an earthquake, and its menacing cracks have since been shaken by thunderbolts. Although the repairs have been judiciously limited to securing the plaster, without attempting any restoration of the frescoes, several compartments are almost wholly defaced. Some female groups, however, remain, which yield to nothing that Masaccio has left for the plaudits of posterity. [Footnote *149: They are in quite fair preservation as things go.] In much better preservation is a hitherto unnoticed painting on the wall of a chapel in the cathedral of Rimini, dated 1448. It represents Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, whom we have so often named in the first volume of this work, kneeling in prayer before his patron saint, Sigismondo, king of Hungary. The wide and once beautifully graduated landscape has unfortunately suffered; but the favourite dog,[*150] crouching behind, is evidently as striking a likeness as his master, whose dignified character and serious pose give to what is but a laboriously accurate portrait, the spiritualised grandeur of a noble devotional composition. It embodies the verity of nature, exempt from the vulgarity of naturalism. [Footnote *150: There are two greyhounds lying side by side facing opposite ways.] We have to lament the disappearance of whatever works in fresco Pietro del Borgo may have executed for Urbino, unless we attribute to him, on an already noticed lunette over the outer doorway of S. Francesco, at Mercatello, a beautiful half-length Marriage of St. Catherine. Of the small pictures, which he is said by Vasari to have painted for that court, one only remains; it is in the sacristy of the Urbino cathedral, and is a monument of great interest as regards the master and his patrons. On one side is the Flagellation of Christ before Pilate, in an open court enriched with a beautiful perspective of colonnades and architectural ornament. On the other is introduced a detached group of three figures in conversation, magnificently attired, who are generally called at Urbino the successive sovereigns Oddantonio, Federigo, and Guidobaldo I.; but their ages, compared with that of the painter, are irreconcileable with such a supposition. The Abbé Pungeleoni, in his _Life of Sanzi_, considers them to represent Count Guidantonio and his successors, Oddantonio and Federigo; or they may more probably be portraits of Oddantonio and the two evil counsellors who led him and themselves to destruction, as narrated in our third chapter.[151] In the graphic character and fine modelling of their features is displayed one of those peculiar excellences which Il Borghese was able, from his knowledge of perspective and light, to introduce into the practice of pictorial art, and which he is said to have carried out by making finished figures of clay, and draping them with various materials. This precious little picture is signed _Opus Petri de Borgo Sci. Sepulcri_, and we have already quoted it as illustrative of both his first and second manner.