We hear occasionally of his suffering from attacks of illness, but as a painter his powers were at their best, and many of his finest works belong to the period between his return from Rome and the close of the fifteenth century. Among classical subjects are the two beautiful pictures now in the Louvre, originally executed for the Marchioness Isabella’s “studio of the grotto,” a room which Andrea, Perugino, and Costa were all employed to decorate, and which became a complete museum of both antique and Renaissance art. Andrea painted several panels for this apartment at Isabella’s command, some we are told in imitation of bronze-reliefs, and one in which the prophet Jonah, is represented in the act of being cast into the sea; but the “Wisdom Victorious over the Vices” and the “Parnassus,” both in the Louvre, are the only works of the series which have come down to posterity. Both closely resemble the “Triumphs” in style of modelling and in delicacy of finish. One is an allegorical composition, such as Botticelli might have painted, in which Minerva and Diana, led by Wisdom bearing a torch, are driving out a tribe of Vices under the forms of centaurs and satyrs, while Justice, Force, and Temperance hover in the air, about to return to earth. The form of the avenging goddesses is essentially classic in type, and the trees of the background show that loving care in each leaf which entitles Mantegna to a foremost place among the foliage painters of the age. The other, perhaps the most poetic of all Andrea’s conceptions, brings before us a pleasant landscape where the Muses dance hand in hand to the music of Apollo’s lyre, while Mercury leans on the neck of Pegasus hard by, and Mars and Venus pause from their embraces to listen to the enchanted sound. Brighter tints than Andrea generally employs enliven the scene, and in the light fluttering drapery and measured stop of the dancing nine there is a grace and charm of movement which no contemporary painter ever surpassed. These groups of dancing nymphs became a favourite motive with Mantegna, and form the subject of one of his engravings as well as of a finished drawing, exceedingly graceful and charming in design, now at Munich. Classical subjects at this time occupied a great part of his thoughts, and some of his finest engravings, the “Battle of the Sea-Gods,” “Hercules and Antæus,” and the “Bacchanalia,” belong to this period. Closely related to these are the beautiful drawings of the British Museum to which Mr. Comyns Carr recently called attention, the “Mars, Diana and Venus,” which in ideal beauty of form yields to none of Andrea’s designs, and the long frieze-shaped composition of “Calumny,” after the pattern of Apelles’s last picture, which these artists of the early Renaissance delighted to recall.