Any one who has had the good fortune to examine, at leisure, Hemelink’s epic picture of the three kings, formerly in the Boiserée collection, and now at Munich, will at once comprehend the possibility of arranging the most complicated subject, without confusion of parts or division of interest; and I cannot comprehend why we are to suppose Polygnotus incapable of such arrangement[105]. There are two pictures in the Pitti palace, by Andrea del Sarto, of the history of Joseph, arranged as I suppose the great works of the Pæcile and at Delphi to have been; which, to such as admire only Italian art of the best time, will afford proof, if it were wanting, of the excellent effect that a departure from vulgar rules may sometimes produce. I must not omit to say that Polygnotus, like the painters of the vases, wrote the names of the principal figures near them. I have now repeated the account Pausanius has left us of the pictures of Polygnotus. It remains to consider what has been said, particularly by Pliny, of the change he effected in the art. Before his time the faces had all one grave set expression; something, as we may presume, like that of the marbles and bronzes of the Eginetic and Etruscan schools. Polygnotus first parted the lips, varied the appearance and expression of the eyes, dimpled the cheeks with smiles, or deformed the brow and nostrils with the expression of passion, however imperfectly rendered. He also it was who introduced the use of veils and other light and becoming ornaments in his female figures, and adorned their heads with fillets and coronals, thus adding delicacy and grace to his high poetical conceptions. In the brides of Castor and Pollux, in the captive Trojan princesses, and in the shades of celebrated and unhappy women in the descent of Ulysses, these qualities were particularly admired. Polygnotus, then, must be looked upon as the painter, who, leaving the practice of making mere coloured bas-reliefs, rendered painting a separate art, and established the difference between statues and groups in marble or bronze, and true pictures. The name of Polygnotus is the greatest that adorns what we may consider as the first great epocha of Greek art. When, having nearly attained perfection, sculpture in the hands of Phidias produced the perfectly sublime in his Jupiter Olympias and his Minerva of the Parthenon, and formed a model which has never been safely departed from, for the composition of basso-relievo in the Panathenaic procession. But in painting, Polygnotus, though he had attained to great grandeur and majesty, had still left much to his successors to add in correctness, in expression, and in grace.