Alonzo Cano, born at Grenada in 1601, was, like Mrs Malaprop's Cerberus, "three gentlemen in one;" that is, he was a great painter, a great sculptor, and a great architect. As a painter, his powers are shown in his full-length picture of the Blessed Virgin, with the infant Saviour asleep on her knees, now in the Queen of Spain's gallery; in six large works, representing passages in the life of Mary Magdalene, which still adorn the great brick church of Getafe, a small village near Madrid; and in his famous picture of Our Lady of Belem, in the cathedral of Seville. Mr Stirling gives a beautifully-executed print of this last Madonna, which, "in serene, celestial beauty, is excelled by no image of the Blessed Virgin ever devised in Spain."--(P. 803.) Cano was, perhaps, even greater in sculpture than in painting; and so fond of the former art, that, when wearied of pencil and brush, he would call for his chisel, and work at a statue by way of rest to his hands. On one of these occasions, a pupil venturing to remark, that to substitute a mallet for a pencil was an odd sort of repose, was silenced by Cano's philosophical reply,--"Blockhead, don't you perceive that to create form and relief on a flat surface is a greater labour than to fashion one shape into another?" An image of the Blessed Virgin in the parish church at Lebrija, and another in the sacristy of the Grenada cathedral, are said to be triumphs of Spanish painted statuary.--(Vol. iii., p. 805) After a life of strange vicissitudes, in the course of which, on suspicion of having murdered his wife, he underwent the examination by torture, he died, honoured and beloved for his magnificent charities, and religious hatred of the Jews, in his native city, on the 3d of October 1667. The old Valencian town of Xativa claims the honour of producing Josè de Ribera, el Spagnoletto; but though Spain gave him birth, Italy gave him instruction, wealth, fame; and although in style he is thoroughly Spanish, we feel some difficulty in writing of him as belonging wholly to the Spanish school of art, so completely Italian was he by nurture, long residence, and in his death. Bred up in squalid penury, he appears to have looked upon the world as not his friend, and in his subsequent good fortunes to have revelled in describing with ghastly minuteness, and repulsive force, all "the worst ills that flesh is heir to." We well recollect the horror with which we gazed spell-bound on a series of his horrors in the Louvre--faugh! At Gosford House are a series of Franciscan monks, such as only a Spanish cloister could contain, painted with an evident fidelity to nature, and the minutest details of dress that is almost offensive--even the black dirt under the unwashed thumb nail is carefully represented by his odiously-accurate and powerful pencil. "Non ragioniam di lor Ma guada e passa."