frescoes cover cupola and chapel wall, we could scarcely comprehend his greatness now—­so cruelly have time and neglect dealt with those delicate dream-shadows of celestial fairyland—­were it not for an interpreter, who consecrated a lifetime to the task of translating his master’s poetry of fresco into the prose of engraving.  That man was Paolo Toschi—­a name to be ever venerated by all lovers of the arts; since without his guidance we should hardly know what to seek for in the ruined splendours of the domes of Parma, or even seeking, how to find the object of our search.  Toschi’s labour was more effectual than that of a restorer however skilful, more loving than that of a follower however faithful.  He respected Correggio’s handiwork with religious scrupulousness, adding not a line or tone or touch of colour to the fading frescoes; but he lived among them, aloft on scaffoldings, and face to face with the originals which he designed to reproduce.  By long and close familiarity, by obstinate and patient interrogation, he divined Correggio’s secret, and was able at last to see clearly through the mist of cobweb and mildew and altar smoke, and through the still more cruel travesty of so-called restoration.  What he discovered, he faithfully committed first to paper in water colours, and then to copperplate with the burin, so that we enjoy the privilege of seeing Correggio’s masterpieces as Toschi saw them, with the eyes of genius and of love and of long scientific study.  It is not too much to say that some of Correggio’s most charming compositions—­for example, the dispute of S. Augustine and S. John—­have been resuscitated from the grave by Toschi’s skill.  The original offers nothing but a mouldering surface from which the painter’s work has dropped in scales.  The engraving presents a design which we doubt not was Correggio’s, for it corresponds in all particulars to the style and spirit of the master.  To be critical in dealing with so successful an achievement of restoration and translation is difficult.  Yet it may be admitted once and for all that Toschi has not unfrequently enfeebled his original.  Under his touch Correggio loses somewhat of his sensuous audacity, his dithyrambic ecstasy, and approaches the ordinary standard of prettiness and graceful beauty.  The Diana of the Camera di S. Paolo, for instance, has the strong calm splendour of a goddess:  the same Diana in Toschi’s engraving seems about to smile with girlish joy.  In a word, the engraver was a man of a more common stamp—­more timid and more conventional than the painter.  But this is after all a trifling deduction from the value of his work.