Though their chiaroscuro was accurately based on that of Correggio, it lacked his aerial play of semitones.  Though they went straight to Titian for color, they never approached Venetian lucidity and glow.  There was something vulgar in their imagination, prosaic in their feeling, leaden in their frigid touch on legend.  Who wants those countless gods and goddesses of the Farnese Gallery, those beblubbered saints and colossal Sibyls of the Bolognese Pinacoteca, those chubby cherubs and buxom nymphs, those Satyrs and S. Sebastians, to come down from the walls and live with us?  The grace of Raphael’s Galatea, the inspiration of Michelangelo’s Genii of the Sistine, the mystery of Lionardo’s Faun-S.  John, the wilding grace of Correggio’s Diana, the voluptuous fascination of Titian’s Venus, the mundane seductiveness of Veronese’s Europa, the golden glory of Tintoretto’s Bacchus,—­all have evanesced, and in their place are hard mechanic figures, excellently drawn, correctly posed, but with no touch of poetry.  Where, indeed, shall we find ’the light that never was on sea or land’ throughout Bologna?[220]

[Footnote 220:  Malvasia has preserved, in his Life of Primaticcio, a sonnet written by Agostino Caracci, in which the aims of the Eclectics are clearly indicated.  The good painter must have at his command Roman or classic design, Venetian movement and shadow, Lombard coloring, the sublimity of Michelangelo, the truth to nature of Titian, the pure and sovereign style of Correggio, Raphael’s symmetry, Tibaldi’s fitness and solidity, Primaticcio’s erudite invention, with something of Parmigianino’s grace (Fels.  Pittr. vol. i. p. 129).  Zanotti adds:  ’This sonnet is assuredly one which every painter ought to learn by heart and observe in practice.’]

Part of this failure must be ascribed to a radically false conception of the way to combine studies of nature with studies of art.  The Eclectics in general started with the theory that a painter ought to form mental ideals of beauty, strength, dignity, ferocity, and so forth, from the observation of characteristic individuals and acknowledged masterpieces.  These ideal types he has to preserve in his memory, and to use living persons only as external means for bringing them into play.  Thus, it was indifferent who sat to him as model.  He believed that he could invest the ugliest lump of living flesh with the loveliest fancy.  Lodovico supplied Annibale Caracci with the fleshy back of a naked Venus.  Guido Reni painted his Madonna’s heads from any beardless pupil who came handy, and turned his deformed color-grinder—­a man ’with a muzzle like a renegado’—­into the penitent Magdalen.[221] It was inevitable that forms and faces thus evolved should bear the stamp of mediocrity, monotony, and dullness on them.  Few, very few, painters—­perhaps only Michelangelo—­have been able to give to purely imagined forms the value and the individuality of persons; and he succeeded best in this perilous attempt when he designed the passionate Genii of the Sistine frescoes.  Such flights were far beyond the grasp of the Eclectics.  Seeking after the ‘grand style,’ they fell, as I shall show in the sequel of this chapter, into commonplace vacuity, which makes them now insipid.[222]