The tones fit for Poetic painting are like its styles of design, generic or characteristic. The former is called negative, or composed of little more than chiaroscuro; the second admits, though not ambitiously, a greater variety and subdivision of tint. The first is the tone of M. Agnolo, the second that of Raffaello. The sovereign instrument of both is undoubtedly the simple, broad, pure, fresh, and limpid vehicle of Fresco. Fresco, which does not admit of that refined variety of tints that are the privilege of oil painting, and from the rapidity with which the earths, its chief materials, are absorbed, requires nearly immediate termination, is for those very reasons the immediate minister and the aptest vehicle of a great design. Its element is purity and breadth of tint. In no other style of painting could the generic forms of M. Agnolo have been divided, like night and day, into that breadth of light and shade which stamps their character. The silver purity of Correggio is the offspring of Fresco; his oil paintings are faint and tainted emanations of the freshness and "limpidezza" in his Frescoes. Oil, which rounds and conglutinates, spreads less than the sheety medium of Fresco, and if stretched into breadth beyond its natural tone, as the spirits which are used to extenuate its glue escape, returns upon itself, and oftener forms surfaces of dough, or wood, or crust, than fleshy fibre. Oil impeded the breadth even of the elemental colours of Tiziano in the Salute. The minute process inseparable from oil, is the reason why M. Agnolo declared oil painting to be a woman's method, or of idle men. The master of the colour we see in the Sistina could have no other: for though colour be the least considerable of that constellation of powers that blaze in its compartments, it is not the last or least accomplishment of the work. The flesh of the academic figures on the frames of the ceiling is a flesh even now superior to all the flesh of Annibale Carracci in the Farnese, generally pale though not cold, and never bricky though sometimes sanguine. The Jeremiah among the Prophets, glows with the glow of Tiziano, but in a breadth unknown to Giorgione and to him. The Eve under the Tree has the bland pearly harmony of Correggio; and some of the bodies in air on the lower part of the Last Judgement, less impaired by time or accident than the rest, for juice and warmth may still defy all competition. His colour sometimes even borders on characteristic variety, as in the composition of the Brazen Serpent. That a man who mastered his materials with such power, did reject the certain impediments and the precarious and inferior beauties of oil, which Sebastian del Piombo proposed for the execution of the Last Judgement, and who punished him for the proposal with his disdain for life, cannot be wondered at. If I have mentioned particular beauties of colour, it was more for others than to express what strikes _me_ most.