Some Account lvii
Thus ingenuously and modestly has this
great painter spoken of himself in the few
cation of which, though detected , found a puny, but per-
fectly homogeneous, champion, whose mortified vanity
prompted him to abet and countenance that silly fiction,
by confident and groundless assertions, false quotations,
and arguments still more flimsy and absurd than the im-
posture itself,) after such a deception, it was not at all
surprising that the cautious inquirer should have been slow
in giving credit to any new discov ery of ancient manuscripts
but the cases were extremely different ; for whether
the process of colouring said to be discovered was the
genuine method of the Venetian School, or at least one
similar in its effects, was a matter of experiment, and
easily ascertained. Some experiments have accordingly
been made, and it seems, with no great success. How-
ever ancient therefore these documents may he, they
hitherto appear to be of little value.
It is highly probable that the great colourists of former
times used certain methods in mixing and laying on
their colours, which they did not communicate to others,
or at least did not set down in writing ; their scholars con-
tenting themselves with adopting as much of the practice
of their masters as inspection and close observation would
give them ; and that by being thus confined to oral tradi-
tion, the mode which they followed, has been lost. Our
great painter, however, had undoubtedly attained a part of
the ancient process used in the Venetian School ; and by
various methods of his own invention produced a similar,
though perhaps not quite so brilliant an effect of colour.