The painting of the Eclectics was not spontaneous art.  It was art mechanically revived during a period of critical hesitancy and declining enthusiasms.  It was produced at Bologna, ‘la dotta’ or ‘la grassa,’ by Bolognese craftsmen.  This is worth remembering; for except Guido Guinicelli and Francesco Raibolini, no natives of Bologna were eminently gifted for the arts.  And Bologna was the city famous for her ponderous learning, famous also for the good cheer of her table, neither erudition nor savory meats being essential to the artist’s temperament.  The painting which emerged there at the close of the sixteenth century embodied religion and culture, both of a base alloy.  The Christianity of the age was not naive, simple, sincere, and popular, like that of the thirteenth century; but hysterical, dogmatic, hypocritical, and sacerdotal.  It was not Christianity indeed, but Catholicism galvanized by terror into reactionary movement.  The culture of the age was on the wane.  Men had long lost their first clean perception of classical literature, and the motives of the mediaeval past were exhausted.  Therefore, though the Eclectics went on painting the old subjects, they painted all alike with frigid superficiality.  If we examine the lists of pictures turned out by the Caracci and Guercino, we shall find a pretty equal quantity of saints and Susannas, Judiths and Cleopatras, Davids and Bacchuses, Jehovahs and Jupiters, anchorites and Bassarids, Faiths and Fortunes, cherubs and Cupids.  Artistically, all are on the same dead level of inspiration.  Nothing new or vital, fanciful or imaginative, has been breathed into antique mythology.  What has been added to religious expression is repellent.  Extravagantly ideal in ecstatic Magdalens and Maries, extravagantly realistic in martyrdoms and torments, extravagantly harsh in dogmatic mysteries and the ecclesiastical parade of power, extravagantly soft in sentimental tenderness and tearful piety, this new religious element, the element of the Inquisition, the Tridentine Council, and the Jesuits, contradicts the true gospel of Christ.  The painting which embodies it belongs to a spirit at strife with what was vital and progressive in the modern world.  It is therefore naturally abhorrent to us now; nor can it be appreciated except by those who yearn for the triumph of ultramontane principles.

If we turn from the intellectual content of this art to its external manifestation, we shall find similar reasons for its failure to delight or satisfy.  The ambition of the Caracci was to combine in one the salient qualities of earlier masters.  This ambition doomed their style to the sterility of hybrids.  Moreover, in selecting, they omitted just those features which had given grace and character to their models.  The substitution of generic types for portraiture, the avoidance of individuality, the contempt for what is simple and natural in details, deprived their work of attractiveness and suggestion.  It is noticeable