_Baroccio_ (Umbrian: 1528-1612).
Federigo Barocci, or Baroccio, is the best of the "Mannerists."
"He feebly continued the style of Correggio," says Symonds,
"with a certain hectic originality, infusing sentimental
pietism into that great master's pagan sensuousness"
(_Renaissance_, viii. 211). His colouring is peculiar: he used
too much vermilion and ultramarine, and too few yellows. He was
a native of Urbino, and the son of a sculptor. In 1548 he went
to Rome and remained there some years, devoting his time to the
study of Raphael. He then returned to Urbino, again visiting
Rome in 1560, when he was employed in the Vatican. While there
he was nearly poisoned, by some rival it is supposed, and for
the rest of his long life he suffered from disease of the
stomach, which rendered him unable to do much work. He died at
Urbino at the age of eighty-four.
An admirable example of the decline of Italian art. The old religious
spirit has entirely vanished, and the Holy Family is represented
as worrying a bird with a cat! John the Baptist holds the little
goldfinch; while the Madonna expressly directs the attention of the
infant Christ to the fun. "See, the cat is trying to get at it," she
seems to say. Behind the bird, the painter, in unconscious irony,
has placed the Cross. The visitor who wishes to see how far Italian
art has travelled in a hundred years should compare this picture
with such an one as Bellini's (280), or with one of Raphael's, of
whom Baroccio was a fellow-countryman. The connecting link should
then be seen in Correggio (23). With Bellini or Perugino, the motive
is wholly religious. With Raphael it is intermingled with artistic
display. Correggio brings heaven wholly down to earth, but yet paints
his domestic scene with lovely grace. Baroccio brings, one may almost
say, heaven down to hell,[63] and uses all his skill to show the infant
Saviour's pleasure in teasing a bird. But the artist only embodied the
spirit of his time. Baroccio was one of the most celebrated painters of
his day, and his biographer (Bellori) writes of him that "his pencil
may be said to have been dedicated to religion: so devout, so tender,
and so calculated to awaken feelings of piety, are the sentiments
expressed in his pictures."