To recall the success of these efforts is to recall the names of Vorsterman, Bolswert, Paul Pontius, and Soutman: men boldly scientific in their art, who, at the first rush, carried to perfection that style of engraving which renders before all the relative richness and varied value of tones in a picture, and whose effects are identical in some sort with those of the painting itself. It is obvious that, in spite of its prodigious merits, this painting is not of so elevated a nature as that of Leonardo da Vinci or Raphael; but is it therefore less true that it is completely summed up, and its living image reflected, in contemporary engraving? Actuated by an idea of colour and effect analogous to that of Marc Antonio with regard to drawing, the Flemish engravers resolutely subordinated accessories to the importance and splendour of essentials; and in this way they succeeded in dissembling, by means of the breadth of the whole, the execution of details and even the laboriousness of the process. It would seem from the sparkling look and brilliant handiwork of these plates, that the engravers had thrown them off in a few hours of inspiration, so completely does their dash banish all idea of the time spent upon them, all sense of patience and toil. And yet these lights and shades, the sweep of the flesh, the sheen and shimmer of the fabrics, are all the result of lines laboriously ploughed; perhaps a thousand strokes have been needed to imitate an effect due to a single glaze, or given by two touches of the brush. The engravings of the Flemish school in Rubens' time are still widely distributed. There are few people who have not had the opportunity of admiring the "Thomiris," the "St. Roch Praying for the Plague-Stricken," or the "Portrait of Rubens," by Pontius; the "Descent from the Cross," by Vorsterman; the "Fall of the Damned," by Soutman; and a hundred other pieces as beautiful, all engraved from the master by his pupils. And who does not know that marvellous masterpiece, the "Crown of Thorns," engraved by Bolswert from Van Dyck? and those other masterpieces of Van Dyck himself--the etched portraits of artists or amateurs, the painter's friends, from the two Breughels to Cornelis, from Franz Snyders to Philip Le Roy? [Illustration: FIG. 57.--VAN DYCK. Etched by Himself.] The progress, however, by which the Flemish school of engraving had distinguished itself, soon had an equivalent in the movement of reform in Holland. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, and on from the beginning of the seventeenth, the Dutch engravers, by dint of insisting too strongly on the innovations of Lucas van Leyden, had almost succeeded in causing scientific ease of handling to degenerate into mere trickery, and spirit of design into inflation and turbulence. Amongst the first, and with greater authority than any, Cornelius Visscher set himself to stay the art of line engraving on its downward course. [Illustration: FIG. 58.--CORNELIUS VISSCHER.