The reader will be disappointed if he expects to find in "Cennino Cennini" a treatise on art. It is nothing more than a book of receipts--very minute and circumstantial as to most particulars, while here and there is a provoking omission; as, for instance, he speaks of a varnish, but omits to say of what materials composed. However curious much of the matter may be, the modern painter, who has to send to the nearest colour-maker for his tube colours, and French brushes, will think the greater part superfluous, and will smile to be told--"Take the tails of the minever, (for no other are good,) and these tails must be baked, and not raw." Nor will he trouble himself with Cennino's list of colours, though it would perhaps be better for him if he did enter a little into their chemical properties. Cennino mentions twenty-four pigments; but the best he considers to be but twelve. It is curious that among them are no browns. We have always been of the opinion that the old masters, for the most part, made their browns with blacks and reds and yellows, and gave them depth by glazing over with the same; and we are pretty much of Wilson's mind, who, when told of a new brown, said "I am sorry for it." Very many of our modern pictures are ruined by the violent contrasts of the asphaltum and similar browns with less obtrusive pigments. The very transparency is, in our eyes, an objection. Asphaltum, for instance, besides that it is a changeable and never thoroughly drying pigment, _is too transparent_ for depth. It was a mistake of Gainsborough when he said that with asphaltum he would make a Tartarus; the depth would be but a little way from the surface; depth is not always intensity of darkness, and never of colour. There is a style of flashy painting which entirely depends on these transparent browns; but it is nevertheless not a good style; it is flimsy, and the _depth_ aimed at is missed. The more simple the palette, the better will be the picture. We are taught by the practice as well as words of Titian, who said that "whoever would be a painter, should be well acquainted with three colours, and have a perfect command over them." There are some excellent observations on this subject in the translator's preface, who quotes from Sir Humphrey Davy on colours. "If red and yellow ochres, blacks and whites, were the colours most employed by Protogenes and Apelles, so are they likewise the colours most employed by Raffaelle and Titian in their best style. The St John and Venus in the tribune of the gallery at Florence offer striking examples of pictures, in which all the deeper tints are evidently produced by red and yellow ochres, and carbonaceous substances." Cennino's argument for the use of fine gold and good colours, will be read with more attention by the modern Germans, who have, it is said, for the purposes of their art joined the Catholic Church, than by our English artists, with whom it will but