In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the constellation of living genius in every department of art, the riches of the Church, the luxurious habits and classical studies of the churchmen, the decline of religious conviction, and the ascendency of religious controversy, had combined to multiply church pictures, particularly those of a large and decorative character.  But, instead of the reign of faith, we had now the reign of taste.  There was an absolute passion for picturesque grouping; and, as the assembled figures were to be as varied as possible in action and attitude, the artistic treatment, in order to prevent the lines of form and the colours of the draperies from interfering with each other, required great skill and profound study:  some of these scenic groups have become, in the hands of great painters, such as Titian, Paul Veronese, and Annibale Caracci, so magnificent, that we are inclined to forgive their splendid errors.  The influence of Sanazzaro, and of his famous Latin poem on the Nativity ("De Partu Virginis"), on the artists of the middle of the sixteenth century, and on the choice and treatment of the subjects pertaining to the Madonna, can hardly be calculated; it was like that of Dante in the fourteenth century, but in its nature and result how different!  The grand materialism of Michael Angelo is supposed to have been allied to the genius of Dante; but would Dante have acknowledged the group of the Holy Family in the Florentine Gallery, to my feeling, one of the most profane and offensive of the so-called religious pictures, in conception and execution, which ever proceeded from the mind or hand of a great painter?  No doubt some of the sculptural Virgins of Michael Angelo are magnificent and stately in attitude and expression, but too austere and mannered as religious conceptions:  nor can we wonder if the predilection for the treatment of mere form led his followers and imitators into every species of exaggeration and affectation.  In the middle of the sixteenth century, the same artist who painted a Leda, or a Psyche, or a Venus one day, painted for the same patron a Virgin of Mercy, or a “Mater Purissima” on the morrow. Here, the votary told his beads, and recited his Aves, before the blessed Mother of the Redeemer; there, she was invoked in the purest Latin by titles which the classical mythology had far otherwise consecrated.  I know nothing more disgusting in art than the long-limbed, studied, inflated Madonnas, looking grand with all their might, of this period; luckily they have fallen into such disrepute that we seldom see them.  The “Madonna dell’ lungo Collo” of Parmigiano might be cited as a favourable example of this mistaken and wholly artificial grace. (Florence, Pitti Pal.)