One difficulty regarding the history of ancient painting still remains to be stated--satisfactorily cleared it never can be--namely, the perfection to which the art actually attained. It has been said, and the remark is just, that there exists a wide disparity between the means and instruments of the art, as described by writers of antiquity, and the excellence of the effects produced, as these have reached us through the same channel. We have, it is replied, the criticisms of the same writers upon other subjects of taste, with the originals likewise in our hands, and finding here their opinions correct--not only so, but exquisitely correct--we are constrained to admit, that in painting their judgment was equally refined as in poetry, oratory, sculpture, or architecture. This reasoning may prove relative, but not absolute excellence; for taste being necessarily formed upon the very models on which it passes sentence, cannot be admitted as evidence beyond its experience. Our own conviction is, that, unless in this view of merely relative beauty, the praises bestowed by the Greek and Roman writers upon their paintings are overcharged; and that these were much inferior to their sculptures. This opinion is founded not upon any alleged inferiority of means, for, besides the difficulty of exactly comprehending certain passages on this subject, we do find, that the ancient artists were armed with all the powers of fresco-painting, in which the grandest conceptions of modern talent are embodied. But these very descriptions, in many of which are accounts of very complicated expression, show that the writers, and especially Pliny, the most circumstantial, either did not truly feel the nature and object of beauty in painting; or they evince, that if such effects were attempted, the art was devoid of that simplicity and natural expression which constitute the primeval source, the all-pervading principle, of beauty and of grandeur, of truth and excellence, in antique sculpture. But again, if, from the few and very imperfect remains of ancient painting, any conclusion be allowed in reference to its higher state, we discover in these all the principles, especially those of form, common to sculpture, always well, often admirably understood, while those peculiar to painting are inartificially expressed, without firmness or decision.