If all ornament be allegoric, if it imply something allusive to the place, the person, or the design for which it is contrived, from that of a public building or a temple, to that of a library or the decorations of a toilette, how have the schools of Design, after the demise of M. Agnolo and Raffaello, observed its principle? Annibale Carracci, with the Capella Sistina and the Vatican before his eye, has filled the mansion of Episcopal dignity with a chaotic series of trite fable and bacchanalian revelry, without allegory, void of allusion, merely to gratify the puerile ostentation of dauntless execution and academic skill. And if we advert to a greater name, that of Pellegrino Tibaldi, is it easy to discover what relation exists between the adventures of Ulysses and the purposes and pursuits of the academical Institute of Bologna? and is it sufficient to exculpate him from impropriety of choice in his plan, if we say that the ceiling of Pellegrino Tibaldi is a doctrine of style, and that design and style are the principal pursuit of the students? But perhaps it is not to Tiziano, but to Tintoretto and Paolo Cagliari, that the debaucheries of Colour and blind submission to fascinating tints, the rage of scattering flowers to no purpose, are ascribed. Let us select from Tintoretto's most extensive work the Scola of St. Rocco, the most extensive composition, and his acknowledged masterpiece, the Crucifixion, and compare its tone with that of Rubens and of Rembrandt for the same subject. What impression feels he, who for the first time casts a glance on the immense scenery of that work? a whole whose numberless parts are connected by a lowering, mournful, minacious tone. A general fearful silence hushes all around the central figure of the Saviour suspended on the cross, his fainting mother, and a group of male and female mourners at his foot:--a group of colours that less imitate than rival Nature, and tinged by grief itself; a scale of tones for which even Tiziano offers to me no parallel: yet all equally overcast by the lurid tone that stains the whole, and like a meteor hangs in the sickly air. Whatever inequality or derelictions of feeling, whatever improprieties of common place, of local and antique costume, the master's rapidity admitted to fill his space, and they are great, all vanish in the power which compresses them into a single point, and we do not detect them till we recover from our terror.