on a high footing, a heavenly saraband among woolly clouds, their prettiness idealised, their costume of exceeding grace.  After a while you tire of the saccharine Murillo and his studio beggar boys, and turn to his drawings with relief.  His landscapes are more sincere than his religious canvases, which are almost as sensuous and earthly as Correggio without the magisterial brush-work and commanding conception of the Parma painter.  To be quite fair, it may be admitted that Murillo could make a good portrait.  Both in Madrid and Seville you may verify this.

A beautiful Fra Angelico, a beautiful Mantegna open your eyes, for the Italian Primitives are conspicuous by their absence.  Correggio is magnificent.  The well-known Magdalen and Christ Risen, Noli Me Tangere!  His Virgin with Jesus and St. John is in his accustomed melting pate.  One Del Sarto is of prime quality, The Virgin, Jesus and St. John, called Asunto Mistico at the Prado.  Truly a moving picture, by a painter who owes much of his fame to Robert Browning.  His Lucrezia is a pretty portrait of his faithless wife.  There are Lotto, Parmigianino, Baroccio, Tintoretto, Bassano, Veronese, Domenico Tiepolo, and his celebrated father the fantastic Giambattista Tiepolo—­not startling specimens any of them.

In the Spanish section Ribera comes at you the strongest.  He was a personality as well as a powerful painter.  Consider his Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew.  Zurbaran follows next in interest, though morbid at times; but of Berragueta, Borgona, Morales, Juanes, Navarette, Coello—­an excellent portraitist, imitator of Moro—­La Cruz, Alfonso Cano, Luis de Tristan, Espinosa, Bias del Prado, Orrente, Esteban de March—­two realistic heads of an old man and an old woman must be set down to his credit—­Ribalta, influenced by Caravaggio, in turn influencing Ribera—­Juan de las Roelas (el Clerigo), Del Mazo—­son-in-law of Velasquez, and responsible for dozens of false attributions—­Carreno de Miranda, Jose Leonardo, Juan Rizi V. Iriarte, the two Herreras, the elder a truculent charlatan, the younger a nonentity, and others of the Spanish school may be dismissed in a word—­mediocrities.

II

The secret of Titian’s colour, the “Venetian secret,” was produced, some experts believe, by first painting a solid monochrome in tempera on which the picture was finished in oil.  Unquestionably Titian corrected and amended his work as much as did Velasquez.  It is a pleasing if somewhat theatric belief that Titian and Velasquez, duelled with their canvases, their rapier a brush.  After inspecting many of the Hals portraits the evidences of direct painting, swift though calculated, are not to be denied.  This may account, with the temperamental equation, for the less profound psychological interest of his portraiture when compared with the Raphael, Titian, Velasquez, and Rembrandt heads.  Yet, what superiority in brush-work had Hals over Raphael and Rembrandt.