404 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

is more likely to discourage than to assist the efforts of an undeveloped school. Granting even what the shallowest materialism of modern artists would assume, that the works of Perugino were of no value but as they taught Raphael, that John Bellini is altogether absorbed and overmastered by Titian-that Nino Pisano was utterly superseded by Bandinelli¹ or Cellini, and Ghirlandajo sunk in the shadow of Buonaroti-granting Van Eyck to be a mere mechanist, and Giotto a mere child, and Angelico a superstitious monk, and whatever you choose to grant that ever blindness deemed or insolence affirmed, still it is to be maintained and proved, that if we wish to have a Buonaroti or a Titian of our own, we shall with more wisdom learn of those of whom Buonaroti and Titian learned, and at whose knees they were brought up, and whom to their day of death they ever revered and worshipped, than of those wretched pupils and partisans who sank every high function of art into a form and a faction, betrayed her trusts, darkened her traditions, overthrew her throne, and left us where we now are, stumbling among its fragments. Sir, if the canvasses of Guido, lately introduced into the gallery,² had been works of the best of those pupils, which they are not-if they had been good works of even that bad master, which they are not,-if they had been genuine or untouched works, even though feeble, which they are not-if, though false and retouched remnants of a feeble and fallen school, they had been endurably decent or elementarily instructive, some conceivable excuse might perhaps have been by ingenuity forged, and by impudence uttered, for their introduction into a gallery where we previously possessed two good Guidos³ and no Perugino (for the attribution to him

¹ [For Bandinelli, see Vol. III. p. 618; for Cellini, Vol. IV. p. 318.]

² [“Lot and his Daughters leaving Sodom” (No. 193), purchased for the Gallery in 1844; and “Susannah and the Elders” (No. 196), purchased in the same year. For another criticism of these purchases, see Vol. III. p. 670.]

³ [The “two good Guidos” previously possessed are the “St. Jerome” (No.11) and the “Magdalen” (No. 177). The “wretched panel” is No. 181, “The Virgin and Infant Christ with St. John”: it is by some attributed to Perugino’s scholar, Lo Spagna. In 1856 a very fine Perugino was purchased for the Gallery-“The

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