It was to be expected that the artists employed were those of note, yet in the general result, outside of delicate grotesques, the drawing is more or less the far-away echo of greater masters whose faults are reproduced, but whose inspiration is not obtainable. After Michael Angelo, came a passion for over-delineation of over-developed muscles; after Raphael--came the debased followers of his favourite pupil, Giulio Romano, who had himself seized all there was of the carnal in Raphael's genius. But if there is something to be desired in the composition and line of the cartoons of the Florentine factory, there is nothing lacking in the consummate skill of the weavers. [Illustration: ITALIAN TAPESTRY. MIDDLE OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY Cartoon by Bacchiacca. Woven by Nicholas Karcher] [Illustration: ITALIAN TAPESTRY. MIDDLE OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY Cartoon by Bacchiacca. Woven by G. Rost] The same Nicholas Karcher who set the standard in the d'Este works, gave of his wonderful skill to the Florentines, and with him was associated John Rost. These were both from Flanders, and although trade regulations for tapestry workers did not exist in Italy, Duke Cosimo granted each of these men a sufficient salary, a habitat, as well as permission to work for outsiders, and in addition paid them for all work executed for himself. The subjects for the set of tapestries had entirely left the old method of pious interpretation and of mediaeval allegory and revelled in pictured tales of the Scriptures and of the gods and heroes of mystical Parnassus and of bellicose Greece, not forgetting those dainty exquisite impossibilities called grotesques. It was about the time of the death of Cosimo I (1574), the founder of the Medicean factory, that a new and unfortunate influence came into the directorship of the designs. This was the appointment of Stradano or Johan van der Straaten, to give his Flemish name, as dominating artist. He was a man without fine artistic feeling, one of those whose eye delighted in the exaggerations of decadence rather than in the restraint of perfect art. He was inspired, not by past perfection of the Italians among whom he came to live, but by those of the decline, and on this he grafted a bit of Northern philistinism. His brush was unfortunately prolific, and at this time the fine examples of weaving set by Rost and Karcher had been replaced by quicker methods so that after 1600 the tapestries poured out were lamentably inferior. Florentine tapestry had at this time much pretence, much vulgar display in its drawing, missing the fine virtues of the time when Cosimo I dictated its taste, the fine virtues of "grace, gaiety and reflectiveness."