that they never painted flowers.  While studying Titian’s landscapes, they omitted the iris and the caper-blossom and the columbine which star the grass beneath Ariadne’s feet.  The lessons of the rocks and chestnut-trees of his S. Jeromes Solitude were lost on them.  They began the false system of depicting ideal foliage and ideal precipices—­that is to say, trees which are not trees, and cliffs which cannot be distinguished from cork or stucco.  In like manner, the clothes wherewith they clad their personages were not of brocade or satin or broadcloth, but of that empty lie called drapery.  The purpled silks of Titian’s Lilac Lady, in the Pitti, the embroidered hems of Boccaccini da Cremona, the crimson velvet of Raphael’s Joanna of Aragon, Veronese’s cloth of silver and shot taffety, are replaced by one monotonous nondescript stuff, differently dyed in dull or glaring colors, but always shoddy.  Characteristic costumes have disappeared.  We shall not find in any of their Massacres of the Innocents a soldier like Bonifazio’s Dall’Armi.  In lieu of gems with flashing facets, or of quaint jewels from the Oreficeria, they adorn their kings and princesses with nothing less elevated than polished gold and ropes of pearls.  After the same fashion, furniture, utensils, houses, animals, birds, weapons, are idealized—­stripped, that is to say, of what in these things is specific and vital.

It would be incorrect to say that there are no exceptions in Eclectic painting to this evil system.  Yet the sweeping truth remains that the Caracci returned, not to what was best in their predecessors, but to what was dangerous and misleading.

The ‘grand style,’ in Sir Joshua’s sense of that phrase, denoting style which eliminates specific and characteristic qualities from objects, replacing them by so-called ‘ideal’ generalities, had already made its appearance in Raphael, Correggio, and Buonarroti We even find it in Da Vinci’s Last Supper.  Yet in Raphael it comes attended with divine grace; in Correggio with faun-like radiancy of gladness; in Buonarroti with Sinaitic sublimity; in Da Vinci with penetrative force of psychological characterization.  The Caracci and their followers, with a few exceptions—­Guido at his best being the notablest—­brought nothing of these saving virtues to the pseudo-grand style.

It was this delusion regarding nobility and elevation in style which betrayed so genial a painter as Reynolds into his appreciation of the Bolognese masters.  He admired them; but he admired Titian, Raphael, Correggio, and Buonarroti more.  And he admired the Eclectics because they developed the perilous part of the great Italian tradition.  Just as Coleridge recommended young students of dramatic verse to found their style at first on Massinger rather than on Shakespeare, so Reynolds thought that the Caracci were sound models for beginners in the science of idealization.  Shakespeare and Michelangelo are inimitable; Massinger and the Caracci exhibit the one thing needful to be learned, upon a scale not wholly unattainable by industry and talent.  That was the line of argument; and, granted that the pseudo-grand style is a sine qua non of painting, Reynolds’s position was logical.[238]