is closely imitated from
Agostino Carracci's.

GUIDO RENI (1575-1642), even more popular in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries than Domenichino, was as skilful in some respects,
but hardly as admirable. The _Ecce Homo_, bequeathed by Samuel Rogers to
the National Gallery, is an excellent example of his ability to charm
the sentimentalist, and if ever there should be a popular revival of
taste in the direction of the now neglected school of the Carracci, he
will possibly resume all the honour formerly paid to him. The same can
hardly be predicted for the far inferior Carlo Maratti, Guercino, and
Carlo Dolce.

Space forbids me more than the bare mention in these pages of the
brilliant revival of painting in Venice during the earlier part of the
eighteenth century by ANTONIO CANALE (1697-1768), GIOVANNI BATTISTA
TIEPOLO (1692-1769), PIETRO LONGHI (1702-1785), and FRANCESCO GUARDI
(1712-1793). Charming as their excellent accomplishments were, they must
give place to more important claims awaiting our attention in other
countries.

_SPANISH SCHOOL_

One of the sensations of the Exhibition of Spanish Old Masters at the
Grafton Gallery in the autumn of 1913 was an altar panel, dated 1250,
which was acquired by Mr Roger Fry in Paris, and catalogued as of the
"Early Catalan School." In view of the fact that this picture is
"certainly to be regarded as one of the very oldest of primitive
pictures painted on wood in any country ... a decade earlier than the
picture by Margaritone in the National Gallery," it seems somewhat
dogmatic to assert that while retaining a strongly Byzantine character
"the style is distinctly that of Catalonia." What was the style of
Catalonia?

So far as the history of the art is concerned, the chapter on Spain is,
with one exception, a very short and a singularly uninteresting one,
whether Mr Fry's panel was painted in Catalonia or whether it was not;
and in spite of every effort to find in this uncongenial country that
expansion of painting that might reasonably have been expected to flow
from Italy and moisten its barren soil for the production of so
wonderful a genius as Velasquez, there is positively nothing earlier
than Velasquez, and not very much after him, that has more than what we
may call a documentary interest. While in Italy or the Netherlands the
names of scores of painters earlier than the seventeenth century are
endeared to us by the recollection of the works th