The fact that Lessing, in discussing the limits of painting in his _Laocoön_, took a work of sculpture as his starting-point, proves that to him the laws and conditions of both arts were valued as the same. They denounced the confusion of the art of painting with poetry, and instead advocated the confounding of painting with sculpture, which was no less hazardous. [Illustration: ANGELICA KAUFFMANN. PORTRAIT OF A LADY AS A VESTAL.] In this manner there came an alien element into Mengs' hitherto quite pictorial apprehension; a vain and exclusively reproductive ideality deprived his figures of the last remnant of truth to nature which he had formerly understood how to give them. It is difficult to believe that Winckelmann's paroxysm of friendship should have burst out, upon the completion of the "Parnassus," into this pæan: "During the whole of the new age a more beautiful work has not appeared in painting; even Raphael would have bowed his head." The whole is nothing more than a _mélange_ of plagiarism and _banal_ reminiscences, without soul or perception, without freshness or individuality; a mere plastic warehouse, and not even a painted antique group, but a daubed compilation of solitary statues, colder and more lifeless than any Baltoni ever painted. There was an audacious, strong aim, genial strength and an overwhelming flow of fantasy in the contemporary works of the great _décorateur_ Tiepolo; here there is a mere work of intellect which with philological aid builds up the composition entirely of borrowed materials. The only thing which even still points in this work to the good old times is a more solid study of form and colour than all that which originated in Germany during the next fifty years. The figures are painted with a strength and bloom which are still quite worthy of the _rococo_.