His colour is superior and more transparent, and his tapestry backgrounds are warmer. And, so far as one can judge from their pictures, life runs as merrily for the Italians of the present as it did for those _rococo_ cavaliers. Hanging here and there beside the serious art of other nations, these little picture-people enjoy their careless tinsel pomp; art is a gay thing for them, as gay as a Sunday afternoon with a procession and fireworks, walks and sips of sherbet, to an Italian woman. By the side of the blue-plush and red-velvet costume-picture comic _genre_ still holds its sway: barbaric in colour and with materials which are merrier than is appropriate in tasteful pictures, _Gaetano Chierici_ represents children, both good and naughty, making their appearance upon a tiny theatre. _Antonio Rotta_ renders comic episodes from the life of Venetian cobblers and the menders of nets. _Scipione Vannuttelli_ paints young girls in white dresses arrayed as nuns or being confirmed in church. _Francesco Monteverde_ rejoices in comical _intermezzi_ in the style of Grützner--for instance, an ecclesiastical gentleman observing, to his horror, that his pretty young servant-girl is being kissed by a smart lad in the yard. This is more or less his style of subject. _Ettore Tito_ paints the pretty Venetian laundresses whom Passini, Cecil van Haanen, Charles Ulrich, Eugène Blaas, and others introduced into art. Only a very few struck deeper notes. _Luigi Nono_, in Venice, painted his beautiful picture "Refugium Peccatorum"; _Ferragutti_, the Milanese, his "Workers in the Turnip Field," a vivid study of sunlight of serious veracity; and after these _Giovanni Segantini_ came forward with his forcible creations, in which he has demonstrated that it is possible for a man to be an Italian and yet a serious artist. [Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ TITO. THE SLIPPER SELLER.]