text:  How vast must have been the genius how capacious the thought how intense the labour of the man who could thus master and bring to perfection this difficult art in a period so short as to men even of superior parts and unwearied application barely to gain the command of the pencil! Modern painting as it appears in the works of Michael Angelo Raphael and Titian is an art as elevated in kind as the highest flights of the epic or tragic muse and it has been brought to a perfection to be paralleled only by the greatest conceptions of Grecian statuary