llegrini, whose decorations in this country
are mentioned by Horace Walpole and of which the most important are
preserved in the cupola and spandrils of the Grand Hall at Castle
Howard. Their work is still to be found in many a Venetian church or
North Italian gallery. Some of it is almost fine, though too often
vitiated by the affected, exaggerated spirit of their day. When
originality asserts itself more decidedly, Rosalba Carriera stands out
as an artist who acquired great popularity. In 1700, when she was a
young woman of twenty-four, she was already a great favourite with the
public. She began life as a lace-maker, but when trade was bad, Jean
Steve, a Frenchman, taught her to paint miniatures. She imparted a
wonderfully delicate feeling to her art, and, passing on to pastel, she
brought to this branch of portraiture a brilliancy and freshness which
it had not known before. Rosalba has perhaps preserved for us better
than any one else, those women of Venice who floated so lightly on the
dancing waves of that sparkling stream. There they are: La Cornaro; La
Maria Labia, who was surrounded by French lovers, "very courteous and
very beautiful"; La Zenobio and La Pisani; La Foscari, with her black
plumes; La Mocenigo, "the lady with the pearls." She has pinned them all
to the canvas; lovely, frail, light-hearted butterflies, with velvet
neck-ribbons round their snowy throats and coquettish patches on their
delicate skin and bouquets of flowers in their high-dressed hair and
sheeny bodices. They look at us with arch eyes and smile with melting
mouths, more frivolous than depraved; sweet, ephemeral, irresponsible in
every relation of life. Older men and women there are, too, when those
artificial years have produced a succession of rather dull, sodden
personages, kindly, inoffensive, but stupid, and still trifling heavily
with the world.

Of Rosalba we have another picture to compare with those of her sitters.
She and the other artists of her circle lived the merry, busy life of
the worker, and found in their art the antidote to the evil living and
the dissipation of the gay world which provided sitters and patrons.
Rosalba's _milieu_ is a type of others of its class. She lives with her
mother and sisters, an honest, cheerful, industrious existence. They are
fond of old friends and old books, and indulge in music and simple
pleasures. Her sisters help Rosalba by preparing the groundwork of
her paintings. She pays visits,