of a declining taste, and the style of view-painting in the hands of the foreign artists who practised it in Italy, with the Prussian Hackert at their head, had the effect of extinguishing for a time all invention in landscape. The academy at Berlin was under the direction of a Frenchman; Oeser was the greatest name at Leipzic and Dresden; and the south of Germany still imported imitations of the latest Italian styles in fashion. The state of the arts in Spain may be judged of by the fact, that when, in 1761, Mengs, who was himself a native of Germany, repaired to Madrid in the service of Charles III., the chief painters established there were a Venetian and a Neapolitan, Tiepolo and Corrado Giaquinto. The Venetian school, sometimes entirely losing its original character, seemed at least to maintain a consistent degeneracy in the styles of Sebastian Ricci and the above-named Giambattista Tiepolo, both weak and mannered imitators of Paul Veronese, but still preserving, at least the latter, some brilliancy of colour and pleasing execution. With Tiepolo the characteristic merits of the school seem however to have ceased altogether: towards the latter part of the century, the chief employment of the Venetian painters was the restoration of old pictures.[2] A particular school was established in 1778 for this purpose, and a description of the extraordinary labours of the artists is preserved in the thirty-eighth volume of Goëthe’s works. In Rome, the talents of Maratta and Sacchi, and “the great but abused powers of Pietro da Cortona,” had been succeeded by feebler efforts, descending or fluctuating through the styles of Cignani, Trevisani, and others, till the time of Sebastian Conca, and Pompeo Battoni. The last-named was approaching the zenith of his short-lived reputation, and almost without a rival (for Mengs was as yet young, and Conca already aged), when Reynolds visited Rome. Footnote 2: It is worthy of remark that about the same time the sculptors in Rome were as exclusively employed in restoring antique statues.