Bembo’s successor, PIETRO PARUTA (1540-98), who continued his history to 1551, typifies the statesman historian, versed in diplomacy and public business, and so highly endowed with the qualifications demanded by such employments as to have become Procurator of the Republic, and to have been prevented only by his death from becoming Doge. He was consequently well fitted to write the annals of a state like Venice, and his work stands high among Italian histories. The third exceptional historian of the age, typical of the accomplished literary amateur, is ANGELO DI COSTANZO, a Neapolitan noble whom we shall meet again among the poets. He wrote the history of Naples from 1250 to 1486, and is interesting as the pupil of Sannazaro, the friend of Vittoria Colonna, a patrician whose love of letters led him to cultivate authorship, and a patriot whose love of country gave umbrage to the jealous Spanish viceroy, and subjected him to perpetual confinement to his estates. His history does not disappoint the favourable prepossessions thus aroused, being composed with great elegance and dignity, and a manifest love of truth; insomuch that the author of the modern standard history of Naples, Giannone, while supplying Costanzo’s defects by close attention to jurisprudence, public economy, and other subjects neglected by his predecessor, has transfused most of the latter’s narrative into his own. Biography, the most attractive form of prose composition, was also well represented in this age, but inspired only two standard works, extremely unlike in style and spirit, but both possessions for all time, and both relating to the line arts. GIORGIO VASARI (1512-74), biographer-general of painters, sculptors, and architects, may be called the Herodotus of art; a practitioner himself, and acquainted with many of the persons whom he describes; lively and garrulous, apparently most artless, he possesses either the science or the knack of felicitous composition in an extraordinary degree. Living when picturesque stories about artists were accepted without question, he is entirely unembarrassed in relating such as commend themselves to him, to the joy of the readers and the scandal of the critics of the future. It is probable that scepticism of the truth of his anecdotes and the authority due to his attributions of pictures has gone much too far; but however this may be, criticism will never be able to turn his living book into a dead one, or to invalidate our debt to him for the mass of unquestionably authentic particulars which he has preserved. His good taste in art as well as in literature is evinced by his admiration for the first-fruits of the early Tuscan school, neglected in his day, and his character appears throughout his work in the most amiable light. His chief defect, a serious one, is the imperfection of his information respecting the important schools of Lombardy and Venice.