[Footnote 227:  I allude to the Tintoretto in S. Maria dell’Orto at Venice, and to the Luini in the Monastero Maggiore at Milan.  Yet the model of Luini’s S. Catherine was the infamous Contessa di Cellant, who murdered her husband and some lovers, and was beheaded for her crimes in Milan.  This fact demonstrates the value of the model in the hands of an artist capable of using it.]

Yet we are bound to acquit him, as a man, of that moral obliquity which Mr. Ruskin seems to impute.  Indeed, we know Domenichino to have been an unaffectedly good fellow.  He was misled by his dramatic bias, and also by the prevalent religious temper of his age.  Jesuitry had saturated the Italian mind; and in a former chapter I have dwelt upon the concrete materialism which formed the basis of the Jesuitical imagination.  In portraying the martyrdom of S. Agnes as he has done, Domenichino was only obeying the rules of Loyola’s Exercitia.  That he belonged to a school which was essentially vulgar in its choice of type, to a city never distinguished for delicacy of taste, and to a generation which was rapidly losing the sense of artistic reserve, suffices to explain the crude brutality of the conceptions which he formed of tragic episodes.[228] The same may be said about all those horrible pictures of tortures, martyrdoms, and acts of violence which were produced by the dozen in Italy at this epoch.  We turn from them with loathing.  They inspire neither terror nor pity, only the sickness of the shambles.  And yet it would be unjust to ascribe their unimaginative ghastliness to any special love of cruelty.  This evil element may be rationally deduced from false dramatic instinct and perverted habits of brooding sensuously on our Lord’s Passion, in minds deprived of the right feeling for artistic beauty.

[Footnote 228:  When I assert that the age was losing the sense of artistic reserve, I wish to refer back to what I have written about Marino, the dictator of the age in matters of taste.  See above, pp. 273, 274.]

Probably Domenichino thought that he was surpassing Titian’s Peter Martyr when he painted his hard and hideous parody of that great picture.  Yet Titian had already touched the extreme verge of allowable realization, and his work belonged to the sphere of higher pictorial art mainly by right of noble treatment.  Of this noble treatment, and of the harmonious coloring which shed a sanctifying splendor over the painful scene, Domenichino stripped his master’s design.  What he added was grimace, spasm, and the expression of degrading physical terror.

That Domenichino could be, in his own way, stately, is proved by the Communion of S. Jerome, in which he rehandled Agostino Caracci’s fine conception.  Though devoid of charm, this justly celebrated painting remains a monument of the success which may be achieved by the vigorous application of robust intellectual powers to the working out of a well-conceived and fully developed composition.  Domenichino’s gigantic saints and Sibyls, with their fleshy limbs, red cheeks, and upturned eyes, though famous enough in the last century, do not demand a word of comment now.[229] So strangely has taste altered, that to our eyes they seem scarcely decorative.