society of Rome at this period was very brilliant.  Painters, sculptors, and goldsmiths mixed with scholars and poets, passing their time alternately in the palaces of dukes and cardinals and in the lodgings of gay women.  Bohemianism of the wildest type was combined with the manners of the great world.  A little incident described at some length by Cellini brings this varied life before us.  There was a club of artists, including Giulio Romano and other pupils of Raphael, who met twice a week to sup together and to spend the evening in conversation, with music and the recitation of sonnets.  Each member of this company brought with him a lady.  Cellini, on one occasion, not being provided for the moment with an innamorata, dressed up a beautiful Spanish youth called Diego as a woman, and took him to the supper.  The ensuing scene is described in the most vivid manner.  We see before us the band of painters and poets, the women in their bright costumes, the table adorned with flowers and fruit, and, as a background to the whole picture, a trellis of jasmines with dark foliage and starry blossoms.  Diego, called Pomona, with regard doubtless to his dark and ruddy beauty, is unanimously proclaimed the fairest of the fair.  Then a discovery of his sex is made; and the adventure leads, as usual in the doings of Cellini, to daggers, midnight ambushes, and vendettas that only end with bloodshed.

An episode of this sort may serve as the occasion for observing that the artists of the late Renaissance had become absorbed in the admiration of merely carnal beauty.  With the exception of Michael Angelo and Tintoretto, there was no great master left who still pursued an intellectual ideal.  The Romans and the Venetians simply sought and painted what was splendid and luxurious in the world around them.  Their taste was contented with well-developed muscles, gorgeous colour, youthful bloom, activity of limb, and grace of outline.  The habits of the day, voluptuous yet hardy, fostered this one-sided development of the arts; while the asceticism of the Middle Ages had yielded to a pagan cult of sensuality.  To draw un bel corpo ignudo with freedom was now the ne plus ultra of achievement.  How to express thought or to indicate the subtleties of emotion, had ceased to be the artist’s aim.  We have already noticed the passionate love of beauty which animated the great masters of the golden age.  This, in the less elevated natures of the craftsmen who succeeded them, and under the conditions of advancing national corruption, was no longer refined or restrained by delicacy of feeling or by loftiness of aim.  It degenerated into soulless animalism.  The capacity for perceiving and for reproducing what is nobly beautiful was lost.  Vulgarity and coarseness stamped themselves upon the finest work of men like Giulio Romano.  At this crisis it was proved how inferior was the neo-paganism of the sixteenth century to the paganism of antiquity it aped.  Mythology preserved Greek