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Pliny is the synonyme of unrivalled and unattainable excellence; but, in our estimate of his talents, we must candidly consider what modifications may be requisite on an enumeration of his actual works. It is very difficult to ascertain how far real value may be attached to the panegyrics on works of art. These will always be bestowed, in the highest strain, on the best works of the writer's time: and thus we observe that, at all periods, contemporary authors have expressed the same degrees of approbation, and in the same terms, of the pictures they have seen produced; whilst we know that, as art was slow in its progress, it is impossible that in every stage it could have merited equal commendation. The works of Apelles, so far as it is possible to comprehend their nature, exhibit neither the deepest pathos of expression, the widest sphere of comprehension, nor the most acute discrimination of character: his great prerogative consisted, perhaps, more in the unison than in the extent of his powers: he knew better what his capabilities could achieve, and what lay beyond them, than any other artist. Grace of conception, and refinement of taste, were his elements, and went hand in hand with grace of execution, and completeness in finish, irresistible when found united. The Venus of Apelles, or, as it may rather be called, the personification of the birthday of Love, was esteemed as the most splendid achievement of art; the outline of the goddess baffled every attempt at improvement, whilst imitation shrunk from the purity, the force, the brilliancy, the evanescent gradations of her tints. The pictures produced by this consummate artist appear to have been numerous, and the reader will find, in Pliny, lib. xxxv. cap. 10, a pretty extensive list. A brief enumeration of some of them will serve to convey a just idea of the class of subjects generally chosen by him. The portraits painted by him both of Alexander the Great and his father Philip were numerous; some of them single, some accompanied by other figures. Alexander launching thunder, in the temple of Diana at Ephesus, has been greatly extolled for its effect and the boldness of its relief, the hand which was raised appearing to come forward, and the lightning to be out of the picture.' In another portrait of the same prince he was represented in a triumphal chariot, and near him the figure of war, with his hands tied behind his back.

This, and another Alexander, accompanied by Castor and Pollux, and a figure of Victory, were presented by Augustus to the forum.

Many other portraits are alluded to: namely, Antiochus, king of Syria; Antigonus; Archelaus, with his wife and daughter; Abron, an effeminate debauchee; Clatus, on horseback armed (except his head), with an attendant delivering his helmet to him; and Megabysus, a priest of the temple of Diana at Ephesus, sacrificing, in his pontifical vestments. In fanciful subjects we find :-Diana attending a sacrifice, surrounded by her nymphs; Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, on horseback, contending with Persians; Hercules, with his back towards the observer, and his head turned round so as to show his face; and lastly his renowned picture of Venus

rising from the sea, already mentioned, which, being taken to Rome, was dedicated by Augus tus in the temple of Julius Cæsar; and upon which several Greek epigrams are to be found in the Anthologia.

The refinements of the art were by Aristides of Thebes applied to the mind. The passions which history had organised for Timanthes, Aristides caught as they rose from the breast or escaped from the lips of nature herself; his volume was man, his scene society: he drew the subtle discriminations of mind in every stage of life, the whispers, the simple cry of passion, and its most complex accents. Such, as histo y informs us, was the suppliant whose voice you seemed to hear, such his sick man's half extinguished eye and laboring breast, such the sister dying for her brother, and, above all, the halfslain mother shuddering lest the eager babe should suck the blood from her palsied nipple. This picture was probably at Thebes, when Alexander sacked that town; what his feelings were when he saw it we may guess from his sending it to Pella. Its expression, poised between the anguish of maternal affection and the pangs of death, gives to commiseration an image which neither the infant piteously caressing his slain mother in the group of Epigonus, nor the absorbed feature of the Niobe, nor the struggle of the Laocoon, excite. Timanthes had marked the limits that discriminate terror from the excess of horror; Aristides drew the line that separates it from disgust. His subject is one of those that touch the ambiguous line of a squeamish sense. -Taste and smell, as sources of tragic emotion, and, in consequence of their power, commanding gesture, seem scarcely admissible in art or on the theatre, because their extremes are more nearly allied to disgust, and loathsome or risible ideas, than to terror. The prophetic rance of Cassandra, who scents the prepared murder of Agamemnon at the threshold of the ominous hall; the desperate moan of Macbeth's queen on seeing the visionary spot still uneffaced infect her hand-are images snatched from the lap of terror-but soon would cease to be so were the artist or the actress to enforce the dreadful hint with indiscreet expression or gesture. This, completely understood by Aristides, was as completely missed by his imitators, Raffaelle in the Morbetto, and Poussin in his Plague of the Philistines. In the group of Aristides our sympathy is immediately interested by the mother, still alive though mortally wounded, helpless, beautiful, and forgetting herself in the anguish for her child, whose situation still suffers hope to mingle with our fears: he is only approaching the nipple of the mother. In the group of Raffaelle the mother dead of the plague, herself an object of apathy, becomes one of disgust, by the action of the man, who bending over her, at his utmost reach of arm, with one hand removes the child from the breast, whilst the other, applied to his nostrils, bars the effluvia of death. feelings alienated from the mother, come too late even for the child, who by his langour already betrays the mortal symptoms of the poison he

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imbibed at the parent corpse. It is curious to observe the permutation of ideas which takes

place, as imitation is removed from the sources of nature: Poussin, not content with adopting the group of Raffaelle, once more repeats the loathsome attitude in the same scene; he forgot, in his eagerness to render the idea of contagion still more intuitive, that he was averting our feelings with ideas of disgust."

At the same era flourished Protogenes of Rhodes, towards whom the generous conduct of Apelles deserves particular attention. Protogenes had painted a picture of Jalysus, which so delighted Apelles that he sailed to Rhodes on purpose to visit his accomplished contemporary. There, finding him in poverty and obscurity, he is reported to have bought several of the performances of Protogenes with the avowed intention of selling them as his own, and thus succeeded in exciting the notice of the people of Rhodes towards the abilities of their fellow citizen, who thence rose from his hitherto humble situation to fame and fortune. The well known friendly contest of Apelles and Protogenes respecting the lines has been described elsewhere, and stands as a fact on undeniable testimony. The tablet whereon they were drawn, having been taken to Rome, was there seen by Pliny himself, who speaks of it as having the appearance of a large blank surface, the extreme delicacy of the lines rendering them invisible except on close inspection. They were drawn with different colors-one upon, or rather within the other. Judging from Pliny's account it might be imagined that all the beauty lay in the extreme delicacy of the points which had been used, and of the hands which had applied them; but it is reasonable to suppose that the first direction of the line might have some principle of beauty for its guide, by which, as well as by the neatness of its execution, Protogenes was immediately moved to the declaration, that none but Apelles could have drawn it.

In comparing the performances of modern painters with the character of those the names and description of which ancient authors have handed down to us, it will appear pretty clearly that the Greek artists surpassed the moderns in sentiment, in invention or imagination, in expression, in position of figures, in proportion, and contour. With regard to color, although they are remarkable for vividness, the case is by no means so evident. Pliny allows them the use of but four, and yet at other times makes allusions which palpably imply their means of that kind to be far more extensive. The use of oils has however given to moderns a decided advantage in this particular.

In A. R. 259, and A. A. C. 494, Appius Claudius consecrated a number of shields in the temple of Bellona, which contained in basso relievo the portraits of his family. This example was followed; and in process of time it was common among the Romans to place those images in private houses. The execution in basso relievo is a proof that they had an idea of painting, at least with one color. As long as the Romans employed artists of other nations, they had little desire to cultivate the arts; but about the year of Rome 450, and 303 years before Christ, one of the Fabii employed himself in

painting. He painted the temple of Safety; and his works remained till that temple was burnt, in the reign of Claudius. The example of Fabius, surnamed Pictor from his profession, did not excite his fellow citizens to imitation. A century and a half elapsed before the tragic poet Pacuvius, nephew of Ennius, painted the temple of Hercules in the forum boarium. The glory which he had acquired by his dramatic works shed some lustre on the art which he exercised; but did not confer on it that respect which could recommend it to general practice. The paintings of Fabius were the recreations of his youth; those of Pacuvius the amusements of his old age; but painting is a difficult art, which requires a man's whole time and attention to be solely devoted to it.

There were in fact no eminent painters at Rome till the time of the emperors; but, as the national spirit was changed, the profession of the fine arts acquired more respectability. The Romans, during the time of the republic, were animated with the spirit of liberty and the desire for conquest. When these two passions were weakened, the love of the arts obtained among them. As a proof of this, Nero himself gloried in being an artist. A Colossian picture of 120 feet was painted at Rome by his command, which was afterwards destroyed by lightning. The name of the painter is not recorded. but this is the only painting on cloth mentioned by ancient authors.

The paintings of the ancient artists were either moveable, or on the ceilings or compartments of buildings. According to Pliny, the most eminent were those who painted moveable pictures. The latter were either on fir wood, larch, boxwood, or canvas, sometimes on marble. When they employed wood, they laid on first a white ground. Among the antiquities of the Herculaneum are four paintings on white marble. Their immoveable paintings on walls were either in fresco, or on dry stucco in distemper. Indeed all the ancient paintings may be reduced to, 1st, fresco painting; 2dly, water color, or distemper painting on a dry ground; and, 3dly, encaustic painting. The ancient fresco paintings appear to have been always on a white stucco ground, the colors inlaid very deep, and the drawing much more bold and free than any similar performance of modern art. The outlines of the ancient paintings on fresco were probably done at once, as appears from the depth of the incision, and the boldness and freedom of the design, equal to the care and spirit of a penciled outline.

In general the ancients painted on a dry ground, even in their buildings, as appears from the Herculanean antiquities, most of which are executed in this manner. At Rome and Naples the first (deepest) coat is of true Puzzolana, of the same nature with the terras now used in mortar, required to keep out wet, about one finger thick: the next of ground marble or alabaster, and sometimes of pure lime or stucco, in thickness about one-third of the former. Upon this they appear to have laid a coat of black, and then another of red paint; on which last the subject itself was executed. Such seems to have been

their method of painting on walls; but in their moveable pictures, and in the performance of their first artists, and where the effects of shade and light were necessary, they doubtless used white. The colors employed they seemed to have mixed up with size, of which they preferred that made by boiling the ears and genitals of bulls. This appears to have made the colors so durable and adhesive, that the ancient paintings lately found bear washing with a soft cloth and water; and sometimes even diluted aquafortis is employed to clean their paintings on fresco. Pliny says, that glue, dissolved in vinegar and then dried, is not again soluble.

The ancient colors, we have said, were vivid: it is obvious also that they were remarkably enduring, from the fact of the Greek paintings having existed uninjured, and become objects of admiration to the Romans several ages after they were executed. They were in the habit of employing a sort of varnish called atramentum, which served to secure their paintings from the influence of the atmospheric air.

Whether the art of composition, at least in the scientific way now practiced, was ever understood by them, or whether they possessed any knowledge whatever of the laws of chiaro-scuro, is wrapped up in doubt and mystery which it is next to impossible any opportunity will occur of unravelling. The accounts of these performances by ancient writers do not seem to have sprung from any practical acquaintance with the rules of the art, and hence they are, as will be readily imagined, very vague and unsatisfactory to the painter. According to the light which is thus afforded us we are led to conclude that the chief aim of the Greek artists was to impress on the mind of the spectator in the most energetic way the effect of one particular image; we do, it is true, occasionally encounter descriptions of pictures containing many figures, but in general the subject is confined to the introduction of two or three. Nothing is said by these writers of what we term background, and little on the contrasts of light and shade, &c. That they had some knowledge of this kind, however, is apparent from an observation of Plutarch, namely, that painters heighten the brilliancy of light colors by opposing them to dark ones, or to shades;' and from another of Pliny, who, speaking of painters in the monochromatic style, adds:- In process of time the art assumed new powers, and discovered light and shadow, by gradating which the colors are alternately kept down or heightened. Afterward splendor was added, which was different from light, and which, being a medium between light and shade, was denominated tonon; while the union of colors, and transition from one to another, they called harmogen; lib. xxxv. c. 5. Hence we find that the great requisites for the science of chiaro-scuro, viz. contrast, tone, and harmony, were comprehended by them; that the various degrees of light and shade, distinctly and in combination, were duly felt; and that the value of middle or half tint was perceived and attended to. Led away by these facts, M. du Bos and others have concluded that chiaro-scuro was scientifically comprehended and practised by

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them. It will not fail, however, to strike the artist that every thing stated by Pliny to have been known by the ancient artists is resolvable into that which is requisite for the due execution of a single figure on a plain ground, and in the most simple style of execution. In the best of the paintings found at Herculaneum there is exhibited an unusually skilful management of chiaro-scuro in the reduction of tone on parts, both of the flesh and drapery, but it is inconclusive on the general point at issue.

With respect to their knowledge of perspective similar uncertainty appears to exist. Vitruvius, indeed, reports it to have been practised by Agatharcus (a contemporary of Eschylus and Polygnotus) in the theatre at Athens; and to have been shortly after reduced to principles, and treated as a science by Anaxagoras and Democritus. The deductions, however, are made from premises of a similarly inconclusive nature to those enumerated in our observations on chiaro-scuro.

Lastly, we may remark that no mention, at all events none of consequence, is made of a ground of relief on the ancient writers on painting. Landscape also appears to have been wholly disregarded. There are attempts at background made in several of the paintings of Herculaneum, but undeserving of any commendation; and the most beautiful of those productions of ancient art which have hitherto been displayed to the eyes of the moderns are of figures relieved off plain grounds, or rather amalgamated into them. In none of the criticisms or observations of ancient authors is a secondary object ever mentioned as being in the distance.

We shall not dwell on the degree of cultivation bestowed on the art of painting by the ancient Romans, but pass on to enumerate the several colors stated by Pliny to have been known to them. See lib. xxxv., caps. 6 and 7.

WHITES.-Melinum. A native white earth from the island of Melos, used by Apelles before white lead prepared with vinegar was invented.

Puratonium. An Egyptian white earth used in distemper, and similar, probably, to the white now called Cremnitz white, from Hungary. Pliny complains that paratonium was often adulterated with Cimolian earth, which was used by the fullers at Rome.

Eretria. An ashy white. It is so named from a town of Euboea, now Trocco. Cerussa. White lead.

Anulare. Gypsum. Creta. Chalk. YELLOWS.-Sil. Ochre of four kinds; named Atticum, Lucidum, Syricum, and Marmorosum. Auripigmentum, or Arsenicum. Orpiment. Cerussa usta. Masticot, first discovered by the fire at the Piraus.

REDS.- Minium. Red lead, both natural and artificial. The best native minium was found in a quicksilver mine near Ephesus; and, in endeavouring to extract gold from it, Callias the

Athenian discovered vermilion.

Vermilion. The same as now used

Sinopis. A red earth. The best was found near Lemnos, and was so valuable as to be sold sealed up. It approached near, in color, to minium.

and without beauty. In Italy, where the first

Rubrica. A red earth. Cinnabar. Native Indian name for dragon's attempts were made, they were employed chiefly blood.

Sandaracha. A red orpiment.

Sandyr. By some thought to be vegetable red, and obtained somewhat after the manner of our lakes, viz. absorbing the coloring matter of a decoction of the vegetable matter in chalk. Purpurissum. A lake made from the ingredient used in dyeing purple, being absorbed in tripoli.

Syricum. A mixture of sinopis and sandyx. Armenium, or Azure, also called Ceruleum. Verd'azur, or blue vitriol. Pliny calls it a sand; and says there were three kinds, viz. the Egyptian, the Scythian, and the Cyprian. Indicum. Indigo.

GREENS.-Chrysocolla. Malachite, or moun

tain green.

Appianum. Another of the same nature. BLACKS.-Atramentum. A common name for all black colors. Pliny speaks of one kind as oozing from the earth; and it may possibly have been some kind of bitumen: of another as being made from smoke of resin and pitch. Burnt lees of wine, or husks of grapes, produced a third, used by Polygnotus and Mycon, under the name of truginon; and a fourth was invented and used by Apelles, by burning ivory. That, being made thin by some process, was probably the atramentum or varnish, which he is said to have laid over the surface of his pictures. What this process was is unknown: perhaps, as the mode of painting with wax by heat was practised, it might have been some modification of that material. Of the above coloring substances, Apelles and other ancient artists employed, if we are to give credit to Pliny, only four. Here, however, he seems to have placed himself between the horus of a dilemma: since we are compelled to question either his correctness as to their limitation of colors, or the abundant encomiums which he bestows on their works. Four perfect colors, it is true, with all their modifications and combinations, may be regarded as adequate to every purpose the art of coloring might require. But the celebrated historian has forbidden us to speculate on the possibility of this perfection, by naming the substances; and since the present practice of art, although possessed of substances far more powerful than those enumerated above, denies the knowledge of any four pigments equal to the production of a really fine piece of coloring, we are, as before observed, compelled to suspend our judgment on the subject.

SECT. II.-OF MODERN PAINTING. The art of painting was revived in Europe about the end of the thirteenth, or beginning of the fourteenth, century. It might have been practised in an humble and obscure manner somewhat earlier; but it was not until a still later period that it made any thing like progress. The human mind, having been plunged into profound ignorance, was destitute of every principle of sound philosophy which enables it to determine on the object of the arts; and consequently the painters contented themselves with works adapted to the general taste, without proportion

on subjects connected with religious feelings, such as the mysteries of the passion, &c.; and their labors were principally in the adornment of ecclesiastical buildings. Painting, however, did not long continue in the imperfect condition in which it was left by those who first cultivated it among the moderns. It was to be expected that their successors would endeavour to surpass them by joining some degree of theory to the barbarous practice they had adopted. Among the first points of art discovered after its restoration was the principle of perspective, a knowledge of which made the artists capable of expressing what is denominated foreshortening, by means of which a greater degree of truth and effect was afforded to their performances. Cimabue, Giotto, Masaccio, Mantegna, and Luca Signorelli, successively upheld the dawning glories of revived art. The latter, in particular, appears to have been the first who contemplated objects with a discriminating eye; perceived what was accidental, what essential; balanced light and shade, and decided the motion of his figures. He foreshortened with equal boldness and intelligence; and thence it is, probably, that Vasari fancies to have discovered, in the Last Judgment of Michael Angelo, traces of imitation from the Lunetta, painted by Luca in the church of the Madonna, at Orvieto; but the powers which animated him there, and before at Arezzo, are no longer visible in the Gothic medley with which he filled two compartments in the chapel of Sextus IV. at Rome.

Two years after the death of Masaccio, namely, in 1445, was born Leonardo da Vinci, whose genius broke forth with a splendor which distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius, favored by education and circumstances, all ear, all eye, all grasp; painter, poet, sculptor, anatomist, architect, engineer, chymist, machinist, musician, man of science, and sometimes empiric, he laid hold of every beauty in the enchanted circle, but, without exclusive attachment to one, dismissed in her turn each. Fitter to scatter hints than to teach by example, he wasted life, insatiate in experiment. To a capacity which at once penetrated the principle and real aim of the art, he joined an inequality of fancy that at one moment lent him wings for the pursuit of beauty, and the next flung him on the ground to crawl after deformity: we owe him chiaro-scuro with all its magic, we owe him caricature with all its incongruities. His notions of the most elaborate finish, and his want of perseverance, were at least equal;-want of perseverance alone could make him abandon his cartoon destined for the great council chamber at Florence, of which the celebrated contest of horsemen was but one group; for to him who could organise that composition, Michael Angelo himself ought rather to have been an object of emulation than of fear: and, that he was able to organise it, we may be certain from the remaining sketch in the Etruria Pittrice lately published, but still more from the admirable print of it by Edelinck, after a drawing of Rubens, who was Leonardo's great ad

mirer, and has done much to impress us with the beauties of his Last Supper, in the Refectory of the Dominicans at Milan, which he abandoned likewise without finishing the head of Christ, exhausted by a wild chase after models for the heads and hands of the apostles: had he been able to conceive the centre, the radii must have followed of course.' Towards the beginning of the century in which Leonardo da Vinci was born, the use of oil was adopted as a vehicle for painting, and afforded the means of most extensive improvements, particularly in color and effect. The methods to which the former execution of the art had been restricted (namely, distemper, in colors mixed with size and water, and afterwards fresco) were of a limited nature, especially the latter, in which, no means being given to change or retouch the colors without manifest detriment to the work, the artist was hampered in his plan of conduct and management of design. The invention of oil-painting remedied this disadvantage; and, as it allowed endless variety in effects as well as disposition of colors, together with complete harmony throughout the whole, the fancy of the artist was now permitted to take its full swing, and to produce enchantments which successive ages have not been sufficient to dissolve or even weaken.

The circumstance of varnishing over pictures which had been painted in water colors is thought, and perhaps justly, to have been that which led to this important discovery. John Van Eyck, who flourished at Brussels in 1410, is the artist to whom the first exercise of painting with colors ground and mixed with oil has been attributed. At all events, if he was not the first who actually applied it to the purposes of his art, it was he who first made effectual use of it. In any other case, his application of the system would not, to use the words of Vanmander, have made as much noise in the world as the discovery of gunpowder by Bertoldo Schwartz had done nearly a century before.' According to this same writer, the art of painting had been carried into Flanders, about the time of Giotto, by some Flemings, who went to Italy for the purpose of receiving instruction in it; and he goes on to describe it as having been practised with gum and eggs, at its first commencement, by Cimabue.' The Germans, likewise, acquired the art about the same time; but its most succesful progress and achievements were confined to the classic countries of Italy.

'Bartolomeo della Porta, or di S. Marco, the last master of this period, first gave gradation to color, form and masses to drapery, and a grave dignity, till then unknown, to execution. If he was not endowed with the versat lity and comprehension of Leonardo, his principles were less mixed with base matter, and less apt to mislead him. As a member of a religious order, he confined himself to subjects and characters of piety; but the few nudities which he allowed himself to exhibit show sufficient intelligence and still more style he foreshortened with truth and boldness; and, whenever the figure admitted of it, made his drapery the vehicle of the limb it invests. He was the true master of Raffaelle,

whom his tuition weaned from the meanness of Pietro Perugino, and prepared for the mighty style of Michel Angiolo Buonarrotti.

Sublimity of conception, grandeur of form, and breadth of manner, are the elements of Michel Angiolo's style. By these principles he selected or rejected the objects of imitation. As painter, as sculptor, as architect, he attempted, and above any other man succeeded, to unite magnificence of plan, and endless variety of subordinate parts, with the utmost simplicity and breadth. His line is uniformly grand: character and beauty were admitted only as far as they could be made subservient to grandeur. The child, the female, meanness, deformity, were by him indiscriminately stamped with grandeur. A beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his women are moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man; his men are a race of giants. This is the terribil via' hinted at by Agostino Caracci, though perhaps as little understood by the Bolognese as by the blindest of his Tuscan adorers, with Vasari at their head. To give the appearance of perfect ease to the most perplexing difficulty was the exclusive power of Michel Angiolo. He is the inventor of epic painting, in that sublime circle of the Sistine chapel, which exhibits the origin, the progress, and the final dispensations of theocracy. He has personified motion in the groups of the cartoon of Pisa; embodied sentiment on the monuments of St. Lorenzo; unravelled the features of meditation in the prophets and sybils of the chapel of Sextus; and in the Last Judgment, with every attitude that varies the human body, traced the master-trait of every passion that sways the human heart. Though, as sculptor, he expressed the character of flesh more perfectly than all who went before or came after him, yet he never submitted to copy an individual, Julio the second only excepted, and in him he represented the reigning passion rather than the man. In painting he contented himself with a negative color; and, as the painter of mankind, rejected all meretricious ornament. The fabric of St. Peter, scattered into an infinity of jarring parts by Bramante and his successors, he concentrated; suspended the cupola, and to the most complex gave the air of the most simple of edifices. Such, take him all in all, was M. Angiolo, the salt of art: sometimes he no doubt had his moments of dereliction, deviated into manner, or perplexed the grandeur of his forms with futile and ostentatious anatomy: he met with armies of copyists, and it has been his fate to have been censured for their folly.

The inspiration of Michel Angiolo was followed by the milder genius of Raffaelle Sanzio, the father of dramatic painting, the painter of humanity; less elevated, less vigorous, but more insinuating, more pressing on our hearts, the warm master of our sympathies. What effect of human connexion, what feature of the mind, from the gentlest emotion to the most fervid burst of passion, has been left unobserved, has not received a characteristic stamp from that examiner of man? M. Angiolo came to nature, nature came to Raffaelle-he transmitted her

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