[Footnote 225:  Lo Spada and Guercino, afterwards to be mentioned, were certainly colorists.]

Of Albani nothing need be said in detail.  Most people knew his pictures of the Four Elements, so neatly executed in a style adapting Flemish smoothness of surface to Italian suavity of line.  This sort of art delighted the cardinals and Monsignori of the seventeenth century.  But it has nothing whatsoever to say to and human soul.

On Domenichino’s two most famous pictures at Bologna Mr. Ruskin has written one of his over-poweringly virulent invectives.[226] It is worth inserting here at length.  More passionate words could hardly be chosen to express the disgust inspired in minds attuned to earlier Italian art by these once worshiped paintings.  Mr. Ruskin’s obvious injustice, intemperance, and ostentatious emphasis will serve to point the change of opinion which has passed over England since Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote.  His denunciation of the badness of Domenichino’s art, though expressed with such a clangor of exaggeration, fairly represents the feeling of modern students.  ‘The man,’ he says, ’who painted the Madonna del Rosario and Martyrdom of S. Agnes in the gallery of Bologna, is palpably incapable of doing anything good, great, or right in any field, way, or kind whatsoever....  This is no rash method of judgment, sweeping and hasty as it may appear.  From the weaknesses of an artist, or failures, however numerous, we have no right to conjecture his total inability; a time may come when he shall rise into sudden strength, or an instance occur when his efforts shall be successful.  But there are some pictures which rank not under the head of failures, but of perpetrations or commissions; some things which a man cannot do or say without sealing forever his character and capacity.  The angel holding the cross with his finger in his eye, the roaring, red-faced children about the crown of thorns, the blasphemous (I speak deliberately and determinedly) head of Christ upon the handkerchief, and the mode in which the martyrdom of the saint is exhibited (I do not choose to use the expressions which alone could characterize it), are perfect, sufficient, incontrovertible proofs that whatever appears good in any of the doings of such a painter must be deceptive, and that we may be assured that our taste is corrupted and false whenever we feel disposed to admire him.  I am prepared to support this position, however uncharitable it may seem; a man may be tempted into a gross sin by passion, and forgiven; and yet there are some kinds of sins into which only men of a certain kind can be tempted, and which cannot be forgiven.  It should be added, however, that the artistical qualities of these pictures are in every way worthy of the conceptions they realize.  I do not recollect any instance of color or execution so coarse and feelingless.’

[Footnote 226:  Modern Painters, vol. i. p. 87.]

We have only to think of the S. Agnes by Tintoretto, or of Luini’s St. Catherine, in order to be well aware how far Domenichino, as a painter, deviated from the right path of art.[227]