them into many extravagances, and altogether defeated their own object. Anxious not to shrink from the representation of anything real, however terrible, they lost sight of that hidden meaning which so often removes the horror of the most awful scenes, giving to them a spiritual beauty which physical distortion cannot destroy; and their works are pervaded by a tragic pathos, a passionate misery, inexpressibly painful.

At the head of the Naturalistic School stands Michelangelo Amerigi, da Caravaggio (1569-1609). His works have some affinity with those of the great artist whose name he bore, and in spite of many shortcomings, give proof of much original power and poetry of feeling. His Entombment of Christ, in the Vatican is his most famous work; the figure of the Virgin admirably expresses abandoned sorrow, and that of Christ is full of grandeur and dignity, though wanting in divinity. The Beheading of S. John, in the Cathedral of Malta, and a portrait in the Louvre of the Grand Master of Malta, are also very fine; and we may name the Card-players- several times repeated, the best example being in the Sciarra Palace, Rome-as a spirited composition of the genre

class.

it was immediate. His power, originality, and even his coarseness, startled Italian Art from its languor and mannerism; and the passionate and brutal Caravaggio had the honor of leading painters back to Nature, ugly and plebeian, it is true-even when the theme is a sacred one-but still Nature, rampant with life, impudent with vigor. Hence his followers have been called Naturalisti.

As a man, he belonged to the Benvenuto Cellini and Torrigiano school, and was vain, quarrelsome, and altogether bloodily vicious. During a dispute in a tennis-court he struck his companion dead with a racket, and at Malta, whither he had fled, and where he had been treated with much honor and consideration by the Grand Master, on account

of his art, he was thrown into prison for wounding a noble cavalier with whom he had quarreled and fought. Escaping, he fled to Messina, and returned by way of Palermo to Naples, where hopes were given him of the Pope's pardon. The devil in him. once more getting the upper hand, he quarreled with some soldiers at an inn-door, and was glad to get on board a felucca with his belongings and set sail for Rome. Casting anchor at a little port, Caravaggio was arrested by mistake for another person, and when released he found the felucca and all his property gone. Wandering despondingly along the shore under an almost vertical sun, he was soon seized with brain fever, and traversing the Pontine marshes he reached Porto Ercole, where, in 1609, after a few days, the great painter, and wild, passionate moral outlaw, died.

He commenced life like Polidoro, the other great painter of Caravaggio, who preceded him by a couple of generations (1495-1543), as a hodman, or mason's laborer. Polidoro began his artistic career by attending upon fresco painters in Rome, and Michelangelo Amerigi by filling similar functions at Milan. After maintaining himself by portrait-painting for some years in Milan, he visited Venice, where, like so many other artists, he studied the works of her great colorists. He afterward proceeded to Rome, but was so poor that he was fain to execute the ornamental parts of Cesare d'Arpino's work in order to procure the requisite materials to commence work of his own. The picture he did produce was the famous Card Players, and he at once became famous. His influence on his contemporaries was immense as

José de Ribera, called from the country of his birth Lo Spagnoletto (1588-1656), spent most of his time in Naples. He was first influenced by the Carracci, but afterward took Caravaggio for his model. Many of his works are in the galleries of Naples and Madrid. He painted an immense number of pictures, many of which were sent to Spain, and we shall shortly come across him again in the article on the Spanish School.

in order to escape the Roman Inquisition-he remained in Rome from 1638 till his death, 1673.

But with all the advantages of such an introduction. Salvator Rosa's success as a painter, in spite of his

SALVATOR ROSA.

genius, might have been indefinitely delayed had he not, toward the close of the Carnival of 1639, appeared in the streets of Rome, on a decorated stage drawn by oxen, in the character of a charlatan and improvisatore. His wit was so genuine, his satire so keen, his improvisation so correct and spontaneous, and his gesticulation as the quack doctor so animated and so exquisitely fantastical in its finish, that the gypsy fortune-tellers and all other classes of Carnival mimers were forsaken, and the cart in which Salvator performed was, to high and low, the one grand attraction. Ere the car left the principal scene of his triumph, Salvator lifted his mask, and from that day he was famous.

It is this Bohemian, mercurial, romantic, and intensely mimic element in the man which inclines us to believe the lack of historic confirmation notwithstanding that the tradition of Salvator's wandering about the mountains of the Abruzzi in the voluntary or enforced company of banditti is based upon fact. The whole school to which Salvator belonged had but too strong a predilection for lawless life. He had doubtless, and for similar reasons, a hearty sympathy for Masaniello and the temporary revolution which he created in Naples. At all events, he was present at one of the torchlight meetings of the patriots, and he has left a fine sketch of the unfortunate chief.

Salvator, after much suffering and agony, was carrierd off by dropsy on the 15th of March, 1673; and a few days before his death he married his housekeeper, Lucrezia, the mother of his son-a boy about thirteen years of age. He was buried in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. Several portraits of himself exist, and his works are to be found in almost every European gallery of note. His satires, on which he worked to the very last, are six in number, and discourse of music, poetry, painting, war, Babylon, and envy.

To many persons Salvator Rosa is only known for those wild landscapes which Fuseli has so well described. "He delighted in ideas of desolation, solitude, and danger; impenetrable forests, rocky or storm-lashed shores; lonely dells leading to dens and caverns of banditti; alpine ridges; trees blasted by lightning, or sapped by time, or stretching their extravagant arms athwart a murky sky; lowering or thundering clouds, and suns shorn of their beams. His figures are wandering shepherds, forlorn travelers, wrecked mariners, banditti lurking for their prey or dividing their spoils." But Salvator Rosa was a poet, musician, active humorist and wit; an whenever reference was made to his work as an artist he scouted and resented with bitterness the idea that he was only a landscape painter.

The fact is, Salvator Rosa tried his hand at all branches of his art-at genre, portraiture, battlepieces, history, sacred and profane, and was, so far as his own morbid nature and early training would allow, successful in all; but posterity has, in the main, indorsed the opinion of his contemporaries, and thinks with them that his fame rests more on his daring and passionate, his weird and often grand conceptions of Nature, than on aught else. Claude had some influence on his manner at one time; but the two men were diametrically opposed in mental structure. Claude delighted in dewy freshness and in the enchanting play of sunlight on summer seas and classic shores; Salvator in threatening precipices and black-throated caverns-in elemental strife, whose enveloping gloom was flashed on by the lightning, or made terrible by the display of unfettered human passion.

At the close of the seventeenth century, Pietro Berrettini da Cortona (1596-1669), in spite of the great original talent which he possessed, exercised a

most pernicious influence on Italian art by the introduction in his works of startling effects of color and chiaro-oscuro, which were eagerly studied and imitated by many scholars; thus finally sealing the fate of Italian Painting, which has never again rallied from the insipid mannerism into which it sank at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

THE LATER VENETIAN SCHOOL.

Before closing the history of Painting in Italy, we must mention one who has made Venetian painting of the eighteenth century famous. Antonio Canal, commonly called Canaletto (1697-1768), devoted many years of his life to depicting architectural scenes in Venice. He followed for awhile the profession of his father, which was that of a scene-painter. This gave him great freedom and promptness of hand, of which he was not slow to avail himself afterward, when painting his many cabinet pictures. Disliking, however, his occupation, he removed while still young, to Rome, and there devoted himself for some time to the study of her magnificent ruins-an example which was faithfully followed afterward by the great draughtsman and engraver, Gianbattista Piranesi, his fellow-citizen. On returning to Venice, he addressed

nature.

lucida; the rest was conscientiously done from "His method," says Wornum, "has somewhat injured the effect of his pictures now, for the preparatory drawing has in many cases darkened, and become too heavy for the coloring."

In 1746, just after the Stuart hopes had been blasted forever on the Muir of Culloden, and the fugitives therefrom were being hunted like wild beasts among the fastnesses of the North, Canaletto came to England, and trying his hand on the public buildings and the historic sites of London, and on some of the stately homes of the aristocracy in the country, he so charmed his patrons with the liveliness of his representations and the perfect quality

of his perspective, both aërial and linear, that his canvases had the effect on them almost of illusion. Such was his popularity there that, after a short absence, he returned to England and remained in that country several years, and amassed, it is said, a fortune by the exercise of his art. Lanzi tells us that in whatever Canaletto employs his pencil, whether buildings, water, clouds, or figures, he never fails to impress them with a vigorous character, always viewing objects in their most favorable aspect. In his Venetian scenes he was occasionally assisted, so far as the figures were concerned, by Tiepolo. Canaletto died at Venice, April 20th, 1768.

himself to the pleasing task of transferring to his canvas the bridges, the streets, and the canals, the palaces and the churches and the life and the bustle of his native city, peopling her squares with citizens and senators, and filling her waters with all the naval pomp pertaining to the Queen of the Adriatic, from the stately galley of the Doge, to the nimble skiff of the cheery gondolier. Such a blending of genre and landscape, of pleasing figures and glorious architecture, with such accuracy of drawing and of perspective, had never been seen before. The Venetians were delighted, and Canaletto became famous. For correctness in linear perspective he was not above using the camera

His most distinguished pupil was Bernardo Belotto, his own nephew, who was known at Dresden as Count Belotto, where he passed the greater part of his life, and of which academy he was a member. He died at Warsaw, October 17th, 1780. Mr. Wornum thinks his manner bolder and more solid than his uncle's; some go further, and unhesitatingly pronounce him in everything the better artist of the two. In the Dresden Gallery, a great room is devoted to the exhibition of his works, and the Germans are certainly right in thinking he deserves the distinction. Another pupil of mark (equally