Now, with regard to this celebrated excellence of his, in colouring the nude, (and here it should be observed, that it is almost exclusively in his female figures,) however natural it may be, is it nature in its most agreeable, its most perfect colouring? It has been said, and intended as praise, that the flesh looks as if it had fed upon roses; but is it a praise? I should rather say it would not unaptly express the thinness, the unsubstantialness of it, as of a rose leaf surface merely. In form, indeed, the figures are any thing but thin and unsubstantial: but I am considering only the colouring; it is not rich; it has indeed the light and play of life, but it has not the glow; it is a surface life, not life, warm life to the very marrow, such as we see in the works of Titian and Giorgione. They did not, as Rubens did, heighten the flesh with _pure white_; they reserved the power of that for another purpose, preserving throughout a lower tone, so that the eye shall not fasten upon any one particular tint, the whole being of the character of the "_nimium lubricus aspici_." Their _white_ and their _dark_, they artfully placed as opposition, the cool white to set off the warmth, the life-glow of the flesh, and the dark to make the low tone shine out fair; so that in this very excellence of flesh painting, they were more perfect, that one only approach to excellence, by which it should seem Rubens had acquired his title as a colourist. But these painters, as well as many others--though take only these, as the most striking contrasts to Rubens--excelled also in the agreeability of their colouring, without reference to subject, and in the sympathy with regard to it. So that in them were united the two essentials. Whereas Rubens had in any perfection neither; the one not at all, and the other only in a minor part and degree.