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THE ROMAN SCHOOL

The Roman School comprises, besides the natives of the metropolis, those of the whole Ecclesiastic State, Bologna, Ferrara, and some part of Romagna excepted.

The origin of this school recedes into the earlier periods of modern art, if we consider Oderigi of Gubbio, a painter of miniature, contemporary with Cimabue, as one of its founders. His death, which preceded that of the Florentine at least one year, the branch of art he exercised, missal-painting, and what we know of his situation, make it extremely improbable that he owed the elements of design to that master, with whom he seems to have had little in common but the honour of rearing a pupil, who in the sequel eclipsed his name, and became the founder of another school.

Perhaps he made some scholars too at home: in 1321 we find Cecco and Puccio of Gubbio, engaged as painters to the Dome of Orvieto; and about 1324, Guido Palmerucci Eugubino, employed in the Town-hall of Gubbio; a few half figures yet remaining of this evanescent work are in a style not inferior to that of Giotto, at whose period we are now arrived.

Giotto, at Rome, gave instructions to Pietro Cavallini in painting and mosaic, and with what success we may form some idea from the wonder-working Christ in S. Paolo at Rome, the Salutation at S. Marco of Florence, and a Crucifixion at Assisi; a crowded composition of soldiers, mob, and horses, varied in dress and not ill discriminated by expression, with groups of angels hovering over them in sable robes. In vastness of conception and spirit it resembles Memmi, and in one of the crucified men, foreshortening is not unsuccessfully attempted; the colours have still a degree of freshness, especially the blue, which here and in other places of the church forms, in the metaphor of Lanzi, a ceiling of oriental sapphire.

After the demise of Cavallini, who, notwithstanding a life of eighty-five years, appears to have left taste nearly in the state he found it; a band of obscure and insignificant artists led the art in a style neither Giottesque nor Greek to the verge of the fifteenth century – that important period when the Popes, re-established at Rome, searched for the best hands to decorate its Vatican and temples. The first name that occurs, is that of Ottaviano Martis, whose Madonna in Sta. Maria Nuova at Gubbio, bears the date of 1403; she has a choir of stripling angels round her in attitudes not ungraceful, but with faces as like to each other as if they had all been cast in one mould.

The name of Gentile da Fabriano is of more consequence; it is he whose style Michael Angelo compared to his name (Gentile.) About 1417 we find him at Orvieto among the painters of its Dome, registered with the title of Magister Magistrorum. Under Martin V. he painted with Pisanello in the Lateran at Rome: what he did there perished, and so did his works in the public palace at Venice, where he resided, was pensioned, and raised to the rank of Patrician. "In that city," says Vasari, "he was the master and like a parent to Giacopo Bellini, the father of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, founders of the Venetian school and masters of Giorgione and Tizian. Of his numerous works the remains are in the Marca d'Ancona, the state of Urbino, at Gubbio and Perugia: Florence still preserves two of his pictures, one in S. Nicolo with the image and histories of that bishop, another in the sacristy of the Trinità, with an Epiphany and the date of 1423. His style resembles that of Frà Angelico da Fiesole, with the exception of forms less elegant, less female grace, and more profusion of gold lace and brocade. Antonio da Fabriano, with the date 1454, and Bartholomæus Magistri Gentilis de Urbino, 1497 and 1508, are inscriptions on pictures at Matelica, Pesaro, and Monte Cicardo, that have no other claim to attention than the relation their names seem to indicate with Gentile.

Piero della Francesca, or Piero Borghese, an Umbrian, of Borgo S. Sepolcro, is a superior name. He must have been born about 1398, as, according to Vasari, his works were about 1458; he grew blind at sixty, and died eighty-five years old. He was instructed in painting at the age of fifteen, after having laid a foundation in mathematics, and distinguished himself in both. His beginnings were minute; his master has escaped search. The first scene of his talent was the Court of Guidobaldo Feltro the old, Duke of Urbino, where the perspective of a vase drawn by him, provokes the astonishment of his biographer; but besides perspective, Painting owes to him her first notions of the effects of light, of muscular precision, and the method of preparing clay models for the study of drapery.⁸⁸

He painted much at Rome, and in the Floreria of the Vatican there still exists a large fresco reputed his, representing Niccolo V. with some cardinals and prelates, whose faces interest by a character of truth. At Arezzo, he seems to have improved even upon Giotto and his school, by the novelty of his foreshortenings, vigour of tone, and powers which attended by equal grace, would have set him on a level with Masaccio.

Nicolo Alunno of Foligno, advanced the art still farther; this is evident on comparing a picture of his painted 1480, with another at S. Nicolo of Foligno, dated 1492. The tone of his colour, even in distemper, has novelty and vigour; his heads have vivacity, though with trivial and sometimes caricatured characters: and in gilding he is moderate. Vasari, who places him in the time of Pinturicchio, praises above all a Pietà in a chapel of the Domo, in which, he says, "there are two angels who weep with such expression of grief, that, in my opinion, no other painter, however excellent, could have done much more."

Nor was Urbino without painters at this period: Fiorillo names Lorenzo da San Severino. At Urbino some pictures still remain of Giovanni Sanzio, the father of Raphael, who by the Duchess Giovanna della Rovere is called a very ingenious artist: a foreshortened figure of St. Sebastian, painted by him for the church of that saint, has been imitated by Raphael in an early picture of Our Lady's Wedding, at Città di Castello. He subscribed himself Io. Sanctis Urbi.; viz. Urbinas. Such at least is the inscription on his Annunciation at Sinigaglia, a work of high finish, but unequal in its parts, and in the best, though less genial, approaching the style of Pietro Perugino, with whom he had for some time co-operated. But the most distinguished Urbinese artist was Bartolommeo Corradini, a Dominican, commonly called Frà Carnevale: at the Osservanza there is a picture of his, defective in perspective, with draperies frittered into the usual tatters of the time, but with faces that breathe and speak, and airs of dignity and ease: he was one of the first who introduced portrait into historic composition, a method adopted and often practised by Raphael, who at Urbino had studied his works.

Perugia laid an early claim to Art, at least as a craft. Mariotti tells of one Tullio a Perugine painter about 1219, and in a long file of quattrocentists, allots the most conspicuous places to Lorenzo di Lorenzo, Bartolommeo Caporali, whose works are dated about 1487, but above all to Benedetto Bonfigli. Yet with this abundance of home-bred artists, Perugia employed in its public works the hands of strangers, and chiefly Tuscans; it was to Florence, States and Princes looked for that master-style which could give splendour to a great commission. When Sisto IV. planned the decorations of the Sistina, the greater number of conscripts for the work were Tuscans, and Pietro Perugino the only artist drawn from his subjects among them.

Pietro Vannucci, of Città della Pieve, as he subscribed some pictures, or of Perugia, as he did others, being a citizen of that place, studied, if we believe Vasari, under a master of little eminence; but according to the more authentic researches of Mariotti,⁸⁹ was a pupil, and sufficiently advanced himself by the instructions of Bonfigli and Piero della Francesca, to finish his style on the works of Giotto and Masaccio at Florence, without entering the school of Verrocchio.

Those who have contemplated the works of Pietro will without much difficulty discover two styles of composition, form, colour, and execution: the first was the result of the instructions he received in the Roman, the second, that of the impression made on his mind and hand by the Tuscan School: what he painted in oil and of small dimensions, generally belongs to the first; what he executed in fresco to the second period. There we find the hardness, the haggard forms, the miserly scantiness of drapery, the Gothic apposition and anxious finish with which he is charged, relieved by azure blues, emerald greens, violet and crimson hues, the legacies of missal-painting, and a certain air of juvenile and female grace, with suavity of countenance and colour: beauties which not only followed him in his second style, but were rendered more impressive by rudiments of that breadth which seems to be the privilege of fresco, by keeping, mellowness, tone, and approaches to composition, as in the altar-piece of the Kindred of the Saviour and the fresco in the Hall of the Change, at Perugia.

Whilst the physiognomic monotony which had hitherto dulled the human feature, began to give way to expression and character in the works of this period, it is not easy to explain why its companion, that Gothic symmetry in the arrangement of the whole, should not only have been retained but aggravated into a studied parallelism; not that pathetic repetition of attitude and gesture which forces the moment of the subject more irresistibly on the mind than the most varied contrasts, but a nearly rectilinear apposition, whose principal law was to place, by a central figure, on each side of the picture, an equal number of subordinate ones; a law that extended itself to the most minute detail, and bade buildings, flowers, clouds and pebbles, re-echo each other; and all this in the face of Giotto, whose Navicella, Death of Maria, and other works, gave evidence that his composition had, a century before, disdained to move in the trammels which were now suffered to check that of Pietro Perugino, and for no inconsiderable time the composition of Raphael himself.

Invention was not the element of Pietro. His crucifixions, depositions, burials, ascensions, and assumptions, are the brothers and sisters of one family. He was blamed for this sterility even in his own time, and defended himself by saying that, if he possessed little, he owed nothing, and that what had pleased in one place could not displease in another. It does not indeed offend to find the scenery of his St. Peter receiving the keys in the Sistina, repeated in the Wedding of our Lady at Perugia, and to meet the beauties here concentrated which he had singly scattered over various places.

Pietro had vigour of constitution and length of life, and if he profited by the works of Raphael, whom he outlived, might have done so by those of Lionardo and Buonarroti. In few men so many contradictory qualities seem to have united: ridiculed for a degree of avarice, which, it was said, made him withhold the necessary drapery from his figures, he is yet allowed by Vasari to have been greedier to accumulate than sordid in the use of wealth, and to have pleased himself by marrying "a beautiful damsel, whom he so much delighted in seeing elegantly dressed both abroad and at home, that he was often suspected of having dressed her himself." By her he had children, but no records enable us to judge of him as a parent. That he was a good and kind master, is proved by the numerous scholars he reared, and still more by the pride which the most eminent and best of them took, by introducing him more than once in his works, to perpetuate with his own gratitude the memory of his master. With this kindness for his pupils, Pietro connected intolerance of rivals and a mordacity of language, which provoked Michael Agnolo to call him publicly a dunce (goffo) in art. His life was spent in receiving commissions from the clergy, in meditating and composing subjects of devotion; and yet, if we believe his biographer, he carried infidelity to a degree which resisted all arguments for the immortality of the soul, and with words dictated by an obstinacy worthy of his marble brains,⁹⁰ rejected all invitations to better information. Of the numerous scholars whom he had reared, the greater part followed his manner with servile attachment; hence many of their works have been ascribed to him, by those who did not form their judgment at Perugia, or at Florence in Sta. Chiara and the Ducal palace: thus he pays forfeit for many a holy family of Guerino da Pistoia, Rocco Zoppo, or some other of his Tuscan scholars. The best and least enthralled of his pupils belong to the Roman school: Bernardino Pinturicchio, less praised by Vasari than he deserves, without the correctness of his master, and with more Gothic profusion of gold-lace and brocade, possesses magnificence of plan, expression of countenance, and propriety of composition. Familiar with Raphael, who was his assistant at Siena, he made attempts to imitate his grace, and sometimes not without success: at Rome, the Vatican and Araceli Temple possess some of his works; at Siena he painted, in ten pictures, the history of Pio II. and added one of Pio III. his employer, and these, with what he left in the Dome of Spello, are the best of his labours.

Of at more independent and grander spirit was Andrea Luigi, of Assisi, surnamed L'Ingegno, the Genius. He assisted Pietro in the Change-hall at Perugia, and there and in his Prophets and Sibyls at Assisi, aggrandized and mellowed the style of his master to a degree, which led Sandrart, with others, to ascribe the latter work to Raphael; but blindness checked his career in the bloom of life, and left the art to Raphael without a rival.

Domenico di Paris Alfani added, likewise, some improvements to the style of Pietro. His name was nearly sunk in that of his son or brother Orazio, and time and dates alone have re-asserted its right to some excellent works long adjudged to the other; and which, were it not for an insipid sweetness of tone bordering on that of Baroccio, seem to have been inspired by the principles of Raphael.

Of Pietro's many ultramontane pupils, Giovanni Spagnuolo, a Spaniard, called Lo Spagna, who settled at Spoleto, is considered by Vasari as the most eminent. But all these names united confer less celebrity on Pietro, than the felicity of having reared the powers of Raffaello Sanzio, if not the founder, the great establisher of the Roman School.

Raffaello Sanzio, born at Urbino on Holy Friday, April 1483, was the son of Giovanni Sanzio, named among the contemporaries and occasional helpers of Pietro, in whose school, after having imparted the first rudiments of Art to his son, conscious of his own inferiority, he had the modesty to place him. Here his progress was so rapid that he soon rendered himself completely master of Vannucci's style, soon became his favourite pupil, soon his co-adjutor, and in a short period more than his competitor: for though the pictures which he painted at Cività di Castello and Perugia, and are so amorously dwelt on by Lanzi, still betray in composition, design, and colour, the principles of the master, they exhibit symptoms of that expression, that beauty, those simple graces, that refinement and precision of finish, which not only had remained unknown to Pietro, but in their purity were never attained by any subsequent artist. – Some of these are perceivable already, if scantily, in the Procession to Golgotha, preceded by horsemen and attended by the Madonna and her female train; and still less perceptibly in one of its predelle which exhibits the Saviour held extended by his Mother, Magdalen and John: they cannot be mistaken in the predelle which represents him among the sleeping disciples praying in the garden, – performances of his puerility, and most probably before he left the school of Pietro.

After an enumeration of Raffaello's juvenile works at Cività di Castello and at Perugia, we are told that he who ascribed Sanzio's art to length of study and not to nature, was not acquainted with the powers of his mind.⁹¹

That such was the verdict of Michael Agnolo, is recorded by Condivi; and from aught that appears, it does not seem either invidious or incompetent. If Art be a complete system of invariable rules, he only is a master of Art who substantiates its precepts by equal uniformity of execution and taste; and till he arrives at that point, he can only be said to have seized more or less of its parts in making approaches to the whole, and to be indebted to "study" and not to "nature," if he put himself at last in possession of it.

Such was the progress of Raffaello; he arrived by degrees at style in design, by degrees at style in composition, by degrees at invention, expression, and at what appeared to him colour. His genius emancipated him from the shackles of prescription and fashion, rapidly, if we compare his progress with the shortness of his life or the progress of the rest of his contemporaries, but slowly, if we compare him with Michael Angelo, whose system of Art seems to have been born with him, whose infancy, virility, age, exhibit one uniform principle. Every element of the system displayed in the Capella Sistina and on the tombs in S. Lorenzo, may be traced in his essays at the garden of the Medici and in the Holy Family painted for Angelo Doni: but what eye will discover the future painter of the Heliodorus, or the composer of the Cartoons in the bridal arrangements of our Lady's Wedding at Cività di Castello, or even in the Cartoons for the sacristy of the Duomo at Sienna?

Though the commission of painting in that place a series of the most memorable events in the life of Pope Pio II. (a Siennese celebrated by the name of Enea Silvio,) had been given to Pinturicchio, who had sufficient modesty and taste to avail himself of the superior and growing powers of his friend, – it has been asked what enterprise of equal magnitude had in that infant state of Art ever been consigned to a single hand, without considering that the co-operation of Raffaello was adventitious, and less owing to the opinion which he had established of himself in the public mind than to the modesty of Pinturicchio. And had not Luca Signorelli singly been entrusted with a work at Orvieto, whose tremendous and universally interesting subjects beyond comparison excelled whatever the embassies, the poetic and papal honours, the canonization of a nun, the ceremonies of a council, the death of the hero himself, and the transportation of his corpse from Ancona to Rome, however varied by character, impressed by the sensibility of the artist, or raised above the heraldry of the times, could pretend to achieve beyond the precincts of Sienna?

Whether Raffaello furnished the whole of the Cartoons for that work, or only part, cannot be ascertained from the contradictory account of Vasari,⁹² who in the life of Pinturicchio asserts the first, and in that of Raffaello, the second. As he, however, did not leave Sienna for Florence till 1504, it is probable that he continued to assist his friend in completing the whole historic series: the work itself is in perfect preservation, and though better informed eyes than those of Bottari⁹³ might not be competent to discriminate the parts which exclusively belong to Raffaello, it is certain that in the progress of the pictures there is an evident progress toward style.

Aggrandisement of style might reasonably be supposed to have been the motive that drew Raffaello to Florence. The David of M. Angiolo was placed; he had begun his cartoon, which from its very inaccessibility, and the high character of the artist whom it opposed, must have been an object of eager curiosity to the public, and of tremulous expectation to the student. Florence was, no doubt, at that period divided into two technic factions, Vinciists and Bonarotists; it does not, however, appear that Raffaello adhered to either of the two leaders; neither the learning and energy of Bonaroti, nor the magic chiaroscuro of Lionardo, could divert the future painter of the passions from his course; he therefore attached himself to the study of Masaccio, as a more direct guide to the drama. The implicit application of that master's conceptions in the same or similar subjects, when he was in the vigour of his powers, if it be the most celebrated proof of this, is a less convincing one than the similarity of taste and vein of thought which pervades their works, and might, to men of bolder conjecture than I pretend to, prove that Masaccio might have been what Raffaello was, had time and means conspired.

According to the account of Vasari,⁹⁴ Raffaello went three times to Florence: the first time when, according to the biographer, roused by the fame of Lionardo and M. Angiolo, he left the partnership of Pinturicchio, 1504 – the date of the recommendatory letter with the affixed name of Joanna Feltria, Duchess of Urbino, addressed to the Gonfaloniere Pietro Soderini, and said to be still preserved at Florence among the papers of the Gaddi family. Supposing the date of the letter (1st October, 1504) to be correct, and the writer of it to have been acquainted with the person she recommends, its genuineness, as Fiorillo observes, is liable to strong suspicion. Its expressions might fit a lad of ten or twelve years, but certainly not a young man of one-and-twenty, the age of Raffaello, who had painted many pictures, was at that very time employed in a great public work, and only three years after was called to Rome by Giulio the Second.

Though Raffaello's talents had spread his name, and attracted the attention and the wishes of Giulio the Second to employ him in the decoration of the Vatican, it may be presumed that the persuasive influence of his relative, Bramante Lazzari, decided the Pontiff to distinguish him by that immediate and exclusive call to Rome, which raised him above all rival competition, and opened the most splendid period of his life, most probably 1507. Which was the picture he began with, would not have been contested by his biographers, encomiasts, and critics, from Vasari to Mengs, had they attended less to hearsay, for tradition it cannot be called, than to the evidence of the works themselves. To date the dispute on the Sacrament after the School of Athens, equally inverts the progressive powers of the artist in conception, taste, style, and execution. Everywhere that composition betrays a young performer, enviably successful in each individual part, but whom experience has not yet enabled to spread an harmonious whole. The connection of its upper with the lower scene, less divided than rent asunder, depends entirely on a mental effort in the spectator. The parallelism of the celestial synod, impresses more with formal monotony than awful energy, and the ostentatious abuse of gold impairs its dignity. In the lower part of the picture, less sublime than dramatic, the artist moves in his own element; its parallelism and its contrasts, no longer the result of ceremonious symmetry, but of the inspiring principle, warms contemplation to sympathy, and its characteristic correctness exhibits in Raffaello's own unassisted, or rather unalloyed hand, the style of the School of Athens, the Mass of Bolsena, the female part of the Heliodorus, and with a felicity unattained in the Parnassus and the Attila, – the more ample outlines and the increased volume of forms in the Angels, and the Heliodorus and his accomplices on the foreground.

A description of two Drawings by Raffaello, from an account of the Collection of Drawings and Prints in the Gallery of Duke Albrecht, of Sachsen Teschen, at Vienna.⁹⁵

I

Two naked male figures, apparently studies from Nature, on one leaf, drawn in red chalk: one with nearly all his back turned to the eye, rests the left hand on his hip, and with the right points to something before him. Somewhat behind you see the other, sideways, in perfect repose, leaning with both hands on a long spear-like staff; the background has some rudiments of a sketched head. To the right of the spectator, at the side of the first figure, you read, "1515, Raffahell di Urbin der so hoch vom Pobst geacht ist gwest, hat diese nakte Bild gemacht, und hat sy dem Albrecht Dürer gen Nornberg geschikt, in seini hand zu weissen."⁹⁶

That Raffaello in his last years, and when at the height of his celebrity, did exchange drawings with Albert Durer, is attested by the biographers of both: and that the design here described is one of that number, is incontestably proved, not only by the peculiarity of style, the elegance and facility of outline, the characteristic contrast of solid and muscular parts, but by the identity of the handwriting with the manuscripts of Albert still existing at Nürnberg, his native city.

I therefore think it no improbable conjecture to suppose that Raffaello, by transmitting this specimen of his hand to Albert, intended to make him sensible of the difference between imitating Nature and dryly copying a model, and so impress him with the necessity of contrasting his outline according to the different texture of the parts in the bodies before him.

This interesting leaf is one foot three inches three lines in height, and ten inches eight lines in width, Vienna measure; and in perfect preservation.

II

This design differs in nothing from the well-known picture of the Transfiguration, but the absolute nudity of all the figures.

That Raffaello was accustomed to sketch in naked outlines, may be known from most collections that possess something of his hand; but perhaps none but this may be able to produce a design, of a numerous and complete composition, in which every figure is rendered with anatomical correctness and finished chiaroscuro.

Another singularity of this important leaf is, the characteristic disparity of execution in the figures; for though all are drawn with the pen, and on the first glance seem hatched in one uniform manner, it soon appears on close inspection, that they cannot have been produced by the same hand.

The figures of the three Disciples on the Mount, especially the foreshortened one, are treated with that spirited facility and confident decision which always mark the pen of Raffaello. Those of the Saviour and the collateral prophets, though drawn with less precision and contours here and there, by repeated strokes, corrected, still exhibit on the whole the same spirit, facility, and confidence of hand. Of the actors below, the figure of John, with hands crossed on his breast, and the three next to him have the same Raffaellesque characteristics, and so the whole of the females kneeling on the foreground; but of the adjoining apostle, with the book in his hand, the projected leg and foot are absolutely out of drawing; whilst the Demoniac and his father, with all the remaining figures, drawn by mere practice, without a symptom of the master spirit, give palpable proofs of a different hand.

It appears no improbable conjecture that Raffaello, after settling the plan and fully arranging the figures of his picture, drew the nudities of this design as the bases of his draperies: for this reason only, the principal parts of the forms, and those muscles that would act most visibly on the draperies, are designed correctly, and finished with decision; whilst the heads, and what was either to be naked in the picture or did not act immediately on the drapery, remained in careless and superficial lines.

That Raffaello suffered parts of his Transfiguration, and in my opinion some of the most important parts, to receive all but the last finish from a pupil, if tradition had not told us, there is ocular demonstration in the picture itself. The proportions of the Demoniac's father are neglected as a whole, in relation of limb to limb, and the figure is sacrificed to place. The face of Christ himself, as it was seen in the Louvre, is unworthy of Raffaello's hand and conception.⁹⁷

The reason why some of the figures are drawn in the true spirit of the artist, and others in a bald and insignificant manner, may be, that after slightly sketching the whole, he gave his own finish in the design to those parts only which he intended to execute with his own hand in the picture; and less solicitous for the rest, left them to the hand of some inferior pupil.

The height of this extraordinary design is one foot eight inches four lines; its breadth one foot two inches five lines; it is without injury.

Taddeo and Federigo Zuccari, the first declared mannerists of this school, sons of Ottaviano Zuccari, a mediocre painter of S. Angiolo in Vado, came to Rome successively, formed a school, and filled towns and states with an immense farrago of good, tolerable, and bad pictures. From the instructions of Pompeo da Fano and Giacomone da Faenza, but chiefly from an obstinate study of Raffaello's works, Taddeo, at no protracted period, gathered enough to diffuse over his own, an air, though not reality, of style, and to anticipate by contrivance and facility the rewards which time owes to invention and genius. Courting the senses of the multitude, he became the hero of the day; they saw their portraits in his faces, their limbs in his forms, their action in his attitudes; his draperies, hair, beards, had a cut of fashion. The simplicity of his disposition is often contrasted by half figures emerging from his foregrounds; perhaps less from a principle of imitating his more remote predecessors, than to invigorate the effect of his chiaroscuro, a method not unknown to Parmegiano.

Rome possesses vast works in fresco of Taddeo; among the best of these are some Gospel stories at the Consolazione. He seldom painted in oil, and less commendably in large than small: some of these are cabinet pictures of exquisite finish, – such a one, (formerly in the collection of the Duke of Urbino, but more recently at Osimo in the Palace Leopardi,) is the Nativity of the Saviour, and in Taddeo's very best style. But the work on which his fame chiefly rests, are the paintings of the Palazzo Farnese, at Caprarola (engraved in a moderate volume, by Prenner, 1748). They represent the Feats of the Farnese Family, in peace and war; to which are joined other stories, both sacred and profane; but what attracts attention most, is the celebrated "Stanza del Sonno," an apartment dedicated to Sleep, replete with a great variety of allegoric imagery, suggested to him by Annibale Caro, in a long, quaint letter, printed among his familiar ones, and reproduced among the "Lettere Pittoriche," t. iii. l. 99.