EASTLAKE’S HISTORY OF

OIL-PAINTING

I. Materials for a History of Oil-Painting. By Charles Lock Eastlake, R.A., F.R.S., F.S.A., Secretary to the Royal Commission for promoting the Fine Arts in Connexion with the Rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament, etc., etc. London, I847.

2. Theophili, qui et Rugerus, Presbyteri et Monachi, Libri III. de Diversis Artibus; seu Diversarum Artium Schedula. (An Essay upon Various Arts, in Three Books, by Theophilus, called also Rugerus, Priest and Monk, forming an Encyclopædia of Christian Art of the Eleventh Century. Translated, with Notes, by Robert Hendrie.) London, I847.

1. THE stranger in Florence who for the first time passes through the iron gate which opens from the Green Cloister of Santa Maria Novella into the Spezieria, can hardly fail of being surprised, and that perhaps painfully, by the suddenness of the transition from the silence and gloom of the monastic enclosure, its pavement rough with epitaphs, and its walls retaining, still legible, though crumbling and mildewed, their imaged records of Scripture History, to the activity of a traffic not less frivolous than flourishing, concerned almost exclusively with the appliances of bodily adornment or luxury. Yet perhaps, on a moment’s reflection, the rose-leaves scattered on the floor, and the air filled with odour of myrtle and myrrh, aloes and cassia, may arouse associations of a different and more elevated character; the preparation of these precious perfumes may seem not altogether unfitting the hands of a religious brotherhood-or if this should not be conceded, at all events it

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