Mander speaks of it, and the Duke Johann Ernst zu SachsenShakespeare's "Duke of Jarmany "-chimes in with the experts, declaring that nothing like it was to be seen elsewhere in England.1

The Portrait of a Man belongs to his early time. It is outlined in black with the point of the brush on flesh-coloured paper, with a spot of red here and there. It would be useless to dilate upon the qualities of this masterpiece, in which Holbein seems to touch the highest point attainable by human faculty within the chosen limits. By the side of such work as this, Leonardo da Vinci himself would appear conventional, almost effeminate. Plate LV is a later drawing in which the master is using the freedom gained by early discipline. This rapid pictorial way of handling the black chalk and the wash of red is telling, though it is perhaps not so astonishing as what we have just seen. The drawings preserved in the Museum at Basle belong to the same category.

We next come to a sheet of studies such as Holbein must often have been commissioned to make for goldsmiths' work.' The compositions are, for the most part, elaborate and crowded with figures, but they fit into the circular spaces with all the freedom in restraint of a Greek coin or gem. The subjects are conceived pictorially with a wealth of occasional interest and detail; but they are presented in the spirit of sculpture, harmoniously balanced, and large though minute. (Plate XVIII.)

In the case of Dürer, it is not much that the researches of German patriotic industry have left to glean. The three drawings in this collection have all been published in Lippman's exhaustive series. The drawing of the Madonna and Child3 is probably an early work, unrefined by the influence of Italian art. The large charcoal head, if it has not been retouched, is hardly worthy of Dürer. The features, sketchily and indecisively rendered, are not as his unerring, analytic hand would have left them. In the third example Dürer, with hasty, genial pen, catches the broad humour and jollity of a scene of common life at Nüremberg. We are told that when Dürer carefully scrutinized the naked ladies who adorned the pageant of Charles V's entry into Augsburg, he thought it worth while to explain that he did so "because he was a painter."

It is perhaps on the same ground of devotion to the serious interests of his art that we find him in the Women's Public Bath at Nüremberg. Anyhow, he seems quite at home, snuffing the reeking atmosphere with the gusto of a Hogarth.'

The Adam and Eve is a good example of Hans Baldung Grien.2 The method of formal hatching, which covers the surface as if with a net, is the same as he employed in his engravings. The lines are flowing and, for a German, graceful; but there is more flesh than nerve. The limbs intertwine like the tentacles of sea-monsters; there is nothing of that grip which we expect of Adam, who was commissioned in the beginning to subdue the earth.

Jan Brueghel (like his father, the celebrated Pieter) visited Italy, and took notes of what he saw in Flemish prose. But the magic of the monuments and their memories had no power to transform him, so, like Luther, he left Rome as obstinately Teutonic as he entered it. We reproduce a view of the forum of Nerva,' with the temple as it still existed in the sixteenth century. Palladio and Du Peyrac both made drawings of this temple, which was eventually pulled down by Paul V, who employed the materials in the construction of the Acqua Paola on the Gianicolo.

The four leaves of a sketch-book' represent scenes of that Flemish life and land to which Brueghel returned with his native dialect unforgotten, and with no false Roman airs of the grand style.

1 Cf. Ephrussi, “Les Bains de Femmes d'Albert Dürer," p. 42. The same critic takes the portrait (Plate IX) to be genuine, and supposes that Dürer may have met the original in the suite of Maximilian at Augsburg ("Albert Dürer et ses dessins," p. 258).

2 Pen on tinted paper, hatched with white.

3 Pen and bistre.

The inscription on the temple of Minerva to the left, of which only a few letters are visible here, is more fully given by Du Peyrac ("Vestigi dell' Antichità di Roma," pl. 6).

5 Pen and bistre.

PICTURES IN THE WANTAGE COLLECTION1

[1902: AET. 39]

I

HE private collections of England fall naturally into two groups. There are the great ancestral accumulations, chiefly of portraits, beginning, as a rule, with the pseudo-Holbein and ending with Reynolds-collections in which taste appears as

2 the handmaid of family pride; while, on the other

hand, there are the collections that have been deliberately and systematically formed, chiefly of late years, either to gratify a genuine personal taste, or as a necessary part of the apparatus of luxury.

The Wantage collection has all the merits of its recent origin. It was begun by Lord Overtoun, who to a profound knowledge of economics and finance added the lighter graces of the intelligent connoisseur, and it has been continued to the present day on lines that clearly mark the difference between the old habit of accumulation and the modern system of collection. For whereas our ancestors employed Van Dyck and Reynolds for the simple reason that their neighbours did, and with no suspicion of the place that they would eventually occupy in the judgment of posterity, nowadays the critic is abroad, and the collector is not content with acquisition-he is forced, even by fashion, to choose and judge.

Beginning with the Italian School, the two famous panels with the Story of David, by Pesellino, claim our first attention in order of time, and indeed of merit.

The story is told after the manner of the artless chronicler who makes everything look probable except the whole; but, though the style of narration is primitive in its simplicity, the artist revels in a 1 Preface to a 66 Catalogue of Pictures forming the Collection of Lord and Lady Wantage at 2, Carlton Gardens, and Lockinge House. London, 1902."

profusion of vivid detail. The landscape and the animals are rendered with a care and insight that show the new fashion of direct appeal to nature. It is upon this combination of simplicity and alertness that the peculiar charm of the panels chiefly depends, like that of Chaucer when he tells of Theseus Duke of Athens.

It is a charm that the advance of knowledge and the growth of critical power will destroy or transfigure; but there will always be many with whom illusion will be more powerful, perhaps because more flattering, than truth; and these will be more touched by the David of Pesellino than by the David of Renan. Pesellino is the predecessor, not only of Benozzo Gozzoli, with whom he has often been confused, but even of Paul Veronese, who, in the fullness of time, overlaid the Gospel with such a wealth of sumptuous but irrelevant accessories that he had to answer for it to the Holy Inquisition. In the same way the transition from Pesellino to Bassano is not so abrupt as might appear from their total outward diversity. Great as is the distance between them, they both work in the same line-that of sacred genre.

In the Return of the Prodigal Bassano has emerged from the stable to which we have grown accustomed in his company. We are on the steps of a palace, and the artist has evidently laboured, though not with complete success, to tone down the peasant in his figures and to bring out something of the airs and graces of the cavalier. The treatment of the scene foreshadows Rembrandt, in the mood in which the homeliness of the language employed serves only to enhance the depth and subtlety of the deliverance when it is once taken in.

The small picture of the Last Supper is said to be a sketch for the picture painted by Titian for the Refectory of the Escurial; but of this there is no proof apart from what may be read in the face of the work itself. Anyhow, its technical qualities are of the highest order, and when considered in detail point straight to Titian. The types are well known as his, and the broad suggestive sweeps of a full brush, with points of high light touched in here and there, have an expressive force, at once summary and exhaustive that Rembrandt alone has equalled. As usual, Titian falls short of the dramatic possibilities of the theme. It is evident that he has seen and pondered Leonardo, but quantum mutatus ab illo! There is contortion without real commotion on the part of these

gigantic figures, and over all there is no sense or shadow of impending tragedy.

The Virgin and Child with Saints, attributed to Palma, is undoubtedly on the plan of much of his most characteristic and successful work; but the colour, though gorgeous and satisfying, lacks the subtlety and delicacy that are never absent from the true Palma, while the Virgin is somewhat too coarse and provincial even for him. On the whole, we share the difficulty of Crowe and Cavalcaselle in pronouncing between Licinio and Cariani. The Santa Conversazione shows the capacity and charm of Venetian art on the lower levels. The figure of the Baptist, who looks less of an ascetic than of a day-dreamer, points to the influence of Palma, of whom the genuine Bonifazio was a pupil. Morelli, as is well known, divided the large and various group of pictures bearing the name of Bonifazio into three classes, and he further pretended to recognize behind their differences the existence of three separate individuals, who betrayed themselves, as usual, by peculiarities in the drawing of the hand and ear, and were marked accordingly, in order of time and merit, I, II, and III. It is difficult not to be impressed when a critic speaks "by the card" as absolutely as this, and the three Bonifazios soon became established and popular with the compilers of lists and gallery catalogues. However, Dr. Ludwig has recently explored the whole question,' especially the documentary evidence that had been put forward to justify the tri-section, and his conclusion-which appears to be irrefragable-is that there was only one Bonifazio who can be traced and named, and that the mass of work distributed by Morelli between No. II and a Veneziano of the same name must have been produced either in the workshop of the master himself or by imitators.

In the same category as the Virgin and Child, though much lower down the stream of tradition, must be placed the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Madonna with S. Iago and S. Lucia. The latter has a touch of the overcharged sentiment of Lotto, but the hand, though peculiar, is unrecognizable.

The sketch by Tintoretto of Jupiter nursed by the Nymphs is full of character, but free from the extravagance that mars so much of

1 66 "Jahrbuch der K. Preussischen Kunstsammlungen,” vol. xxi, p. 61 and p. 180 (1901); vol. xxiii, p. 36 (1902).