The second picture known by the name of "La Notte," represents the birthnight of the Saviour, and was the commission of Alberto Pratonieri, as appears from a writing dated in 1522, though it was not finished till 1527 according to Mengs, or 1530 as Fiorillo surmised, when it was dedicated in the Chapel Pratonieri of S. Prospero at Reggio: from whence, 1640, it was carried to the gallery of Modena, by order, of Duke Francesco I. and from thence at length to that of Dresden. A chapel in the church del S. Sepolcro at Parma, possessed formerly the altar-piece known by the name of "La Madonna della Scodella," because the Virgin, represented on her flight to Egypt, holds a wooden bowl in her hand: a figure, whom Mengs fancies the Genius of the Fountain, pours water into it; and in the back ground an angel, whose action and expression he considers as too graceful for the business, ties up the ass. This picture, he tells us, was, thirteen years before the date in which he wrote, nearly swept out of the panel by the barbarous wash of a Spanish journeyman painter who had obtained permission to copy it. It is now in the Louvre, and how much of its present florid colour is legitimate, must be left to the decision of the committee "de la Restoration." If the most sublime degree of expression be entitled to the right of originality, Mengs must be followed in his decision on the Ecce Homo, formerly in the Palace Colonna, without much anxiety whether it be the same that belonged to the family of Prati at Parma, or that which Agostino Carracci engraved. The Madonna seated beneath a palm-tree, bending in somnolently pensive contemplation over the Infant on her lap, watched by an Angel above her, and attended by a Leveret, known by the name of "La Zingarella" or the Egyptian, from the sash round her head, formerly in the gallery of Parma, and now at Naples in that of Capo di Monte, has suffered so much from a modern hand, that little of the master remains but the conception. Nearly a duplicate of it was presented by Cardinal Alessandro Albani to king Augustus of Poland; but Mengs hesitates to pronounce it an original. In the period of these, about 1530, we may probably place the two celebrated pictures of Leda and Danae, than which no modern works of art have suffered more from accident and wanton or bigoted barbarity, or been tossed about by more contradictory tradition.