Two others, among the best of these imitators of a more solid taste, are Vecchia and Loth, fully entitled as much as the rest to the rank they hold. Pietro Vecchia sprung from the school of Padovanino, but he did acquire altogether his style, most probably because Padovanino, like the Caracci, gave an individual direction to the talents of his pupils, in the path he judged best adapted to their success. The genius of Vecchia was not at all calculated for lighter subjects. He had imbibed from his master an admiration of the ancients, as well as the art of imitating them; and with these principles he arrived at such a degree of excellence, that several of his pictures pass for those of Giorgione, of Licini, and even of Titian. It is true, that by dint of copying and exactly imitating old paintings, much darkened by time, he contracted the habit of colouring with considerable dulness of lights, affording an example for every young artist, that he should learn to tinge with lively colours, previous to taking copies of similar pictures. For though he, indeed, acquired the colouring of the ancients, he added neither much variety nor much choice of countenances; and he still remained a naturalist, limited in his ideas, and more inclined towards the burlesque than the serious. Some of his best productions consist of pictures for private ornament; of youths armed, or equipped and ornamented with plumes, in the manner of Giorgione, though not without some degree of caricature. One of these, an astrologer telling their fortune to some soldiers, is in possession of the senator Rezzonico at Rome, altogether of so beautiful a character that Giordano painted a companion to it; a little picture quite in the same taste. But although his humourous pieces please us in some, they disgust us in many of his other subjects, and more particularly in the Passion of our Saviour; a sacred mystery, in which the spectator ought never to be presented with cause for mirth. But Vecchia seemed to forget this, and introduces, like Callot, certain caricatures among his sacred pieces, of which specimens are to be seen in the church of Ognissanti at Venice; in possession of the Conti Bevilacqua at Verona, and in other places. In other points, with a style rather strong and loaded with shade than pleasing, he shewed himself an excellent artist, both in his naked parts and his draperies; which he designed and coloured at the same time in the academies. His fleshes are dark red, his handling easy, his colour thick and heavy, the effects of his light new and studied, and his whole taste so far from any degree of mannerism, and of such a composition, that to any one unversed in pictorial history, he would appear to have flourished at least two ages before his real time. Melchiori bestows particular commendation upon him for his talents in restoring old pictures; and conjectures that he, in this way, acquired the appellation