The best of these engravings produced in the workshop of Marcantonio--those, namely, done by his own hand, and especially those done during the first few years after he had attached himself to Raphael--count among the most prized and coveted examples of the art. In them he enters into the genius of his master, and loses little of the chastened science and rhythmical purity of Raphael's contours, or of the inspired and winning sentiment of his faces; while in the parts where he is left to himself--the rounding and shading, the background and landscape--he manages his burin with all the skill and freedom which he had gained by the imitation of northern models, but puts away the northern emphasis and redundance of detail. His work, however, does not long remain at the height marked by pieces like the Lucretia, the Dido, the Judgment of Paris, the Poetry, the Philosophy, or the first Massacre of the Innocents. Marcantonio's engravings after the works of Raphael's later years are cold, ostentatious, and soulless by comparison. Still more so, as is natural, were those which he and his pupils produced after the designs of the degenerate scholars of Raphael and Michelangelo, of a Giulio Romano, a Polidoro, or a Bandinelli. Marcantonio's association with Giulio Romano was the cause of his first great disaster in life. He engraved a series of obscene designs by that painter in illustration of the _Sonnetti lussuriosi_ of Pietro Aretino, and thereby incurred the anger of pope Clement VII., at whose order he was thrown into prison. Marcantonio's ruin was completed by the calamities attendant on the sack of Rome in 1527. He had to pay a heavy ransom in order to escape from the hands of the Spaniards, and fled from Rome, in the words of Vasari, "all but a beggar." It is said that he took refuge in his native city, Bologna; but he never again emerges from obscurity, and all we know with certainty is that in 1534 he was dead. (S. C.) MARCASITE, a mineral with the same chemical composition as pyrites, being iron disulphide FeS2, but crystallizing in the orthorhombic instead of in the cubic system. The name is of Arabic origin and was long applied to crystallized pyrites (q.v.); it was restricted to the present species by W. Haidinger in 1845. The mineral was known to G. Agricola in 1546 under the names _Wasserkies_ or _Weisserkies_ and _Leberkies_, and it has been variously known as white pyrites, hepatic pyrites, lamellar pyrites, radiated pyrites (German _Strahlkies_) and prismatic pyrites. The orthorhombic form of the crystals, as distinct from the cubic form of pyrites, was recognized by Romé de l'Isle in 1772, though later R. J. Haüy considered the crystals to be only distorted cubic forms. [Illustration]