Raffaelle did; take many models, and not take even him for your guide
alone to the exclusion of others. And yet the number is infinite of
those who seem, if one may judge by their style, to have seen no other
works but those of their master, or of some favourite whose manner is
their first wish and their last.

I will mention a few that occur to me of this narrow, confined,
illiberal, unscientific, and servile kind of imitators. Guido was thus
meanly copied by Elizabetta Sirani, and Simone Cantarini; Poussin, by
Verdier and Cheron; Parmigiano, by Jeronimo Mazzuoli; Paolo Veronese and
Iacomo Bassan had for their imitators their brothers and sons; Pietro de
Cortona was followed by Ciro Ferri and Romanelli; Rubens, by Jacques
Jordans and Diepenbeck; Guercino, by his own family, the Gennari; Carlo
Marratti was imitated by Giuseppe Chiari and Pietro da Pietri; and
Rembrandt, by Bramer, Eckhout, and Flink. All these, to whom may be
added a much longer list of painters, whose works among the ignorant pass
for those of their masters, are justly to be censured for barrenness and
servility.

To oppose to this list a few that have adopted a more liberal style of
imitation: Pelegrino Tibaldi, Rosso, and Primaticio did not coldly
imitate, but caught something of the fire that animates the works of
Michael Angelo. The Carraches formed their style from Pelegrino Tibaldi,
Correggio, and the Venetian School. Domenichino, Guido, Lanfranco,
Albano, Guercino, Cavidone, Schidone, Tiarini, though it is sufficiently
apparent that they came from the School of the Carraches, have yet the
appearance of men who extended their views beyond the model that lay
before them, and have shown that they had opinions of their own, and
thought for themselves, after they had made themselves masters of the
general principles of their schools.