Over the living art of Italy, Camuccini at Rome, and Benvenuti at Florence, preside. The former is perhaps the best draughtsman in Europe, but is inferior as a colorist; he wants depth, harmony, and force; his grouping also is defective in richness and variety, approaching too nearly to the linear as in relievo. His expression, though noble, is cold--deficient in that warm gush of sentiment, which, in the ancient masters, seemed to 'create a soul under the ribs of death.' Benvenuti excels his contemporary as a colorist, in the disposition of his group, and in the force of _chiar' oscuro_; but in purity of drawing, in classical taste, and in the selection of form, he is inferior. Each has chosen his subjects principally from profane history. Camuccini's best performance is the Departure of Regulus; Benvenuti's a scene in the recent history of Saxony. Rome possesses several other good painters, but few natives--for, to the artist as to the poet of every nation, she has become
THE Trans-alpine schools of painting now demand attention. The German is usually divided into three distinct schools--the German, properly so called, the Flemish, and the Dutch. These distinctions are rather local than depending upon characteristic difference of manner. Indeed, prior to the age of Durer, the only style discernible in the schools is that named Gothic, common more or less to all the states of Europe, but especially indigenous in Germany. The expression, then, is here employed not altogether in its vague and generic sense of anything stiff and formal--for these early or Gothic pictures exhibit a specific character both of design and execution. They are painted upon wood, usually oak, covered sometimes with canvass, always with a white ground, upon which the outline of the subject is sketched, and the whole overlaid with gilding. This last forms the real grounding of the picture, which is painted in water or size-color, with great care and diligence of finish, often with considerable felicity of effect, and always with more of the simplicity of individual nature than occurs in any other works of the same age and description. This early school terminated in the fifteenth century, from the more general diffusion of oil-painting; its principal masters were Schoen, the Bon Martino of the Italians, born in 1420, painter and engraver; Wohlgemuth, the instructer of Durer; and Muiller, or Kranach, Burgomaster of Wittemberg, and friend of Luther. But the prince of German artists is Albert Durer, born at Nuremberg in 1471--the Da Vinci of this school, as excelling in science and in art. His works in painting and engraving are equally admirable, evincing knowledge of the best principles of imitation. They still retain a degree of constraint--a remnant of the Gothic manner, of which the habits and prejudices of his countrymen, and his own ignorance of the antique, prevented the removal. Want of dignified design and grandeur of composition, hard and meagre outline, are his defects; truth, originality, and simplicity of thought, good coloring, and the invention, or at least perfecting, of etching on copper, form his contributions to the arts. His contemporary, and, in portraits, superior, was Holbein, best known in England, and whose works, in the reign of Henry VIII., are excellent examples of the school; his successors, in departing from the national style, become blended with the minor Italian masters--for the German school ceases to be original or distinct when it ceases to be Gothic. After Schwartz Rolenhamer, and others of the sixteenth century, who painted history in the Italian manner, Germany sent forth chiefly landscape painters, as Bauer, Elzhaimer, and others, who finished in a style exquisitely delicate and natural.