whither it might lead them; timid of their own powers, doubtful of their influence on the public. They contented themselves at first with enlarging the range of subjects, or with varying the pose of the actors. Fearing to abandon traditional types, they ventured not beyond the addition of accessories, such as architecture, landscape, animals, fruits, and flowers, or a disposal of the draperies with greater freedom and attention to truth. But, the further they departed from received forms, the more willingly did their genius pluck by the way those graceful aids and appliances which spontaneous nature offered in a land of beauty; and every new combination which that awakened genius inspired, induced, and to a certain extent authorised, fresh novelties. The modifications thus introduced have been distinguished in modern phrase by the term naturalism, in contradistinction to those traditional forms and spiritualised countenances which constitute the mysticism of mediæval art. It would lead us too far from our subject to trace the progress of naturalism from such early symptoms as we have indicated, until portraits, at first interponed as donors of the picture, or as spectators of its incident, were habitually selected as models for the most sacred personages. That the adaptation of nature to the highest purposes of art, by skilful selection and by judicious idealisation, is the noblest object which pictorial genius can keep in view for its inventions will scarcely be contested. But another consideration, inherent in the axioms of the mystic school, was too often lost sight of by the naturalists. The portraiture of criminal or even vulgar life, in deeply religious works, is an outrage upon all holy feeling, whether in the example of Alexander VI., who commanded Pinturicchio to introduce into one of the Vatican frescoes his own portrait, kneeling before the ascending Redeemer;[111] or in the case of those painters in Rome whose favourite model for the Saviour has of late years been a cobbler, hence known in the streets by the blasphemous name of Jesus Christ. [Footnote 111: Roscoe, who wrote without an opportunity of seeing these paintings, describes this Pope as kneeling in his pontificals before the Madonna, in whom is portrayed his mistress, Julia Farnese. In this palpable blunder he has been followed by Rio and others. It would be curious to discover on what authority Gordon, in his life of Borgia, states that a likeness of La Vanosia, another of his mistresses, hung for Madonna-worship in the church of the Popolo at Rome. The circumstance coming from such a quarter is questionable; at all events, it is no longer true. Alexander kneels before the Risen, not the Ascending Christ. *Roscoe followed Vasari.]