be done without destroying the old walls) to have
such buildings added to the stables as would serve him for a kind of
lodge, to come out and merrily sup in when he liked. Whereupon Giulio
began to think out the famous Palazzo del T.

This painter is an unlucky kind of man, to whom all criticism seems
to have agreed to attribute great power and deny great praise.
Castiglione had found him at Rome, after the death of his master
Raphael, when his genius, for good or for ill, began for the first
time to find original expression. At Mantua, where he spent all the
rest of his busy life, it is impossible not to feel in some degree
the force of this genius. As in Venice all the Madonnas in the
street-corner shrines have some touch of color to confess the
painter's subjection to Titian or Tintoretto; as in Vicenza the
edifices are all in Greekish taste, and stilted upon pedestals in
honor and homage to Palladio; as in Parma Correggio has never died,
but lives to this day in the mouths and chiaroscuro effects of all the
figures in all the pictures painted there;--so in Mantua Giulio Romano
is to be found in the lines of every painting and every palace. It is
wonderful to see, in these little Italian cities which have been the
homes of great men, how no succeeding generation has dared to wrong
the memory of them by departing in the least from their precepts
upon art. One fancies, for instance, the immense scorn with which the
Vicentines would greet the audacity of any young architect who dared
to think Gothic instead of Palladian Greek, and how they would put
him to shame by asking him if he knew more than Palladio about
architecture! It seems that original art cannot arise in the presence
of the great virtues and the great errors of the past; and Italian art
of this day seems incapable of even the feeble, mortal life of other
modern art, in the midst of so much immortality.

Giulio Romano did a little of everything for the Dukes of
Mantua,--from painting the most delicate and improper little fresco
for a bed-chamber to restraining the Po and the Mincio with immense
dikes, restoring ancient edifices and building new ones, draining
swamps and demolishing and reconstructing whole streets, painting
palaces and churches, and designing the city slaughter-house. He grew
old and very rich in the service of the Gonzagas; but though Mrs.
Jameson says he commanded respect by a sense of his own dignity as an
artist, the Bishop of Casale,