surface resists the ordinary solvents.141 This admixture of resinous solutions or varnishes with the solid is not alluded to, as far as we have seen, by any of the writers on Italian practice, but as the method corresponds with that now prevalent in England, the above hypothesis is not likely to be objected to for the present.
Various local circumstances and relations might seem to warrant the supposition that the Venetian painters used resinous substances. An important branch of commerce between the mountains of Friuli and Venice still consists in the turpentine or fir-resin.142 Similar substances produced from various trees, and known under the common name of balsams,143 were imported from the East through Venice, for general use, before the American balsams144 in some degree superseded them; and a Venetian painter, Marco Boschini, in his description of the Archipelago, does not omit to speak of the abundance of mastic produced in the island of Scio.145
The testimonies, direct or indirect, against the employment of any such substances by the Venetian painters, in the solid part of their work, seem, notwithstanding, very conclusive; we begin with the writer just named. In his principal composition, a poem146 describing the practice and the productions of the Venetian painters, Boschini speaks of certain colours which they shunned, and adds:—"In like manner (they avoided) shining liquids and varnishes, which I should rather call lackers;147 for the surface of flesh, if natural and unadorned, assuredly does not shine, nature speaks as to this plainly." After alluding to the possible alteration of this natural appearance by means of cosmetics, he continues: "Foreign artists set such great store by these varnishes, that a shining surface seems to them the only desirable quality in art. What trash it is they prize! fir-resin, mastic, and sandarach, and larch-resin (not to say treacle), stuff fit to polish boots.148 If those great painters of ours had to represent armour, a gold vase, a mirror, or anything of the kind, they made it shine with (simple) colours."149