A great number of the Italians do the same even now. In numerous costume pictures, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, flashing with silk and velvet, the Southerner's bright pleasure in colour still loves to celebrate its orgies. Gay trains rustle, rosy Loves laugh down from the walls, Venetian chandeliers shed their radiance; no other epoch in history enables the painter with so much ease to produce such an efflorescence of full-toned chords of colour. With his shining glow of hue the delectable and spirited _Favretto_ (who, like Fortuny, entered the world of art as a victor, and, like him again, was snatched from it when barely thirty-seven, after a brief and brilliant career) stands at the head of this group. The child of poor parents, indeed the son of a joiner, he was born in Venice in 1849, and, like the Spaniard, passed a youth which was full of privations. But all the cares of existence, even the loss of an eye, did not hinder him from seeing objects under a laughing brightness of colour. Through his studies and the bent of his fancy he had come to be no less at home in the Venice of the eighteenth century than in that of his own time. This Venice of Francesco Guardi, this city of enchantment surrounded with the gleam of olden splendour, the scene of rich and brilliantly coloured banquets and a graceful and modish society, rose once more under Favretto's hands in fabulous beauty. What _brio_ of technique, what harmony of colours, were to be found in the picture "Un Incontro," the charming scene upon the Rialto Bridge, with the bowing cavalier and the lady coquettishly making her acknowledgments! This was the first picture which gave him a name in the world. What fanfares of colour were in the two next pictures, "Banco Lotto" and "Erbajuolo Veneziano"! At the Exhibition in Turin in 1883 he was represented by "The Bath" and "Susanna and the Elders"; at that in Venice in 1887 he celebrated his last and greatest triumph. The three pictures "The Friday Market upon the Rialto Bridge," "The Canal Ferry near Santa Margherita," and "On the Piazzetta" were the subject of enthusiastic admiration. All the Venetian society of the age of Goldoni, Gozzi, and Casanova had become vivid in this last picture, and moved over the smooth brick pavement of the Piazzetta at the hour of the promenade, from the Doge's palace to the library, and from the Square of St. Mark to the pillar of the lions and Theodore, to and fro in surging life. Men put up their glasses and chivalrously greeted the queens of beauty. The enchanting magic building of Sansovino, the _loggetta_ with their bright marble pillars, bronze statues of blackish-grey, and magnificent lattice doors, formed the background of the standing and sauntering groups, whose variegated costumes united with the tones of marble and bronze to make a most beautiful combination of colours. Favretto had a manner of his own, and, although a member of the school