On examining the dates which I have given, it will be noticed that the Bolognese Eclectics, intervening between the age of Michelangelo and the age of Nicholas Poussin, worked during the first fervor of the Catholic Revival.  Their art may therefore be taken as fairly representative of the religious temper and the profane culture of the Italians in the period influenced by the Council of Trent.  It represents that temper and that culture before the decline of the same influence, when the Counter Reformation was in active progress and the Papal pretensions to absolute dominion had received no check.

[Footnote 213:  The three founders of the school were thus born precisely during the most critical years of the Council.  They felt the Catholic reaction least.  That expressed itself most markedly in Domenichino, born seventeen years after its close.]

[Footnote 214:  Nich.  Poussin, b. 1594; Claude, 1600; Gaspar Poussin, 1613; Salvator Rosa, 1615; Luca Giordano, 1632; Canaletto, 1697.]

We should be wrong, however, to treat the Eclectics as though they succeeded without interruption to that ‘giant race, before the flood.’  Their movement was emphatically one of revival; and revival implies decadence.  After 1541, when Michelangelo finished the Last Judgment, and before 1584, when the Caracci were working on their frescoes in the Palazzo Fava at Bologna—­that is to say, between the last of the genuine Renaissance paintings and the first of the Revival—­nearly half a century elapsed, during which art sank into a slough of slovenly and soulless putrescence.[215] Every city of Italy swarmed with artists, adequately educated in technical methods, and apt at aping the grand style of their masters.  But in all their work there is nothing felt, nothing thought out, nothing expressed, nothing imagined.  It is a vast vacuity of meaningless and worthless brush-play, a wilderness of hollow trickery and futile fumbling with conventional forms.  The Mannerists, as they were called, covered acres of palace and church walls with allegories, histories, and legends, carelessly designed, rapidly executed, but pleasing the eye with crowds of figures and with gaudy colors.  Their colors are now faded.  Their figures are now seen to be reminiscences of Raphael’s, Correggio’s, Buonarroti’s draughtsmanship.  Yet they satisfied the patrons of that time, who required hasty work, and had not much money wherewith to reward the mature labors of a conscientious student.  In relation, moreover, to the spiritless and insincere architecture then coming into vogue, this art of the Mannerists can scarcely be judged out of place.  When I divulge the names of Giorgio Vasari, Giuseppe Cesari (Cav. d’Arpino), Tempesta, Fontana, Tibaldi, the Zuccari, the Procaccini, the Campi of Cremona, the scholars of Perino del Vaga, I shall probably call up before the reluctant eyes of many of my readers visions of dreary wanderings through weariful saloons and of disconsolate starings up at stuccoed cupolas in Rome and Genoa, in Florence and Naples, and in all the towns of Lombardy.[216]