But in the midst of these paganized and degenerate influences, the reform in the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church was preparing a revolution in religious art.  The Council of Trent had severely denounced the impropriety of certain pictures admitted into churches:  at the same time, in the conflict of creed which now divided Christendom, the agencies of art could not safely be neglected by that Church which had used them with such signal success.  Spiritual art was indeed no more.  It was dead:  it could never be revived without a return to those modes of thought and belief which had at first inspired it.  Instead of religious art, appeared what I must call theological art.  Among the events of this age, which had great influence on the worship and the representations of the Madonna, I must place the battle of Lepanto, in 1571, in which the combined fleets of Christendom, led by Don Juan of Austria, achieved a memorable victory over the Turks.  This victory was attributed by Pope Pius V. to the especial interposition of the Blessed Virgin.  A new invocation was now added to her Litany, under the title of Auxilium Christianorum; a new festival, that of the Rosary, was now added to those already held in her honour; and all the artistic genius which existed in Italy, and all the piety of orthodox Christendom, were now laid under contribution to incase in marble sculpture, to enrich with countless offerings, that miraculous house, which the angels had borne over land and sea, and set down at Loretto; and that miraculous, bejewelled, and brocaded Madonna, enshrined within it.

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In the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Caracci school gave a new impetus to religious, or rather, as it has been styled in contradistinction, sacerdotal or theological art.  If these great painters had been remarkable merely for the application of new artistic methods, for the success with which they combined the aims of various schools—­

  “Di Michel Angiol la terribil via
  E ’l vero natural di Tiziano,”

the study of the antique with the observation of real life,—­their works undoubtedly would never have taken such a hold on the minds of their contemporaries, nor kept it so long.  Everything to live must have an infusion of truth within it, and this “patchwork ideal,” as it has been well styled, was held together by such a principle.  The founders of the Caracci school, and their immediate followers, felt the influences of the time, and worked them out.  They were devout believers in their Church, and most sincere worshippers of the Madonna.  Guido, in particular, was so distinguished by his passionate enthusiasm for her, that he was supposed to have been favoured by a particular vision, which enabled him more worthily to represent her divine beauty.