refining it, they still continued augmenting the work, by which the tints were preserved clear and virgin; a result which requires no less promptness of hand than of intellect, besides education, and a taste cultivated from the earliest period. Hence the artist Vecchia was accustomed to say, that by dint of copying pictures executed with diligence, a painter will acquire the same quality; but to succeed in copies from a Titian or a Paolo, and to imitate their stroke, is a task surmounted only by the Venetians, whether natives or educated in their school. (_Boschini_, p. 274.) Should it here be inquired what good result may attend such a method, I reply that Boschini points out two very considerable ones. The first of them is, that by this mode of colouring, which he terms _di macchia_ and _di pratica_, a certain hardness of style may more easily be avoided; and the other, that, better than any other, it gives a bolder relief to paintings in the distance: and pictures being intended to be thus viewed, rather than closer to the eye, such an object is by this process most easily attainable. I am aware of the moderns having misapplied and abused these maxims; but they were meant to have been judiciously employed, and I only wish to propose as examples the most celebrated of the school who so ably comprehended the method, and the limits of such a practice. Nor was the harmony of colours better understood by any other artists, insomuch, that the mode of assimilating and of contrasting them, may be considered as the second source of the delightful and lively, so predominant in their works, and more especially in those of Titian and his contemporaries.