The artists of this school, of our own day, will doubtless also receive their meed of praise from posterity. They are now industriously occupied in establishing their own fame, and conferring honour on their country. The rising generation, who are entering upon the art, may look for increased support from the Genoese academy, recently founded for the promotion of the three sister arts. Within these few years the members of this academy have been furnished with a splendid domicile, with an abundant collection of select casts and rare designs. With such masters and so many gratuitous sources of assistance to study, this institution may be already numbered amongst the most useful and ornamental of the city. This establishment owes its existence to the genius and liberality of a number of noblemen, who united together in its splendid foundation, and who continue to support it by their patronage. BOOK VI. THE HISTORY OF PAINTING IN PIEDMONT AND THE ADJACENT TERRITORY. EPOCH I. _Dawn of the Art, and Progress to the Sixteenth Century._ Piedmont, like the other states of Italy, cannot boast of a series of ancient masters; but it does not on that account forfeit its claim to a place in the history of painting. That enchanting art, the daughter of peace and contemplation, shuns not only the sound but the very rumour of war. Piedmont, from her natural position, is a warlike country; and if she enjoys the merit of having afforded to the other parts of Italy the protection necessary for the cultivation of the fine arts, she is at the same time under the disadvantage of not being able to insure them safety in her own territory. Hence, though Turin has ever been fruitful in talent, to obtain the decorations suitable to a metropolis, she has been compelled to seek at a distance for painters, or at least for pictures; and whatever we find excellent either in the palace or the royal villas, in the churches, in the public buildings, or in private collections, will be found to be wholly the work of foreigners. I may be told that the artists of Novara and Vercelli, and others from the Lago Maggiore, are not strangers. That might be true after those communities were included in the dominions of the house of Savoy; but they, who were the first in this epoch, were born, lived, and died subjects of other states: and after the new conquests, these artists no more became Piedmontese from that circumstance, than Parrhasius and Apelles became Romans from the moment that Greece was subjected to Rome. For this reason I have classed these artists in the Milanese School; to which, though they had not belonged as subjects, they ought still to be assigned by education, residence, or neighbourhood. This plan I have hitherto persevered in: the subject of my history being not the states of Italy, but her schools of painting. Nor on that account will the artists of Monferrato be excluded from this place.