354 Dissertation on the Faintings of the middle Age. 



what all the world has observed ? I wish to speak of that 

 trivial corruption of taste in this particular work to be 

 asctrtained in the succeeding schools, who abandoned 

 that fine arrangement which we admire in ancient dresses, 

 and which have been preserved down to the time of Ra- 

 phael, when so many artists were influenced both by the 

 ridicidous usages of the habits and ecccurric formed stuffs 

 of those times; and by the mannerism introduced by sotTiC 

 rash master; a character which was so easy of imitation, 

 and to which we owe that enormous heap of stuffs, and 

 those barbarous adjustments which are insupportable to the 

 sight. I ought to add here, that the art of the most emi- 

 nent painters of our days is still related in this respect 

 with antiquity : and notwithstandino: the respect which we 

 owe to the Carracci, to Guido, who have been constantly 

 imitated and praised in this respect, who has not remarked 

 how much success modern art has obtained by this single 

 reform ? And who does not prefer the taste of the costume 

 received in our best paintings to those conventional and 

 shocking laz^ii with which a depraved taste loads our 

 most famous pictures? It is proper to add here, that the 

 veneration for the schools of Italy still propagates doubts, 

 that the writers who have determined the limits of the two 

 arts of sculpture and pamtinii have gone too far, and have 

 exaggerated the demarcations in order to justity so many 

 celebrated painters: "finally, that the best method of fixing 

 our ideas on the subject of the draperies in our art, is to 

 contemplate the examples left by the ancients, and to me- 

 ditate upon the effects still exhibited in this respect by the 

 paintings of the middle age*; and it is so very true that we 

 have few tilings to change in painting, in the imitation of 

 the draperies of ancient sculpture, that in the decorations 

 in which the painters are liberated from the trammels of 

 the school, and where they have literally translated the an- 

 cients, these same draperies bear an excellent character not-, 



Messiah, tliat of the Virgin and the I.i fant Jesus, or the naivete of the youn|^ 

 persons who throw draperies ur.der t|ie footsteps of our Saviour when en- 

 tering' Nazareth, we find several paintings remarkable for a sage and 

 well re^sotieil expression. See that of the Cemetery of Saint Priscilla, 

 tome ii. p. 311, re;>resenting Isaac carrying the wood for his own sacri- 

 fice: Abrjiiam on the poliu of immolating him, tome ii. p. 87 : the Mar- 

 tyrdom of Saint Sebastir.n, tomcii. p. ^i5, as well as another painting ex- 

 cellent in point of expression, tome ii. p. till, no. 7. 



* These mo.lels arc not rare; but see among oihers the draperies of a paint- 

 ing of the Cemeteries of Pontica and S. Abdon. Bosio, tome i. pi 385 ; and 

 another of the Cemetery of St. Julius in the same volume, p. .'354: he cveu 

 linds some very fine in the works of Perugin; and, in a word, in all those 

 which were made before the manner of the iloreiuiue school. 



withbtandins: 



