a Sibyl.  Her dark cave is broken open, and the blue sky and the coming light break beautifully in upon her and her companions, the sullen owl and flapping bat, which shrink from its unwelcome ray.  The Hours are represented under the figure of children, fluttering about before the goddess, and extinguishing the stars of night—­a beautiful idea; but one, perhaps, better adapted to poetry than painting.  The Hours of Guercino are, however, infinitely less poetic and less beautiful than the bright female forms which encircle the car of day in Guido’s Aurora.  Yet it is a masterpiece of painting; and but for the Aurora of Guido, we could have conceived nothing beyond the Aurora of Guercino.

    Rome in the Nineteenth Century (5th edition, London, 1852).

AURORA

(GUIDO RENI)

JOHN CONSTABLE

Although no distinct landscape is known by the hand of Guido, yet in a history of this particular branch it may not be improper to notice its immense importance as an accessory in his picture of Aurora.  It is the finest instance I know of the beauty of natural landscape brought to aid a mythological story, and to be sensible of its value we have only to imagine a plain background in its stead.  But though Guido has placed us in the heavens, we are looking towards the earth, where seas and mountain-tops are receiving the first beams of the morning sun.  The chariot of Apollo is borne on the clouds, attended by the Hours and preceded by Aurora, who scatters flowers, and the landscape, instead of diminishing the illusion, is the chief means of producing it, and is indeed most essential to the story.

    Leslie, Life and Letters of John Constable, R.A. (London, new
    ed., 1896).

THE ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN

(TITIAN)

THEOPHILE GAUTIER

The pearl of the Museum at Madrid is a Raphael; that of Venice is a Titian, a marvellous canvas, forgotten and afterwards recovered, which has its legend also.  For many long years Venice possessed this masterpiece without knowing it.  Relegated to an old and seldom frequented church it had disappeared under a slow coating of dust and behind a network of spider-webs.  The subject could scarcely be made out.  One day, Count Cicognora, a great connoisseur, noticing that these rusty figures had a certain air, and scenting the master under this livery of neglect and misery, wetted his finger and rubbed the canvas, an action which is not one of exquisite propriety, but which an expert on pictures cannot help doing when he is face to face with a dirty canvas, be he twenty times a count and a thousand times a dandy.  The noble picture, preserved intact under this layer of dust, like Pompeii under its mantle of ashes, appeared so