Padre Jacopo Cortese, a Jesuit, called from his native country Il Borgognone, carried this branch of the art to a height unknown before or since. M. A. Cerquozzi discovered his genius for this department, and persuaded him to abandon the other branches of painting which he cultivated, and to confine himself to this alone. The Battle of Constantine, by Giulio Romano in the Vatican, was the model on which he founded his style. His youth had been dedicated to arms, and his military spirit was not to be extinguished by the luxury of Rome, or the indolence of the cloister. He imparted a wonderful air of reality to his compositions. His combatants appear before us courageously contending for honour or for life, and we seem to hear the cries of the wounded, the blast of the trumpet, and the neighing of the horses. He was indeed an inimitable artist in his line, and his scholars were accustomed to say that their own figures seemed to fight only in jest, while those of Borgognone were the real occupants of the field of battle. He painted with great despatch, and his battle pieces are in consequence very frequent in collections; his touch was rapid, in strokes, and his pencil flowing, so that the effect is heightened by distance; and this style was probably the result of his study of Paolo at Venice, and of Guido in Bologna. From whatever cause it may be, his colouring is very different from that of Guglielmo Baur, who is considered his master, and of whom there are some works in the Colonna gallery. There also may be seen several specimens of his scholars, Bruni, Graziano, and Giannizero, who adopted from Borgognone their colouring, and the selection of a distant point of view for their subject. Others of his scholars occur in various schools. It was also during the pontificate of Urban, about the year 1626, that the burlesque style was first brought into notice in Rome. It had been practised by Ludius in the time of Augustus, and was not wholly unknown to our early artists; but I am not aware that any one had exercised this branch as a profession, or on so small a scale as was practised by Pietro Laar, who was called Bamboccio, from his deformity, as well as from the subjects of his pencil; and the appellation of _bambocciate_ is generally applied to these small pictures, which represent the festivities of the vintage, dances, fights, and carnival masquerades. His figures are usually of a span in size, and the accompanying landscape and the animals are so vividly coloured, that we seem, says Passeri, to see the very objects themselves from an open window, rather than the representation on canvass. The great painters frequently purchased the pictures of Pietro, in order to study his natural style of colour, though at the same time they lamented that so much talent should be misapplied to such low subjects.[83] He resided many years in Rome, and then retired to Holland, where he died at an advanced age, and not a young man, as Passeri has imagined.