[Footnote 212:  Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, by Vernon Lee.]

CHAPTER XIII.

THE BOLOGNESE SCHOOL OF PAINTERS.

Decline of Plastic Art—­Dates of the Eclectic Masters—­The Mannerists—­Baroccio—­Reaction started by Lodovico Caracci—­His Cousins Annibale and Agostino—­Their Studies—­Their Academy at Bologna—­Their Artistic Aims—­Dionysius Calvaert—­Guido Reni—­The Man and His Art—­Domenichino—­Ruskin’s Criticism—­Relation of Domenichino to the Piety of His Age—­Caravaggio and the Realists—­Ribera—­Lo Spagna—­Guercino—­His qualities as Colorist—­His Terribleness—­Private Life—­Digression upon Criticism—­Reasons why the Bolognese Painters are justly now neglected.

After tracing the origin of modern music at its fountain head in Palestrina, it requires some courage to approach the plastic arts at this same epoch.

Music was the last real manifestation of the creative genius in Italy.  Rarefied to evanescent currents of emotional and sensuous out-breathings, the spirit of the race exhaled itself in song from human throats, in melody on lute and viol, until the whole of Europe thrilled with the marvel and the mystery of this new language of the soul.  Music was the fittest utterance for the Italians of the Counter-Reformation period.  Debarred from political activity, denied the liberty of thought and speech, that gifted people found an inarticulate vehicle of expression in tone; tone which conveys all meanings to the nerves that feel, advances nothing to the mind that reasons, says everything without formulating a proposition.

Only a sense of duty to my subject, which demands completion, makes me treat of painting in the last years of the sixteenth century.  The great Italian cycle, rounded by Lionardo, Raffaello, Michelangelo, Correggio and Tiziano, was being closed at Venice by Tintoretto.  After him invention ceased.  But there arose at Bologna a school, bent on resuscitating the traditions of an art which had already done its utmost to interpret mind to mind through mediums of lovely form and color.  The founders of the Bolognese Academy, like Medea operating on decrepit Aeson, chopped up the limbs of painting which had ceased to throb with organic life, recombined them by an act of intellect and will, and having pieced them together, set the composite machine in motion on the path of studied method.  Their aim was analogous to that of the Church in its reconstitution of Catholicism; and they succeeded, in so far as they achieved a partial success, through the inspiration which the Catholic Revival gave them.  These painters are known as the Eclectics and this title sufficiently indicates their effort to revive art by recomposing what lay before them in disintegrated fragments.  They did not explore new territory or invent fresh vehicles of expression.  They sought to select the best points of Graeco-Roman