. _In this certainly men are not equal;_ and a man
can bring home wares only in proportion with the capital with which he
goes to market. Carlo, by diligence, made the most of what he had;
but there was undoubtedly a heaviness about him, which extended itself
uniformly to his invention, expression, his drawing, colouring, and the
general effect of his pictures. The truth is, he never equalled any of
his patterns in any one thing, and he added little of his own.'

Here, then, Reynolds, we see, fairly gives up the argument. Carlo, after
all, was a heavy hand; nor could all his diligence and his making
the most of what he had make up for the want of 'natural powers.' Sir
Joshua's good sense pointed out to him the truth in the individual
instance, though he might be led astray by a vague general theory. Such,
however, is the effect of a false principle that there is an evident
bias in the artist's mind to make genius lean upon others for support,
instead of trusting to itself and developing its own incommunicable
resources. So in treating in the Twelfth Discourse of the way in which
great artists are formed, Sir Joshua reverts very nearly to his first
position:

'The daily food and nourishment of the mind of an Artist is found in the
great works of his predecessors. There is no other way for him to become
great himself. _Serpens, nigi serpentem comederit, non fit draco._
Raffaelle, as appears from what has been said, had carefully studied the
works of Masaccio, and indeed there was no other, if we except Michael
Angelo (whom he likewise imitated),(1) so worthy of his attention; and
though his manner was dry and hard, his compositions formal, and not
enough diversified, according to the custom of Painters in that early
period, yet his works possess that grandeur and simplicity which
accompany, and even sometimes proceed from, regularity and hardness
of manner. We must consider the barbarous state of the arts before his
time, when skill in drawing was so little understood, that the best
of the painters could not even foreshorten the foot, but every figure
appeared to stand upon his toes, and what served for drapery had, from
the hardness and smallness of the folds, too much the appearance of
cords clinging round the body. He first introduced large drapery,
flowing in an easy and natural manner; indeed, he appears to be the
first who discovered the path that leads to every excellence to which
the art afterwards arrived, and m