The solidity of this judgment presupposed, _Jordans_, according to Rochefoucault’s maxims, ought rather to be ranked among the greatest originals, than among the mimicks of common nature, where _Rembrandt_ may fill up his place, as _Raoux_ or _Vatteau_ that of _Stella_; though all these painters do nothing but what Euripides did before them; they draw man _ad vivum_. There are no trifles, no meannesses in the art, and if we recollect of what use the _Caricatura_ was to Bernini, we should be cautious how we pass judgment even on the Dutch forms. That great genius, they say[46], owed to this monster of the art, a distinction for which he was so eminent, the “Franchezza del Tocco.” When I reflect on this, I am forced to alter my former opinion of the _Caricatura_, so far as to believe that no artist ever acquired a perfection therein without gaining a farther improvement in the art itself. “It is, says the author, a peculiar distinction of the ancients to have gone beyond nature:” our artists do the same in their _Caricaturas_: but of what avail to them are the voluminous works they have published on that branch of the art? The author lays it down, in the peremptory style of a legislator, that “Precision of Contour can only be learned from the Greeks:” but our academies unanimously agree, that the ancients deviate from a strict Contour in the clavicles, arms, knees, &c. over which, in spite of apophyses and bones, they drew their skin as smooth as over mere flesh; whereas our academies teach to draw the bony and cartilaginous parts, more angularly, but the fat and fleshy ones more smooth, and carefully to avoid falling into the ancient style. Pray, Sir, can there be any error in the advices of academies _in corpore_? _Parrhasius_ himself, the father of Contour, was not, by Pliny’s account[47], master enough to hit the line by which completeness is distinguished from superfluity: shunning corpulency he fell into leanness: and _Zeuxis_’s Contour was perhaps like that of Rubens, if it be true that, to augment the majesty of his figures, he drew with more completeness. His female figures he drew like those of Homer[48], of robust limbs: and does not even the tenderest of poets, Theocritus, draw his Helen as fleshy and tall[49] as the Venus of Raphael in the assembly of the gods in the little Farnese? Rubens then, for painting like Homer and Theocritus, needs no apology. The character of Raphael, in the treatise, is drawn with truth and exactness: but well may we ask the author, as Antalcidas the Spartan asked a sophist, ready to burst forth in a panegyrick on Hercules, “Who blames him?” The beauties however of the Raphael at Dresden, especially the pretended ones of the Jesus, are still warmly disputed. _What you admire, we laugh at._ Why did not he rather display his patriotism against those Italian connoisseurs, whose squeamish stomachs rise against every Flemish production? _Turpis Romano Belgicus ore color._