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which Michael Angelo himself might not disdain to be supposed the author, or that they should be, as in fact they often are, mistaken for his. I will mention one particular instance, because it is found in a book which is in every young artist's hand-Bishop's Ancient Statues. He there has introduced a print, representing Polyphemus, from a drawing of Tibaldi, and has inscribed it with the name of Michael Angelo, to whom he has also in the same book attributed a Sybil of Raffaelle. Both these figures, it is true, are professedly in Michael Angelo's style and spirit, and even worthy of his hand. But we know that the former is painted in the Institute a Bologna by Tibaldi, and the other in the Pace by Raffaelle.

The Caracci, it is acknowledged, adopted the mechanical part with sufficient success. But the divine part which addresses itself to the imagination, as possessed by Michael Angelo or Tibaldi, was beyond their grasp they formed however, a most respectable school, a style more on the level, and calculated to please a greater number; and if excellence of this kind is to be valued according to the number, rather than the weight and quality of admirers, it would assume even a higher rank in art. The same, in some sort, may be said of Tintoret, Paolo Veronese, and others of the Venetian painters. They certainly much advanced the dignity of their style by adding to their fascinating powers of colouring, something

6 Pellegrino Tibaldi visited Rome in 1547, and studied in the Sistine Chapel, from the works of Michael Angelo; and on his return to Bologna, Cardinal Poggi employed him to finish the architecture of the Palazzo del Instituto, which he afterwards enriched with frescoes from passages in the Odyssey. His designs have less ideal beauty than the works of Michael Angelo exhibit, and his figures more of common nature; which characteristic was even increased when the style fell into the hands of the Caracci. In sculpture, it was taken up by John de Bologna, and that in so successful a manner, that several of his figures are ascribed to the chisel of Michael Angelo; but, though the air and turn of the figure are given, and also the articulation of the several joints, yet the whole of his works bear an overstrained appearance, and want that firmness and compactness characteristic of the great original. In the paintings of Parmegiano, this is still more apparent; the application of grace enfeebles the whole, till it sinks into affectation. An example of this, we have in the " Vision of St. Jerome," in the National Gallery: the air of the whole is Angelesque, the attitudes, the arrangement of the smaller portions, even to the peculiar turn of the hands and feet; but it is a French translation of the old Florentine's style, obliterating, with excess of elegance, the strong impress of Nature.

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