It may seem strange to those who have visited the picture galleries of Italy, and have noticed how very large a number of the painters flourished after 1550, that I should have persistently spoken of the last half of the sixteenth century as a period of decadence.  This it was, however, in a deep and true sense of the word.  The force of the Renaissance was exhausted, and a time of relaxation had to be passed through, before the reaction known as the Counter-Reformation could make itself felt in art.  Then, and not till then, a new spiritual impulse produced a new style.  This secondary growth of painting began to flourish at Bologna in accordance with fresh laws of taste.  Religious sentiments of a different order had to be expressed; society had undergone a change, and the arts were governed by a genuine, if far inferior, inspiration.  Meanwhile, the Renaissance, so far as Italy is concerned, was ended.

It is one of the sad features of this subject, that each section has to end in lamentation.  Servitude in the sphere of politics; literary feebleness in scholarship; decadence in art:—­to shun these conclusions is impossible.  He who has undertaken to describe the parabola of a projectile, cannot be satisfied with tracing its gradual rise and determining its culmination.  He must follow its spent force, and watch it slowly sink with ever dwindling impetus to earth.  Intellectual movements, when we isolate them in a special country, observing the causes that set them in motion and calculating their retarding influences, may, not unreasonably, be compared to the parabola of a projectile.  To shrink from studying the decline of mental vigour in Italy upon the close of the Renaissance, would be therefore weak; though the task of tracing the impulse communicated by her previous energy to other nations, and their stirring under a like movement, might be more agreeable.

FOOTNOTES: 

[389] Frescoes in the Brera and at Lugano.

[390] S. Maurizio, on the Screen, inner church.  Lugano in the Angeli.

[391] In the Brera.  See also the Madonna, with Infant Christ, S. John, and a Lamb, at Lugano.

[392] Side chapel of S. Maurizio at Milan.  These frescoes are, in my opinion, Luini’s very best.  The whole church is a wonderful monument of Lombard art.

[393] “Crucifixion” at Lugano.

[394] See, for example, the oil-paintings in the cathedral of Como, so fascinating in their details, so lame in composition.

[395] In the Brera.

[396] Frescoes at Saronno and in the Sacro Monte at Varallo.