[Footnote 233:  But the men who used the word failed to perceive that what justified these qualities in Michelangelo’s work was piercing, poignant, spiritual passion, of which their age had nothing.]

Yet we feel that the man loved largeness, massiveness, and volume; that he was preoccupied with intellectual problems; planning deeply, and constructing strongly, under conditions unfavorable to spiritual freedom.

Guercino lived the life of an anchorite, absorbed in studies, unwived, sober, pious, truthful, sincere in his commerce with the world, unaffectedly virtuous, devoted to his art and God.  Some of his pictures bring forcibly before our minds the religious milieu created by the Catholic Revival.  I will take the single instance of a large oil-painting in the Bolognese Gallery.  It represents the reception of a Duke of Aquitaine into monastic orders by S. Bernard.  The knightly quality of the hero is adequately portrayed; his piety is masculine.  But an accessory to the main subject of the composition arrests attention.  A monk, earnestly pleading, emphatically gesticulating, addresses himself to the task of converting a young squire.  Perugino, or even Raphael, would have brought the scene quite otherwise before us.  The Duke’s consecration would of course have occupied a commanding place in the picture.  But the episodes would have been composed of comely groups or animated portraits.  Guercino, obedient to the religious spirit of the Counter-Reformation, compels sympathy with ecclesiastical propaganda.

Guido exercised a powerful influence over his immediate successors.  Guercino felt it when he painted that soulless picture of Abraham and Hagar, in the Brera—­the picture which excited Byron’s admiration, which has been praised for its accurate delineation of a teardrop, and which, when all is reckoned, has just nothing of emotion in it but a frigid inhumanity.  He competed with Guido in the fresco of the Lodovisi Aurora, a substantial work certainly, yet one that lacks the saving qualities of the Rospigliosi ceiling—­grace and geniality of fancy.

In the history of criticism there are few things more perplexing than the vicissitudes of taste and celebrity, whereby the idols of past generations crumble suddenly to dust, while the despised and rejected are lifted to pinnacles of glory.  Successive waves of aesthetical preference, following one upon the other with curious rapidity, sweep ancient fortresses of fame from their venerable basements, and raise upon the crests of wordy foam some delicate seashell that erewhile lay embedded in oblivious sand.  During the last half-century, taste has been more capricious, revolutionary, and apparently anarchical than at any previous epoch.  The unity of orthodox opinion has broken up.  Critics have sought to display originality by depreciating names famous in former ages, and by exalting minor stars to the rank of luminaries of the first magnitude.