The Martyrdom, or rather the brutally ostentatious murder of St. Agnes leads us to the _limits_ of expression: sympathy and disgust are the irreconcileable parallels that must for ever separate legitimate terror and pity from horror and aversion. We cannot sympathise with what we detest or despise, nor fully pity what we shudder at or loathe. So little were these limits understood by the moderns, M. Agnolo excepted, that even the humanity and delicacy of Raffaello did not guard him from excursions into the realms of horror and loathsomeness: it is difficult to conceive what could provoke him to make a finished design of the inhumanities that accompany the martyrdom of St. Felicitas at which even description shudders; a design made on purpose to be dispersed over Europe, perpetuated and made known to all by the graver of Marc Antonio: Was it to prove to Albert Durer and the Germans of his time that they had not exhausted the sources of abomination? He made an equal mistake in the Morbetto, where, though not with so lavish a hand as Poussin after him, instead of the moral effects of the plague, he has personified the effluvia of putrefaction. What _he_ had not penetration to avoid, could not be expected to be shunned by his scholars. Julio Romano delighted in studied images of torture as well as of the most abandoned licentiousness. Among his contemporaries, Correggio even attempted to give a zest to the most wanton cruelty by an affectation of grace in the picture of the Saints Placido and Flavia: but the enamoured trance of Placido with his neck half cut, and the anthem that quivers on the lips of Flavia whilst a sword is entering her side, in vain bespeak our sympathy, for whilst we detest the felons who slaughter them, we loathe to inspect the actual process of the crime; mangling is contagious, and spreads aversion from the slaughterman to the victim. If St. Bartholomew and St. Erasmus are subjects for painting, they can only be so before, and neither under nor after the operation of the knife or windlass. A decollated martyr represented with his head in his hand, as Rubens did, and a headless corpse with the head lying by it, as Correggio, can only prove the brutality, stupidity, or bigotry of the employer, and the callus or venality of the artist. The gradations of expression within, close to, and beyond its limits cannot perhaps be elucidated with greater perspicuity than by comparison; and the different moments which Julio Romano, Vandyke and Rembrandt, have selected to represent the subject of Samson betrayed by Delilah, offers one of the fairest specimens furnished by art. Considering it as a drama, we may say that Julio forms the plot, Vandyke unravels it, and Rembrandt shows the extreme of the catastrophe.