The sensali are not without their use in another respect.  So indirect and underhand is the Italian’s mode of dealing in these matters, and so eccentric his notions as to value, that a foreigner is apt to be speedily disgusted or driven away by the magnitude of demands which in reality the seller never expects to realize.  Hence the negotiation is best done through an agent, the buyer having fixed his price, leaving the sensale to make what he can for himself.  No purchaser, however, should give heed to any statement about the history or authenticity of the works offered to him through such channels, but rely both for value and facts upon his own resources; otherwise he will be deceived to an extent that would appear almost fabulous to the uninitiated.

Such are the preliminary difficulties that beset the amateur.  We will suppose him in connection with the seller, and trace his progress.  First, the quality of his judgment and the impressibility of his imagination are tested by a series of experiments as delicate as the atmospherical gauges of a barometer.  He is of course not to be entrapped by copies or fabrications.  He has a shrewd distrust of dealers, and therefore prefers to buy family pictures or originals directly from chapels and convents.  All Italians have a patriotic pride in getting rid of trash at the expense of the foreigner.  The more common baits to entrap—­by bringing pictures mysteriously boxed, grandly baptized, and liberally decorated with aristocratic seals and eloquent with academical certificates, anointed with refined flattery and obsequious courtesy—­having failed, his Eccellenza being too knowing to be seduced into buying the ostentatiously furbished-up roba of shops, they set about to accommodate him with originals from first hands.  By substituting old frames for new, dirtying the pictures, and other ingenious processes familiar to the initiated, and then putting them out to board in noble villas, antique palaces, or other localities the most natural for good pictures to be discovered in, spiced with a romance of decayed family-grandeur,—­by employing new agents, and by hints sagaciously conveyed to the buyer, his curiosity is excited, hopes raised, and, finally, with much trouble and enhanced expense, he triumphantly carries off the very pictures which in a shop he could not be tempted to look at for fear of being caught with chaff, but which now, from a well-got-up romance, have acquired a peculiar value in his eyes.  Not that this sort of delicate mystification is reserved exclusively for foreigners.  For we have detected in an altar-piece, borne away as a great prize by an Italian friend from a secluded little chapel attached to a noble villa in the vicinity of Florence, a worthless specimen of an old painter, from one of the secret depositories of the city, which had long been wholly unsalable on any terms.