"But before he could finish his task he was interrupted by death, hastened either by poison, or by the many severe vexations he had experienced both from his relatives and his adversaries, and the weight of which was augmented by the arrival of his former enemy Lanfranco. This artist superceded Zampieri in the painting of the basin of the chapel; Spagnoletto, in one of his oil pictures; Stanzioni in another; and each of these artists, excited by emulation, rivaled, if he did not excel, Domenichino. Caracciolo was dead. Bellisario, from his great age, took no share in it, and was soon afterwards killed by a fall from a stage, which he had erected for the purpose of retouching some of his frescos. Nor did Spagnoletto experience a better fate; for, having seduced a young girl, and become insupportable even to himself from the general odium which he experienced, he embarked on board a ship; nor is it known whither he fled, or how he ended his life, if we may credit the Neapolitan writers. Palomino, however, states him to have died in Naples in 1656, aged sixty-seven, though he does not contradict the first part of our statement. Thus these ambitious men, who by violence or fraud had influenced and abused the generosity and taste of so many noble patrons, and to whose treachery and sanguinary vengeance so many professors of the art had fallen victims, ultimately reaped the merited fruit of their conduct in a violent death; and an impartial posterity, in assigning the palm of merit to Domenichino, inculcates the maxim, that it is a delusive hope to attempt to establish fame and fortune on the destruction of another's reputation." GIUSEPPE RIBERA, CALLED IL SPAGNOLETTO--HIS EARLY POVERTY AND INDUSTRY.