The least pardonable of all Mannerists appears to be he who applies to meanness to furnish him with the instruments to dignity and grandeur. He who relies for all upon his model, should treat no other subject but his model; and I will venture to say, that even the extravagant forms, and, if you will, caricatures of Goltzius seduced by Spranger are preferable to those of Albert Durer or Caravaggio, though recommended by the precision of the one and the chiaroscuro of the other, when applied to a pure heroic or symbolic subject; for though eccentric and extreme, they are eccentricities and extremes of the great style, in which meanness of conception is of all other blemishes the least excusable. From this blemish the mighty genius of Raffaello, before it emerged from the dregs of Pietro Perugino, was not entirely free;--whether from timidity or languor of conception, the Christ in the Dispute on the Sacrament, though the principal figure, the centre from which all the rest like radii emanate and ought to emanate in due subordination, is a tame, mean figure, and, the placidity of the face perhaps excepted, for even that has a tincture of meanness, inferior to all the patriarchs and doctors of that numerous composition. The _third_ class, or those who mix up a motley assemblage of ideal beauty and common nature, such as was pounded together by Pietro Testa and Gherard Lairesse, and from which neither Guido nor Poussin were entirely free--though perhaps not strictly chargeable with the absolute impropriety of the first and the lowness of the second class, must be content with what we can spare of disapprobation from either: they surprise us into pleasure by glimpses of character and form, and as often disappoint us by the obtrusion of heterogeneous or vulgar forms. But this disappointment is not so general, because we want that critical acquaintance with the principles of ancient art which can assign each trunk its head, each limb its counterpart: a want even now so frequent, notwithstanding the boasted refinements of Roman and German criticisms, that a Mercury, if he have left his caduceus, may exchange his limbs with a Meleager, and he with an Antinous; perhaps a Jupiter on Ida his torso with that of a Hercules anapauomenos, an Ariadne be turned into the head of a hornless Bacchus, and an Isis be substituted for every ideal female. FOOTNOTES: [95] Analogia. Vitruv. Commensio? [96] If this happened at all, it must have happened before 1505, at least before the expiration of that year: Giov. Bellino, with whom the author of the preface makes Albert acquainted too, died in 1512. Albert Durer was born in 1471. [97] Idealismus. EIGHTH LECTURE. COLOUR.--IN FRESCO PAINTING. EIGHTH LECTURE.