Note 25 — Chapter IV

Agostino Caracci, who deserves to be numbered amongst the cleverest engravers of the end of the sixteenth century, did not blush to devote his talents to a similar publication, serious in style, but of most obscene intention. The Bolognese artist, like his celebrated countryman, seems to have wished to display at once his science and his shamelessness. The one only serves to make the other more inexcusable, and it is even still more difficult to tolerate this austere immodesty than the licentiousness, without æsthetic pretension, which characterises the little French prints sold under the rose in the eighteenth century.