when he was buried in 1323, within these very walls, St Stephen and St Augustine came down from heaven, and laid his body in the tomb with their own holy hands-an incident which forms the subject of the picture. St Stephen, a dark-haired youth of noble countenance, and St Augustine, a hoary old man wearing a mitre, both of them arrayed in rich pontifical vestments of golden tissue, support the dead Count in their arms, and gently lower him into the grave, shrouded like a baron of Roslin in his iron panoply.' Nothing can be finer than the execution and the contrast of these three heads; never was the image of the peaceful death of the just man' more happily conveyed, than in the placid face and powerless form of the warrior: nor did Giorgione or Titian ever excel the splendid colouring of his black armour, rich with gold damascening. To the right of the picture, behind St Stephen, kneels a fair boy in a dark dress, perhaps the son of the Count; beyond rises the stately form of a gray friar; to the left, near St Augustine, stand two priests in gorgeous vestments, holding, the one a book, and the other a taper. Behind this principal group appear the noble company of mourners, hidalgos and old Christians all, with olive faces and beards of formal cut, looking on with true Castilian gravity and phlegm, as if the transaction were an every-day occurrence. are mostly portraits, perhaps some of the originals did actually stand, a few years later, with the like awe in their hearts and calm on their cheeks, in the royal presence-chamber, when the news came to court that the proud Armada of Spain had been vanquished by the galleys of Howard, and cast away on the rocks of the Hebrides." We make no apology for thus freely quoting from Mr Stirling's pages his description of this picture; the extract brings vividly before our readers at once the merits of the old Toledan painter, and his accomplished biographer and critic. After embellishing his adopted city, not only with pictures such as this, but with works of sculpture and architecture, and vindicating his graceful profession from the unsparing exactions of the tax-gatherers-a class who appear to As they 67 intermittent war against the fine arts have waged an unrelenting though in Spain-he died there at a green old age in 1625, and was buried in the church of St Bartolemé. Even the painters most employed at the munificent and art-loving court of the second and third Philips, found time to paint for the venerable cathedral. Thus, in 1615, Vincencio Carducho, the Florentine, painted, with Eugenio Caxes, a series of frescoes in the genio Caxes, leaving the works at the chapel of the Sagrario; and thus Euthedral of Toledo the Adoration of the Pardo and Madrid, painted for the caMagi, and other independent pictures. Meanwhile the school of El Greco was producing worthy fruit; from it, tury, came forth Luis Tristan, an artist in the infancy of the seventeenth cenand Edinburgh, but whose style Veeven now almost unknown in London lasquez did not disdain to imitate, and whose praises he was never tired sped" in Toledo, or its neighbourhood, of sounding. "Born, bred, and painter of Badajoz, so may Tristan as Morales was emphatically the be termed the painter of Toledo. No foreign graces, no classical models, adorned or vitiated his stern Spanish style; yet, in his portrait of Archbishop Sandoval, he is said by Mr Stirling to have united the elaborate execution of Sanchez Coello with much of the spirit of Titian. And of that having, while yet a stripling, him is the pleasant story recorded, painted for the Jeronymite convent at asked two hundred ducats, and being Toledo a Last Supper, for which he denied payment by the frugal friars, he appealed with them to the arbitration viewed the picture, called the young of his old master, El Greco, who, having painter a rogue and a novice, for asking only two for a painting worth five hundred ducats. Toledan church that contains the ashes In the same of his great master, lies the Murcian Pedro Orrente, called by our author great sheep and cattle master of "the Bassano, or the Roos- the Spain:" he too was employed by the art-encouraging chapter, and the cathedral possessed several of his finest pictures. But with Tristan and Orand waned; and, trusting that our rente the glories of Toledan art paled readers have not been uninterested in following our brief sketch of the remarkable men who for four hundred years rendered this quaint old Gothic city famous for its artistic splendours, we retrace our steps, halting and perplexed among so many pleasant ways, blooming flowers, and brilliant bowers, to the magnificent, albeit gloomy Escurial, where Philip II. lavished the wealth of his mighty empire in calling forth the most vigorous energies of Spanish and of foreign art. For more than thirty years did the astonished shepherds of the Guadaramas watch the mysterious pile growing under scaffolding alive with armies of workmen; and often, while the cares of the Old World and the New-to say nothing of that other World, which was seldom out of Philip's thoughts, and to which his cruel fanaticism hurried so many wretches before their time-might be supposed to demand his attention at Madrid, were they privileged to see their mighty monarch perched on a lofty ledge of rock, for hours, intently gazing upon the rising walls and towers which were to redeem his vow to St Laurence at the battle of Saint Quentin, and to hand down, through all Spanish time, the name and fame of the royal and religious founder. On the 23d of April 1563, the first stone of this Cyclopean palace was laid, under the direction of Bautiste di Toledo, at whose death, in 1567, the work was continued by Juan de Herrera, and finally perfected by Leoni (as to the interior decorations) in 1597. Built in the quaint unshapely form of St Laurence's gridiron, the Escurial is doubtless open to much severe criticism; but the marvellous grandeur, the stern beauty, and the characteristic effect of the gigantic pile, must for ever enchant the eyes of all beholders, who are not doomed by perverse fate to look through the green spectacles of gentle dulness. But it is not our purpose to describe the Escurial; we only wish to bring before our readers the and merits of few of the le, i fod among its mptuous halls niches in the temple of fame, and in its saturnine founder the most gracious and munificent of patrons. Suffice it, then, to say of the palaceconvent, in Mr Stirling's graceful words, that "Italy was ransacked for pictures and statues, models and designs; the mountains of Sicily and Sardinia for jaspers and agates; and every sierra of Spain furnished its contribution of marble. Madrid, Florence, and Milan supplied the sculptures of the altars; Guadalajara and Cuenca, gratings and balconies; Saragossa the gates of brass; Toledo and the Low Countries, lamps, candelabra, and bells; the New World, the finer woods; and the Indies, both East and West, the gold and gems of the custodia, and the five hundred reliquaries. The tapestries were wrought in Flemish looms; and, for the sacerdotal vestments, there was scarce a nunnery in the empire, from the rich and noble orders of Brabant and Lombardy to the poor sisterhoods of the Apulian highlands, but sent an offering of needlework to the honoured fathers of the Escurial." We could wish to exclude from our paper all notice of the foreign artists,. whose genius assisted in decorating the new wonder of the world; but how omit from any Escurialian or Philippian catalogue the names of Titian and Cellini, Cambiaso and Tibaldi? For seven long years did the great Venetian labour at his famous Last Supper, painted for, and placed in the refectory; and countless portraits by his fame-dealing pencil graced the halls and galleries of the Palatian convents. In addition to these, the Pardo boasted eleven of his portraits; among them, one of the hero Duke Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy, who has received a second grant of renown-let us hope a more lasting one-from the poetic chisel of Marochetti, and stands now in the great square of Turin, the very impersonation of chivalry, horse and hero alike-κυδεϊ γαιῶν. The magnificent Florentine contributed "the matchless marble crucifix behind the prior's seat in the choir," of which Mr Stirling says "Never was marble shaped into a sublimer image of the great sacrifice for man's atonement." Luca Cambiaso, the Genoese, painted the. Martyrdom of St Laurence for the high altar of the church-a picture that must have been regarded, from its subject and position, as the first of all the Escurial's religious pictures, -besides the vault of the choir, and two great frescoes for the grand stair case. Pellegrino Tibaldi, a native of the Milanese, came at Philip's request to the Escurial in 1586. He, too, painted a Martyrdom of Saint Laurence for the high altar, but apparently with no better success than his immediate predecessor, Zuccaro, whose work his was to replace. But the ceiling of the library was Tibaldi's field of fame; on it he painted a fresco 194 feet long by 30 wide, which still speaks to his skill in composition and brilliancy in colouring. Philip rewarded him with a Milanese marquisate and one hundred thousand crowns. Morales, the first great devotional painter of Castile, on whom his admiring countrymen bestowed the soubriquet of "divine”—with more propriety, it must be confessed, than their descendants have shown in conferring it upon Arguelles--contributed but one picture to the court, and none to the Escurial; but in Alonzo Sanchez Coello, born at Benifayrô, in Valencia, we find a famous native artist decorating the superb walls of the new palace. While at Madrid he was lodged in the Treasury, a building which communicated with the palace by a door, of which the King kept a key; and often would the royal Mæcenas slip thus, unobserved by the artist, into his studio. Emperors and popes, kings and queens, princes and princesses, were alike his friends and subjects; but we are now only concerned to relate that, in 1582, he painted “five altar-pieces for the Escurial, each containing a pair of saints." Far more of interest, however, attaches itself to the name and memory of Juan Fernandez Navarete, "whose genius was no less remarkable than his infirmities, and whose name-El Mudo, the dumb painter-is as familiar to Europe as his works are unknown," (vol. i. p. 250.) Born at Logroño in 1526, he went in his youth to Italy. Here he attracted the notice of Don Luis Manrique, grand-almoner to Philip, who procured him an invitation to Madrid. He was immediately set to work for the Escurial; and in 1571 four pictures, the Assumption of the Virgin, the Martyrdom of St James the Great, St Philip, and a Repenting St Jerome, were hung in the sacristy of the convent, and brought him five hundred ducats. In 1576 he painted, for the reception-hall of the convent, a large picture representing Abraham receiving the three Angels. "This picture," says Father Andres Ximenes, quoted by Mr Stirling, (vol. i. p. 255,)" so appropriate to the place it fills, though the first of the master's works that usually meets the eye, might, for its excellence, be viewed the last, and is well worth coming many a league to see." An agreement, bearing date the same year, between the painter and the prior, by which the former covenanted to paint thirty-two large pictures for the side altars, is preserved by Cean Bermudez; but El Mudo unfortunately died when only eight of the series had been painted. On the 28th of March 1579 this excellent and remarkable painter died in the 53d year of his age. A few years later, Juan Gomez painted from a design of Tibaldi a large picture of St Ursula, which replaced one of Cambiaso's least satisfactory Escurialian performances. While acres of wall and ceiling were being thus painted in fresco, or covered by large and fine pictures, the Escurial gave a ready home to the most minute of the fine arts: illuminators of missals, and painters of miniatures, embroiderers of vestments, and designers of altar-cloths, found their labours appreciated, and their genius called forth, no less than their more aspiring compeers. Fray Andrez de Leon, and Fray Martin de Palencia, enriched the Escurial with exquisite specimens of their skill in the arts of miniature-painting and illuminating; and under the direction of Fray Lorenzo di Monserrate, and Diego Rutiner, the conventual school of embroidery produced frontals and dalmatics, copes, chasubles, and altar-cloths, of rarest beauty and happiest designs. The goldsmiths and silversmiths, too, lacked not encouragement in this greatest of temples. Curious was the skill, and cunning the hand, which fashioned the tower of gold and jasper tocontain the Escurial's holiest relique, -a muscle, singed and charred, of St Laurence and no doubt that skill was nobly rewarded. In 1598, clasping to his breast the veil of Our Lady of Monserrat, in a little alcove hard by the church of the Escurial, died its grim, magnificent founder. He had witnessed the completion of his gigantic designs: palace and convent, there it stood-a monument alike of his piety and his pride, and a proof of the grandeur and resources of the mighty empire over which he ruled. But he appears to have thought with the poet Weighed in the balance, hero-dust for he built no stately mausoleum, merely a common vault, to receive the imperial dead. This omission, in 1617, Philip III. undertook to supply; and Giovanni Battista Crescenzi, an Italian, was selected as the architect. For thirty-four years did he and his successors labour at this royal necropolis, which when finished" became, under the name of the Pantheon, the most splendid chamber of the Escurial." (Vol. i. p. 412.) Mr Stirling's second volume opens with a graphic account of the decay of Spanish power under Philip IV., and an equally graphic description of this, the chief architectural triumph of his long inglorious reign. The Pantheon was "an octagonal chamber 113 feet in circumference, and 38 feet in height, from the pavement to the centre of the domed vault. Each of its eight sides, excepting the two which are occupied by its entrance, and the altar, contain four niches and four marble urns; the walls, Corinthian pilasters, cornices and dome, are formed of the finest marbles of Toledo and Biscay, Tortosa and Genoa; and the bases, capitals, scrolls, and other ornaments, are of gilt bronze. Placed beneath the presbytery of the church, and approached by the long descent of a stately marble staircase, this hall of royal tombs, gleaming with gold and polished jasper, seems a creation of Eastern romance... Hither Philip IV. would come, when melancholy-the fatal taint of his blood was strong upon him-to hear mass, and meditate on death, sitting in the niche which was shortly to receive his bones." Yet this was the monarch whose quick eye detected the early genius of Velasquez, and who bore the palm as a patron from all the princes of his house, and all the sovereigns of Europe. Well did the great painter repay the discriminating friendship of the king, and so long as Spanish art endures, will the features of Philip IV. be known in every European country; and his fair hair, melancholy mien, impassive countenance and cold eyes, reveal to all time the hereditary characteristics of the phlegmatic house of Austria. Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez was born at Seville in 1599. the Elder, a dashing painter, and a Here he entered the school of Herrera violent man, who was for ever losing alike his temper and his scholars. Velasquez soon left his turbulent rule for the gentler instruction of Francisco Pacheco. artist worked diligently, while he took Thus, while Velasquez he retained to the last that freedom cannot be called a self-taught painter, from mannerism, and that gay fidelity to nature, which so often-not in his from the highest rules and requirecase-compensate for a departure ments of art. While he was thus studying and painting the flowers and the fruits, the damsels and the beggars, of sunny Seville, there arrived in that beautiful city a collection of Italian and Spaninfluence on the taste and style of the ish pictures. These exercised no small young artist; but, true to his country, and with the happy inspiration of genius, it was to Luis Tristan of Toledo, rather than to any foreign master, that he directed his chief attention; and hence the future chief of the Castilian school was enabled to combine with its merits the excellencies of both the other great divisions of Spanish art. At the end of five years spent in this manner, he married Pacheco's daughter, who witnessed all his forty years' labours and successes, and closed his dying eyes. At the age of twentythree, Velasquez, anxious to enlarge his acquaintance with the masterpieces of other schools, went to Madrid; but after spending a few months there, and at the Escurial, he returned to Seville-soon, however, to be recalled at the bidding of the great minister and Mæcenas, Olivarez. Now, in 1623, set in the tide of favour and of fame, which henceforward was not to flag or ebb till the great painter lay stretched, out of its reach, on the cold bank of death. During this summer he painted the noble portrait of the king on horseback, which was exhibited by royal order in front of the church of San Felipe, and which caused the all-powerful Count-duke to exclaim, that until now his majesty had never been painted. Charmed and delighted with the picture and the painter, Philip declared no other artist should in future paint his royal face; and Mr Stirling maliciously adds that "this resolution he kept far more religiously than his marriage vows, for he appears to have departed from it during the life-time of his chosen artist, in favour only of Rubens and Crayer." (Vol. ii. p. 592.) On the 31st of October 1623, Velasquez was formally appointed painter in ordinary to the king, and in 1626 was provided with apartments in the Treasury. To this period Mr Stirling assigns his best likeness of the equestrian monarch, of which he says "Far more pleasing than any other representation of the man, it is also one of the finest portraits in the world. The king is in the glow of youth and health, and in the full enjoyment of his fine horse, and the breeze blowing freshly from the distant hills; he wears dark armour, over which flutters a crimson scarf; a hat with black plumes covers his head, and his right hand grasps a truncheon."-(P. 595.) In 1628, Velasquez had the pleasure of showing Rubens, who had come to Madrid as envoy from the Low Countries, the galleries of that city, and the wonders of the Escurial; and, following the advice of that mighty master, he visited Italy the next year. On that painter-producing soil, his steps were first turned to the city of Titian; but the sun of art was going down over the quays and palaces of once glorious Venice, and, hurrying through Ferrara and Bologna, the eager pilgrim soon reached Rome. In this metropolis of religion, learning, and art, the young Spaniard spent many a pleasant and profitable month: nor, while feasting his eyes and storing his memory with "its thousand forms of beauty and delight," did he allow his pencil a perfect holiday. The Forge of Vulcan and Joseph's Coat were painted in the Eternal City. After a few weeks at Naples, he returned to Madrid in the spring of 1631. Portrait-painting for his royal patron, who would visit his studio every day, and sit there long hours, seems to have been now his main occupation; and now was he able to requite the friendly aid he had received from the Count- duke of Olivarez, whose image remains reflected on the stream of time, not after the hideous caricature of Le Sage, but as limned by the truthful-albeit graceconferring-pencil of Velasquez. In 1639, leaving king and courtiers, lords and ladies, and soaring above the earth on which he had made his step so sure, Velasquez aspired to the grandest theme of poet, moralist, or painter, and nobly did his genius justify the flight. His Crucifixion is one of the sublimest representations conceived by the intellect, and portrayed by the hand of man, of that stupendous event. "Unrelieved by the usual dim landscape, or lowering clouds, the cross in this picture has no footing upon earth, but is placed on a plain dark ground, like an ivory carving on its velvet pall. Never was that great agony more powerfully depicted. The head of our Lord drops on his right shoulder, over which falls a mass of dark hair, while drops of blood trickle from his thorn-pierced brows. The anatomy of the naked body and limbs is executed with as much precision as in Cellini's marble, which may have served Velasquez as a model; and the linen cloth wrapped about the loins, and even the fir-wood of the cross, display his accurate attention to the smallest details of a |