ancients afford us of Alexander or Augustus?[3] Not that I object to the introduction of such particulars in the lives of the great luminaries of art: in a Raffaello or a Caracci minute circumstances derive interest from the subject; but how intolerable do they become in the life of an ordinary individual, where the principal incidents are but little interesting? Suetonius has not written the lives of his Cæsars and his grammarians in the same manner: the former he has rendered familiar to the reader; the latter are merely noticed and passed over. The tastes of individuals, however, are different, and some people delight in minutiæ, as it regards both the present and the past; and since it may be of utility to those who may hereafter be inclined to give a very full and perfect history of every thing relating to Italian painting, let us view with indulgence those who have employed themselves in compiling lives so copious, and let those who have time to spare, beguile it with their perusal. At the same time, due regard should be paid to that very respectable class of readers, who, in a history of painting, would rather contemplate the artist than the man; and who are less solicitous to become acquainted with the character of a single painter, whose solitary and insulated history cannot prove instructive, than with the genius, the method, the invention, and the style of a great number of artists, with their characteristics, their merits, and their rank, the result of which is a history of the whole art.