intendent of fine arts, and she despatched
Cochin, the great engraver of the day, to accompany him in a studious
tour through the holy land of the arts. Cochin was away nearly two
years, and on his return produced three little volumes (1758), in which
he deals such blows to some vaunted immortalities as made the idolators
by convention not a little angry. The abbe Richard (1766) published six
very stupid volumes on Italy, and such criticism on art as they contain
is not worthy of serious remark. The President de Brosses spent a year
in Italy (1739-40), and wrote letters to his friends at home, which may
be read to-day with interest and pleasure for their graphic picture of
Italian society; but the criticisms which they contain on the great
works of art are those of a well-informed man of the world, taking many
things for granted, rather than of a philosophical critic industriously
using his own mind. His book recalls to us how true the eighteenth
century was to itself in its hatred of Gothic architecture, that symbol
and associate of mysticism, and of the age which the eighteenth century
blindly abhorred as the source of all the tyrannical laws and cruel
superstitions that still weighed so heavily on mankind. "You know the
Palace of Saint Mark at Venice," says De Brosses: "_c'est un vilain
monsieur, s'il eu fut jamais, massif, sombre, et gothique, du plus
mechant gout_!"[23]

[23] _Lettres Familieres_, i. 174. (Ed. 1869.)

Dupaty, like De Brosses, an eminent lawyer, an acquaintance of Diderot
and an early friend of a conspicuous figure of a later time, the
ill-starred Vergniaud, travelled in Italy almost immediately before the
Revolution (1785), and his letters, when read with those of De Brosses,
are a curious illustration of the change that had come over the spirit
of men in the interval. He leaves the pictures of the Pitti collection
at Florence, and plunges into meditation in the famous gardens behind
the palace, rejoicing with much expansion in the glories of light and
air, in greenery and the notes of birds, and finally sums all up in one
rapturous exclamation of the vast superiority of nature over art.[24]

[24] Dupaty's _Lettres sur l'Italie_, No. 40. In talking of Rome, he
complains in a very Diderotian spirit of the want of _le beau
moral_. "On ne trouve ici dans les moeurs ni des hommes prives ni
des hommes publics, cette moralite, cette bienseance, dont les
moeurs francoises sont pl