every where obtrude the sense of power upon the eye. His limbs convey an idea of muscular power, of moral grandeur, and even of intellectual dignity: they are firm, commanding, broad and massy, capable of executing with ease the determined purposes of the will. His faces have no other expression than his figures conscious power and capacity; they appear only to think what they shall do, and to know that they can do it. This is what is meant by saying that his style is hard and masculine; it is the reverse of Correggio's, which is effiminate. That is, the Gusto of Michael Angelo consists in expressing energy of will without proportionable sensibility; Corregio's, in expressing exquisite sensibility, without energy of will. In Correggio's faces, as well as figures, we see neither bones nor muscles, but then what a soul is there, full of sweetness and of grace-pure, playful, soft angelical. There is sentiment enough in a hand painted by Correggio to set up a school of history painters. Whenever we look at the hands of Correggio's women, or of Raphael's, we always wish to touch them.*

* This may seem obscure; we will therefore avail ourselves of our privilege to explain, as members of Parliament do, when they let fall any thing too paradoxical, novel or abstruse, to be immediately apprehended by the other side of the house. When the Widow Wadman looked over my uncle Toby's map of the siege of Namur with him, and as he pointed out the approaches of his battalion in a transverse line across the plain to the gate of St. Nicholas, kept her hand constantly pressed against his; if my uncle Toby had then "been an artist and could paint" (as Mr. Fox wished himself to be that "he might draw Buona

Again, Titian's landscapes have a prodigious Gusto, both in the colouring and forms. We shall never forget one that we saw many years ago in the Orleans Gallery, of Acteon hunting. It had a brown, mellow, autumnal look; the sky was of the colour of stone; the winds seemed to sing through the rustling branches of the trees, and already you might hear the twanging of bows resound through the tangled mazes of the wood. Mr. West, we understand, has this landscape; he will know if this description of it is just. The landscape back-ground of the St. Peter Martyr is another well known instance of the power of this great painter to give a romantic interest, and appropriate character, to the objects of his pencil, where every circumstance adds to the effect of the scene, the bold trunks of the tall forest trees, the trailing ground plants; with that cold convent spire rising in the distance amidst the blue sapphire mountains and the golden sky.

Rubens has a great deal of Gusto in his Fauns and Satyrs, and in all that expresses motion, but

parte's conduct to the King of Prussia in the blackest colours,") my uncle Toby would have drawn the hand of his fair enemy in the manner we have above described. We have heard a good story of this same Buonaparte playing off a very ludicrous parody of the Widow Wadman's stratagem upon as greata commander by sea, as my uncle Toby was by land. Now when Sir Isaac Newton, who was sitting smoking, with his mistress's hand in his, took her little finger and made use of it as a tobacco-pipe stopper; there was here a total absence of mind, or a great want of Gusto.

in nothing else. Rembrandt has it in every thing; every thing in his pictures has a tangible character. If he puts a diamond in the ear of a Burgomaster's wife, it is of the first water; and his furs and stuffs are proof against a Russian winter. Raphael's Gusto was only in expression; he had no idea of the character of any thing but the human form. The dryness and poverty of his style in other respects is a phenomenon in the art; his are like sprigs of grass stuck in a book of botanical specimens. Was it that Raphael never had time to go beyond the walls of Rome? that he was always in the streets, at church, or in the bath? He was not one of the society of Arcadians.*

Claude's landscapes, perfect as they are, want Gusto; this is not easy to explain. They are perfect abstractions of the visible images of things; they speak the visible language of nature truly, they resemble a mirror or a microscope. They are more perfect to the eye only than any other landscapes that ever were, or will be painted; they give more of nature, as cognizable by one sense alone; but they lay an equal stress on all visible impres

* Raphael not only could not paint a landscape, he could not paint people in a landscape. He could not have painted the heads or the figures, or even the dresses of the St. Peter Martyr. His figures have always an in-door look, that is, a set, determined, voluntary, dramatic character, arising from their own passion, or a watchfulness of those of others, and want that uncertainty of expression, which is connected with the accidents of nature, and the changes of the elements. He has nothing romantic about him,

sions; they do not interpret one sense by another; they do not distinguish the character of different objects as we are taught, and can only be taught to distinguish them by their effect on the different senses; that is, his eye wanted imagination-it did not strongly sympathise with his other faculties— he saw the atmosphere, but he did not feel it. He painted the trunk of a tree, or a rock in the foreground, as smooth, with as complete an abstraction of the gross tangible impression, as any other part of the picture; his trees are perfectly beautiful, but quite immoveable. His landscapes are unequalled imitations of nature, released from its subjection to the elements, as if all objects were become a delightful fairy vision, and the eye had rarified and refined away the other senses; they have a look of enchantment.

Perhaps the Greek statues want Gusto for the same reason. The sense of perfect form occupies the whole mind, and hardly suffers it to dwell on any other feeling. It seems enough for them to be without acting or suffering. Their forms are ideal, spiritual. Their beauty is power. "By their beauty they are raised above the frailties of pain or passion, by their beauty they are deified,"

The infinite quantity of dramatic invention in Shakspeare takes from his Gusto. The power he delights to show is not intense but discursive. He never insists on any thing as much as he might, except a quibble. Milton has great Gusto; He repeats his blow twice, grapples with and ex

hausts his subject. His imagination has a double relish of its objects, an inveterate attachment to the things he describes, and to the words describing them :

"Or where Chineses drive
« With sails and wind their cany waggons light."

"Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss."

There is a Gusto in Pope's compliments, in Dryden's Satires, and Prior's Tales; and among prose writers; Boccacio and Rabelais had the most of it. We will only mention one work which appears to us to be full of Gusto, and that is the Beggar's Opera, if it is not, we are altogether mistaken in our notions on this delicate subject.

W. H.

ART. III. Extracts from a translation of an Italian work on Painting.

To the Editor of ANNALS OF THF FINE ARTS.

SIR,

I send you some extracts from a translation of an Italian work on Painting, and think your inserting it will be useful to the students in the art.

LODOVICO DOLCE, the author of the work here quoted, ranked high among the literati of the sixteenth century, was intimately connected with