Incarceration of Count Ugolino and his Family, were collecting and concocting.

Something there is in the former of suffering-a sort of tacit and reluctant acknowledgment—about the mouth and the space between the nose and mouth (owing to the individual peculiarity of the model,) seems somewhat more considerable than symmetry, or perfect harmony of parts, would admit of: but as you gaze, cover up the mouth, and— what do you perceive? A clear open brow; a consciousness of rectitude; a sensation of unjust suffering; a Regulus, or Caius-Marius-like air. Assuredly it is a banished Lord." It bears the character of a man of noble mind, suffering under unjust expatriation, but not depressed by melancholy. On the contrary" Godlike erect, in native honour clad,"there is that in his eye which proudly anticipates triumphant return.

Of this vigorous head-speaking technically, and with some reference to the definitions I have ventured-I should say that it is elevated in character ; and that the expression is somewhat dissonant and deteriorating. In the shape of the mouth there is something, not merely unyielding, but rather brutally so and with this tinge of brutality, there is mingled a reflex of misery. There is beside, a degree of meanness in the formation of the, rather too small, nose, which the mezzotinto engraver, who called it a Banished Lord, has in some measure amended. The character is altogether better in the print, than in the picture, Though we cannot say of the Banished Lord, as of Hamlet,

"Oh! what a noble mind is here o'erthrown,”

yet is it in some degree debased, although not sub

dued. The noble mind has been coerced: acted upon but in as far as it retains its original purpose, and power of reaction, it will vindicate its claims. And this lofty consciousness of honour, almost unblemished, resides chiefly in the eyes and forehead. The nose, (as is observed above,) is not so large and significant as to harmonize with the open brow.

Howsoever mingled, or blended, in their pictorial existence, I conceive that character and expression, like compound colours, are susceptible of being traced to their primary elements, and separately ascertained. And concerning this point of the critical philosophy of historical painting, my readers will perceive, by what follows, that I have the honour of coinciding with the latest and best historian of Italian Art.

"Critics have often expressed a wish (he says) that these heads [of St. Cecilia and certain Madonnas, from the pencil of Raphael] had possessed a more dignified CHARACTER; and in this respect he was perhaps excelled by Guido Reni; and however engaging his children may be, those of Titian are still more beautiful. His true empire was in the heads of his men, which are portraits selected with judgment, and depicted with a dignity proportioned to his subject.

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Lionardo was the first, as we shall see in the Milanese school, to lead the way to delicacy of ExPRESSION; but that master, who painted so little, and with such labour, is not to be compared to Raffaelle, who possessed the whole quality in its fullest extent. There is not a movement of the human soul-capable of being expressed by art-that he has not caught, expressed, and varied, in a thousand different ways, and always within the bounds of propriety.

"Nature had endowed him with an imagination

which transported his mind to the scene of the event, either fabulous or remote, on which he was engaged, and awoke in him the very same emotions which the subjects of such story must themselves have experienced; and this vivid conception assisted him until he had designed his subject with that distinctness which he had either observed in other countenances, or found in his own mind. This faculty, seldom found in poets, and still more rarely in painters, no one possessed in a more eminent degree than Raffaelle. His figures are passions personified: and Love, Fear, Hope and Desire, Anger, Placability, Humility or Pride, assume their places by turns as the subject changes.

"There is another delicacy of Expression: and this is the gradation of the Passions, by which every one perceives, whether they are in their commencement, or at their height, or in their decline. He had observed their shades of difference in the intercourse of life, and on every occasion he knew how to transfer the result of his observations to his canvas.

"The smallest perceptible motion of the eyes, of the nostrils, of the mouth, and of the fingers, corresponds to the chief movements of every passion; the most animated and vivid actions discover the violence

of the passion that excites them; and, what is more, they vary in innumerable degrees, without ever departing from Nature, and conform themselves to a diversity of CHARACTER without ever risking propriety."-Roscoe's Translation.

Thus far Lanzi. From the head of Rembrandt's Hebrew Adultress, though it be small, some illustrative light is thrown on the object of our present inquiry. Here, though the character is unelevated, the contrite expression is exceedingly to the purpose.

And, without forgetting that we have already referred the reader to Reynolds's Ugolino as a pertinent illustration of expression, when compared with the unimpassioned CHARACTER of the same head: we may also, since our recent acquisition of the Londonderry treasures of Art, refer him to Coreggio's extraordinary heads of the Madonna and of Jesus Christ: the former as the finest example probably in the world, of the true expression of overwhelming maternal sorrow-so true that it makes the work of most other artists look but like grimace in the comparison: the latter as a super-eminent and exquisite instance, expressing with supreme resignation, boundless and divine philanthropy triumphing over human suffering, together with all other temporal considerations; and discriminating and denoting deific power, by its placid elevation above human passion. The expression of latent power, though it be as it can only be but delicately indicated, is always more sublime than that of power in action, as respects the human face divine; because, of the latter we seem to behold the limit, while of the former, as we do not, it partakes of the infinite and ineffable.

This fine head affords a more pertinent and satisfactory example of sublime expression superinduced on divinely elevated character, than is to be met with elsewhere in the National Gallery-or out of it, I should perhaps have ventured to add, were I not restrained by the reflection that those critics who have not visited Italy, must seem deficient in privilege to write thus positively on such a topic. Professor Phillips has brought us home, a head copied by himself from one of Michael Angelo's Sibyls, by which it evidently appears that the engravings pub

lished after this exemplary original, are far-very far, from conveying an adequate idea of its grandeur. It is at once so mystical and prophetic in its expression, that a poet would almost swear Pope must have been sitting before it when he commenced his Messiah -so admirably does it express the sentiment "Rapt into future times:" and this sentiment is not-like Rembrandt's expression of contrition-superinduced on a common frail female; but on a chaste Cassandra-like character of feminine energy that is in complete accordance with it.

The reader will probably pardon, if he should not approve, the rather long, but I trust not impertinent, illustration from Lanzi, and from the practice and discrimination of Raphael-in the productions of whose pencil we are as yet so comparatively poorof the technic or proper use of two terms of Art, which by cursory critics and observers are so frequently confounded.

I have further to apologize for a short repetition or two, the same ideas having incontinently recurred to me in treating of similar matters, but where a more thorough paced writer than myself would have studiously avoided the employment of the same words. I believe the chief of these is the re-introduction of those fine, original, and expressive, verses from the pen of Keats, where Wisdom and Truth hath met together, and Taste and Philosophy have kissed each other, which I could not forbear to adopt as a general motto, although I had previously quoted them in the body of my volume. I must trust to their pertinence to plead my excuse.

J. L.