their beards and hair streaming with the waters, who are seeking to support themselves on the necks of their horses; others are crying aloud in their fear of death; and some again are struggling with the most violent efforts, and using all their endeavours to escape the fate which threatens them. On the other side of the sea are seen Moses, Aaron, and all the rest of the Hebrews, men and women, offering thanks to God for their safety; and here the artist has painted a number of vases, with vestments and other riches, of which the Hebrews have despoiled the people of Egypt. The habiliments of the Hebrew women in this part of the picture are also very beautiful, and of admirably-varied forms, as are the head-dresses of the same.”—Vasari. Life of Pierino del Vaga.

On Pierino's return to Rome, Giulio Romano and Il Fattore, who had been chosen after the death of Raphael to finish the works of the Vatican, associated him with them, well knowing his abilities from previous experience, and further cemented their union by bestowing upon him Caterina, the sister of Il Fattore, in marriage. This took place in 1525; and not long afterwards, Pierino obtained great praise for a beautiful painting of the creation of Eve, in a chapel of the Church of San Marcello. This specimen of his powers is now in existence. He was still occupied with this work when the terrible siege and sack of Rome took place, where many artists were slain, many driven away or despoiled of all they possessed, and many triumphs of Art for ever destroyed. During the sack, Pierino rushed from place to place with his infant daughter in his arms, seeking in vain for a refuge. He was soon captured, and compelled to pay so large a sum for his ransom, that he was reduced to beggary, and almost driven to despair at seeing the fruits of long years of labour thus passing into the hands of a brutal soldiery. While in this state of beggary, and obliged to paint for his daily bread, Nicolo Veneziano, an old friend, and a distinguished master in embroidery, arrived in Rome, and endeavoured to induce Pierino to leave it for Genoa, where he promised to use all his influence with his master, Prince Doria, to procure him some honourable and lucrative employment. Persuaded by Nicolo, Pierino accordingly, after placing his wife and daughter with their relatives in Rome, departed for Genoa, where his arrival was most agreeable to the Prince, who showed him many marks of favour, held long conversations with him upon Art, and finally determined to entrust him with the erection of a superb palace, to be adorned with ornaments in stucco, and with frescoes and oilpaintings, and with decorations of every kind. As Giulio Romano signalized himself by the erection and decoration of the Palazzo del Te at Mantua, where his originality, versatility, and fancy shone forth more conspicuously than anywhere else, so did Pierino in this palace, which he built and decorated for Prince Doria, distinguish himself more than in any other work which he ever undertook. At Genoa, he became the founder of a school which produced many able artists, and to which he imparted much of that grace and expression which he had himself acquired from Raphael. His works in the Doria Palace are characterised by that fertile invention, exuberant fancy, and playful grace for which he was distinguished; and his designs were carried out by a number of excellent artists, who wrought under his superintendence, such as Giovanni and Silvio da Fiesole, Pordenone, and

Dominico Beccafumi. In one of the halls, Pierino commemorated the military and naval exploits of various members of the Doria family; in another, he painted the battle of Jupiter and the Titans; and in four other apartments, various scenes from the fables of Ovid, in which, besides the human and mythological personages, animals, foliage, fruit, and grotesques were introduced with inexhaustible fertility and power of invention. When Pierino first arrived in Genoa, he found the painter Girolamo da Trevisi already established there, and was by him viewed as an interloper and rival. Girolamo, seeing the time Pierino spent on the cartoons for the frescoes of the Doria Palace, sneeringly exclaimed, "Cartoons, and nothing but cartoons! For my part, I carry my art at the point of my pencil." On this being reported to Pierino, he was highly indignant, and causing one of the cartoons to be fixed to the roof of the hall for which it was intended, he then removed the scaffolding, so that those who were below might see the effect. When this was done, he threw the hall open to the public, and all Genoa flocked to see and admire, while Girolamo himself, overwhelmed by the beauty of the work, gave up the field to Pierino, and retired to Bologna.

Italy was at this time much indebted to the scholars of the school of Raphael. In Naples, Polidoro Caldara and Andrea da Salerno founded a flourishing school, as did also Giulio Romano in Mantua, Pellegrino in Modena, and Guadenzio in Milan, while that established by Pierino in Genoa yielded the palm to none of them. It not only produced many eminent fresco-painters, so that scarcely an ancient church or palace in Genoa is destitute of fine works in this department, but was also famous in oils, exhibiting a truth and force of colouring inferior to no school of Italy, with the single exception of the Venetian. Prince Doria would have had Pierino make Genoa his permament abode, but the painter was so much pleased with Pisa during a passing visit, that he bought a house there as a refuge for his old age. At Pisa, he painted several pictures, one of which, representing the Madonna and various saints, designed and commenced by him, and finished by Antonio Sogliani, is still one of the greatest ornaments of the cathedral. Although Pierino was married, he seems to have been of a very unsettled disposition, and not to have entirely devoted his affections to her who alone had the legitimate right to them. He left Pisa after some time and returned to Genoa, chiefly induced by certain love affairs, which occupied too much of his attention. Neither did he finally settle in Genoa, but repaired to Rome, where he remained for a considerable time, neglected and unemployed. But his paintings in the Chapel of the Trinità, and other proofs of his abilities, at length induced the Cardinal Farnese to bestow a pension upon him, to which the Pope afterwards added another of twenty-five scudi a-month. In the Sala Regia he executed a number of decorations in stucco, which Vasari affirms "surpassed all that has ever been done in that manner by the ancients or moderns." Pierino showed a true and pleasing veneration and respect for the memory of Giotto, the great reviver of painting in Italy. Some paintings by him were upon the old wall of St. Peter's at Rome, which was being demolished; but Pierino interfered, caused the wall around them to be carefully sawed, and succeeded in preserv

ing the pictures, which, however, have since been demolished by less scrupulous hands, during the rebuilding of the church. Pierino now received many commissions, most of which he executed by the hands of his scholars, himself furnishing only the designs. In this way he performed an immense deal of work, but sometimes in a way more favourable to his purse than his reputation. He appears, indeed, at this period of his life, to have desired riches rather than honour, and to have determined to make up for the losses of earlier years by the labours of his maturer age. He was jealous of any rival near his throne; and in order to prevent young and rising artists from interfering with the monopoly which he enjoyed at Rome during the latter part of his life, he would take them into his own employment, and make use of them to execute the commissions with which he was charged. When Titian came to Rome, in 1545, the jealousy of Pierino was powerfully excited by the honours which were paid to him by the Papal court, and by a rumour which was spread abroad that he had come to execute personally the paintings in the Sala Regia, which Pierino desired to retain as his own especial property; and this ill-will toward the great Venetian he retained until the moment of his departure, so that he would never go near him, nor make his acquaintance. In the Castle of St. Angelo, Pierino, Luigi Romano, one of his best scholars, and several of his other pupils, executed a number of paintings which still remain, and not content with engrossing the principal pictorial commissions in Rome, our artist would accept meaner and more mechanical works, which he turned over to some of his numerous scholars whose services he commanded.

"He would frequently (says one of his biographers) paint such things as the pennons for the trumpeters, the standards for the castle, or the banners used by the religious brotherhoods. He would also prepare canopies, copes, screens, and curtains for doors, or any other thing, however inferior as a work of art, that came to his hands."

Pierino, however, at length found himself the undisputed head of the artists of Rome, and the person entrusted with almost all the public works in that very city which he had entered as a poor boy, and where he had for years maintained himself by working by the day for any person who chose to employ him. But although he now only supplied the designs for the greater part of the commissions entrusted to him, such was their number, that he was obliged to be drawing day and night; so that the constant labour at length wore out his strength, and, while talking with a friend one evening in the neighbourhood of his own house, he was struck by a fit of apoplexy, and died upon the spot, in the fortyseventh year of his age. He was buried in the Chapel of St. Joseph, in the Rotonda at Rome, where his epitaph recounts his wonderful excellence and versatility in the pictorial and plastic arts. The latter part of his life, though successful and prosperous in a merely commercial point of view, was spent in a perpetual whirl of toil, excitement, and anxiety, from the vast extent of the business entrusted to him, the whole of which he had personally to regulate and superintend. The only diversion he allowed himself was, to meet a few chosen friends in a

tavern, the place where-like Frank Floris, Adrian Brauwer, and our own Morland-he conceived that true felicity and freedom from care were alone to be found; and the freedom of his libations on these occasions told severely upon a constitution already undermined by incessant labours. We cannot better close our notice of this highly-gifted and indefatigable artist than in the graphic words of Vasari

"Of Pierino, then, it may be asserted, from all that we have related, and from much beside that might have been said regarding him, that he was one of the most extensively endowed and versatile painters of our times. By him also were artists taught to produce the most admirable works in stucco. He executed landscapes, animals, grottesche, and every other subject that can well be brought within the domain of the painter, and worked admirably well, whether in fresco, in oil, or in tempera; wherefore it may ever be affirmed, that Pierino was the father of these most noble arts, seeing that his gifts and endowments still survive in the many artists now pursuing his footsteps in all the honourable walks of art.”

Y.

3 B

VOL. II.

682

CHARACTERISTIC ANECDOTES.

NAPOLEON THE FIRST.

THERE are few of whom so many anecdotes are recorded as of Napoleon I., and they are recurred to with untiring interest. Even in those connected with his earliest days, the same traits of character are observed for which he was remarkable throughout his extraordinary career. His very birth seemed ominous of the part he was to play in the scenes of life-his mother was taken suddenly ill, carried home in haste, and laid upon a couch which was covered with a tapestry which represented some of the remarkable passages in the Iliad; and thus the young Napoleon was ushered into life in the midst of its heroes. It was the custom of his family to pass their summers in a villa which had once been the residence of a relation of his mother. It was in a romantic situation by the sea-side, in the vicinity of the Isle of Sanquiniere. It was here that Napoleon had his earliest enjoyments; the retirement was exactly suited to his meditative mind; it was the more interesting to him because it had fallen somewhat into decay. shady avenue, its wild garden, and its wilderness of shrubberies were favourite haunts; but it was to a secluded summer-house, fallen into disuse, and so closely overgrown with clematis and the wild olive that its entrance was impervious to the view of the passers-by, that he most delighted to resort.

Its

On his return from the military school at Brienne, to pass his vacations, as soon as the fond salutations of the family were over, he was sure to seek his favourite solitude. In this sequestered nook perhaps the happiest hours of his life were passed; it may have been here that he used to read with delight the affecting story of " Paul and Virginia” and the poems of Ossian, which were ever after his favourite works; in that romantic spot he may have first indulged in those visions of the destiny which he felt he was appointed to fulfil; for from childhood he believed that he was yet to master the world. This impression never forsook him; in after days he often expressed it. His earnestness produced a corresponding effect upon those about him. In speaking of his fearlessness, Madame Junot alludes to it. "He was," she says, a thousand cubits above the apprehension of any common danger; his destiny was not fulfilled, and he knew it." He often spoke of his lucky star, and on the day of the battle of Dresden he exclaimed, “I cannot be beaten." This belief in his own safety, till his mission should be fulfilled, was responded to by his soldiers, who were encouraged by every declaration of the kind which he made, and inspired with fresh courage. "Fear nothing, my friends," he would say to his Generals when they urged him not to expose himself in battle-"fear nothing, my friends; the bullet which will kill me is not yet cast."

66

In captivity this faith was still retained. When O'Meara urged on him that he ought not to accelerate his death by refusing to take the proper remedies, he replied, looking up to heaven, "Le qui est ecoit,