r
successors. In their own house they opened an _Accademia_, calling it
_degli Incaminati_, "the opening a new way," or "the beginners." The
academy was furnished with casts, drawings, prints, a school for
anatomy, and for the living figure; receiving all comers with kindness;
teaching gratuitously, and, as it is said, without jealousy; but too
many facts are recorded to allow us to credit the banishment of this
infectious passion from the academy of the Caracci, who, like other
congregated artists, could not live together and escape their own
endemial fever.

It was here, however, that Agostino found his eminence as the director
of their studies; delivering lectures on architecture and perspective,
and pointing out from his stores of history and fable subjects for the
designs of their pupils, who, on certain days exhibited their works to
the most skilful judges, adjusting the merits by their decisions. "To
the crowned sufficient is the prize of the glory," says Lanzi; and while
the poets chanted their praises, the lyre of Agostino himself gratefully
celebrated the progress of his pupils. A curious sonnet has been
transmitted to us, where Agostino, like the ancient legislators,
compresses his new laws into a few verses, easily to be remembered. The
sonnet is now well known, since Fuseli and Barry have preserved it in
their lectures. This singular production has, however, had the hard fate
of being unjustly depreciated: Lanzi calls it _pittoresco veramente piu
che poetico_; Fuseli sarcastically compares it to "a medical
prescription." It delighted Barry, who calls it "a beautiful poem.
Considered as a didactic and descriptive poem, no lover of art who has
ever read it, will cease to repeat it till he has got it by heart. In
this academy every one was free to indulge his own taste, provided he
did not violate the essential principles of art; for though the critics
have usually described the character of this new school to have been an
imitation of the preceding ones, it was their first principle to be
guided by nature, and their own disposition; and if their painter was
deficient in originality, it was not the fault of this academy so much
as of the academician. In difficult doubts they had recourse to
Lodovico, whom Lanzi describes in his school like Homer among the
Greeks, _fons ingeniorum_, profound in every part of painting. Even the
recreations of the pupils were contrived to keep their mind and hand in
exercise; in