imparts a special physiognomy and a peculiar feature to the work. A young French painter, M. Garcin, was preparing to make a copy of this fine canvass, which we hope soon to see in Paris.

It seems to us that a gallery, composed of copies well made from the chefs-d'œuvre of every school, would be most profitable as well as interesting for art. There must already exist many elements for such a gallery. We would consecrate a room to each great master, of whose works we would have entire copies, from those now scattered amongst the churches and galleries of Europe; we would make a selection from masters of the second rank, which are so original, so spiritual, and so full of talent, notwithstanding their lack of genius. And we would re-unite in this one palace that which is now disseminated over all the earth, and exact, for exhibition, what now entails long and often impossible journeys to behold. The Palace of Fine Arts, or the Galleries of great deeds in the Louvre, might become the asylum of such a collection, which, beyond the instruction it would afford to artists, would have the advantage of prolonging for some centuries the life, or at least the memory, of chefs-d'-œuvre nearly about to disappear.

The pearl of the Madrid Gallery is a Raphael; that of Venice is a Titien, a marvellous forgotten picture, now restored, which also has its legend. During long years Venice possessed this picture without knowing it. Shut up in an old and little-frequented church, it had disappeared under a light bed of dust, behind a network of cobwebs. The subject could be but vaguely discerned. One day, Cicognara, a fine connoisseur, finding a certain air about the soiled figures, and scenting the master under this livery of neglect and misery, wetted a spot on the picture with saliva and rubbed it with his finger,—an action not in exquisite taste, but which an amateur of pictures could not refrain from when face to face with any sort of a smoked painting, even if he were twenty times a Count and a thousand times a dandy. The noble picture, preserved intact under this coat of dust, like Pompeii under its mantle of ashes, appeared so young and fresh, that the Count did not doubt his having found the picture of a great master, an unknown chef-d'-auvre. He had the wisdom to smother his emotion, and proposed to the cure to change this great dilapidated painting for a fine new picture, suit

able, glittering, well framed, which would do honour to the church and give pleasure to the faithful. The Curate accepted the offer with joy, smiling within himself at the foolishness of the Count, who was giving a new thing for an old one. Cleansed from the filth which soiled it, "The Assunta," of Titien, appeared radiant as the sun conquering the clouds. The Parisian reader may form an idea of the importance of this discovery by going to see at the BeauxArts the beautiful copy, by Serrur, recently executed and placed.

L'Assunta is one of the greatest works of Titien, and that in which he attained his highest grandeur. The composition is poised and distributed with infinite art. The upper portion, which is arched, represents Paradise or Glory,—to speak in the ascetic language of the Spanish; frills of angels, bathed and lost in a flood of light, have incalculable depth; stars scintillating on flame, sparkle more lively than the eternal day from the halo of Saint Peter, who arrives from the depths of the infinite with the movement of a hovering eagle, accompanied by an archangel and a seraphim, whose hands sustain the crown of Saint Peter and the halo of his glory. The Jehovah in this picture, like a divine bird, presents himself with the head and body flying, fore-shortened horizontally under a flood of flying drapery, open like wings, and this astonishes us by its sublime boldness. If it was possible for human touch to give a figure to the Divinity, certainly Titien. has succeeded. The divine figure has a power without bounds, and an imperishable youthfulness, making radiant his face with its snowy beard, which has but to shake itself and the snows would fall as if from the eternal heavens. Since the Jupiter Olympus, of Phidias, never has the Master of heaven and earth been represented so worthily. The centre of the picture is occupied by the Virgin Mary, encircled by a garland of angels and souls of the biessed. She is supported by the gushing forth of her own robust faith, by the purity of her own soul, which elevates her more effectually than would the most luminous ether. There is in the figure an unimaginable force of ascension, and to obtain that effect Titien has not had recourse to delicate forms, slender drapery, or transparent colours. His Madonna is a veritable woman, quite living, quite real, of a solid beauty like the Venus of Milo, or the Femme Coucheé by the Tribune of

Florence. An ample drapery flutters around her in numerous folds; their wide flanks are sufficient to contain a God, and if she were not on a cloud, the Marquis du Guast might seize the hand on its fine bosom, as in the picture in our Museum. Yet, notwithstanding the realness, nothing can be more celestially beautiful than this large and strong figure in its rose tunic and its mantle of azure. Despite the voluptuous power of the body, the face shines with the purest virginity. In the foreground of the picture the Apostles are grouped around in divers attitudes of ravishment and surprise, artistically contrasted. Two or three little angels, who bound the intermediate zone of the composition, seem to explain to them the miracle which is being wrought. The heads of the Apostles, of varied ages and character, are painted with surprising force of life and reality. In seeing this virgin, and comparing her with other virgins of different masters, we wonder that art can be at once so marvellous and yet always new. It astounds and astonishes the imagination, that catholic painting has embroidered in variations this theme of the Madonna without exhausting it, but, in reflecting, one comprehends that under the acknowledged type, each painter conveys in the same work, his own dream of love and the personification of his own talent.

The Madonna of Albert Durer, in its sorrowful grace and constraint, with its fatigued features, more interesting than beautiful, its air of the matron rather than the virgin, its German and borough candour, her concise vestments and the symmetrical folds, nearly always accompanied with a rabbit, an owl, or a monkey, by a vague invoking of German pantheism; must it not be the woman he loved and preferred, and does it not well represent even the genius of the artist? As she is his Madonna, so also she might be his Muse.

The same resemblance in spirit exists also for Raphael. The type of his Madonna, where, mingled with souvenirs of the antique, are always found traits of Fornarine, so often displayed, so often copied and often idealised. Is it not the most exact symbolization of his elegant talent, graceful yet penetrated with chaste voluptuousness? The Christian

nourished by Plato and by Grecian art, the friend of Leon X., the dilletante Pope; the artist who died of love in combing the Transfiguration; do we not behold him fully, in these modest Venuses, holding on their knees an infant which is

not love? If we wished in an allegorical painting to symbolise the genius of each painter, could we otherwise figure the genius of Raphael in this case? The virgin and his "Assunta," grand, powerful, highly coloured, with its healthy and robust grace, its fine carriage, its simple and natural beauty,—is it not as a picture by Titien, with all his qualities? One may push the resemblance further, but we have advanced enough to indicate the shading.

In front of the "Assunta of Titien, is the robust "Saint Mark emancipating a slave," of Tintoret. Tintoret is of rowdies in art-the King. He has an impetuosity of composition, a fury of brush, an incredible audacity of foreshortening, and the "Saint Mark may pass as one of the boldest and most ferocious of pictures. The subject of the painting is the patron saint of Venice, coming to the aid of a poor slave, whom a barbarous master condemns and torments, because of the obstinate devotion the unfortunate devil has for the saint. The slave is extended on the earth, on a cross, encircled with the materials of the executioner, who is making vain efforts to bind him to the infamous tree. The nails bend, the hammers break, the axes fly in splinters; more merciful than men, the instruments lose their edge in the hands of the torturers; the curious gaze at each other and whisper in astonishment; the judge leans from his high tribunal to see why his orders are not executed, whilst Saint Mark, in one of those foreshortenings the most violently drawn which painter ever risked, puts his head from the heavens, and makes a plunge upon the earth, without clouds, without wings, without cherubim, without any of the ærostatic means ordinarily employed in sacred paintings, and comes to deliver the slave who has faith in him. This vigorous figure, of athletic muscle and colossal proportions, cleaving the air like a rock launched from a titanic catapult, produces a most singular effect. The design is cast with such power that the massive saint is supported in space, yet falls not; it is a veritable tour de force. Add to this that the painting is so lofty in tone, so abrupt in its contrasts of light and shade, so vigorous in its details, so harsh and turbulent in touch, that the most ferocious of Caravage or Espagnolet's placed alongside of it, seem as rose water, and you will have an idea of the tableau, which, despite its barbarisms, ever preserves by its accessories that abundant and sumptuous architectural aspect peculiar to the school of

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Venice. There is also in the same salon an "Adam and Eve" and a "Cain and Abel," by the same painter,-two magnificent pictures, treated as studies, and perhaps the most accomplished of the master's works, in point of execution. On a ground of subdued and mysterious green, distant foliage of Eden, or rather its enclosure, two superb bodies are apart, of a brightness at once white and warm, a lively carnation and of a powerful reality. It is probable that Eve here holds forth to Adam the fatal apple which is reposing on her breast, and which sufficiently legitimatises two personages exposed naked in the open air; but that is as nothing. Believe it, never figure more beautiful, flesh more white and supple, came from the brush of a colourist. Tintoret, who has written on this, "The design of Michael Angelo and the colours of Titien," has, in the picture, fulfilled at least half of his programme. The "Cain and Abel" breathes all the savage fury that we could look for in such a subject and by such a painter. Death, the consequence of the sin of our first parents, makes his entry on the young world in a formidable shape, where the assassin and his victim struggle. In the corner of the picture bleeds the head of a butchered sheep. Is it the victim offered by Abel, or a significant symbol, that even the innocent lambs must bear the penalty of Eve's curiosity? This we dare not affirm. Tintoret probably did not think of it. He had many other matters to do, rather than to dream of such finesseing; he, the great mover of machines, the most intrepid brushman that ever existed, and who would have surpassed in speed Luca fa Presto.

Bonifazio, of whom our Museum contains but one insufficient example, is an admirable artist. His "Mauvais Riche,' in the Academy of Fine Arts, very intelligently copied by M. Serrur, to whom we owe the fine fac-simile of "L'Assunta," is profoundly a Venetian painting. There are wanting neither the beautiful women, with their rolling tresses, with strings of pearls, robed in velvet and brocade, nor the poised magnificent seigneurs, courteous and gallant, nor the musicians, the pages, nor the negroes, nor the table covers of rich damask, spread with vessels of silver and gold, nor the dogs sporting with each other on the Mosaic pavement, and at this time smelling at the rags of Lazarus with the defiance of well-bred dogs, nor does it lack balustraded terraces, or refreshing wine in the antique Roman drinking cups, or the white colonades