of Marcantonio's masterpiece, the portrait of Pietro Aretino, the infamous bastard of Arezzo, considered the most consummate piece of engraved portraiture in existence. This fac-simile has been made with great skill, by the mechanical process of M. Amand-Durand, from an impression of the first state of the print, of which there are only two known examples. Mr. Colvin's text is distinguished for a very happy and, when occasion requires, a brilliant literary style, especially when concerned with analysis of methods in the production of artistic effects. The reciprocal influence of the Italian and German masters in the earliest development of the art of engraving during the sixteenth and the latter half of the fifteenth century, as explained in Mr. Colvin's fourth article, is a good example of the service which literature may render to art; from the nature of the case, the essential characteristics of the spirit of a school or of an artist are often of a kind to elude expression in language; they are called matters of feeling, and the lay reader is obliged to content himself with a mystery when he seeks for a tangible fact. But the words in these papers which are directed to the analysis of the genius of Andrea Mantegna (page 57), for instance, are not used in the merely literary manner, to cover a real absence of appreciation with an affluence of high-sounding phrases, but they convey concrete ideas with elegance and precision; they accomplish the difficult task of making clear to the layman some of the apparently unspeakable qualities of artistic genius, qualities such as poetry of the highest order sometimes succeeds in suggesting to the imaginative and sympathetic mind, but which seem to defy the resources of prose to set forth in any uninspired, deliberate, or merely scientific manner.

This is high praise, but it may be applied also to Mr. Colvin's description of the Little Masters of Germany and their works. To the careful reader, not versed in the spirit of the earlier etchings and engravings of German, or, as Vasari always called it, of Flemish art, these descriptions and comparisons must prove

a revelation, not alone of the quality of the art, which of course is the immediate point in question, but of the manners and customs of the time, the habits of thought which the art all unconsciously illustrates and embodies. Thus interpreted, the three little subjects opposite page 136, etched by Altdorfer, and the four opposite page 152, by the brothers Beham, must assume a new significance; their importunate and often homely and unimaginative detail, their exquisite care and finish, their quaintness of subject, their unaffected and earnest manner, these qualities are genuine and naïve; to consider them intelligently is an exposition of history. The religious art, which places the awful subject of the Annunciation in a Dutch kitchen, with a roller towel hung against the wall behind the announcing angel, with the lily in a clay flower-pot, and a busy street scene outside the homely casement, as shown in one of the illustrative plates, is an art which needs more explanation than is readily attainable; the secret of it lies remote among the springs of human action, and, when discovered, explains far more than the real meaning of a print four inches by seven; it reveals the causes of wars, treaties, and reformations. Hence, such literature as we are now dealing with, in throwing light upon the obscure motives which formed a certain phase of art, is benefiting humanity as well as art. It is not merely a curious study; it is a contribution to essential knowledge.

The art of the Italian masters from 1450 to 1550, although compact of antique learning and traditions, is impassioned and emotional. As Mr. Colvin finely says of Mantegna, "founding his art upon the study of statuary and the antique, and upon the laws of perspective and geometry, he might easily have lost hold of nature and fallen into pedantry. But the art of that age in Italy was as incapable of pedantry as of vulgarity; it can carry any amount of learning without being pedantic; the very fervor of the artist's studies, the intensity of his devotion to science and the antique,—il grande amore, somehow pass into the

marble or canvas, and prevent the work from seeming cold or labored." The contemporary art of Dürer and his compatriots, on the other hand, seems to have been evolved out of the necessities of their own natures; it was inspired by the res angustæ domi, and shaped its ideal out of the homely stuff such as may be found in peasant lives; but it was expressed with loving and minute care, with earnestness, delicacy, and force; so that the Italians, stimulated by the knowledge and imagination of the fresh Renaissance, with their minds full of heroes, demigods, the creatures of mythological traditions and their great doings, when they fell upon these German prints, grotesque but strenuous, rugged and commonplace in theme, but pathetic, intense, and rendered with patient skill, found a new inspiration drawn from contemporary life, and immediately adopted into their own art all the qualities out of German art which could improve their methods or humanize their genius. Of course the German ideal in contact with that of Italy was forthwith elevated to a higher plane, but it never lost its rural force and pathos.

The series of plates from the National Gallery is continued in the Portfolio for last year with etchings by Flameng, Mengin, Lhuillier, and other masters, and a new series from the collection of Earl Spencer (the Althorp Gallery) is begun with etchings by Flameng, Richeton, Murray, and Lhuillier. Of these the works of Flameng in especial are remarkable for their happy suggestion of the element of color in the original paintings, without which suggestion, in fact, the raison d'être of some of these plates might fairly be questioned; but in so far as they do set forth the values of color and the chiaro-scuro, as well as the qualities of drawing, in the masters whose works they undertake to reproduce, they must take a very high rank in the art. The etchings of Flameng, at least, easily and surely accomplish this result.

Any notice of this collection, however, would be incomplete without especial reference to the masterly etchings of Legros, in the portraits of Poynter, the

English painter, and of Jules Dalou, the French sculptor. These two works are in the severe early Italian style of etching with lines running in one direction, without the usual cross-hatching which was invented by the Germans. Under this exceptionally difficult condition of handling, the modeling of these two heads is a triumph of technical skill. We have seldom met with such fine examples of portrait design in serious mod

ern art.

Mr. Hamerton himself continues his temperate but appreciative papers on Turner. They are such papers as an artist should write of an artist; they get behind the apparent face of Turner's genius, and disclose the primary formations beneath the surface out of which, by the series of great revolutions and upheavals to which the sensitive mind is subject, finally emerged the perfected artistic nature of the man. It is a very workmanlike and thorough piece of analysis, which can enable the mind untrained in the technique of the painter's craft to "make sense" out of the shapeless iridescence and wanton aberrations by which, in the experimental stages of its career, this singular and fortunate imagination gave expression to its conflict with nature. It is to this task, however, that the artist critic successfully addresses himself in these pages. We have space to quote but one general observation as an example, but this, in view of the manner in which it is customary to talk of the greatest Turneresque effects, is worth remembering.

Mr. Hamerton, in speaking of Turner's distant effects, by which he made his first claim to be regarded as a master of landscape art, says: "Such painting requires not only much good-will in the spectator, but also great knowledge, freedom from vulgar prejudices, and some degree of faith in the painter himself. When people see a noble effect in nature, there is one stock observation which they almost invariably make: they always say, or nearly always, 'Now, if we were to see that effect in a picture we should not believe it to be possible.' One would think that, after such a re

flection on their own tendency to unbelief in art and to astonishment in the presence of nature, people would be forewarned against their own injustice; but it is not so. They will make that observation every time they see a fine sunset or a remarkable cloud in the natural world, and remain as unjust as ever to the art which represents phenomena of the same order. Turner had to contend against this disposition to deny the truth of everything that is not commonplace."

This, in short, is the sort of literary work which, not stooping to amuse by mere prettiness, opens to common apprehensions the profound and serious. mission of art in these modern days, and encourages the artist to approach the higher standards of culture. The Portfolio is by no means the least among the agencies at work to bring about this result. We commend it as a part of the machinery of the new civilization.

Dr. Wilhelm Lübke, professor of art at Stuttgart, and author of a number of works, all of which, like the present,1 have been issued in repeated editions, seems to hold for his own country a position somewhat like that of Taine and Viollet-le-Duc in France and Ruskin in England. The analogy is not very close, since there is nothing in him of the doctrinaire, nothing of the warm enthusiasm of the latter two for the original views they propound with a corresponding impatience of contradiction. Nor is he, like Taine, purely a philosopher. He appears in the more patient and laborious rôle of a compiler. Instead of surveying the field of art with a keen, fresh glance, to divine in it a meaning hitherto undiscovered, his preoccupation appears to be rather to weigh judicially former systems in the various branches, to select the positions he deems the best supported, and to throw them together in a reliable whole for the use of those who desire a text-book in a moderate compass. He is reported by some of those who have listened to his lectures at Stuttgart, which are no doubt better at first than at second hand, to be a person

1 The History of Art. By DR. WILHELM LÜBKE. A New Translation, from the Seventh German Edi

of general appreciation and sympathies. Apart from a strong patriotic German bias, he certainly shows no especial predilection or favoritism for one form of art over another.

An important feature of the late awakening of interest in these matters is its extension amongst the middle classes. They cannot afford many or expensive books. They would like a work, ornamental and attractive in itself, to present the subject fully and lie upon the drawing-room table for reference. It need

not go into all the minor sinuosities, but it ought to contain, without omitting any, those broader, leading aspects which may be mastered without neglecting the ordinary avocations of life. Bearing in mind thoroughness and painstaking as traditional German traits, looking over the very full illustrations, there are five hundred and fifty in all, - and snatching here and there some passages of graphic and picturesque description, one is inclined at first to believe that he has found something quite meeting the requirement. It has, for the moment, much of the effect of examples of the new Munich school of painting, in which the mechanism is still as perfect as of old, while the traditional German hardness and coldness are replaced by freedom and warmth. The pleasant impression lasts especially through the distinct characterizations of the earlier epochs of art. So great is the accumulation of matters at the present time that it is particularly desirable and this above all in a popular treatise that each branch of human development should be displayed by its most distinctive side, in order that it may keep its place amid the pressure of a thousand new demands. The author is apparently aware of this, and aims to gratify it by tracing each successive phenomenon to a definite, physical cause. We are delighted with these lucid concepts, and astonished to find that so vast and apparently obscure a field has been so thoroughly sifted and reduced to rule. It is not until we begin to compare these neat summaries among themselves that tion. Edited by CLARENCE COOK. New York : Dodd, Mead, & Co. 1878.