By the beginning of the 16th century a desire for a more complicated kind of effects was already arising among the followers of the art in Italy. Both backgrounds and passages of foreground detail were often imitated, inartificially enough, from the works of the northern masters. Marcantonio himself was among the foremost in this movement. About eighty engravings can be referred to the first five or six years of his career (1505-1511). Their subjects are very various, including many of pagan mythology, and some of obscure allegory, along with those of Christian devotion. The types of figures and drapery, and the general character of the compositions, bespeak for the most part the inspiration, and sometimes the direct authorship, of Francia. But the influence of German example is very perceptible also, particularly in the landscape backgrounds, and in the endeavour to express form by means of light and shadow with greater freedom than had been hitherto the practice of the southern schools. In a few subjects also the figures themselves correspond to a coarse Teutonic, instead of to the refined Italian, ideal. But so far we find Marcantonio only indirectly leaning on the north for the sake of self-improvement. It must have been for the sake of commercial profit that he by-and-by produced a series of direct counterfeits on copper from Albert Dürer's woodcuts. These facsimiles are sixty-nine in number, including seventeen of Dürer's "Life of the Virgin," thirty-seven of his "Little Passion," on wood, and a number of single pieces. According to Vasari, Dürer's indignation over those counterfeits was the cause of his journey to Venice, where he is said to have lodged a complaint against Marcantonio, and induced the Senate to prohibit the counterfeiting of his monogram, at any rate, upon any future imitations of the kind. Vasari's account must certainly be mistaken, inasmuch as Dürer's journey to Venice took place in 1506, and neither of the two series of woodcuts imitated by Marcantonio was published until 1511. The greater part of the designs for the "Life of the Virgin" had, it is true, been made and engraved seven years earlier than the date of their publication; and it is to be remarked that, whereas Marcantonio's copies of the "Little Passion" leave out the monogram of Dürer, it is inserted in his copies of the "Life of the Virgin"; whence it would, after all, seem possible that he had seen and counterfeited a set of impressions of this series at the time when they were originally executed, and before their publication. But the real nature of the transaction, if transaction there was, which took place between Dürer and Marcantonio we cannot now hope to recover. Enough that the Bolognese engraver evidently profited, both in money and in education of the hand, by his work in imitating in a finer material the energetic characters of these northern woodcuts. He was soon to come under a totally different influence, and to turn the experience he had