of Austria.  Giambattista Aleotti, a native of pageant-loving Ferrara, traced the stately curves and noble orders of the galleries, designed the columns that support the raftered roof, marked out the orchestra, arranged the stage, and breathed into the whole the spirit of Palladio’s most heroic neo-Latin style.  Vast, built of wood, dishevelled, with broken statues and blurred coats of arms, with its empty scene, its uncurling frescoes, its hangings all in rags, its cobwebs of two centuries, its dust and mildew and discoloured gold—­this theatre, a sham in its best days, and now that ugliest of things, a sham unmasked and naked to the light of day, is yet sublime, because of its proportioned harmony, because of its grand Roman manner.  The sight and feeling of it fasten upon the mind and abide in the memory like a nightmare,—­like one of Piranesi’s weirdest and most passion-haunted etchings for the Carceri.  Idling there at noon in the twilight of the dust-bedarkened windows, we fill the tiers of those high galleries with ladies, the space below with grooms and pages; the stage is ablaze with torches, and an Italian Masque, such as our Marlowe dreamed of, fills the scene.  But it is impossible to dower these fancies with even such life as in healthier, happier ruins phantasy may lend to imagination’s figments.  This theatre is like a maniac’s skull, empty of all but unrealities and mockeries of things that are.  The ghosts we raise here could never have been living men and women:  questi sciaurati non fur mai vivi. So clinging is the sense of instability that appertains to every fragment of that dry-rot tyranny which seized by evil fortune in the sunset of her golden day on Italy.

In this theatre I mused one morning after visiting Fornovo; and the thoughts suggested by the battlefield found their proper atmosphere in the dilapidated place.  What, indeed, is the Teatro Farnese but a symbol of those hollow principalities which the despot and the stranger built in Italy after the fatal date of 1494, when national enthusiasm and political energy were expiring in a blaze of art, and when the Italians as a people had ceased to be; but when the phantom of their former life, surviving in high works of beauty, was still superb by reason of imperishable style!  How much in Italy of the Renaissance was, like this plank-built plastered theatre, a glorious sham!  The sham was seen through then; and now it stands unmasked:  and yet, strange to say, so perfect is its form that we respect the sham and yield our spirits to the incantation of its music.

The battle of Fornovo, as modern battles go, was a paltry affair; and even at the time it seemed sufficiently without result.  Yet the trumpets which rang on July 6, 1495, for the onset, sounded the reveil of the modern world; and in the inconclusive termination of the struggle of that day, the Italians were already judged and sentenced as a nation.  The armies who met that morning represented Italy and France,—­Italy, the Sibyl of Renaissance; France, the Sibyl of Revolution.  At the fall of evening Europe was already looking northward; and the last years of the fifteenth century were opening an act which closed in blood at Paris on the ending of the eighteenth.