And now we must inquire what tools were used by antique artists. Here again Mr. Wilkinson is our best informant. In the unfinished pictures in some of the catacombs, he saw traces of the use of charcoal points, and also of red outlines, corresponding not only with the practice recommended by Cennino, but with what I saw in the Campo Santo at Pisa, where, the upper stucco having fallen off, upon which the pictures themselves had been painted while wet, a line drawn in red earth, like the bole of Sinope, appeared upon the coarser ground, and had evidently been corrected preparatory to laying the true ground and colour. The metal points used for drawing by the early Greeks, were most likely used also by the Egyptians, where required; but the paintings we are best acquainted with, namely, those on the mummy cases, are outlined, if not with a pen or reed, with a fine pencil. In the curious collection of Egyptian furniture, tools, &c., brought together by Mr. Sams, there were some palettes; they were oblong, and had a sort of case at one end for the pencils and brushes, and at the other a handle. The plates in Rossellini’s Egypt show the manner in which these were used. D’Agincourt gives some tracings from an illuminated MS. Dioscorides, in the library at Vienna, in two of which we find an artist’s study; in one, a paintress is at work upon a picture sketched upon a moveable frame, not unlike those used for needle-work; her colours appear to be in a box, as water colours would be, and she has a small palette held in the palm of her left hand. The other is a painter employed in drawing a plant; his easel is three-legged, his paper is pinned or tacked to a widish board, his palette is like that of the paintress, and his colour box the same; the pencils seem as fine as pens in both. Cennino directs that pencils shall be made either of the tails of grey squirrels, called Vair[274], answering to sable, or of hogs’ bristles. He points out with minuteness how to select the longest hairs of the vair, and how many tails must contribute the longest, in order to make a good pencil; what is more, he mentions that these soft brushes were to be used of all sizes, from those which were drawn into the hollow of a pigeon’s feather, to those requiring a vulture’s quill. As to the bristle tools, they appear to be exactly what we now use; and the art of making which appears to be one of those handed down from the Greeks and Romans, without any change worth notice.