of Fortuny, he was stronger and healthier than the latter. He drew like a genuine painter, without having too much of the Fortuny fireworks. His soft, rich painting was that of a colourist of distinction, always tasteful, exquisite in tone, and light and pleasing in technique. By the other Italian costume painters the scale run through by Fortuny was not enriched by new notes. Most of their pictures are nugatory, coquettishly sportive toys, masterly in technique no doubt, but so empty of substance that they vanish from memory like novels read upon a railway journey. Many have no greater import than dresses, cloaks, and hats worn by ladies during a few weeks of the season. Sometimes their significance is not even so great, since there are modistes and dressmakers who have more skill in making ruches and giving the right _nuance_ to colours. Some small part of Favretto's refined taste seems to have been communicated to the Venetian _Antonio Lonza_, who delights in mingling the gleaming splendour of Oriental carpets, fans, and screens amid the motley, picturesque costumes of the _rococo_ period--Japanese who perform as jugglers and knife-throwers in quaint _rococo_ gardens before the old Venetian nobility. But the centre of this costume painting is Florence, and the great mart for it the _Società artistica_, where there are yearly exhibitions. [Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ FAVRETTO. SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS.] Francesco Vinea, Tito Conti, Federigo Andreotti, and Edoardo Gelli are in Italy the special manufacturers who have devoted themselves, with the assistance of Meissonier, Gérôme, and Fortuny, to scenes from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to plumed hats, Wallenstein boots, and horsemen's capes, to Renaissance lords and laughing Renaissance ladies, and they have thereby won great recognition in Germany. Pretty, languishing women in richly coloured costumes, tippling soldiers and gallant cavaliers, laughing peasant women and trim serving-girls drawing wine in the cellar vaults and setting it before a trooper, who in gratitude affectionately puts his arm round their waist, beautiful and still more languishing noble ladies, who laugh with a parrot or a dog, instead of a trooper, in apartments richly furnished with Gobelins--such for the most part are the subjects treated by _Francesco Vinea_ with great virtuosity bordering on the routine of a typewriter. His technique is neither refined nor fascinating; the colours are so crude that they affect the eye as a false note the ear. But the mechanical power of his painting is great. He has much ability, far more, indeed, than Sichel, and possesses the secret of painting, in an astonishing manner, the famous lace kerchiefs wound round the heads of his fair ones. _Andreotti_ and _Tito Conti_ work in the same fashion, except that the ballad-singers and rustic idylls of Andreotti are the smoother and more mawkish, whereas the pictures of Conti make a somewhat more refined and artistic effect.