In contrast to the school established as before mentioned, certain academicians had set up one grounded on principles promulgated by Michael Angelo da Caravaggio, wherein the old idealism and conventional forms of beauty were neglected, and the models furnished by the works of the early masters were entirely slighted, to make room for a simple copying of nature, whether beautiful or repulsive, full of grace or rugged and barren of all charms. This new school had been planted in Naples by Caravaggio; and beneath that glowing sky arose a number of masters who devoted themselves not only to the reproduction of unidealized nature, but the delineation of human passions in their sternest and most violent demonstrations; preferring, in fact, to depict the darkest and stormiest side of humanity. For this purpose, depth of coloring and dark shadows were employed. These masters were not wanting in talent, nor were their creations without effect and influence; but they had nothing of the pure and holy element which seems like a genuine inspiration in art. The gloomy and passionate, expressed in their pictures, too often appeared also in their characters and actions. The relations of these Neapolitan artists with those of the Bolognese school were by no means friendly, and rivals settled their disputes as frequently with the dagger and the poison-cup as with the pencil and the palette. Such a state of things was hardly favorable to the development of woman’s talent. ANIELLA DI ROSA. Yet we find one artist of surpassing merit, who, on account of her genius and her tragical fate, was called the Sirani of the school of Naples. This was Aniella di Rosa, niece of the painter Pacecco di Rosa, and pupil of that Massimo Stanzioni who, in common with Caravaggio, exercised a species of tyranny over the struggles of Neapolitan art, and was one of the leaders of the opposition set up against the artists from Bologna. Aniella painted in his atelier, and he directed her studies with paternal solicitude. She succeeded in giving to her pictures the grace, the soft and transparent coloring of Pacecco, and united in her heads the elegance of her uncle’s style with the correct drawing and able grouping of Stanzioni. Her master set her to color his sketches, and she succeeded so well that he often sold their joint productions as his own. When her education was sufficiently advanced, she desired that her talents should be put to a public test; and her master induced the governors of the church of the Pietà dei Turchini to give her a commission for two paintings which were to adorn the ceiling.