ITALIAN CITIES.
Italian Cities. By Edwin Howland Blashfield and Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield. 2 vols. (A. H. Bullen. 12s.)—The authors4of the admirable new version of Vasari's Lives ought to have trans- lated parts of their present work into English. Be the topic the "bewitching masquerades" of Botticelli, or what Ruskin called "the kicking gracefulnesses of Raphael," or a " house-party " [sic] of the time of the trecento, or the, mosaics of San Vitale, we are constantly. engulphed in a rhetorical surge of the choicest words of the neo-Anglo-American dialect. Perhaps this is done that the "American and English girls" who "eat candy and sweets ". in the Via Tornabnoni, or "your kitchenmaid " who loves "society items" and "novels about lords and ladies," may. be lured on to higher things. In any case, the Precept of Polonius on the limitations of the familiar and the vulgar is forgotten by the. authors when they apostrophise Goethe with a "Ohs, ch., Messer. Welfgang ? " or indulge in silly chaff of the " wag and dare-devil,' Sodoma, with his nee /ripen and his tame badger and raven and his habits as blagueur d'atelier ; or describe a certain youth's first impression of "that little wooden red-and-blue lady," the Belle Jardiniere of the Louvre. Disinfected of these and other cognate flights of the eagle of nonsense, and of such beauties of diction as the occurrence of "the blessed word" lacking six times in four consecutive paragraphs, the book would be a useful ladder to the works of Liibke, Mentz, and Lafenestre. The writers have always worked in sight of the objects described, they have the good old love of "art as art," and they do not run to death the modern trick of regarding a picture not as "a thing of beauty" but as a " document" from which we have to extract the secrets of the artist's personality and surroundings. Then, instead of being ignorant, like, e.g., Taine, of the entire bug. ness of painting, they have a practical knowledge of the techni- calities of the art. Excellent is their refutation of the absurd idea of Rie and Ruskin that Giotto rendered leaves and blades of grass in minute detail because they were made by God, but generalised his draperies because they were the work of man. Our authors combat the prevalent craze which obliges the critic who respects himself to distinguish between the brush work of Raphael and that of Pinturiechio or Giulio Romano, even in cracked patches of paint which have been cleaned up and daubed over years or can. tunes ago. Yet they categorically assert, for instance, that three frescos of the Stanza d'Eliodoro "were executed by assistants." Perhaps they are well advised in ignoring the library of con- flicting interpretations of the portraiture and symbolism of the Dispute and the School of Athens. Nowadays, Botticelli "ha il grido " ; in this respect our essayists have a fairly catholic taste ; if they adore the primitives, they take care "to praise the works of Pietro Perugino," love "the Correggiosity of Correggio," and " differentiate" the "dressing gown and slippers" style of Giulio Romano from the manner of Mantegna, who "moved only to stateliest cadences, with chin held high and frowning brow."
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