dour that attract it in every direction, and wanders from Papal busts to Grecian statues; from the magnificent marble pulpit, richly adorned with basso relievo, and its beautiful stair-case, to the splendid dirty baptistery, and the Ghigi Chapel, on which piety has heaped more magnificence than taste would perhaps have directed.

It is adorned with a copy in Mosaic, executed at Rome, of a picture of Carlo Maratti's, so admirably done, that I could scarcely believe it was mosaic, and not painting. It is wonderful with what fidelity, both in design and colouring, a mere mechanic art can give back the copy in stone, of the masterpiece of the pencil. The most delicate touches are imitated.

In the niches of the chapel stand two celebrated statues by Bernini-St Jerome, and a Magdalen. The former is the best; but the affectation of attitude, the distortion of limb and feature, the overcharged expression, the want of nature and simplicity, which are the irredeemable faults of his style, are still but too apparent, even in these much-extolled performances.

We stopped at the door of the library adjoining the church, to examine a beautiful Pagan altar of Parian marble, adorned with rams' heads and wreaths of flowers, found in digging the foundations of the cathedral, and converted into the pedestal of one of the pillars of the door-way.

At the same time and place, was dug up a mutilated groupe of the Graces, universally allowed to be the finest representation of them in the world.

They are placed in the library, to the greatest possible disadvantage; so injudiciously elevated, that the smallness of their stature (for they are considerably below the human size) makes them appear contemptible, and so lost in the glare of the large solitary window, that the eye can with difficulty trace the perfect symmetry of their forms. From these circumstances, from their dirty discoloration, and their mutilated state, (one head, and various arms and legs being wanting) it is not till after some examination that their excellence becomes apparent. My first sensation was disappointment, my last delighted admiration; and it was with difficulty I tore myself from gazing on their faultless beauty. The air of easy and unstudied grace, the unrestrained simplicity of attitude, the chaste design, the freedom of nature, and beauty of expression, proclaim this admirable groupe to be one of the purest models of Grecian sculpture.

When Raphael was only sixteen years old, he came to Siena to assist Pinturicchio, (another and a senior pupil of his master, Pietro Perugino,) to paint the walls of this library in fresco; and as he generally gets the whole credit, or discredit, of every work his pencil ever touched, we were assured they were his work. The fact is, that the designs were his, and there is no doubt that one compartment, that on the left side of the room on entering, and nearest the window, in which his own portrait is introduced as a youth on horseback, was executed by his own hand.

But he was sent for to Rome when the painting of this library had made but little progress;* and there is no reason to believe that he ever painted any more of it. This is believed to be his earliest existing work, and it is therefore valuable, for it is certainly interesting to trace the progress of genius from its first faint essays to its latest perfection; but I will not attempt to conceal from you that these hard, rigid, upright figures, struck me as about the most hideous old things I had ever beheld in painting; but for the name of Raphael, I should never have looked at them twice; and long and vainly did I look, in the hope of finding out their excellence. The inspection of them, indeed, raised my admiration of Raphael higher than ever, not from their beauties, but their excessive ugliness. That the same hand that feebly sketched these straight, stiff, Gothic figures, should ever have pourtrayed the sublime form of St John in the Desert, the angelic beauty of the Madonna della Sedia,+ or the faultless perfection of the Martyrdom of St Stephen,‡ was indeed a proud triumph to genius.

Sixteen years had not elapsed between the execution of these two widely different works, the ex

* Lanzi. Storia Pittorica.

+ In the Palazzo Pitti at Florence; the only picture I had then seen in that invaluable collection.

At Genoa, in the Church of S. Stefano. It is worth while to go there, were it only to see this picture. It is partly painted by Giulio Romano, but designed by Raphael.

tremes of good and ill. What a transition! What a space passed over! He had not only to teach himself the very rudiments of design and first principles of composition, but he had to unlearn-a far more difficult task-all the dry Gothic mannerall the meanness and littleness that he had acquired from Pietro Perugino-faults glaringly apparent in these figures. Sir Joshua Reynolds felt humbled on examining his early portraits, to see that he had so little improved upon them; but Raphael might have looked at his with pride, to behold his almost immeasurable progress. From what he had already achieved, we may conjecture what he might have done, had not death cut him off before his early spring of genius had reached maturity, at the age of thirty-seven. We visited the Accademia de' Belli Arti, filled with the productions of Sienese artists. Out of Siena you see little, and hear less of the Sienese school; in it, you see and hear of nothing else. "Lieto scuola fra' lieto popolo," was the character given to this school of painting by one of its most discerning critics.-Gay in colouring, free in design, allegorical, fanciful, but not deep.

Its pretensions to antiquity reach even higher than those of Florence, and in that alone it surpasses the other schools of Italy. It is the oldest and the poorest, the least learned, the least scienti fic, and the least distinguished of them all. In a long course of centuries, it has never produced a single artist whose name has been heard of beyond the Alps, except by the small tribe of virtuosi, with

whom names, indeed, are the most important part of knowledge. The fame of Raphael, Titian, Domenichino, Guido, the Caracci, Corregio, the Poussins, Claude Lorraine, and Salvator Rosa, has filled the world, and been revered by thousands who have never beheld their works. But who ever heard of Casolani, or Vanni, or Meccarino, or Beccafiume, or even Peruzzi?

Guido da Siena, the earliest of them all, flourished in 1220, while Cimabue was yet unborn. His paintings, then highly celebrated, still exist in the Accademia de' Belli Arti, in this city, where stiff black figures of forgotten saints, and grim old Madonnas, extended on gilt grounds, seem made in scrupulous conformity to the Tenth Commandment; for they are not "the likeness of any thing in the heavens above, nor in the earth beneath, nor in the waters under the earth." Yet the praise of Guido of Siena was sung by the first poets of his day; and his pupils vainly emulated his works. The Sienese pretend that their Guido was the reviver of painting; but that the art, or such rude attempts at it as these, was ever wholly extinct, I see no reason to believe. In the most barbarous times, hideous representations, or rather misrepresentations, of men, and animals, and landscapes, were probably made; nay, dubious and forgotten names of the painters of such works have been industriously grubbed out of the dust of antiquity, by laborious compilers of long disquisitions, that nobody but themselves will read; but, as far back as our eye can penetrate into the darkness of the