That boundless and instructive volume, open to all, but cultivated by few, was rightly appreciated by Batoni, and it was hence that he derived that beautiful variety in his heads and contours, which are sometimes wanting even in the great masters, who were occasionally too much addicted to the ideal. Hence, too, he derived the gestures and expressions most appropriate to each subject. Persuaded that a vivid imagination was not alone sufficient to depict those fine traits in which the sublimity of the art consists, he did not adopt any attitudes which were not found in nature. He took from nature the first ideas, copied from her every part of the figure, and adapted the drapery and folds from models. He afterwards embellished and perfected his work with a natural taste, and enlivened all with a style of colour peculiarly his own; clear, engaging, lucid, and preserving after the lapse of many years, as in the picture of various saints at S. Gregorio, all its original freshness. This was in him not so much an art as the natural ebullition of his genius. He sported with his pencil. Every path was open to him; painting in various ways, now with great force, now with a touch, and now finishing all by strokes. Sometimes he destroyed the whole work, and gave it the requisite force by a line.[95] Although he was not a man of letters, he yet shows himself a poet in conception, both in a sublime and playful style. One example from a picture in the possession of his heirs, will suffice. Wishing to express the dreams of an enamoured girl, he has represented her wrapped in soft slumbers, and surrounded by loves, two of whom present to her splendid robes and jewels, and a third approaches her with arrows in his hand, while she, captivated by the vision, smiles in her sleep. Many of these poetical designs, and many historical subjects, are in private collections, and in the courts of Europe, from which he had constant commissions.