The Spanish school may be said to hold a middle place between the schools of Italy and Flanders. The most natural and the most indigenous style it can boast is, unquestionably, that of Murillo, who was never out of Spain; and although it is true that he formed his manner, in a great degree, from the study of Ribera and Vandyck, the principles of those painters are so different, that it would be difficult to recognise either model in a union of the two. But Murillo superadded much that was his own, and much that was immediately, and somewhat too indiscriminately, derived from the observation of nature. The artists of the school of Seville, of which Murillo is the chief, were generally called _naturalistas_, as opposed to those who followed the Italian purity of taste in design, invention, and imitation. Although it is hardly safe to class all the professors of one province under a particular designation, the earlier school of Valencia may be considered the rival of the _naturalistas_: its Italian character is to be traced from Vincent Juanes, who was compared by Palomino to Raffaelle; in Ribalta, a work by whom, it is said, was mistaken in Rome for a performance of Raffaelle’s; in Jacinto Gerónimo di Espinosa, by Cean Bermudez called a second Domenichino; and in Pedro Orrente and Luis Tristan, who imitated Bassano and Titian. The appearance in Italy of the fac-similists and _tenebrosi_ (corresponding with the Spanish _naturalistas_, with whom they are connected by Ribera’s imitation of Caravaggio) is considered, with some reason, to have hastened the decline of painting in that country; in Spain and Flanders, on the other hand, the art which had before been a feeble or mannered imitation of the best Italian works, then only began to be great when the style of the _naturalistas_ was introduced. The practice of the Sevillian painters in copying objects of still life as a preparatory study, was probably derived from the Netherlands, and this style again, which was ominous of degradation and decay in Italy, was the cause of much of the excellence of the Andalusian painters. The taste of these painters, in short, was for individual nature; a taste which was in some degree, and in spite of themselves, corrected by their being almost exclusively employed in painting for churches. The arts in Spain, from their earliest introduction, have been devoted to religion; nor is it to be wondered that this should be the case in a country which seems to have considered itself in an especial manner the representative of Catholicism, a natural consequence, perhaps, of its defending the outposts of Christendom from the infidels. The representation of the human figure is strictly forbidden by the Koran, and there can be no doubt that the spirit of opposition was manifested in this point, as in every other, by the antagonists of the Moors. The conquest of Granada at the close of the fifteenth century happens to correspond with the