[Footnote 221:  See Malvasia, op. cit. vol. i. p. 277; vol. ii. p. 57.  The odd thing is that Malvasia tells these stories of the Lodovico-Aphrodite and the color-grinder-Magdalen with applause, as though they proved the mastery of Annibale Caracci and Guido.]

[Footnote 222:  The later Eclectics—­Spada, Domenichino, Guercino—­were to some extent saved by the influences they derived from Caravaggio and the Naturalisti.  But they had not the tact to see where the finer point of naturalistic art lies for a delicately minded painter.  They added its brutality, as employed by Caravaggio, to the insipidities of the Caracci, and produced such horrors as Domenichino’s Martyrdom of S. Agnes.]

There was at this time a native of Antwerp named Dionysius Calvaert, a coarse fellow of violent manners, who kept open school in Bologna.  The best of the Caracci’s pupils—­Guido Reni, Domenichino and Albani—­emigrated to their academy from this man’s workshop.  Something, as it seems to me, peculiar in the method of handling oil paint, which all three have in common, may perhaps be ascribed to early training under their Flemish master.  His brutality drove them out of doors; and, having sought the protection of Lodovico Caracci, they successively made such progress in the methods of painting as rendered them the most distinguished representatives of the Bolognese Revival.  All three were men of immaculate manners.  Guido Reni, beautiful as a Sibyl in youth, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and fair complexion, was, to the end of his illustrious career, reputed a virgin.  Albani, who translated into delicate oil-painting the sensuousness of the Adone, studied the forms of Nymphs and Venuses from his lovely wife, and the limbs of Amorini from the children whom she bore him regularly every year.  Domenichino, a man of shy, retiring habits, preoccupied with the psychological problems which he strove to translate into dramatic pictures, doted on one woman, whom he married, and who lived to deplore his death (as she believed) by poison.  Guido was specially characterized by devotion to Madonna.  He was a singular child.  On every Christmas eve, for seven successive years, ghostly knockings were heard upon his chamber door; and, every night, when he awoke from sleep, the darkness above his bed was illuminated by a mysterious egg-shaped globe of light.[223] His eccentricity in later life amounted to insanity, and at last he gave himself up wholly to the demon of the gaming-table.  Domenichino obeyed only one passion, if we except his passion for the wife he loved so dearly, and this was music.  He displayed some strangeness of temperament in a morbid dislike of noise and interruptions.  Otherwise, nothing disturbed the even current of an existence dedicated to solving questions of art.  Albani mixed more freely in the world than Domenichino, enjoyed the pleasures of the table and of sumptuous living, but with Italian sobriety, and expatiated in those spheres of literature which supplied him with motives for his coldly sensual pictures.  Yet he maintained the credit of a thoroughly domestic, soundly natured, and vigorously wholesome man.