and at the same age, having only completed his thirty-seventh year.

Parmigiano, in his best pictures, is one of the most fascinating of painters dignified, graceful, harmonious. His children, cupids, and angels are, in general, exquisite; his portraits are noble, and are perhaps his finest and most faultless productions -the Moses and the Eve excepted. It was the error of Parmigiano that in studying grace he was apt to deviate into affectation, and become what the French call manière: all studied grace is disagreeable. In his female figures he lengthened the limbs, the necks, the fingers, till the effect was not grace, but a kind of stately feebleness; and as he imitated at the same time the grand drawing and large manner of Michael Angelo, the result conveys an impression of something quite incongruous in nature and in art. Then his Madonnas have in general a mannered grandeur and elegance, something between goddesses and duchesses; and his female saints are something between nymphs and maids of honour. For instance, none of his compositions, not even the Cupid shaping his Bow, has been more popular than his Marriage of St. Catherine, of which there are so many repetitions ; a famous one in the collection of Lord Normanton ; another, smaller and most exquisite, in the Grosvenor Gallery-not to speak of an infinitude of copies and engravings; but is not the Madonna

with her long slender neck and her half-averted head far more aristocratic than divine? and does not St. Catherine hold out her pretty finger for the ring with the air of a lady-bride ?-and most of the sacred pictures of Parmigiano are liable to the saine censure. Annibal Carracci, in a famous sonnet, in which he pointed out what was most worthy of imitation in the elder painters, recommends, significantly, "a little" of the grace of Parmigiano; thereby indicating, what we feel to be the truth, that he had too much.

GIORGIONE:

Born 1478; died 1511.

THIS painter was another great inventor; one of those who stamped his own individuality on his art. He was essentially a poet, and a subjective poet, who fused his own being with all he performed and created :-if Raphael be the Shakspere, then Giorgione may be styled the Byron, of painting.

He was born at Castel Franco, a small town in the territory of Treviso, and his proper name was Giorgio Barbarelli. Nothing is known of his family or of his younger years, except that having shown a strong disposition to art, he was brought, when a boy, to Venice, and placed under the tui