painting of the seventeenth century passed on towards the eighteenth, and, from ceilings and panels, rosy nymphs and Venuses smile at us, attitudinising and contorted upon their cloudy backgrounds. Lackadaisical Magdalens drop sentimental tears, and the Angel of the Annunciation capers above the head of an affected Virgin, while violent colours, intensified chiaroscuro, and black greasy impasto betray the neighbourhood of the _tenebrosi_. When, towards the end of the seventeenth century, Gregorio Lazzarini set himself to shake off these influences, he went to the opposite extreme. Although a beautiful designer, he becomes cold and flat in colour, with a coldness and insipidity, indeed, that take us by surprise, appearing in a country where the taste for luminous and brilliant tints was so strongly rooted. The student of Venetian painting, who wishes to fill up the hiatus which lies between the Golden Age and the revival of the eighteenth century, cannot do better than compare Fumiani's vault in San Pantaleone with Lazzarini's sober and earnest fresco, "The Charity of San Lorenzo Giustiniani," in San Pietro in Castello, and with Pietro Liberi's "Battle of the Dardanelles" in the Ducal Palace. In all three we have examples of the varied and accomplished yet soulless art of this period. Not many of the scenes painted for the palaces of patricians in the seventeenth century have survived. They are to be found here and there by the curious who wander into old churches and palaces with a second-hand copy of Boschini in their hands; but in the reaction from the florid which took place in the Empire period, many of them gave place to whitewash and stucco. In the Ducal Palace, side by side with the masterpieces of the Renaissance, are to be found the overcrowded canvases of Vicentino, Giovanni Contarini, Pietro Liberi, Celesti, and others like them. Some of the poor and meretricious mosaics in St. Mark's are from designs by Palma Giovine and Fumiani. Carlo Ridolfi, who was a painter himself, as well as the painter's chronicler, has an "Adoration of the Magi" in S. Giovanni Elemosinario, poor enough in invention and execution. Two pictures by obscure artists disfigure a corner of the Scuola di San Rocco. The Museo Civico has a large canvas by Vicentino, a "Coronation of a Dogaressa," which once adorned Palazzo Grimani. We hear of a school opened by Antonio Balestra, who was the master of Rosalba Carriera and Pietro Longhi, and the names of others have come down to us in numbers too numerous to be quoted. Towards the end of the seventeenth century more light and novelty sparkles in the painting of the Bellunese, Battista Ricci, and assures us that he was no mere copyist; and, as the eighteenth century opens, we become aware of the strong and daring brush of Gianbattista Piazetta. Piazetta studied the works of the Carracci for some time in Bologna, and especially those of Guercino, whose style, with its bold contrasts of light and shade,