[Footnote 218:  I have mainly used the encyclopedic work entitled Felsina Pittrice (Bologna, 1841, 2 vols.) for my study of the Eclectics.  This is based upon the voluminous writings of the Count C.C.  Malvasia, who, having been born in 1616, and having enjoyed personal intercourse with the later survivors of the Bolognese Academy, was able to bequeath a vast mass of anecdotical and other material to posterity.  The collection contains critical annotations and additions by the hand of Zanotti and later art students, together with many illustrative documents of the highest value.  Reading this miscellaneous repertory, we are forced to regret that the same amount of characteristic and authentic information has not been preserved about one of the greater schools of Italy—­the Venetian, for example.]

[Footnote 219:  He acquired a somewhat infamous celebrity by his obscene engravings in the style of Giulio Romano.]

Like Lodovico, the brothers served their first apprenticeship in art at Parma and Venice.  Annibale’s letters from the former place show how Correggio subdued him, and the large copies he there made still preserve for us some shadows of Correggio’s time-ruined frescoes.  At Venice he executed a copy of Titian’s Peter Martyr.  This picture, the most dramatic of Titian’s works, and the most elaborate in its landscape, was destined to exercise a decisive influence over the Eclectic school.  From the Caracci to Domenichino we are able to trace the dominant tone and composition of that masterpiece.  No less decisive, as I have already observed, was the influence of Correggio’s peculiar style in the choice of type, the light and shade, and the foreshortenings of the Bolognese painters.  In some degree, the manner of Paolo Veronese may also be discerned.  The Caracci avoided Tintoretto, and at the beginning of their career they derived but little from Raphael or Michelangelo.  Theirs was at first a mainly Veneto-Lombardic eclecticism, dashed with something absorbed from Giulio Romano and something from the later Florentines.  It must not however, be supposed that they confined their attention to Italian painters.  They contrived to collect casts from antique marbles, coins, engravings of the best German and Italian workmanship, books on architecture and perspective, original drawings, and similar academical appliances.  Nor were they neglectful of drawing from the nude, or of anatomy.  Indeed, their days and nights were spent in one continuous round of study, which had for its main object the comparison of dead and living nature with the best specimens of art in all ages.  It may seem strange that this assiduity and thoroughness of method did not produce work of higher quality.  Yet we must remember that even enthusiastic devotion to art will not give inspiration, and that the most thorough science cannot communicate charm.  Though the Caracci invented fresh attitudes and showed complete mastery of the human form, their types remained commonplace.