The Dutch and Flemish painters (in spite of their exquisite pots and pans, and cabbages and carrots, their birch-brooms, in which you can count every twig, and their carpets, in which you can reckon every thread) do not interest me; their landscapes too, however natural, are mere Dutch nature (with some brilliant exceptions), fat cattle, clipped trees, boors, and windmills.  Of course I am not speaking of Vandyke, nor of Rubens, he that “in the colours of the rainbow lived,” nor of Rembrandt, that king of clouds and shadows; but for mine own part, I would give up all that Mieris, Netscher, Teniers, and Gerard Douw ever produced, for one of Claude’s Eden-like creations, or one of Guido’s lovely heads—­or merely for the pleasure of looking at Titian’s Flora once a day, I would give a whole gallery of Dutchmen, if I had them.

In the daughter of Herodias, by Leonardo da Vinci, there is the same eternal face he always paints, but with a peculiar expression—­she turns away her head with the air of a fine lady, whose senses are shocked by the sight of blood and death, while her heart remains untouched either by remorse or pity.

His ghastly Medusa made me shudder while it fascinated me, as if in those loathsome snakes, writhing and glittering round the expiring head, and those abhorred and fiendish abominations crawling into life, there still lurked the fabled spell which petrified the beholder.  Poor Medusa! was this the guerdon of thy love? and were those the tresses which enslaved the ocean’s lord?  Methinks that in this wild mythological fiction, in the terrific vengeance which Minerva takes for her profaned temple, and in the undying snakes which for ever hiss round the head of her victim—­there is a deep moral, if woman would lay it to her heart.

In Guercino’s Endymion, the very mouth is asleep:  in his Sybil the very eyes are prophetic, and glance into futurity.

The boyish, but divine St. John, by Raffaelle, did not please me so well as some of his portraits and Madonnas; his Leo the Tenth, for instance, his Julius the Second, or even his Fornarina:  and I may observe here, that I admire Titian’s taste much more than Raffaelle’s, en fait de maitresse.  The Fornarina is a mere femme du peuple, a coarse virago, compared to the refined, the exquisite La Manto, in the Pitti Palace.  I think the Flora must have been painted from the same lovely model, as far as I can judge from compared recollections, for I have no authority to refer to.  The former is the most elegant, and the latter the most poetical female portrait I ever saw.  At Titian’s Venus in the Tribune, one hardly ventures to look up; it is the perfection of earthly loveliness, as the Venus de’ Medici is all ideal—­all celestial beauty.  In the multiplied copies and engravings of this picture I see every where the bashful sweetness of the countenance, and the tender languid repose of the figure are made coarse, or something worse:  degraded, in short, into a character altogether unlike the original.