once satisfactorily explored, it would prove highly useful in the restoration of ancient pictures, nor superfluous in regard to the adoption of that firm, fused, and lucid colouring, which we shall have occasion to commend in various Lombard and Venetian pictures, and more especially in those of Coreggio. These observations will not be useless to the connoisseur, who doubts the age of a picture on which there are no characters. Where there are letters he may proceed with still greater certainty. The letters vulgarly called gothic, began to be used after the year 1200, in some places more early than in others; and characters were loaded with a superfluity of lines, through the whole of the fourteenth, until about the middle of the fifteenth century, when the use of the Roman alphabet was revived. What forms were adopted by artists in subscribing their names, will be more conveniently explained in the course of a few pages further. I have judged it proper to give here a sort of paleology of painting; because inattention to this has been, and still is, a fruitful source of error. The reader, however, may observe, that though the rules here proposed, afford some light to resolve doubtful points, they are not to be considered as infallible and universal, and he may further recollect, that in matters of antiquity nothing is more dangerous and ridiculous, than to form general rules, which a single example may be sufficient to overthrow. [Footnote 26: See Tiraboschi, _Storia della Litterat. Italiana_, towards the end of tom. iv. See also the Dissertation of Lami on the Italian painters and sculptors who flourished from the year 1000 to 1300; in the Supplement to Vinci's _Trattato della Pittura_, printed at Florence in 1792; and see Moreni, P. iv. p. 108.] [Footnote 27: See the Oration of Mon. Francesco Carrara _Delle Lodi delle belle Arti_, Roma, 1758, 4to. with the accompanying Notes, in which the two Bianchini, Marangoni, and Bottari, their illustrators, are cited.] [Footnote 28: Pointed out to me by Sig. D'Agincourt, a gentleman deeply versed in antiquities of this sort.] [Footnote 29: There were similar remains in the choir, the design of which I have seen. They were covered over in 1733. Among other curiosities was the portrait of the patriarch Popone, of the Emperor Conrad, and his son Henry; the design, action, and characters, like the mosaics at Rome; executed about the year 1030. See Bartoli, _Antichità di Aquileja_, p. 369; and Altan, _Del vario Stato_, &c. p. 5.] [Footnote 30: The figure of our Lady is retouched; but two miniatures attached to it, are better preserved; the one represents a man, the other a woman: and their drapery is in the costume of that period. The figures are reversed in the engraving of them, which is published.] [Footnote 31: See P. della Valle in the Preface to Vasari, p. 51.]