[Footnote 223:  This tradition of Guido’s childhood I give for what it is worth, from Malvasia, op. cit. vol. ii. p. 53.  In after life, beside being piously addicted to Madonna-worship, he had a great dread of women in general and witches in particular.  What some will call spiritual, others effeminate, in his mature work, may be due to the temperament thus indicated.]

I have thought it well thus to preface what I have to say about these masters, partly because critics of the modern stamp, trusting more to their subjective impressions than to authoritative records, have painted the moral characters of Guido and Domenichino in lurid colors, and also because there is certainly something in their work which leaves a painful memory of unhealthy sentiment, impassiveness to pain, and polished carnalism on the mind.  It may incidentally be recorded that Lodovico Caracci, Guido Reni, and Francesco Albani are all of them, on very good authority, reported to have been even prudishly modest in their use of female models.  They never permitted a woman to strip entirely, and Guido carried his reserve to such a pitch that he preferred to leave his studio door open while drawing from a woman.[224] Malevolence might suggest that this was only part and parcel of post-Tridentine hypocrisy; and probably there is truth in the suggestion.  I certainly do not reckon such solicitous respect for garments entirely to their credit.  But it helps us to understand the eccentric compound of sentiment, sensuality, piety, and uneasy morality which distinguished the age, and which is continually perplexing the student of its art.

[Footnote 224:  Malvasia, op. cit. p. 53, p. 178.  The latter passage is preceded by a discussion of the nude in art which shows how Malvasia had imbibed Tridentine morality in the middle of Italy glowing with Renaissance masterpieces.]

Of these three men, Guido was the most genially endowed.  He alone derived a true spark from the previous age of inspiration.  He wearies us indeed with his effeminacy, and with the reiteration of a physical type sentimentalized from the head and bust of Niobe.  But thoughts of real originality and grace not seldom visited his meditations; and he alone deserved the name of colorist among the painters I have as yet ascribed to the Bolognese School.[225] Guido affected a cool harmony of blue, white, and deadened gold, which in the best pictures of his second manner—­the Fortune, the Bacchus and Ariadne of S. Luke’s in Rome, the Crucifixion at Modena—­has a charm akin to that of Metastasio’s silvery lyrics.  The samson at Bologna rises above these works both in force of conception and glow of color.  The Aurora of the Rospigliosi Casino attempts a wider scheme of hues, and is certainly, except for some lack of refinement in the attendant Hours, a very noble composition.  The S. Michael of the Cappuccini is seductive by its rich bravura style; and the large Pieta in the Bolognese Gallery impresses our mind by a monumental sadness and sobriety of tone.  The Massacre of the Innocents, though one of Guido’s most ambitious efforts, and though it displays an ingenious adaptation of the Niobe to Raphael’s mannerism, fails by falling between two aims—­the aim to secure dramatic effect, and the aim to treat a terrible subject with harmonious repose.