MRS. CALLCOTT'S ESSAYS ON PAINTING.

A COMPLETE and concise History of Painting, the result of a knowledge of the art and its productions, combined with discrimi-

nating research, and written con (more, yet untechnically, has

long been a desideratum in our literature; and of such a work Mrs. CALLCOTT, in these " Essays," as she modestly terms them, supplies the first few chapters. The accounts that have been handed down to us of the ancient painters are almost as scanty and unsatisfactory as the relics of their art. Of the moderns who constitute the various schools of Italy, Spain, Flanders, Holland, Germans', and France, we have more ample materials of informa- tion. As regards their method of painting and its results, we have the best of all evidence—their beautiful works: and there is no

lack of contemporary history and gossip about the men. These written materials, however, are not so complete as could be wished:

they are, moreover, contained in different languages, and are tint only scattered but alloyed with party-spfiit and careless mis- statements; so that the mass requires to be arranged and digested, the contradictory testimony resolved, and discrepancies reconciled. Of the two best known Histories of the Painters of Italy, VASARI, strellge to say, has not even been translated ; and LANZI,of whose Ilistory we have an English version by Mr. THOMAS ROSCOE, is so dry and overlaid with accounts of painters of no note, as to be repulsive if not absolutely unreadable. Of the Spanish painters we know comparatively nothing ; MURILLO and VELASQUEZ are the only two who enjoy an English flame; yet there is a voluminous dictionary of them in existence.

Mrs. Cetscorr brings to the task several important qualifica- tions: without being professionally an artist, she has an extensive and enlightened acquaintance with pictures, having seen most of

the chefs.d'wurre of art in Europe; as the wife of one of our most eminent painters she has every fileility for acquiring as much

knowledge of the materials of painting as is requisite for her pur- pose. As a writer, Mrs. CALLCOTT acquired a deservedly high reputation by her 'various publications when she was MARIA GRAHAM ; and in the present work she evinces those rare and excellent qualities of an historian, accuracy, clearness, and im- partiality, with the addition of a graceful style. The present volume gives a sketch of the origin and progress of art "from the first faint traces of her path among savage tribes, to her majestic footsteps in the flourishing states of Greece; not lasing sight of her entirely in her sad hours of degradation under Imperial Rome." The next will be devoted to the task of "finally watching over. her gentle though slow revival under the brilliant sun of Daly." Mrs. CALLCOTT merely gives a passing smile at the disputes of the learned about the birthplace of fine art, which is indigenous to every soil trodden by man ; and is content to indicate the record of its existence in Hindostan, Persia, Mexico, China, and Egypt, commencing her consecutive History of Painting with the Etrus- cans. " I um induced to do this," she says, " because the real ancient Italian art—namely, that of the Etruscans—was coeval with the oldest Greek schools, if' not anterior to them ; and that as the Roman conquests destroyed the arts of Old Italy before the most brilliant periods of Greek painting, I may well look upon Italian or Etruscan painting as having an earlier life and death than that of Greece." The Etruscans, indeed, seem to have been the first to produce true pictures; meaning, by this term, coloured representations of objects on a flat surface in perspective, uith the light and shade and various tints of nature; the Egyptian hiero- glyphics being merely sculptures coloured. Painting, lerwever, as well as sculpture attained to its highest perfection in that great garden of genius, Greece ; where fine art rose to a refinement corresponding with that of science and literature.

The glowing descriptions of the antique pictures, by PetNat, LUCIAN, and other ancient writers, have been regarded by some as exaggerated eulogies, and as expressing the delight of the be- holders pleased with the first rude and imperfect attempts at pic- torial representation, rather than reflecting the merits of the paintings. But PLINY was no mean connoisseur, though Lociesr professes to know nothing of the art ; and if the testimony Of ZEUXIS to the deceptive truth of a curtain painted by Peeitue- stus can be invalidated, surely, when we are told that the birds peeked at some grapes painted by Zeuxis, and carae to perch on the scene-paintings at Rome, and that a horse greeted a pictured resemblance of one of' its race by APELLES, we must either al- together reject the anecdotes as fabulous, or at once concede the power of imitation to the antique painters. The scepticism as to the merits of the Greek pictures, however, has been founded on want of proof, or at best, on the negative evidence of the antique pictures discovered at Pompeii. These, however, being merely de- corations of the houses of a provincial Roman city, are no criterion

of the merits of Greek painting. Two of the finest specimens of antique painting are now exhibiting at the British Institution In Pall Mall, Nos. 84 and 122 in the Catalogue. They were discovered

in 1823, in an ancient tomb in a vineyard to the right of the Via Apple, near San Sebastian°, and now belong to Sir M. W. RIDLEY. One of them is a Ganymede, smaller than life; and shows that the ancients understood light and shade, colour and effect, as well as form and expression. The other is the head and bust of a bey blowing the double flute; painted with great breadth, and " re- minding one," says Mr. Cata.corr, " of the Venetian frescoes, particularly those of Paul Veronese." They are sculpture-like in style,—as, we take it, all the antique paintings were; but there is more roundness and less stiffness of form than in the inferior spe- cimens. Colour and effect, we think, were subordinate in their

pictures to form and expression. The Greeks were not acquainted with chiaroscuro ; and the chaste simplicity and severe exact- ness of their painting is the very opposite to the meretricious glare and dash of ours ; but this certainly does not prove their art to be inferior. That a nation who could produce such sculptures as the Elgin Marbles should be barbarians in painting, is prepos- terous. The extensive practical use mace of painting, too, is moral evidence of their proficiency. It was not only universally employed in decorating temples, tombs, and dwellings, in paint-

ing signs for shops, and scenes for theatres, but books were illus- trated with miniatures, and portraits were painted. NERO had a

canvas strained for a colossal portrait of himself, a hundred and twenty feet high, to overlook the city from the gardens of MARIUS; but the portrait was blasted by lightning before it was finished. Pictorial representations, too, were employed to add splendour to triumphal processions and to celebrate the deeds of warriors; in- stead of laudatory paragraphs in newspapers, pictures were dis- played in the market-place representing hernia actions ; they were also used in pleadings in courts of law, and employed to excite commiseration and implore charity for persons in distress; and as

some one instanced the existence of a gallows as a mark of civili- zation, so the fact of piettne-cleaners being employed by the an- cients—(one of these quack " restorers" ruined a picture of Bacchus and Ariadne, by ARISTIDES)—may be taken as a sign of the maturity of the art.

We have not space to follow the lucid and interesting history of Greek art, which extends through two Essays, and enumerates the leading characteristics of the great Greek painters : but we quote the brief summary of its career.

"The first efforts of painting in Greece appear to have been as rude as we found them among the savages of Polynesia. The earliest steps of art in Egypt and Etruria elude our observation ; but the nature of the iniprovemeuts attri- buted to Eumanus of Athens, teaches us what they were in Greece.

" The art once exercised, however, neither halted nor tarried. It was sublime in its simplicity in the bands of Polygnotus and his contemporaries. It served

their gods and their country. Much improved in beauty, but still grave and dignified, it grew popular in the time of Parrhasitis and Zeuxis. Under Apelles and his followers it was deemed to the graces, revelled in beauty, and ministered to the retitled pleasures of taste, rather than, as at first, to the grati- fication of higher moral feelings. " Brought down thus to the commoner tone of general society, more various subjects were thought win thy of it. Pyreicus anticipated the subjects of the modern Dutch p Linters ; and, it should seem, with kindred success. The natural desire for novelty, and the anxiety for individual distinction, produced fire-light scenes, pictures of still life, and other varieties. Fashion, rather than taste,

became the guide of purchasers ; and it may truly be said that the decline of painting began Wth the Macedonian conquests, which altered the character of thu Greeks, and consequently of their arts."

Thus we see that in Greece as in Rome war was the destroyer of art. Rome, indeed, could hardly boast of a school of art of her own : the wealth or arms of the R ,mans purchased the labours of Etruscan and Greek artists, and quantities of paintings and statues were imported into Rome. Art, which flourished among the Greek republics, degenerated under the Imperial despotism of Rome, from the handmaid of beauty to the pander of luxury and sen- suality.

Mrs. CA LLCOTT devotes an Essay to the subject of the "Classi- fication of Pictures in cataloguing them : her system, based on FUSEL I'S, is judicious, though rather too minute in its subdivi- sions for general adoption. The concluding Essay, 'Ott the Ma- terials used by Painters," is more exclusively interesting to artists. Mrs. CA LLCOTT considers Pm stv's statement of APE I. LES using only four colours, erroneous and unfou..fled ; as it appears to be. The ancient painters scented to have employed nearly the same materials as arc used now. At first they painted on stone, then on dry plaster (distemper), and on wet plaster (fresco): the encaustic process, in which a varnish of hut oil and wax was em- ployed, has been disused,— though the use of wax as a protection against damp has lately been revived in the case of sculpture with advantage. They painted pictures also, as we do, on strained linen canvas, and on pannels with prepared grounds,—not perhaps the same, but similar; and sometimes skins and parchment were used. The famous pictures forming the Titian Gallery at Blen- heim, by the by, are painted on leather. The "vehicles" of colour were water, gum, and white of egg : oil was only occasionally used, and then mure as a varnish ; so that, in point of fact, the ancients were "water-colour painters" on a grand scale. The ancient painters, like all the great artists of Italy and Holland, ground their own colours.