which required time and trouble to work out. Their rivals, of more simple taste, preferred mastery and breadth of handling. A Florentine altarpiece might be seen at a greater distance, a Siennese panel invited closer attention; but, for this very cause, it demanded more minute finish and more time. A system. which had the advantage of affording time for finish might be essential, it was certainly practised by the Siennese, and necessarily involved the continuance of the old technical methods. These methods may be summed up in a few words. Having prepared their materials with the care peculiar to the oldest painters, and covered their panel with a cloth to keep the joints together, as the artists of every school did in that age; they primed it with a white ground of “gesso” on which the drawing was engraved with the minutest attention. The flesh tints were then laid on in one general and dense coat of verde, covering the light parts as well as those intended to be in shadow. Upon this universal ground they began to model, by laying in the lights in a copious stippling, seeking the form by the direction of its lines. .Having thus obtained light and shadow by the juxtaposition of the stippling with the original verde, they melted the colours together by working them over and over with excessive labour and patience till the forms had gained a sufficient amount of rounding. This slow process was facilitated by the peculiar capacity for moistness in the original verde. Ruddier tones were now stippled on to the cheeks and lips; high light to the most projecting points, and the whole was finally fused together by transparent glazes. But nothing that the artist could do sufficed to produce any more than a low key of harmony, because the deep verde always reappeared and absorbed too much light to allow of the quality of brightness and clearness. The stippling never succeeded in creating perfect semitones, so that a sharp contrast invariably existed between the light which was too yellow, and the shadow which re mained too green. At first perhaps, these defects were
