The ancients certainly practised this species of painting, but I do not know that the description of any has been preserved. There is, however, in Fortefiocca’s life of Cola di Rienzi a very remarkable account of some which that extraordinary man caused to be painted, in order to stir up the Romans of his time to a sense of their degradation[149]. One was painted upon the wall of the palace of the Capitol, looking towards the Forum; the other near St. Angelo. In both, the nobles and magistrates of Rome were treated with bitter satire, and the city and commonwealth represented as in the lowest state of misery. The effect these caricatures had upon the people may be read in the original life of Rienzi, written in the vernacular idiom of Rome in his own time. It would be most unjust not to consider, as preeminent in this walk of art, Hogarth, whose satirical pencil was employed in the chastisement of vice, and the promotion of virtue. His works are a school in themselves; and are as far removed, as a “greatest is from least,” from the mean and filthy caricatures that libel private life, and from the evanescent exaggerations of political squibs. EPIC PICTURES. The examples for the first division of this class, containing supernatural agents of a Christian character, must, of course, be taken exclusively from modern works. First of these, the Last Judgment of Michael Angelo will occur to every imagination. With it I will name a work that he himself looked upon with the highest admiration; the chapel, painted by Luca Signorelli, at Orvieto, many of the figures of which were adopted by Buonarotti himself, who, perhaps scarcely ever surpassed in expression the group of blasphemers struck by the thunderbolt[151]. Nor can I omit Raffaelle’s Heliodorus in the Temple: these are instances of the terrible in this class. Of that sublime, the key to which is stillness[152], Raffaelle’s dispute of the Sacrament is the most perfect example. Though in the Spanish Chapter-House of St. Maria Novella, in Florence, that elder painter, Taddeo Gaddi, in a subject of the same kind, has in one or two figures reached the grand and the awful. To the Christian division of the Epic class also belong all those magnificent pictures which represent the Ascension of Christ, the Assumption of the Virgin, the Martyrdoms and the Miracles of Saints, with their supernatural appearances, and also many of the subjects taken from the Old Testament.