[Footnote 229:  Go to S. Andrea nella Valle in Rome, to study the best of them.]

While the Caracci were reviving art at Bologna in the way that I have described, Caravaggio in Rome opposed the Mannerists after his own and a very different fashion.[230] The insipidities of men like Cesari drove him into a crude realism.  He resolved to describe sacred and historical events just as though they were being enacted in the Ghetto by butchers and fishwives.  This reaction against flimsy emptiness was wholesome; and many interesting studies from the taverns of Italy, portraits of gamesters, sharpers, bravi and the like, remain to prove Caravaggio’s mastery over scenes of common life.[231] But when he applied his principles to higher subjects, their vulgarity became apparent.  Only in one picture, the Entombment in the Vatican, did he succeed in affecting imagination forcibly by the evident realization of a tragic scene.  His martyrdoms are inexpressibly revolting, without appeal to any sense but savage blood-lust.  It seems difficult for realism, either in literature or art, not to fasten upon ugliness, vice, pain, and disease, as though these imperfections of our nature were more real than beauty, goodness, pleasure, and health.  Therefore Caravaggio, the leader of a school which the Italians christened Naturalists, may be compared to Zola.

[Footnote 230:  Michelangelo Amerighi da Caravaggio (1569-1609).]

[Footnote 231:  For the historian of manners in seventeenth-century Italy those pictures have a truly precious value, as they are executed with such passion as to raise them above the more careful but more lymphatic transcripts from beer-cellars in Dutch painting.]

A Spaniard, settled at Naples—­Giuseppe Ribera, nicknamed Lo Spagnoletto—­carried on Caravaggio’s tradition.  Spagnoletto surpassed his master in the brutally realistic expression of physical anguish.  His Prometheus writhing under the beak of the vulture, his disembowelled martyrs and skinless S. Bartholomews, are among the most nauseous products of a masculine nature blessed with robust health.  Were they delirious or hysterical, they would be less disgusting.  But no; they are merely vigorous and faithful representations of what anybody might have witnessed, when a traitor like Ravaillac or a Lombard untore was being put to death in agony.  His firm mental grip on cruelty, and the somber gloom with which he invested these ghastly transcripts from the torture-chamber, prove Ribera true to his Spanish origin.  Caravaggio delighted in color, and was indeed a colorist of high rank, considering the times in which he lived.  Spagnoletto rejoiced in somber shadows, as though to illustrate the striking sonnet I have quoted in another place from Campanella.[232]

[Footnote 232:  See above, part I. p. 47.]