1§§ clarke’s .travels.. 
Concerning the Theban gem, it can perhaps be proved that 
the subject thereon exhibited was originally derived from a 
very popular picture painted by Zeuxis; and as its execution 
is by no means uniformly excellent, there is reason to conclude 
that the work is not of remote antiquity. Every traveller who 
has visited Italy may have remarked a practice of represent¬ 
ing, both by cameos and intaglios, the subjects of celebrated 
pictures; such, for example, as those of the Danae and the 
Yenus by Titian, and many other. Copies of this kind were 
also known among the Romans,* and perhaps at an earlier pe¬ 
riod, taken from the works of Grecian painters. The first 
style of imitating such pictures by engraving was probably that 
exhibited by the intaglio, from whose cast the cameo was made. 
Gems of this kind, executed by the lapidaries of Greece, even 
so long ago as the age of Zeuxis, may have given origin to the 
Theban stone. That it does exhibit a subject nearly coinciding 
with an ancient description of one of his pictures, is manifest 
from a Greek Commentary upon Gregory Nazianzen, discover¬ 
ed by the late professor Forson, in a manuscript of that author 
brought by me from the library of the monastery cf the Apo¬ 
calypse in the Isle of Patmos.f The commentary would per¬ 
haps have been illegible to other eyes than those of the learned 
professor.J I shall therefore subjoin an extract from his own 
copy of this very curious marginal illustration^ as authority 
senary virtue in healing diseases. Many persons in vain endeavoured to purchase if. 
The earl of Elgin, ambassador at the Porte, at last found the means of inducing its 
owner to part with it. 
* The famous Mosaic picture of the vase, and pigeons , found.in the Villa of Me- 
caenas, and lately in the capitol at Rome, exhibits a subject frequently introduced 
.upon the ancient gems of Italy. 
j The writing both of the commentary and of the text, in that manuscript, was 
deemed, by the learned professor, as ancient as that of Plato from the same place, 
mow with the copy of Gregory in the Bodleian library. 
X It is impossible to give an idea of the difficulty thus surmounted, without, exhi- 
foitmg the manuscript itself. Above two thirds of every letter in the beginning of the 
note had been cut off; these the professor restored, from their reliques, and from the 
context; and the abbreviated style of the whole is such as would baffle all but Porso- 
nian acumen. 
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