Carlo Marratti, without distinguished merit of any kind—­unless it was a distinguished merit to be the father of Faustina Zappi,—­owed his fortune, his title of Cavaliere, and the celebrity he once enjoyed, not to any superiority of genius, but to his successful arts as a courtier, and his assiduous flattery of the great.  What can be more characteristic of the man, than his simpering Virgins, fluttering in tasteless, many-coloured draperies, with their sky blue back-grounds, and golden clouds?

Caravaggio was a gloomy misanthrope and a profligate ruffian:  we read, that he was banished from Rome, for a murder committed in a drunken brawl; and that he died at last of debauchery and want.  Caravaggio was perfect in his gamblers, robbers, and martyrdoms, and should never have meddled with Saints and Madonnas.  In his famous Pieta in the Vatican, the Virgin is an old beggar-woman, the two Maries are fish-wives, in “maudlin sorrow,” and St. Peter and St. John, a couple of bravoes, burying a murdered traveller:  dipinse ferocemente sempre perche feroce era il suo carrattere, says his biographer; an observation, by the way, in support of my hypothesis.

Rubens, with all his transcendent genius, had a coarse imagination:  he bore the character of an honest, liberal, but not very refined man.  Rubens painted Virgins—­would he had let them alone! fat, comfortable farmers’ wives, nursing their chubby children.  Then follows Vandyke in the opposite extreme.  Vandyke was celebrated in his day, for his personal accomplishments:  he was, says his biographers, a complete scholar, courtier and gentleman.  His beautiful Madonnas are, accordingly, what we might expect—­rather too intellectual and lady-like:  they all look as if they had been polished by education.

The grand austere genius of Michel Angelo was little calculated to portray the dove-like meekness of the Vergine dolce e pia, or the playfulness of infantine beauty.  In his Mater Amabilis, sweetness and beauty are sacrificed to expression; and dignity is exaggerated into masculine energy.  In the Mater Dolorosa, suffering is tormented into agony:  the anguish is too human:  it is not sufficiently softened by resignation; and makes us turn away with a too painful sympathy.  Such is the admirable head in the Palazzo Litti at Milan; such his sublime Pieta in the Vatican—­but the last, being in marble, is not quite a case in point.

I will mention but two more painters of whose lives and characters I know nothing yet, and may therefore fairly make their works a test of both, and judge of them in their Madonnas, and afterwards measure my own penetration and the truth of my hypothesis, by a reference to the biographical writers.