, in
the collections of Carpi. Lanzi considers this art of so much
importance, that he thus concludes his article upon it: "After the
practice of modeling had been brought to vie with sculpture, and after
engraving upon wood had so well counterfeited works of design, we have
to record this third invention, belonging to a State of no great
dimensions. Such a fact is calculated to bring into higher estimation
the geniuses who adorned it. There is nothing of which man is more
ambitious, than of being called an inventor of new arts; nothing is more
flattering to his intellect, or draws a broader line between him and the
animals. Nothing was held in higher reverence by the ancients, and hence
it is that Virgil, in his Elysian Fields, represented the band of
inventors with their brows bound with white chaplets, equally distinct
in merit as in rank, from the more vulgar shades around them."

THE GOLDEN AGE OF PAINTING.

"We have now arrived," says Lanzi, "at the most brilliant period of the
Roman school, and of modern painting itself. We have seen the art
carried to a high degree of perfection by Da Vinci and Buonarotti, at
the beginning of the sixteenth century, and it is remarkable that the
same period embraces not only Rafaelle, but also Correggio, Giorgione,
Titian, and the most celebrated Venetian painters; so that a man
enjoying the common term of life might have seen the works of all these
illustrious masters. The art in a few years thus reached a height to
which it had never before attained, and which has never been rivalled,
except in the attempt to imitate these early masters, or to unite in one
style their various and divided excellencies. It seems an ordinary law
of providence that individuals of consummate genius should be born and
flourish at the same period, or at least at short intervals from each
other, a circumstance of which Velleius Paterculus protested he could
never discover the real cause. 'I observe,' he says, 'men of the same
commanding genius making their appearance together, in the smallest
possible space of time; as it happens in the case of animals of
different kinds, which, confined in a close place, nevertheless, each
selects its own class, and those of a kindred race separate themselves
from the rest. A single a