[151] The frequent want of equilibration found in Tintoretto's figures, even where no violence of action can palliate or account for it, has not without probability been ascribed to his method of studying foreshortening from models loosely suspended and playing in the air; to which he at last became so used that he sometimes employed it even for figures resting on firm ground, and fondly sacrificed solidity and firmness to the affected graces of undulation. [152] It would be mere waste of time to recapitulate what has been said on the efficient beauties of this astonishing work in the lectures on colour and chiaroscuro, and in the article of Tintoretto, in the last edition of Pilkington's Dictionary. It has been engraved on a large scale by Agostino Carracci, if that can be called engraving which contents itself with the mere enumeration of the parts, totally neglecting the medium of that tremendous twilight which hovers over the whole and transposes us to Golgotha. If what Ridolfi says be true, that Tintoretto embraced the engraver when he presented the drawing to him, he must have had still more deplorable moments of dereliction as a man than as an Artist, or the drawing of Agostino, must have differed totally from the print. [153] It is engraved by Pietro Monaco, as that of Tiziano, by Le Fevre, but in a manner which makes us lament the lot of those who have no means to see the original. THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. Mantoua,[154] the birth-place of Virgil, a name dear to poetry, by the adoption of Andrea Mantegna and Giulio Pippi claims a distinguished place in the history of Art, for restoring and disseminating style among the schools of Lombardy. Mantoua, desolated by Attila, conquered by Alboin, wrested from the Longobards by the Exarch of Ravenna, was taken and fortified by Charles the Great: from Bonifazio of Canossa it descended to Mathilda; after her demise, 1115, became a republic tyrannized by Bonacorsi, till the people conferred the supremacy on Lodovico Gonzaga, under whose successors it rose from a marquisate, 1433, to a dukedom, 1531, and finished as an appendage to the spoils of Austria. Revolutions so uninterrupted, aggravated by accidental devastations of floods and fire, may account for the want of earlier monuments of art in Mantoua and its districts, than the remains from the epoch of Mathilda.[155] A want perhaps more to be regretted by the antiquary than the historian of art, whose real epoch begins with the patronage of Lodovico Gonzaga and the appearance of Andrea Mantegna.[156] This native of Padova[157] was the adopted son and pupil of Squarcione, in whose school he acquired that taste for the antique which marks his works at every period of his practice; if sometimes mitigated, never supplanted by the blandishments of colour and the precepts of Giovanni Bellino, whose daughter he had married.