To the same connection with the Oratory we owe one of the most

remarkable series of Palestrina's compositions. These were written upon

the words of an Italian Canzone in thirty octave stanzas, addressed as a

prayer to the Virgin. Palestrina set each stanza, after the fashion of a

Madrigal, to different melodies; and the whole work proved a manual of

devotional music, in the purest artistic taste, and the most delicately

sentimental key of feeling. Together with this collection of spiritual

songs should be mentioned Palestrina's setting of passages from the Song

of Solomon in a series of motetts; which were dedicated to Gregory

XIII., in 1584. They had an enormous success. Ten editions between that

date and 1650 were poured out from the presses of Rome and Venice, to

satisfy the impatience of thousands who desired to feed upon 'the nectar

of their sweetness.' Palestrina chose for the motives of his

compositions such voluptuous phrases of the Vulgate as the following:

_Fasciculus myrrhae dilectus meus mihi._ _Fulcite me floribus, stipate

me malis, quia amore langueo._ _Vulnerasti cor meum, soror, sponsa mea._

This was the period when Italy was ringing with the secular sweetnesses

of Tasso's _Aminta_ and of Guarini's _Pastor fido_; when the devotion of

the cloister was becoming languorous and soft; when the cult of the

Virgin was assuming the extravagant proportions satirized by Pascal;

finally, when manners were affecting a tone of swooning piety blent with

sensuous luxuriousness. Palestrina's setting of the Canticle and of the

Hymn to Mary provided the public with music which, according to the

taste of that epoch, transferred terrestrial emotions into the regions

of paradisal bliss, and justified the definition of music as the

_Lamento dell'amore o la preghiera agli dei_. The great creator of a new

ecclesiastical style, the 'imitator of nature,' as Vincenzo Galilei

styled him, the 'prince of music,' as his epitaph proclaimed him, lent

his genius to an art, vacillating between mundane sensuality and

celestial rapture, which, however innocently developed by him in the

sphere of music, was symptomatic of the most unhealthy tendencies of his

race and age. While singing these madrigals and these motetts the youth

of either sex were no longer reminded, it is true, of tavern ditties or

dance measures. But the emotions of luxurious delight or passionate

ecstasy deep in their own natures were drawn forth, and sanctified by

application to the language of effeminate devotion.

I have dwelt upon these two sets of compositions, rather than upon the

masses of strictly and severely ecclesiastical music which Palestrina

produced with inexhaustible industry, partly because they appear to have

been extraordinarily popular, and partly because they illustrate those

tendencies in art and manners which the sentimental school of Bolognese

painters attempted to embody. They belong to that religious sphere which

the Jesuit Order occupied, governed, and administered upon the lines of

their prescribed discipline. These considerations are not merely

irrelevant. The specific qualities of Italian music for the next two

centuries were undoubtedly determined by the atmosphere of sensuous

pietism in which it flourished, at the very time when German music was

striking far other roots in the Chorales of the Reformation epoch. What

Palestrina effected was to substitute in Church music the clear and

melodious manner of the secular madrigal for the heavy and scholastic

science of the Flemish school, and to produce masterpieces of religious

art in his motetts on the Canticles which confounded the lines of

demarcation between pious and profane expression. He taught music to

utter the emotions of the heart; but those emotions in his land and race

were already tending in religion toward the sentimental and voluptuous.

There is no doubt that the peril to which music was exposed at the time

of the Tridentine Council was a serious and real one. When we remember

how intimate was the connection between the higher kinds of music and

the ritual of the Church, this will be apparent. Nor is it too much to

affirm that the art at that crisis, but for the favor shown to it by

Pius IV. and for Palestrina's intervention, might have been well-nigh

extinguished in Italy. How fatal the results would then have been for

the development of modern music, can be estimated by considering the

decisive part played by the Italians in the formation of musical style

from the end of the sixteenth century onwards to the age of Gluck,

Handel, Haydn and Mozart. Had the music of the Church in Italy been

confined at that epoch to Plain Song, as the Congregation of Reform

threatened, the great Italian school of vocalization would not have been

founded, the Conservatories of Naples and the Scuole of Venice would

have been silent, and the style upon which, dating from Palestrina's

inventions, the evolution of all species of the art proceeded, would

have passed into oblivion.

That this proposition is not extravagant, the history of music in

England will suffice to prove. Before the victory of Puritan principles

in Church and State, the English were well abreast of other races in

this art. During the sixteenth century, Tallis, Byrd, Morland, Wilbye,

Dowland and Orlando Gibbons could hold their own against Italian

masters. The musical establishments of cathedrals, royal and collegiate

chapels, and noble houses were nurseries for artists. Every English

home, in that age, like every German home in the eighteenth century,

abounded in amateurs who were capable of performing part-songs and

concerted pieces on the lute and viol with correctness. Under the

_regime_ of the Commonwealth this national growth of music received a

check from which it never afterwards recovered. Though the seventeenth

century witnessed the rising of one eminent composer, Purcell; though

the eighteenth was adorned with meritorious writers of the stamp of Blow

and Boyce; yet it is obvious that the art remained among us

unprogressive, at a time when it was making gigantic strides in Italy

and Germany. It is always dangerous to attribute the decline of art in a

nation to any one cause. Yet I think it can scarcely be contested that

the change of manners and of temperament wrought in England by the

prevalence of Puritan opinion, had much to answer for in this premature

decay of music. We may therefore fairly argue that if the gloomy passion

of intolerant fanaticism which burned in men like Caraffa and Ghislieri

had prevailed in Italy--a passion analogous in its exclusiveness to

Puritanism--or if no composer, in the place of Palestrina, had satisfied

the requirements of the Council and the congregation, the history of

music in Italy and Europe to us-wards would have been far different.

These considerations are adduced to justify the importance attached by

me to the episode of which Palestrina was the hero. Yet it should not be

forgotten that other influences were at work at the same time in Italy,

which greatly stimulated the advance of music. If space permitted, it

would be interesting to enlarge upon the work of Luca Marenzio, the

prince of madrigal-writers, and on the services rendered by Vincenzo

Galileo, father of the greatest man of science in his age, in placing

the practice of stringed instruments on a sound basis. It should also be

remembered that in the society of Filippo Neri at Rome, the Oratorio was

taking shape, and emerging from the simple elements of the Spiritual

Laud and _Aria Divota_. This form, however, would certainly have

perished if the austere party in the Church had prevailed against the

lenient for the exclusion of figured music, from religious exercises.

There was, moreover, an interesting contemporary movement at Florence,

which deserves some detailed mention. A private academy of amateurs and

artists formed itself for the avowed purpose of reviving the musical

declamation of the Greeks. As the new ecclesiastical style created by

Palestrina grew out of the Counter-Reformation embodied in the decrees

of the Tridentine Council, so this movement, which eventually resulted

in the Opera, attached itself to the earlier enthusiasms of the

Classical Revival. The humanists had restored Latin poetry; the

architects had perfected a neo-Latin manner; sculptors and painters had

profited by the study of antique fragments, and had reproduced the

bas-reliefs and arabesques of Roman palaces. It was now, much later in

the day, the turn of the musicians to make a similar attempt. Their

quest was vague and visionary. Nothing remained of Greek or Roman music.

To guide these explorers, there was only a dim instinct that the

ancients had declaimed dramatic verse with musical intonation. But, as

the alchemists sought the philosopher's stone, and founded modern

chemistry; as, according to an ancient proverb, they who search for

silver find gold; so it happened that, from the pedantic and

ill-directed attempts of this academy proceeded the system on which the

modern Oratorio and Opera were based. What is noticeable in these

experiments is, that a new form of musical expression, declamatory and

continuous, therefore dramatic, as opposed to the lyrical and fugal

methods of the contrapuntists, was in process of elaboration. Claudio

Monteverde, who may be termed the pioneer of _recitativo_, in his opera

of _Orfeo_; Giacomo Carissimi, in whose _Jephtha_ the form of the

Oratorio it already outlined, were the most eminent masters of the

school which took its origin in the Florentine Academy of the Palazzo

Vernio.

To pursue the subject further, would be to transgress the chronological

limits of my subject. It is enough to have attempted in this chapter to

show how the destinies of Italian music were secured and its species

determined in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. How that art

at its climax in the eighteenth century affected the manners, penetrated

the whole life, and influenced the literature of the Italians, may be

read in an English work of singular ability and originality.[212]

[Footnote 212: _Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy_, by Vernon

Lee.]

CHAPTER XIII.

THE BOLOGNESE SCHOOL OF PAINTERS.

Decline of Plastic Art--Dates of the Eclectic Masters--The

Mannerists--Baroccio--Reaction started by Lodovico Caracci--His

Cousins Annibale and Agostino--Their Studies--Their Academy at

Bologna--Their Artistic Aims--Dionysius Calvaert--Guido Reni--The

Man and His Art--Domenichino--Ruskin's Criticism--Relation of

Domenichino to the Piety of His Age--Caravaggio and the

Realists--Ribera--Lo Spagna--Guercino--His qualities as

Colorist--His Terribleness--Private Life--Digression upon

Criticism--Reasons why the Bolognese Painters are justly now

neglected.

After tracing the origin of modern music at its fountain head in

Palestrina, it requires some courage to approach the plastic arts at

this same epoch.

Music was the last real manifestation of the creative genius in Italy.

Rarefied to evanescent currents of emotional and sensuous

out-breathings, the spirit of the race exhaled itself in song from human

throats, in melody on lute and viol, until the whole of Europe thrilled

with the marvel and the mystery of this new language of the soul. Music

was the fittest utterance for the Italians of the Counter-Reformation

period. Debarred from political activity, denied the liberty of thought

and speech, that gifted people found an inarticulate vehicle of

expression in tone; tone which conveys all meanings to the nerves that

feel, advances nothing to the mind that reasons, says everything without

formulating a proposition.

Only a sense of duty to my subject, which demands completion, makes me

treat of painting in the last years of the sixteenth century. The great

Italian cycle, rounded by Lionardo, Raffaello, Michelangelo, Correggio

and Tiziano, was being closed at Venice by Tintoretto. After him

invention ceased. But there arose at Bologna a school, bent on

resuscitating the traditions of an art which had already done its utmost

to interpret mind to mind through mediums of lovely form and color. The

founders of the Bolognese Academy, like Medea operating on decrepit

Aeson, chopped up the limbs of painting which had ceased to throb with

organic life, recombined them by an act of intellect and will, and

having pieced them together, set the composite machine in motion on the

path of studied method. Their aim was analogous to that of the Church in

its reconstitution of Catholicism; and they succeeded, in so far as they

achieved a partial success, through the inspiration which the Catholic

Revival gave them. These painters are known as the Eclectics and this

title sufficiently indicates their effort to revive art by recomposing

what lay before them in disintegrated fragments. They did not explore

new territory or invent fresh vehicles of expression. They sought to

select the best points of Graeco-Roman and Italian style, unconscious

that the physical type of the Niobids, the voluptuous charm of

Correggio, the luminous color of Titian, the terribleness of

Michelangelo, and the serenity of Raphael, being the ultimate

expressions of distinct artistic qualities, were incompatible. A still

deeper truth escaped their notice--namely, that art is valueless unless

the artist has something intensely felt to say, and that where this

intensity of feeling exists, it finds for itself its own specific and

inevitable form.

'Poems distilled from other poems pass away,

The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes;

Admirers, importers, obedient persons,

make but the soil of literature.'

These profound sentences are the epitaph, not only of imitative poetry,

but also of such eclectic art as the Caracci instituted. Very little of

it bears examination now. We regard it with listlessness or loathing. We

turn from it without regret. We cannot, or do not, wish to keep it in

our memory.

Yet no student of Italian painting will refuse the Caracci that tribute

of respect which is due to virile effort. They were in vital sympathy

with the critical and analytical spirit of their age--an age mournfully

conscious that its scepter had departed--that

'Nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;'

an age incapable as yet of acquiescing in this gloom, strenuously eager

by study and by labor to regain the kingdom which belongs alone to

inspiration. Science and industry enabled them to galvanize the corpse

of art; into this they breathed the breath of the religion _a la mode_,

of fashionable sensuousness and prevalent sentimentality.

Michelangelo died in 1564, Paolo Veronese in 1588, Tintoretto in 1594.

These were the three latest survivors of the great generation, and each

of them had enjoyed a life of activity prolonged into extreme old age.

Their intellectual peers had long ago departed; Lionardo in 1520,

Raphael in 1522, Correggio in 1534.

'Theirs was the giant race, before the flood.'

These dates have to be kept in mind; for the painters of the Bolognese

School were all born after 1550, born for the most part at that decisive

epoch of the Tridentine Council which might be compared to a watershed

of time between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation--Lodovico

Caracci in 1555, Agostino in 1558, Annibale in 1560, Guido Reni in 1574,

Lionello Spada in 1576, Francesco Albani in 1578, Domenichino in 1581,

Guercino in 1590.[213] With the last of these men the eclectic impulse

was exhausted; and a second generation, derived in part from them,

linked the painters of the Renaissance to those of modern times. It is

sufficient to mention Nicholas and Gaspar Poussin, Claude Lorraine,

Salvator Rosa, Luca Giordano, and Canaletto as chief representatives of

this secondary group.[214]

On examining the dates which I have given, it will be noticed that the

Bolognese Eclectics, intervening between the age of Michelangelo and the

age of Nicholas Poussin, worked during the first fervor of the Catholic

Revival. Their art may therefore be taken as fairly representative of

the religious temper and the profane culture of the Italians in the

period influenced by the Council of Trent. It represents that temper and

that culture before the decline of the same influence, when the Counter

Reformation was in active progress and the Papal pretensions to absolute

dominion had received no check.

[Footnote 213: The three founders of the school were thus born precisely

during the most critical years of the Council. They felt the Catholic

reaction least. That expressed itself most markedly in Domenichino, born

seventeen years after its close.]

[Footnote 214: Nich. Poussin, b. 1594; Claude, 1600; Gaspar Poussin,

1613; Salvator Rosa, 1615; Luca Giordano, 1632; Canaletto, 1697.]

We should be wrong, however, to treat the Eclectics as though they

succeeded without interruption to that 'giant race, before the flood.'

Their movement was emphatically one of revival; and revival implies

decadence. After 1541, when Michelangelo finished the Last Judgment, and

before 1584, when the Caracci were working on their frescoes in the

Palazzo Fava at Bologna--that is to say, between the last of the genuine

Renaissance paintings and the first of the Revival--nearly half a

century elapsed, during which art sank into a slough of slovenly and

soulless putrescence.[215] Every city of Italy swarmed with artists,

adequately educated in technical methods, and apt at aping the grand

style of their masters. But in all their work there is nothing felt,

nothing thought out, nothing expressed, nothing imagined. It is a vast

vacuity of meaningless and worthless brush-play, a wilderness of hollow

trickery and futile fumbling with conventional forms. The Mannerists, as

they were called, covered acres of palace and church walls with

allegories, histories, and legends, carelessly designed, rapidly

executed, but pleasing the eye with crowds of figures and with gaudy

colors. Their colors are now faded. Their figures are now seen to be

reminiscences of Raphael's, Correggio's, Buonarroti's draughtsmanship.

Yet they satisfied the patrons of that time, who required hasty work,

and had not much money wherewith to reward the mature labors of a

conscientious student. In relation, moreover, to the spiritless and

insincere architecture then coming into vogue, this art of the

Mannerists can scarcely be judged out of place. When I divulge the names

of Giorgio Vasari, Giuseppe Cesari (Cav. d'Arpino), Tempesta, Fontana,

Tibaldi, the Zuccari, the Procaccini, the Campi of Cremona, the scholars

of Perino del Vaga, I shall probably call up before the reluctant eyes

of many of my readers visions of dreary wanderings through weariful

saloons and of disconsolate starings up at stuccoed cupolas in Rome and

Genoa, in Florence and Naples, and in all the towns of Lombardy.[216]

In an earlier volume I briefly sketched the development of this

pernicious mannerism, which now deluged the arts of Italy. Only one

painter, outside Venice, seems to have carried on a fairly good

tradition. This was Federigo Baroccio (1528-1612), who feebly continued

the style of Correggio, with a certain hectic originality, infusing

sentimental pietism into that great master's pagan sensuousness. The

mixture is disagreeable; and when one is obliged to mention Baroccio as

the best in a bad period, this accentuates the badness of his

contemporaries. He has however, historical value from another point of

view, inasmuch as nothing more strongly characterizes the eclecticism of

the Caracci than their partiality for Correggio.[217] Though I have no

reason to suppose that Baroccio, living chiefly as he did at Urbino,

directly influenced their style, the similarity between his ideal and

theirs is certainly striking. It seems to point at something inevitable

in the direction taken by the Eclectics.

[Footnote 215: I of course except Venice, for reasons which I have

sufficiently set forth in _Renaissance in Italy_, vol. iii. p. 347. Long

after other schools of Italy the Venetian was still only adolescent.]

[Footnote 216: I have not thought it worth while to write down more than

a very few names of the Mannerists. Notice how often they worked in

whole families and indistinguishable coteries.]

[Footnote 217: Everyone familiar with European picture-galleries will

remember cabinet pieces by the Caracci, especially Ecce Homos, Pietas,

Agonies in the Garden, which look like copies from Correggio with a dash

of added sentimentalism.]

Such was the state of art in Italy when Lodovico Caracci, the son of a

Bolognese butcher, conceived his plan of replacing it upon a sounder

system.[218] Instinct led him to Venice, where painting was still alive.

The veteran Tintoretto warned him that he had no vocation. But Lodovico

obstinately resolved to win by industry what nature seemed to have

denied him. He studied diligently at Florence, Parma, Mantua, and

Venice, founding his style upon those of Andrea del Sarto, Correggio,

Titian, Parmigiano, Giulio Romano, and Primaticcio. When he again

settled at Bologna, he induced his two cousins, Agostino and Annibale,

the sons of a tailor, to join him in the serious pursuit of art.

Agostino was a goldsmith by trade, already expert in the use of the

burin, which he afterwards employed more frequently than the brush.[219]

Of the three Caracci he was the most versatile, and perhaps the most

gifted. There is a note of distinction and attainment in his work.

Annibale, the youngest, was a rough, wild, hasty, and hot-tempered lad,

of robust build and vigorous intellect, but boorish in his manners,

fond of low society, and eaten up with jealousy. They called him the

_ragazzaccio_, or 'lout of a boy,' when he began to make his mark at

Bologna. Agostino presented a strong contrast to his brother, being an

accomplished musician, an excellent dancer, a fair poet, fit to converse

with noblemen, and possessed of very considerable culture. Lodovico, the

eldest of the cousins, acted as mentor and instructor to the others. He

pacified their quarrels, when Annibale's jealousy burst out; set them

upon the right methods of study, and passed judgment on their paintings.

[Footnote 218: I have mainly used the encyclopedic work entitled

_Felsina Pittrice_ (Bologna, 1841, 2 vols.) for my study of the

Eclectics. This is based upon the voluminous writings of the Count C.C.

Malvasia, who, having been born in 1616, and having enjoyed personal

intercourse with the later survivors of the Bolognese Academy, was able

to bequeath a vast mass of anecdotical and other material to posterity.

The collection contains critical annotations and additions by the hand

of Zanotti and later art students, together with many illustrative

documents of the highest value. Reading this miscellaneous repertory, we

are forced to regret that the same amount of characteristic and

authentic information has not been preserved about one of the greater

schools of Italy--the Venetian, for example.]

[Footnote 219: He acquired a somewhat infamous celebrity by his obscene

engravings in the style of Giulio Romano.]

Like Lodovico, the brothers served their first apprenticeship in art at

Parma and Venice. Annibale's letters from the former place show how

Correggio subdued him, and the large copies he there made still preserve

for us some shadows of Correggio's time-ruined frescoes. At Venice he

executed a copy of Titian's Peter Martyr. This picture, the most

dramatic of Titian's works, and the most elaborate in its landscape, was

destined to exercise a decisive influence over the Eclectic school. From

the Caracci to Domenichino we are able to trace the dominant tone and

composition of that masterpiece. No less decisive, as I have already

observed, was the influence of Correggio's peculiar style in the choice

of type, the light and shade, and the foreshortenings of the Bolognese

painters. In some degree, the manner of Paolo Veronese may also be

discerned. The Caracci avoided Tintoretto, and at the beginning of

their career they derived but little from Raphael or Michelangelo.

Theirs was at first a mainly Veneto-Lombardic eclecticism, dashed with

something absorbed from Giulio Romano and something from the later

Florentines. It must not however, be supposed that they confined their

attention to Italian painters. They contrived to collect casts from

antique marbles, coins, engravings of the best German and Italian

workmanship, books on architecture and perspective, original drawings,

and similar academical appliances. Nor were they neglectful of drawing

from the nude, or of anatomy. Indeed, their days and nights were spent

in one continuous round of study, which had for its main object the

comparison of dead and living nature with the best specimens of art in

all ages. It may seem strange that this assiduity and thoroughness of

method did not produce work of higher quality. Yet we must remember that

even enthusiastic devotion to art will not give inspiration, and that

the most thorough science cannot communicate charm. Though the Caracci

invented fresh attitudes and showed complete mastery of the human form,

their types remained commonplace. Though their chiaroscuro was

accurately based on that of Correggio, it lacked his aerial play of

semitones. Though they went straight to Titian for color, they never

approached Venetian lucidity and glow. There was something vulgar in

their imagination, prosaic in their feeling, leaden in their frigid

touch on legend. Who wants those countless gods and goddesses of the

Farnese Gallery, those beblubbered saints and colossal Sibyls of the

Bolognese Pinacoteca, those chubby cherubs and buxom nymphs, those

Satyrs and S. Sebastians, to come down from the walls and live with us?

The grace of Raphael's Galatea, the inspiration of Michelangelo's Genii

of the Sistine, the mystery of Lionardo's Faun-S. John, the wilding

grace of Correggio's Diana, the voluptuous fascination of Titian's

Venus, the mundane seductiveness of Veronese's Europa, the golden glory

of Tintoretto's Bacchus,--all have evanesced, and in their place are

hard mechanic figures, excellently drawn, correctly posed, but with no

touch of poetry. Where, indeed, shall we find 'the light that never was

on sea or land' throughout Bologna?[220]

[Footnote 220: Malvasia has preserved, in his _Life of Primaticcio_, a

sonnet written by Agostino Caracci, in which the aims of the Eclectics

are clearly indicated. The good painter must have at his command Roman

or classic design, Venetian movement and shadow, Lombard coloring, the

sublimity of Michelangelo, the truth to nature of Titian, the pure and

sovereign style of Correggio, Raphael's symmetry, Tibaldi's fitness and

solidity, Primaticcio's erudite invention, with something of

Parmigianino's grace (_Fels. Pittr._ vol. i. p. 129). Zanotti adds:

'This sonnet is assuredly one which every painter ought to learn by

heart and observe in practice.']

Part of this failure must be ascribed to a radically false conception of

the way to combine studies of nature with studies of art. The Eclectics

in general started with the theory that a painter ought to form mental

ideals of beauty, strength, dignity, ferocity, and so forth, from the

observation of characteristic individuals and acknowledged

masterpieces. These ideal types he has to preserve in his memory, and

to use living persons only as external means for bringing them into

play. Thus, it was indifferent who sat to him as model. He believed that

he could invest the ugliest lump of living flesh with the loveliest

fancy. Lodovico supplied Annibale Caracci with the fleshy back of a

naked Venus. Guido Reni painted his Madonna's heads from any beardless

pupil who came handy, and turned his deformed color-grinder--a man 'with

a muzzle like a renegado'--into the penitent Magdalen.[221] It was

inevitable that forms and faces thus evolved should bear the stamp of

mediocrity, monotony, and dullness on them. Few, very few,

painters--perhaps only Michelangelo--have been able to give to purely

imagined forms the value and the individuality of persons; and he

succeeded best in this perilous attempt when he designed the passionate

Genii of the Sistine frescoes. Such flights were far beyond the grasp of

the Eclectics. Seeking after the 'grand style,' they fell, as I shall

show in the sequel of this chapter, into commonplace vacuity, which

makes them now insipid.[222]

[Footnote 221: See Malvasia, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 277; vol. ii. p. 57.

The odd thing is that Malvasia tells these stories of the

Lodovico-Aphrodite and the color-grinder-Magdalen with applause, as

though they proved the mastery of Annibale Caracci and Guido.]

[Footnote 222: The later Eclectics--Spada, Domenichino, Guercino--were

to some extent saved by the influences they derived from Caravaggio and

the Naturalisti. But they had not the tact to see where the finer point

of naturalistic art lies for a delicately minded painter. They added its

brutality, as employed by Caravaggio, to the insipidities of the

Caracci, and produced such horrors as Domenichino's Martyrdom of S.

Agnes.]

There was at this time a native of Antwerp named Dionysius Calvaert, a

coarse fellow of violent manners, who kept open school in Bologna. The

best of the Caracci's pupils--Guido Reni, Domenichino and

Albani--emigrated to their academy from this man's workshop. Something,

as it seems to me, peculiar in the method of handling oil paint, which

all three have in common, may perhaps be ascribed to early training

under their Flemish master. His brutality drove them out of doors; and,

having sought the protection of Lodovico Caracci, they successively made

such progress in the methods of painting as rendered them the most

distinguished representatives of the Bolognese Revival. All three were

men of immaculate manners. Guido Reni, beautiful as a Sibyl in youth,

with blonde hair, blue eyes, and fair complexion, was, to the end of his

illustrious career, reputed a virgin. Albani, who translated into

delicate oil-painting the sensuousness of the _Adone_, studied the forms

of Nymphs and Venuses from his lovely wife, and the limbs of Amorini

from the children whom she bore him regularly every year. Domenichino, a

man of shy, retiring habits, preoccupied with the psychological problems

which he strove to translate into dramatic pictures, doted on one woman,

whom he married, and who lived to deplore his death (as she believed) by

poison. Guido was specially characterized by devotion to Madonna. He was

a singular child. On every Christmas eve, for seven successive years,

ghostly knockings were heard upon his chamber door; and, every night,

when he awoke from sleep, the darkness above his bed was illuminated by

a mysterious egg-shaped globe of light.[223] His eccentricity in later

life amounted to insanity, and at last he gave himself up wholly to the

demon of the gaming-table. Domenichino obeyed only one passion, if we

except his passion for the wife he loved so dearly, and this was music.

He displayed some strangeness of temperament in a morbid dislike of

noise and interruptions. Otherwise, nothing disturbed the even current

of an existence dedicated to solving questions of art. Albani mixed more

freely in the world than Domenichino, enjoyed the pleasures of the table

and of sumptuous living, but with Italian sobriety, and expatiated in

those spheres of literature which supplied him with motives for his

coldly sensual pictures. Yet he maintained the credit of a thoroughly

domestic, soundly natured, and vigorously wholesome man.

[Footnote 223: This tradition of Guido's childhood I give for what it is

worth, from Malvasia, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 53. In after life, beside

being piously addicted to Madonna-worship, he had a great dread of women

in general and witches in particular. What some will call spiritual,

others effeminate, in his mature work, may be due to the temperament

thus indicated.]

I have thought it well thus to preface what I have to say about these

masters, partly because critics of the modern stamp, trusting more to

their subjective impressions than to authoritative records, have painted

the moral characters of Guido and Domenichino in lurid colors, and also

because there is certainly something in their work which leaves a

painful memory of unhealthy sentiment, impassiveness to pain, and

polished carnalism on the mind. It may incidentally be recorded that

Lodovico Caracci, Guido Reni, and Francesco Albani are all of them, on

very good authority, reported to have been even prudishly modest in

their use of female models. They never permitted a woman to strip

entirely, and Guido carried his reserve to such a pitch that he

preferred to leave his studio door open while drawing from a woman.[224]

Malevolence might suggest that this was only part and parcel of

post-Tridentine hypocrisy; and probably there is truth in the

suggestion. I certainly do not reckon such solicitous respect for

garments entirely to their credit. But it helps us to understand the

eccentric compound of sentiment, sensuality, piety, and uneasy morality

which distinguished the age, and which is continually perplexing the

student of its art.

[Footnote 224: Malvasia, _op. cit._ p. 53, p. 178. The latter passage is

preceded by a discussion of the nude in art which shows how Malvasia had

imbibed Tridentine morality in the middle of Italy glowing with

Renaissance masterpieces.]

Of these three men, Guido was the most genially endowed. He alone

derived a true spark from the previous age of inspiration. He wearies us

indeed with his effeminacy, and with the reiteration of a physical type

sentimentalized from the head and bust of Niobe. But thoughts of real

originality and grace not seldom visited his meditations; and he alone

deserved the name of colorist among the painters I have as yet ascribed

to the Bolognese School.[225] Guido affected a cool harmony of blue,

white, and deadened gold, which in the best pictures of his second

manner--the Fortune, the Bacchus and Ariadne of S. Luke's in Rome, the

Crucifixion at Modena--has a charm akin to that of Metastasio's silvery

lyrics. The samson at Bologna rises above these works both in force of

conception and glow of color. The Aurora of the Rospigliosi Casino

attempts a wider scheme of hues, and is certainly, except for some lack

of refinement in the attendant Hours, a very noble composition. The S.

Michael of the Cappuccini is seductive by its rich bravura style; and

the large Pieta in the Bolognese Gallery impresses our mind by a

monumental sadness and sobriety of tone. The Massacre of the Innocents,

though one of Guido's most ambitious efforts, and though it displays an

ingenious adaptation of the Niobe to Raphael's mannerism, fails by

falling between two aims--the aim to secure dramatic effect, and the aim

to treat a terrible subject with harmonious repose.

[Footnote 225: Lo Spada and Guercino, afterwards to be mentioned, were

certainly colorists.]

Of Albani nothing need be said in detail. Most people knew his pictures

of the Four Elements, so neatly executed in a style adapting Flemish

smoothness of surface to Italian suavity of line. This sort of art

delighted the cardinals and Monsignori of the seventeenth century. But

it has nothing whatsoever to say to and human soul.

On Domenichino's two most famous pictures at Bologna Mr. Ruskin has

written one of his over-poweringly virulent invectives.[226] It is worth

inserting here at length. More passionate words could hardly be chosen

to express the disgust inspired in minds attuned to earlier Italian art

by these once worshiped paintings. Mr. Ruskin's obvious injustice,

intemperance, and ostentatious emphasis will serve to point the change

of opinion which has passed over England since Sir Joshua Reynolds

wrote. His denunciation of the badness of Domenichino's art, though

expressed with such a clangor of exaggeration, fairly represents the

feeling of modern students. 'The man,' he says, 'who painted the Madonna

del Rosario and Martyrdom of S. Agnes in the gallery of Bologna, is

palpably incapable of doing anything good, great, or right in any field,

way, or kind whatsoever.... This is no rash method of judgment, sweeping

and hasty as it may appear. From the weaknesses of an artist, or

failures, however numerous, we have no right to conjecture his total

inability; a time may come when he shall rise into sudden strength, or

an instance occur when his efforts shall be successful. But there are

some pictures which rank not under the head of failures, but of

perpetrations or commissions; some things which a man cannot do or say

without sealing forever his character and capacity. The angel holding

the cross with his finger in his eye, the roaring, red-faced children

about the crown of thorns, the blasphemous (I speak deliberately and

determinedly) head of Christ upon the handkerchief, and the mode in

which the martyrdom of the saint is exhibited (I do not choose to use

the expressions which alone could characterize it), are perfect,

sufficient, incontrovertible proofs that whatever appears good in any of

the doings of such a painter must be deceptive, and that we may be

assured that our taste is corrupted and false whenever we feel disposed

to admire him. I am prepared to support this position, however

uncharitable it may seem; a man may be tempted into a gross sin by

passion, and forgiven; and yet there are some kinds of sins into which

only men of a certain kind can be tempted, and which cannot be forgiven.

It should be added, however, that the artistical qualities of these

pictures are in every way worthy of the conceptions they realize. I do

not recollect any instance of color or execution so coarse and

feelingless.'

[Footnote 226: _Modern Painters_, vol. i. p. 87.]

We have only to think of the S. Agnes by Tintoretto, or of Luini's St.

Catherine, in order to be well aware how far Domenichino, as a painter,

deviated from the right path of art.[227]

[Footnote 227: I allude to the Tintoretto in S. Maria dell'Orto at

Venice, and to the Luini in the Monastero Maggiore at Milan. Yet the

model of Luini's S. Catherine was the infamous Contessa di Cellant, who

murdered her husband and some lovers, and was beheaded for her crimes in

Milan. This fact demonstrates the value of the model in the hands of an

artist capable of using it.]

Yet we are bound to acquit him, as a man, of that moral obliquity which

Mr. Ruskin seems to impute. Indeed, we know Domenichino to have been an

unaffectedly good fellow. He was misled by his dramatic bias, and also

by the prevalent religious temper of his age. Jesuitry had saturated the

Italian mind; and in a former chapter I have dwelt upon the concrete

materialism which formed the basis of the Jesuitical imagination. In

portraying the martyrdom of S. Agnes as he has done, Domenichino was

only obeying the rules of Loyola's _Exercitia_. That he belonged to a

school which was essentially vulgar in its choice of type, to a city

never distinguished for delicacy of taste, and to a generation which was

rapidly losing the sense of artistic reserve, suffices to explain the

crude brutality of the conceptions which he formed of tragic

episodes.[228] The same may be said about all those horrible pictures of

tortures, martyrdoms, and acts of violence which were produced by the

dozen in Italy at this epoch. We turn from them with loathing. They

inspire neither terror nor pity, only the sickness of the shambles. And

yet it would be unjust to ascribe their unimaginative ghastliness to any

special love of cruelty. This evil element may be rationally deduced

from false dramatic instinct and perverted habits of brooding sensuously

on our Lord's Passion, in minds deprived of the right feeling for

artistic beauty.

[Footnote 228: When I assert that the age was losing the sense of

artistic reserve, I wish to refer back to what I have written about

Marino, the dictator of the age in matters of taste. See above, pp. 273,

274.]

Probably Domenichino thought that he was surpassing Titian's Peter

Martyr when he painted his hard and hideous parody of that great

picture. Yet Titian had already touched the extreme verge of allowable

realization, and his work belonged to the sphere of higher pictorial art

mainly by right of noble treatment. Of this noble treatment, and of the

harmonious coloring which shed a sanctifying splendor over the painful

scene, Domenichino stripped his master's design. What he added was

grimace, spasm, and the expression of degrading physical terror.

That Domenichino could be, in his own way, stately, is proved by the

Communion of S. Jerome, in which he rehandled Agostino Caracci's fine

conception. Though devoid of charm, this justly celebrated painting

remains a monument of the success which may be achieved by the vigorous

application of robust intellectual powers to the working out of a

well-conceived and fully developed composition. Domenichino's gigantic

saints and Sibyls, with their fleshy limbs, red cheeks, and upturned

eyes, though famous enough in the last century, do not demand a word of

comment now.[229] So strangely has taste altered, that to our eyes they

seem scarcely decorative.

[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.]

This digression upon the Naturalists was needed partly to illustrate the

nature of the attempted revival of the art of painting at this epoch,

and partly to introduce two notable masters of the Bolognese school.

Lionello Spada, a street-arab of Bologna, found his way into the studio

of the Caracci, where he made himself a favorite by roguish ways and

ready wit. He afterwards joined Caravaggio, and, when he reappeared in

Lombardy, he had formed a manner of his own, more resplendent in color

and more naturalistic than that of the Caracci, but with less of realism

than his Roman teacher's. If I could afford space for anecdotical

details, the romance of Spada's life would furnish much entertaining

material. But I must press on toward Guercino, who represents in a more

famous personality this blending of the Bolognese and Naturalistic

styles. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri got his nickname of Il Guercino, or

the 'Squintling,' from an accident which distorted his right eye in

babyhood. Born of poor parents, he was apprenticed to indifferent

painters in Bologna at an early age, his father agreeing to pay for the

boy's education by a load of grain and a vat of grapes delivered yearly.

Thus Guercino owed far less to academical studies than to his own

genius. Being Lodovico Caracci's junior by thirty-five years, and

Annibale's by thirty, he had ample opportunities for studying the

products of their school in Bologna, without joining the Academy. A

generation lay between him and the first Eclectics. Nearly the same

space of time separated Guercino from the founder of the Naturalists,

and it was universally admitted in his lifetime that he owed to

Caravaggio in coloring no less than he derived from the Caracci in

sobriety and dignity of conception. These qualities of divergent schools

Guercino combined in a manner marked by salient individuality. As a

colorist, he approached the Tenebrosi--those lovers of surcharged

shadows and darkened hues, whose gloom culminated in Ribera. But we

note a fat and buttery _impasto_ in Guercino, which distinguishes his

work from the drier and more meager manner of the Roman-Neapolitan

painters. It is something characteristic of Bologna, a richness which we

might flippantly compare to sausage, or a Flemish smoothness, indicating

Calvaert's influence. More than this, Guercino possessed a harmony of

tones peculiar to himself, and strongly contrasted with Guido's

silver-gray gradations. Guido's coloring, at its best, often reminds one

of olive branches set against a blue sea and pale horizon in faintly

amber morning light. The empurpled indigoes, relieved by smouldering

Venetian red, which Guercino loved, suggest thunder-clouds, dispersed,

rolling away through dun subdued glare of sunset reflected upward from

the west. And this scheme of color, vivid but heavy, luminous but

sullen, corresponded to what contemporaries called the Terribilita of

Guercino's conception. Terribleness was a word which came into vogue to

describe Michelangelo's grand manner. It implied audacity of

imagination, dashing draughtsmanship, colossal scale, something demonic

and decisive in execution.[233] The terrible takes in Guercino's work

far lower flights than in the Sistine Chapel. With Michelangelo it

soared like an eagle; with Guercino it flitted like a bat. His brawny

saints are ponderous, not awe-inspiring.

[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. A man, yet in middle life, can remember with what

reverence engravings after Raphael, the Caracci, and Poussin were

treated in his boyhood; how Fra Angelico and Perugino ruled at a

somewhat later period; how one set of eloquent writers discovered

Blake, another Botticelli, and a third Carpaccio; how Signorelli and

Bellini and Mantegna received tardy recognition; and now, of late years,

how Tiepolo has bidden fair to obtain the European _grido_. He will also

bear in mind that the conditions of his own development--studies in the

Elgin marbles, the application of photography to works of art, the

publications of the Arundel Society, and that genius of new culture in

the air which is more potent than all teaching, rendered for himself

each oracular utterance interesting but comparatively unimportant--as it

were but talk about truths evident to sight.

Meanwhile, amid this gabble of 'sects and schisms,' this disputation

which makes a simple mind take refuge in the epigram attributed to Swift

on Handel and Bononcini,[234] criticism and popular intelligence have

been unanimous upon two points, first, in manifesting a general dislike

for Italian art after the date of Raphael's third manner, and a

particular dislike for the Bolognese painters; secondly, in an earnest

effort to discriminate and exhibit what is sincere and beautiful in

works to which our forefathers were unintelligibly irresponsive. A

wholesome reaction, in one word, has taken place against academical

dogmatism; and the study of art has been based upon appreciably better

historical and aesthetical principles.

[Footnote 234:

'Strange that such difference should be

'Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.']

The seeming confusion of the last half-century ought not, therefore, to

shake our confidence in the possibility of arriving at stable laws of

taste. Radical revolutions, however salutary, cannot be effected without

some injustice to ideals of the past and without some ill-grounded

enthusiasm for the ideals of the moment. Nor can so wide a region as

that of modern European art be explored except by divers pioneers, each

biassed by personal predilections and peculiar sensibilities, each

liable to changes of opinion under the excitement of discovery, each

followed by a coterie sworn to support their master's _ipse dixit_.

The chief thing is to obtain a clear conception of the mental atmosphere

in which sound criticism has to live and move and have its being. 'The

form of this world passes; and I would fain occupy myself only with that

which constitutes abiding relations.' So said Goethe; and these words

have much the same effect as that admonition of his 'to live with steady

purpose in the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful.' The true critic must

divert his mind from what is transient and ephemeral, must fasten upon

abiding relations, _bleibende Verhaeltnisse_. He notes that one age is

classical, another romantic; that _this_ swears by Giotto, _that_ by the

Caracci. Meanwhile, he resolves to maintain that classics and romantics,

the Caracci and Giotto, are alike only worthy of regard in so far as

they exemplify the qualities which bring art into the sphere of abiding

relations. One writer is eloquent for Fra Angelico, another for Rubens;

the one has personal sympathy for the Fiesolan monk, the other for the

Flemish courtier. Our true critic renounces idiosyncratic whims and

partialities, striving to enter with firm purpose into the understanding

of universal goodness and beauty. In so far as he finds truth in

Angelico and Rubens, will he be appreciative of both.

Aristotle laid it down as an axiom that the ultimate verdict in matters

of taste is 'what the man of enlightened intelligence would decide.' The

critic becomes a man of enlightened intelligence, a [Greek: phronimos],

by following the line of Goethe's precepts. In working out self-culture,

he will derive assistance by the way from the commanding philosophical

conception of our century. All things with which we are acquainted are

in evolutionary process. Everything belonging to human nature is in a

state of organic transition--passing through necessary phases of birth,

growth, decline, and death. Art, in any one of its specific

manifestations--Italian painting for example--avoids this law of organic

evolution, arrests development at the fairest season of growth, averts

the decadence which ends in death, no more than does an oak. The oak,

starting from an acorn, nourished by earth, air, light, and water,

offers indeed a simpler problem than so complex an organism as Italian

painting, developed under conditions of manifold diversity. Yet the

dominant law controls both equally.

It is not, however, in evolutions that we must seek the abiding

relations spoken of by Goethe. The evolutionary conception does not

supply those to students of art, though it unfolds a law which is

permanent and of universal application in the world at large. It forces

us to dwell on necessary conditions of mutability and transformation. It

leads the critic to comprehend the whole, and encourages the habit of

scientific tolerance. We are saved by it from uselessly fretting

ourselves because of the ungodly and the inevitable; from mourning over

the decline of Gothic architecture into Perpendicular aridity and

flamboyant feebleness, over the passage of the scepter from Sophocles to

Euripides or from Tasso to Marino, over the chaos of Mannerism,

Eclecticism and Naturalism into which Italian painting plunged from the

height of its maturity. This toleration and acceptance of unavoidable

change need not imply want of discriminative perception. We can apply

the evolutionary canon in all strictness without ignoring that adult

manhood is preferable to senile decrepitude, that Pheidias surpasses the

sculptors of Antinous, that one Madonna of Gian Bellini is worth all the

pictures of the younger Palma, and that Dossi's portrait of the

Ferrarese jester is better worth having than the whole of Annibale

Caracci's Galleria Farnesina.[235] It will even lead us to select for

models those works which bear the mark of adolescence or vigorous

maturity, as supplying more fruitful sources for our own artistic

education.

[Footnote 235: The great picture by Dosso Dossi, to which I have

alluded, is in the Modenese gallery.]

Nevertheless, not in evolution, but in man's soul, his intellectual and

moral nature, must be sought those abiding relations which constitute

sound art, and are the test of right aesthetic judgment. These are such

as truth, simplicity, sobriety, love, grace, patience, modesty,

thoughtfulness, repose, health, vigor, brain-stuff, dignity of

imagination, lucidity of vision, purity, and depth of feeling. Wherever

the critic finds these--whether it be in Giotto at the dawn or in Guido

at the evensong of Italian painting, in Homer or Theocritus at the two

extremes of Greek poetry--he will recognize the work as ranking with

those things from which the soul draws nourishment. At the same time, he

may not neglect the claims of craftsmanship. Each art has its own

vehicle of expression, and exacts some innate capacity for the use of

that vehicle from the artist. Therefore the critic must be also

sufficiently versed in technicalities to give them their due value. It

can, however, be laid down, as a general truth, that while immature or

awkward workmanship is compatible with aesthetic excellence, technical

dexterity, however skillfully applied, has never done anything for a

soulless painter.

Criticism, furthermore, implies judgment; and that judgment must be

adjusted to the special nature of the thing criticised. Art is different

from ethics, from the physical world, from sensuality, however refined.

It will not, therefore, in the long run do for the critic of an art to

apply the same rules as the moralist, the naturalist, or the hedonist.

It will not do for him to be contented with edification, or

differentiation of species, or demonstrable delightfulness as the

test-stone of artistic excellence. All art is a presentation of the

inner human being, his thought and feeling, through the medium of

beautiful symbols in form, color, and sound. Our verdict must therefore

be determined by the amount of thought, the amount of feeling, proper to

noble humanity, which we find adequately expressed in beautiful

aesthetic symbols. And the man who shall pronounce this verdict is, now

as in the days of Aristotle, the man of enlightened intelligence, sound

in his own nature and open to ideas. Even his verdict will not be final;

for no one is wholly free from partialities due to the age in which he

lives, and to his special temperament. Still, a consensus of such

verdicts eventually forms that voice of the people which, according to

an old proverb, is the voice of God. Slowly, and after many successive

siftings, the cumulative votes of the _phronimoi_ decide. Insurgents

against their judgment, in the case of acknowledged masters like

Pheidias, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, are doomed to final defeat, because

this judgment is really based upon abiding relations between art and

human nature.

Our hope with regard to the unity of taste in the future then is, that,

all sentimental or academical seekings after the ideal having been

abandoned, momentary theories founded upon idiosyncratic or temporary

partialities exploded, and nothing accepted but what is solid and

positive, the scientific spirit shall make men progressively more and

more conscious of those _bleibende Verhaeltnisse_, more and more capable

of living in the whole; also that, in proportion as we gain a firmer

hold upon our own place in the world, we shall come to comprehend with

more instinctive certitude what is simple, natural, and honest,

welcoming with gladness all artistic products that exhibit these

qualities. The perception of the enlightened man will then be the taste

of a healthy person who has made himself acquainted with the laws of

evolution in art and in society, and is able to test the excellence of

work in any stage, from immaturity to decadence, by discerning what

there is of truth, sincerity, and natural vigor in it.

This digression was forced upon me by the difficulty of properly

appreciating the Bolognese Eclectics now. What would be the amused

astonishment of Sir Joshua Reynolds, if he returned to London at the

present moment, and beheld the Dagon of his esteemed Caracci dashed to

pieces by the ark of Botticelli--Carpaccio enthroned--Raffaello

stigmatized as the stone of stumbling and the origin of evil? Yet

Reynolds had as good a right to his opinion as any living master of the

brush, or any living masters of language. There is no doubt that the

Bolognese painters sufficed for the eighteenth century, whose taste

indeed they had created.[236] There is equally no doubt that for the

nineteenth they are insufficient.[237] The main business of a critic is

to try to answer two questions: first why did the epoch produce such

art, and why did it rejoice in it?--secondly, has this art any real

worth beyond a documentary value for the students of one defined

historical period; has it enduring qualities of originality, strength,

beauty, and inspiration? To the first of these questions I have already

given some answer by showing under what conditions the Caracci reacted

against mannerism. In the due consideration of the second we are

hampered by the culture of our period, which has strongly prejudiced all

minds against the results of that reaction.

[Footnote 236: The passage from Lodovico Caracci through Poussin to

Reynolds is direct and unbroken. 'Poussin,' says Lanzi, 'ranked

Domenichino directly next to Raffaello.' _History of Painting in Italy_,

Engl. Tr. vol. iii. p. 84.]

[Footnote 237: Perhaps a generation will yet arise which shall take the

Caracci and their scholars into favor, even as people of refinement in

our own days find a charm in patches, powder, perukes, sedan-chairs,

patchouli, and other lumber from the age despised by Keats. I remember

visiting a noble English lady at her country seat. We drank tea in her

room, decorated by a fashionable 'Queen Anne' artist. She told us that

the quaintly pretty furniture of the last century which adorned it had

recently been brought down from the attic, whither her fore bears had

consigned it as tasteless--Gillow in their minds superseding

Chippendale.]

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

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]

[Footnote 238: It is only because I am an Englishman, writing a popular

book for English folk, that I thus spend time in noticing the opinions

of Joshua Reynolds. Addressing a European audience in this year grace, I

should not have thought of eddying about his obsolete doctrine.]

The criticism and the art-practice of this century have combined to

shake our faith in the grand style. The spirit of the Romantic movement,

penetrating poetry first, then manifesting itself in the reflective

writings of Rio and Lord Lindsay, Ruskin and Gautier, producing the

English landscape-painters and pre-Raphaelites, the French Realists and

Impressionists, has shifted the center of gravity in taste. Science,

too, contributes its quota. Histories of painting, like Kugler's, and

Crowe and Cavalcaselle's, composed in an impartial and searching spirit

of investigation, place students at a point of view removed from

prejudice and academical canons of perfection. Only here and there,

under special reactionary influences, as in the Dusseldorf and Munich

schools of religious purists, has anything approaching to the

eighteenth-century 'grand style' delusion reappeared.

Why, therefore, the Eclectics are at present pining in the shade of

neglect is now sufficiently apparent. We dislike their religious

sentiments. We repudiate their false and unimaginative ideality. We

recognize their touch on antique mythology to be cold and lifeless.

Superficial imitations of Niobe and the Belvedere Apollo have no

attraction for a generation educated by the marbles of the Parthenon.

Dull reproductions of Raphael's manner at his worst cannot delight men

satiated with Raphael's manner at his best. Whether the whirligig of

time will bring about a revenge for the Eclectics yet remains to be

seen. Taste is so capricious, or rather the conditions which create

taste are so complex and inscrutable, that even this, which now seems

impossible, may happen in the future. But a modest prediction can be

hazarded that nothing short of the substitution of Catholicism for

science and of Jesuitry for truth in the European mind will work a

general revolution in their favor.

CHAPTER XIV.

CONCLUSION.

The main Events of European History--Italy in the

Renaissance--Germany and Reformation--Catholic Reaction--Its

Antagonism to Renaissance and Reformation--Profound Identity of

Renaissance and Reformation--Place of Italy in European

Civilization--Want of Sympathy between Latin and Teutonic

Races--Relation of Rome to Italy--Macaulay on the Roman Church--On

Protestantism--Early Decline of Renaissance Enthusiasms--Italy's

Present and Future.

I.

The four main events of European history since the death of Christ are

the decline of Graeco-Roman civilization, the triumph of Christianity as

a new humanizing agency, the intrusion of Teutonic and Slavonic tribes

into the comity of nations, and the construction of the modern world of

thought by Renaissance and Reformation.

As seems to be inevitable in the progress of our species, each of these

changes involved losses, compensated by final gains; for humanity moves

like a glacier, plastically, but with alternating phases of advance and

retreat, obeying laws of fracture and regelation.

It would thus be easy to deplore the collapse of that mighty and

beneficent organism which we call the Roman Empire. Yet without this

collapse how could the Catholic Church have supplied inspiration to

peoples gifted with fresh faculties, endowed with insight differing from

that of Greeks and Romans?

It is tempting to lament the extinction of arts letters, and elaborated

habits of civility, which followed the barbarian invasions. Yet without

such extinction, how can we imagine to ourselves the growth of those new

arts, original literatures, and varied modes of social culture, to which

we give the names of mediaeval, chivalrous, or feudal?

It is obvious that we can quarrel with the Renaissance for having put an

end to purely Christian arts and letters by imposing a kind of pagan

mannerism on the spontaneous products of the later mediaeval genius. But

without this reversion to the remaining models of antique culture, how

could the European races have become conscious of historical continuity;

how could the corrupt system of Papal domination have been broken by

Reform; how, finally, could Science, the vital principle of our present

civilization, have been evolved?

In all these instances it appears that the old order must yield place to

the new, not only because the new is destined to incorporate and

supersede it, but also because the old has become unfruitful. Thus, the

Roman Empire, having discharged its organizing function, was decrepit,

and classical civilization, after exhibiting its strength in season, was

decaying when the Latin priesthood and the barbarians entered that

closed garden of antiquity, and trampled it beneath their feet.

Mediaeval religion and modes of thought, in like manner, were at the

point of ossifying, when Humanism intervened to twine the threads of

past and present into strands that should be strong as cables for the

furtherance of future energy.

It is incontestable that the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation,

each of them on different grounds antagonistic to the Renaissance,

appear to have retarded that emancipation of the reason, begun by

Humanism, which is still in progress. Nevertheless, the strife of

Protestantism and Catholicism was needed for preserving moral and

religious elements which might have been too lightly dropped, and for

working these into the staple of the modern consciousness. The process

of the last three centuries, attended as it has been by serious

drawbacks to the Spanish and Italian peoples, and by a lamentable waste

of vigor to the Teutonic nations, has yet resulted in a permeation of

the modern compost with the leaven of Christianity. Unchecked, it is

probable that the Renaissance would have swept away much that was

valuable and deserved to be permanent. Nor, without the flux and reflux

of contending principles by which Europe was agitated in the

Counter-Reformation period, could the equipoise of reciprocally

attracting and repelling States, which constitutes the modern as

different from the ancient or the mediaeval groundwork of political

existence, have been so efficiently established.

II.

Permanence and homogeneity are not to be predicated of 'anything that's

merely ours and mortal.' We have missed the whole teaching of history if

we wail aloud because Greek and Roman culture succumbed to barbarism,

out of which mediaeval Christianity emerged; because the revival of

learning diverted arts and letters in each Occidental nation from their

home-plowed channels; because Protestant theologians and Spanish Jesuits

impeded that self-evolution of the reason which Italian humanists

inaugurated. No less futile were it to waste declamatory tears upon the

strife of absolutism with new-fledged democracy, or to vaticinate a

reign of socialistic terror for the immediate future. We have to

recognize that man cannot be other than what he makes himself; and he

makes himself in obedience to immutable although unwritten laws, whereof

he only of late years became dimly conscious. It is well, then, while

reflecting on the lessons of some deeply studied epoch in world-history,

to regard the developments with which we have been specially occupied,

no less than the ephemeral activity of each particular individual, as

factors in a universal process, whereof none sees the issue, but which,

willing or unwilling, each man helps to further. We shall then

acknowledge that a contest between Conservatism and Liberalism, between

established order and the order that is destined to replace it, between

custom and innovation, constitutes the essence of vitality in human

affairs. The nations by turns are protagonists in the drama of progress;

by turns are doomed to play the part of obstructive agents. Intermingled

in conflict which is active life, they contribute by their phases of

declension and resistance, no less than by their forward movements, to

the growth of an organism which shall probably in the far future be

coextensive with the whole human race.

III.

These considerations are suggested to us by the subject I have handled

in this work. The first five volumes were devoted to showing how Italy,

in the Renaissance, elaborated a new way of regarding man and the world,

a new system of education, new social manners, and a new type of culture

for herself and Europe. This was her pioneer's work in the period of

transition from the middle ages; and while she was engaged in it, all

classes, from popes and princes down to poetlings and pedants, seemed

for a while to have lost sight of Catholic Christianity. They were

equally indifferent to that corresponding and contemporary movement

across the Alps, which is known as Reformation. They could not discern

the close link of connection which binds Renaissance to Reformation.

Though at root identical in tendency towards freedom, these stirrings of

the modern spirit assumed externally such diverse forms as made them

reciprocally repellent. Only one European nation received both impulses

simultaneously. That was England, which adopted Protestantism and

produced the literature of Spenser, Bacon, and Shakespeare at the same

epoch. France, earlier than England, felt Renaissance influences, and

for some while seemed upon the point of joining the Reformation. But

while the French were hesitating, Spain proclaimed herself the

uncompromising enemy of Protestantism, and Rome, supported by this

powerful ally, dragged Italy into the Catholic reaction. That effort

aimed at galvanizing a decrepit Church into the semblance of vital

energy, and, while professing the reformation of its corrupt system,

stereotyped all that was antagonistic in its creed and customs to the

spirit of the modern world. The Catholic Revival necessitated vigorous

reaction, not only against Protestantism, but also against the

Liberalism of the Renaissance and the political liberties of peoples. It

triumphed throughout Southern Europe chiefly because France chose at

length the Catholic side. But the triumph was only partial, condemning

Spain and Italy indeed to intellectual barrenness for a season, but not

sufficing to dominate and suppress the development of rationalism. The

pioneer's work of Italy was over. She joined the ranks of obscurantists

and obstructives. Germany, having failed to accomplish the Reformation

in time, was distracted by the Catholic reaction, which plunged her

into a series of disastrous wars. It remained for England and Holland,

not, however, without similar perturbations in both countries, to lead

the van of progress through two centuries; after which this foremost

post was assigned to France and the United States.

IV.

The views which I have maintained throughout my work upon the

Renaissance will be found, I think, to be coherent. They have received

such varied illustrations that it is difficult to recapitulate the

principles on which they rest, without repetition. The main outline of

the argument, however, is as follows. During the middle ages, Western

Christendom recognized, in theory at least, the ideal of European unity

under the dual headship of the Papacy and Empire. There was one civil

order and one Church. Emperor and Pope, though frequently at strife,

were supposed to support each other for the common welfare of

Christendom. That mediaeval conception has now, in the centuries which

we call modern, passed into oblivion; and the period in which it ceased

to have effective value we denote as the period of the Renaissance and

the Reformation. So long as the ideal held good, it was possible for the

Papacy to stamp out heresies and to stifle the earlier stirrings of

antagonistic culture. Thus the precursory movements to which I alluded

in the first chapter of my 'Age of the Despots,' seemed to be abortive;

and no less apparently abortive were the reformatory efforts of Wyclif

and Huss. Yet Europe was slowly undergoing mental and moral changes,

which announced the advent of a new era. These changes were more

apparent in Italy than elsewhere, through the revival of arts and

letters early in the fourteenth century. Cimabue, Giotto, and the

Pisani, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, set culture forward on fresh

paths divergent from previous mediaeval tradition. The gradual

enfeeblement of the Empire and the distraction of the Church during the

Great Schism prepared the means whereby both Renaissance and Reformation

were eventually realized. The Council of Constance brought the Western

nations into active diplomatical relations, and sowed seeds of thought

which afterwards sprang up in Luther.

Meanwhile a special nidus had been created in the South. The Italian

communes freed themselves from all but titular subjection to the Empire,

and were practically independent of the Papacy during its exile in

Avignon. They succumbed to despots, and from Italian despotism emerged

the Machiavellian conception of the State. This conception, modified in

various ways, by Sarpi's theory of Church and State, by the Jesuit

theory of Papal Supremacy, by the counter-theory of the Divine Right of

Kings, by theories of Social Contract and the Divine Right of Nations,

superseded the elder ideal of Universal Monarchy. It grew originally

out of the specific conditions of Italy in the fifteenth century, and

acquired force from that habit of mind, fostered by the Classical

Revival, which we call humanism. Humanism had flourished in Italy since

the days of Petrarch, and had been communicated by Italian teachers to

the rest of Europe. As in the South it generated the new learning and

the new culture which I have described in the first five volumes of my

work, and acted as a solvent on the mediaeval idea of the Empire, so in

the North it generated a new religious enthusiasm and acted as a solvent

on the mediaeval idea of the Church. All through the middle ages,

nothing seemed more formidable to the European mind than heresy. Any

sacrifices were willingly made in order to secure the unity of the

Catholic Communion. But now, by the Protestant rebellion, that spell was

broken, and the right of peoples to choose their faith, in dissent from

a Church declared corrupt, was loudly proclaimed.

So long as we keep this line of reasoning in view, we shall recognize

why it is not only uncritical, but also impossible, to separate the two

movements severally called Renaissance and Reformation. Both had a

common root in humanism, and humanism owed its existence on the one hand

to the recovery of antique literature, on the other to the fact that the

Papacy, instead of striving to stamp it out as it had stamped out

Provencal civilization, viewed it at first with approval. The new

learning, as our ancestors were wont to call it, involved, in

Michelet's pregnant formula, the discovery of the world and man, and

developed a spirit of revolt against mediaevalism in all its

manifestations. Its fruits were speedily discerned in bold exploratory

studies, sound methods of criticism, audacious speculation, and the free

play of the intellect over every field of knowledge. This new learning

had time and opportunity for full development in Italy, and for adequate

extension to the Northern races, before its real tendencies were

suspected. When that happened, the transition from the mediaeval to the

modern age had been secured. The Empire was obsolete. The Church was

forced into reaction. Europe became the battle-field of progressive and

retrogressive forces, the scene of a struggle between two parties which

can best be termed Liberalism and Conservatism.

Stripping the subject of those artistic and literary associations which

we are accustomed to connect with the word Renaissance, these seem to me

the most essential points to bear in mind about this movement. Then,

when we have studied the diverse antecedent circumstances of the German

and Italian races, when we take into account their national qualities,

and estimate the different aims and divergent enthusiasms evoked in each

by humanistic ardor, we shall perceive how it came to pass that

Renaissance and Reformation clashed together in discordant opposition to

the Catholic Revival.

V.

Italy, through the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, and the Roman

Church, gave discipline, culture, and religion to the Western world.

But, during the course of this civilizing process, a force arose in

Northern Europe which was destined to transfer the center of gravity

from the Mediterranean basin northwards. The Teutonic tribes effaced the

Western Empire, adopted Christianity, and profoundly modified what still

survived of Latin civility among the Occidental races. A new factor was

thus introduced into the European community, which had to be assimilated

to the old; and the genius of the Italian people never displayed itself

more luminously than in the ability with which the Bishops of Rome

availed themselves of this occasion. They separated the Latin from the

Greek Church, and, by the figment of the Holy Roman Empire, cemented

Southern and Northern Europe into an apparently cohesive whole. After

the year A.D. 800, Europe, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean,

acknowledged a dual headship; Papacy and Empire ranking as ideals under

which the unity of Christendom subsisted in a multiplicity of separate

and self-evolving nations.

The concordat between Latin Church and German Empire, the one

representing traditions of antique intelligence and southern habits of

State organization, the other introducing the young energies of

half-cultivated peoples and the chivalry of the North, was never

perfect. Yet, incomplete as the fusion between Roman and Teuton actually

was, it had a common basis in religion, and it enabled the federated

peoples to maintain recognized international relations. What we now call

Renaissance and Reformation revealed still unreconciled antagonisms

between Southern and Northern, Latin and German, factors in this

mediaeval Europe. Italy, freed for a while from both Papacy and Empire,

expressed her intellectual energy in the Revival of Learning, developing

that bold investigating spirit to which the names of Humanism or of

Rationalism may be given. The new learning, the new enthusiasm for

inquiry, the new study of the world and man, as subjects of vital

interest irrespective of our dreamed-of life beyond the grave,

stimulated in Italy what we know as Renaissance; while in Germany it led

to what we know as Reformation. The Reformation must be regarded as the

Teutonic counterpart to the Italian Renaissance. It was what emerged

from the core of that huge barbarian factor, which had sapped the Roman

Empire, and accepted Catholicism; which lent its vigor to the mediaeval

Empire, and which now participated in the culture of the classical

Revival. As Italy restored freedom to human intelligence and the senses

by arts and letters and amenities of refined existence, so Germany

restored freedom to the soul and conscience by strenuous efforts after

religious sincerity and political independence. The one people aiming

at a restoration of pagan civility beneath the shadow of Catholicism,

the other seeking after a purer Christianity in antagonism to the Papal

hierarchy, initiated from opposite points of view that complete

emancipation of the modern mind which has not yet been fully realized.

If we inquire why the final end to which both Renaissance and

Reformation tended--namely, the liberation of the spirit from mediaeval

prepossessions and impediments--has not been more perfectly attained, we

find the cause of this partial failure in the contradictory conceptions

formed by South and North of a problem which was at root one. Both

Renaissance and Reformation had their origin in the revival of learning,

or rather in that humanistic enthusiasm which was its vital essence. But

the race-differences involved in these two movements were so

irreconcilable, the objects pursued were so divergent, that Renaissance

and Reformation came into the conflict of chemical combination,

producing a ferment out of which the intellectual unity of Europe has

not as yet clearly emerged. The Latin race, having created a new

learning and a new culture, found itself at strife with the Teutonic

race, which at the same period developed new religious conceptions and

new political energies.

The Church supplied a battle-field for these hostilities. The

Renaissance was by no means favorable to the principles of Catholic

orthodoxy; and the Italians showed themselves to be Christians by

convention and tradition rather than by conviction in the fifteenth

century. Yet Italy was well content to let the corrupt hierarchy of

Papal Rome subsist, provided Rome maintained the attitude which Leo X.

had adopted toward the liberal spirit of the Classical Revival. The

Reformation, on the other hand, was openly antagonistic to the Catholic

Church. Protestantism repudiated the toleration professed by skeptical

philosophers and indulgent free-thinkers in the South, while it repelled

those refined persons by theological fervor and moral indignation which

they could not comprehend. Thus the Italian and the German children of

humanism failed to make common cause against Catholicism, with which the

former felt no sympathy and which the latter vehemently attacked.

Meanwhile the Church awoke to a sense of her peril. The Papacy was still

a force of the first magnitude; and it only required a vigorous effort

to place it once more in an attitude of domination and resistance. This

effort it made by reforming the ecclesiastical hierarchy, defining

Catholic dogma, and carrying on a war of extermination against the

twofold Liberalism of Renaissance and Reformation.

That reactionary movement against the progress of free thought which

extinguished the Italian Renaissance and repelled the Reformation, has

formed the subject of the two preceding volumes of my work. It could not

have been conducted by the Court of Rome without the help of Spain. The

Spanish nation, at this epoch paramount in Europe, declared itself

fanatically and unanimously for the Catholic Revival. In Italy it lent

the weight of arms and overlordship to the Church for the suppression of

popular liberties. It provided the Papacy with a spiritual militia

specially disciplined to meet the exigencies of the moment. Yet the

center of the reaction was still Rome; and the Spanish hegemony enabled

the Roman hierarchy to consolidate an organism which has long survived

its own influence in European affairs.

VI.

After the close of the Great Schism Rome began to obey the national

impulses of the Italians, entered into their confederation as one of the

five leading powers, and assumed externally the humanistic culture then

in vogue. But the Church was a cosmopolitan institution. Its interests

extended beyond the Alps, beyond the Pyrenees, beyond the oceans

traversed by Portuguese and Spanish navigators. The Renaissance so far

modified its structure that the Papacy continued politically to rank as

an Italian power. Its headquarters could not be removed from the Tiber,

and by the tacit consent of Latin Catholicism the Supreme Pontiff was

selected from Italian prelates. Yet now, in 1530, it began to play a new

part more consonant with its mediaeval functions and pretensions. Rome

indeed had ceased to be the imperial capital of Europe, where the

secular head of Christendom assumed the crown of Empire from his peer

the spiritual chieftain. The Eternal City in this new phase of modern

history, which lasted until Vittorio Emmanuele's entrance into the

Quirinal in 1870, gave the Pope a place among Catholic sovereigns. From

his throne upon the seven hills he conducted with their approval and

assistance the campaign of the Counter-Reformation. Instead of

encouraging and developing what yet remained of Renaissance in Italy,

instead of directing that movement of the self-emancipating mind beyond

the stage of art and humanism into the stage of rationalism and science,

the Church used its authority to bring back the middle ages and to

repress national impulses. It made common cause with Spain for a common

object--the maintenance of Italy in a state of political and

intellectual bondage, and the subjugation of such provinces in Europe as

had not been irretrievably lost to the Catholic cause. The Italians, as

a nation, remained passive, but not altogether unwilling or unapproving

spectators of the drama which was being enacted under Papal leadership

beyond their boundaries. Once again their activity was merged in that of

Rome--in the action of that State which had first secured for them the

Empire of the habitable globe, and next the spiritual hegemony of the

Western races, and from the predominance of which they had partially

disengaged themselves during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It

was the Papacy's sense of its own danger as a cosmopolitan institution,

combined with the crushing superiority of Spain in the peninsula, which

determined this phase of Italian history.

The Catholic Revival, like the Renaissance, may in a certain sense be

viewed as a product of Italian genius. This is sufficiently proved by

the diplomatic history of the Tridentine Council, and by the dedication

of the Jesuits to Papal service. It must, however, be remembered that

while the Renaissance emanated from the race at large, from its

confederation of independent republics and tyrannies, the Catholic

Revival emanated from that portion of the race which is called Rome,

from the ecclesiastical hierarchy imbued with world-wide ambitions in

which national interests were drowned. There is nothing more interesting

to the biographer of the Italians than the complicated correlation in

which they have always stood to the cosmopolitan organism of Rome,

itself Italian. In their antique days of greatness Rome subdued them,

and by their native legions won the overlordship of the world. After the

downfall of the Empire the Church continued Roman traditions in an

altered form, but it found itself unable to dispense with the foreign

assistance of Franks and Germans. The price now paid by Italy for

spiritual headship in Europe was subjection to Teutonic suzerains and

perpetual intriguing interference in her affairs. During the Avignonian

captivity and the Great Schism, Italy developed intellectual and

confederative unity, imposing her laws of culture and of state-craft

even on the Papacy when it returned to Rome. But again at the close of

the Renaissance, when Italian independence had collapsed, the Church

aspired to spiritual supremacy; and at this epoch she recompensed her

Spanish ally by aiding and abetting in the enslavement of the peninsula.

Still the Roman Pontiff, who acted as generalissimo of the Catholic

armies throughout Europe, was now more than ever recognized as an

Italian power.

VII.

In his review of Ranke's _History of the Popes_ Lord Macaulay insists

with brilliant eloquence upon the marvelous vitality and longevity of

the Roman Catholic Church. He describes the insurrection of the

intellect against her rule in Provence, and her triumph in the Crusade

which sacrificed a nation to the conception of mediaeval religious

unity. He dwells on her humiliation in exile at Avignon, her

enfeeblement during the Great Schism, and her restoration to splendor

and power at the close of the Councils. Then he devotes his vast

accumulated stores of learning and his force of rhetoric to explain the

Reformation, the Catholic Revival, and the Counter-Reformation. He

proves abundantly what there was in the organism of the Catholic Church

and in the temper of Papal Rome, which made these now reactionary powers

more than a match for Protestantism. 'In fifty years from the day on

which Luther publicly renounced communion with the Papacy, and burned

the bull of Leo before the gates of Wittenberg, Protestantism attained

its highest ascendency, an ascendency which it soon lost, and which it

never regained.' This sentence forms the theme for Lord Macaulay's

survey of the Catholic Revival. Dazzling and fascinating as that survey

is, it fails through misconception of one all-important point. Lord

Macaulay takes for granted that conflict in Europe, since the

publication of Luther's manifesto against Rome, has been between

Catholicism and Protestantism. Even after describing the cataclysm of

the French Revolution, he winds up his argument with these words: 'We

think it a most remarkable fact that no Christian nation, which did not

adopt the principles of the Reformation before the end of the sixteenth

century, should ever have adopted them. Catholic communities have, since

that time, become infidel and Catholic again; but none has become

Protestant.' This is tantamount to regarding Protestantism as something

fixed and final in itself, as a permanent and necessary form of

Christianity. Here lies the fallacy which makes his reasoning, in spite

of all its eloquence, but superficial. Protestantism, in truth, has

never been more than a half-way house or halting-place between

Catholicism and what may variously be described as free thought or

science or rationalism. Being in its origin critical--being, as its name

implies, a protest and an opposition--Protestantism was doomed to

sterility, whenever it hardened into one or other of its dogmatic

forms. As critics and insurgents, Luther and Calvin rank among the

liberators of the modern intellect. As founders of intolerant and

mutually hostile Christian sects, Luther and Calvin rank among the

retarders of modern civilization. In subsequent thinkers of whom both

sects have disapproved, we may recognize the veritable continuators of

their work in its best aspect. The Lutheran and Calvinist Churches are

but backwaters and stagnant pools, left behind by the subsidence of

rivers in flood, separated from the tidal stress of cosmic forces.

Macaulay's misconception of the true character of Protestantism, which

is to Catholicism what the several dissenting bodies are to the English

Establishment, has diverted his attention from the deeper issues

involved in the Counter-Reformation. He hardly touches upon Rome's

persecution of free thought, upon her obstinate opposition to science.

Consequently, he is not sufficiently aware that Copernicus and Bruno

were, even in the sixteenth century, far more dangerous foes to

Catholicism than were the leaders of the Reformed Churches. Copernicus

and Bruno, the lineal ancestors of Helmholtz and Darwin, headed that

opposition to Catholicism which has been continuous and potent to the

present day, which has never retreated into backwaters or stagnated in

slumbrous pools. From this opposition the essence of Christianity, the

spirit which Christ bequeathed to his disciples, has nothing to fear.

But Catholicism and Protestantism alike, in so far as both are dogmatic

and reactionary, clinging to creeds which will not bear the test of

scientific investigation, to myths which have lost their significance in

the light of advancing knowledge, and to methods of interpreting the

Scriptures at variance with the canons of historical criticism, have

very much to fear from this opposition. Lord Macaulay thinks it a most

remarkable fact that no Christian nation has adopted the principles of

the Reformation since the end of the sixteenth century. He does not

perceive that, in every race of Europe, all enlightened thinkers,

whether we name Bacon or Descartes, Spinoza or Leibnitz, Goethe or

Mazzini, have adopted and carried forward those principles in their

essence. That they have not proclaimed themselves Protestants unless

they happened to be born Protestants, ought not to arouse his wonder,

any more than that Washington and Heine did not proclaim themselves

Whigs. For Protestantism, when it became dogmatic and stereotyped itself

in sects, ceased to hold any vital relation to the forward movement of

modern thought. The Reformation, in its origin, was, as I have tried to

show, the Northern and Teutonic manifestation of that struggle after

intellectual freedom, which in Italy and France had taken shape as

Renaissance. But Calvinism, Lutheranism, Zwinglianism, and Anglicanism

renounced that struggle only less decidedly than Catholicism; and in

some of their specific phases, in Puritanism for example, they showed

themselves even more antagonistic to liberal culture and progressive

thought than did the Roman Church.

Whatever may be thought about the future of Catholicism (and no prudent

man will utter prophecies upon such matters), there can be no doubt that

the universal mind of the Christian races, whether Catholic or

Protestant, has been profoundly penetrated and permeated with

rationalism, which, springing simultaneously in Reformation and

Renaissance out of humanism, has supplied the spiritual life of the last

four centuries. This has created science in all its branches. This has

stimulated critical and historical curiosity. This has substituted sound

for false methods of inquiry, the love of truth for attachment to

venerable delusion. This has sustained the unconquerable soul of man in

its persistent effort after liberty and its revolt against the tyranny

of priests and princes. At present, civilization seems threatened by

more potent foes than the Roman Church, nor is it likely that these foes

will seek a coalition with Catholicism.

As a final remark upon this topic, it should be pointed out that

Protestantism, in spite of the shortcomings I have indicated, has, on

the whole, been more favorable to intellectual progress than

Catholicism. For Protestantism was never altogether oblivious of its

origin in revolt against unjust spiritual domination, while Catholicism

has steadily maintained its conservative attitude of self-defense by

repression. This suffices to explain another point insisted on by Lord

Macaulay--namely, that those nations in which Protestantism took root

have steadily advanced, while the decay of Southern Europe can be mainly

ascribed to the Catholic Revival. The one group of nations have made

progress, not indeed because they were Protestants, but because they

were more obedient to the Divine Mind, more in sympathy with the vital

principle of movement, more open to rationalism. The other group of

nations have declined, because Catholicism after the year 1530, wilfully

separated itself from truth and liberty and living force, and

obstinately persisted in serving the false deities of an antiquated

religion.

VIII.

Few periods in history illustrate the law of reaction and retrogression,

to which all processes of civil progress are subject, more plainly and

more sadly than the one with which I have been dealing in these volumes.

The Renaissance in Italy started with the fascination of a golden dream;

and like the music of a dream, it floated over Europe. But the force

which had stimulated humanity to this delightful reawakening of senses

and intelligence, stirred also the slumbering religious conscience, and

a yearning after personal emancipation. Protestantism arose like a stern

reality, plunging the nations into confused and deadly conflict,

arousing antagonisms in established orders, unleashing cupidities and

passions which had lurked within the breasts of manifold adventurers.

The fifteenth century closed to a solemn symphony. After the middle of

the sixteenth, discord sounded from every quarter of the Occidental

world. Italy lay trampled on and dying. Spain reared her dragon's crest

of menacing ambition and remorseless fanaticism. France was torn by

factions and devoured by vicious favorites of corrupt kings. Germany

heaved like a huge ocean in the grip of a tumultuous gyrating cyclone.

England passed through a complex revolution, the issue of which, under

the sway of three Tudor monarchs, appeared undecided, until the fourth

by happy fate secured the future of her people. It is not to be wondered

that, in these circumstances, a mournful discouragement should have

descended on the age; that men should have become more dubitative; that

arts and letters should have seemed to pine upon unfertile ground. The

nutriment they needed was absorbed by plants of fiercer and ranker

growth, religious hatreds, political greeds, relentless passions burning

in the hearts of princes and of populations.

IX.

Italy had already given so much of mental and social civilization to

Europe, that her quiescence at this epoch can scarcely supply a

substantial theme for rhetorical lamentations. Marino and Guido Reni

prove that the richer veins of Renaissance art and poetry had been

worked out. The lives of Aldus the younger and Muretus show that

humanism was well-nigh exhausted on its native soil. This will not,

however, prevent us from deploring the untimely frost cast by

persecution on Italy's budding boughs of knowledge. While we rejoice in

Galileo, we must needs shed tears of fiery wrath over the passion of

Campanella and the stake of Bruno. Meanwhile the tree of genius was ever

green and vital in that Saturnian land of culture. Poetry, painting,

sculpture, and architecture, having borne their flowers and fruits,

retired to rest. Scholarship faded; science was nipped in its unfolding

season by unkindly influences. But music put forth lusty shoots and

flourished, yielding a new paradise of harmless joy, which even priests

could grudge not to the world, and which lulled tyranny to sleep with

silvery numbers.

Thanks be to God that I who pen these pages, and that you who read them,

have before us in this year of grace the spectacle of a resuscitated

Italy! In this last quarter of the nineteenth century, the work of her

heroes, Vittorio Emmanuele, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour, stands

firmly founded. The creation of united Italy, that latest birth of the

Italian genius, that most impossible of dreamed-of triumphs through long

ages of her glory and greatness, compensates for all that she has borne

in these three hundred years. Now that Rome is no longer the seat of a

cosmopolitan theocracy, but the capital of a regenerated people; now

that Venice joins hands with Genoa, forgetful of Curzola and Chioggia;

now that Florence and Pisa and Siena stand like sisters on the sacred

Tuscan soil, while Milan has no strife with Naples, and the Alps and

sea-waves gird one harmony of cities who have drowned their ancient

spites in amity,--the student of the splendid and the bitter past may

pause and bow his head in gratitude to Heaven and swear that, after all,

all things are well.

X.

There is no finality in human history. It is folly to believe that any

religions, any social orders, any scientific hypotheses, are more than

provisional, and partially possessed of truth. Let us assume that the

whole curve of human existence on this planet describes a parabola of

some twenty millions of years in duration.[239] Of this we have already

exhausted unreckoned centuries in the evolution of pre-historic man, and

perhaps five thousand years in the ages of historic records. How much of

time remains in front? Through that past period of five thousand years

preserved for purblind retrospect in records, what changes of opinion,

what peripeties of empire, may we not observe and ponder! How many

theologies, cosmological conceptions, polities, moralities, dominions,

ways of living and of looking upon life, have followed one upon another!

The space itself is brief; compared with the incalculable longevity of

the globe, it is but a bare 'scape in oblivion.' And, however ephemeral

the persistence of humanity may be in this its earthly dwelling-place,

the conscious past sinks into insignificance before those aeons of the

conscious future, those on-coming and out-rolling waves of further

evolution which bear posterity forward. Has any solid gain of man been

lost on the stream of time to us-ward? We doubt that. Has anything final

and conclusive been arrived at? We doubt that also. The river broadens,

as it bears us on. But the rills from which it gathered, and the ocean

whereto it tends, are now, as ever in the past, inscrutable. It is

therefore futile to suppose, at this short stage upon our journey, while

the infant founts of knowledge are still murmuring to our ears, that any

form of faith or science has been attained as permanent; that any

Pillars of Hercules have been set up against the Atlantic Ocean of

experience and exploration. Think of that curve of possibly twenty

million years, and of the five thousand years remembered by humanity!

How much, how incalculably much longer is the space to be traversed than

that which we have left behind! It seems, therefore, our truest, as it

is our humblest, wisdom to live by faith and love. 'And now abideth

faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is

charity.' Love is the greatest; and against love man has sinned most in

the short but blood-bedabbled annals of his past. Hope is the virtue

from which a faithful human being can best afford to abstain, unless

hope wait as patient handmaid upon faith. Faith is the steadying and

sustaining force, holding fast by which each one of us dares defy

change, and gaze with eyes of curious contemplation on the tide which

brought us, and is carrying, and will bear us where we see not. 'I know

not how I came of you and I know not where I go with you; but I know I

came well and I shall go well.' Man can do no better than live in

Eternity's Sunrise, as Blake put it. To live in the eternal sunrise of

God's presence, ever rising, not yet risen, which will never reach its

meridian on this globe, seems to be the destiny, as it should also be

the blessing, of mankind.

[Footnote 239: Twenty millions of years is of course a mere symbol, _x_

or _y_.]

INDEX.

A

ACADEMIES, Italian, the flourishing time of, i. 52.

ACCIAIUOLI, Roberto, i. 33.

ACCOLTI, Benedetto, conspirator against Pius IV., i. 132.

ACCORAMBONI, Claudio (father of Vittoria), i. 356.

---Marcello (brother of Vittoria):

intrigues for the marriage of his sister with the

Duke of Bracciano, i. 358 _sqq._;

procures the murder of her husband, 362;

employs a Greek enchantress to brew love-philters, 365;

his death, 372.

---Tarquinia (mother of Vittoria), i. 356.

---Vittoria, the story of, i. 355 _sqq._;

her birth and parentage, 356;

marriage with Felice Peretti, 357;

intrigue with the Duke of Bracciano, 360;

the murder of her husband, 362;

her marriage with Bracciano, 364;

annulled by the Pope, 364, 366;

the union renounced by the Duke, 365;

put on trial for the murder of Peretti, _ib._;

their union publicly ratified by the Duke, 366;

flight from Rome, _ib._;

death of Bracciano, 367;

her murder procured by Lodovico Orsini, 369.

'ACTS of Faith,' i. 107, 176, 187.

ADMINISTRATOR, the (Jesuit functionary), i. 273.

'ADONE,' Marino's:

its publication, ii. 264;

critique of the poem, 266 _sqq._

ALBANI, Francesco, Bolognese painter, ii. 355, 358.

ALEXANDER VI., Pope, parallel between, and Pope Paul IV., i. 106.

ALFONSO II., Duke of Ferrara:

sketch of his Court, ii. 28 _sqq._;

his second marriage, 30;

treatment of Tasso, 38, 51, 53, 58, 60 _sqq._;

his third marriage, 66;

estimate of the reasons why he imprisoned Tasso, 66 _sqq._

ALFONSO the Magnanimous:

arrangements under his will, i. 4.

ALIDOSI, Cardinal Francesco, murder of, i. 36.

ALLEGORY, hypocrisy of the, exemplified in Tasso, ii. 44;

in Marino, 272;

in Ortensi's moral interpretations of Bandello's

_Novelle_, 272 _n._

ALTEMPS, Cardinal d' (Mark of Hohen Ems), legate at Trent, i. 119 _n._

ALVA, Duke of, defeat of the Duke of Guise by, i. 103.

'AMADIS of Gaul,' the favorite book of Loyola in his youth, i. 232.

AMIAS, Beatrice, mother of Francesco Cenci, i. 346.

'AMINTA,' Tasso's pastoral drama, first production of, ii. 39;

its style, 114.

ANGELUZZO, Giovanni, Tasso's first teacher, ii. 12.

ANIMA Mundi, Bruno's doctrine of, ii. 177.

ANTONIANO, a censor of the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, ii. 43.

---Silvio, a boy _improvvisatore_, anecdote of, ii. 328.

AQUAVIVA, the fifth General of the Jesuits, i. 248.

AQUITAINE, Duke of, Guercino's painting of in Bologna, ii. 367.

ARAGONESE Dynasty, the, in Italy, i. 4.

ARBUES, Peter, Saint of the Inquisition in Aragon, i. 161, 178.

ARETINO, Pietro, i. 42, 70;

satire of on Paul IV., 108.

'ARIE Divote,' Palestrina's, ii. 335.

ARISTOTLE'S Axiom on Taste, ii. 371, 374.

ARMADA, Spanish, i. 149.

ARMI, Lodovico dall', a _bravo_ of noble family, i. 409;

accredited at Venice as Henry VIII.'s 'Colonel,' 410;

his career of secret diplomacy, 411;

negotiations between Lord Wriothesley and Venice regarding

the ban issued against him, 412;

his downfall, 413;

personal appearance, 414;

execution, 415.

ARNOLFINI, Massimiliano, paramour of Lucrezia Buonvisi, i. 331;

procures the assassination of her husband, 332;

flight from justice, 332;

outlawed, 336;

his wanderings and wretched end, 339.

ART of Memory, Bruno's, ii. 139.

ART of Poetry, Tasso's Dialogues on the, ii. 22, 24;

influence of its theory on Tasso's own work, 25.

ASSISTANTS, the (Jesuit functionaries), i. 273.

ASTORGA, Marquis of, i. 22.

AURORA, the Ludovisi fresco of, ii. 368.

AVILA, Don Luigi d', i. 128.

B

BAGLIONI, Malatesta, i. 46.

BAINI'S _Life of Palestrina_, ii. 316 _sqq._

BALBI, Cesare, on Italian decadence, ii. 3.

BANDITTI, tales illustrative of, i. 388 _sqq._

'BANDO' (of outlawry), recitation of the terms of a, i. 328.

BARBIERI, Giovanni Francesco, _see_ IL GUERCINO.

BARCELONA, the Treaty of, i. 15.

BARNABITES, Order of the:

their foundation, i. 80.

BAROCCIO, Federigo, ii. 349.

BAROZZA, a Venetian courtezan, i. 394, 396.

BASEL, Council of, i. 94.

BEARD, unshorn, worn in sign of mourning, i. 36.

BEDELL, William (Bishop of Kilmore), on Fra Paolo and

Fra Fulgenzio, ii. 231.

BEDMAR'S conspiracy, ii. 186.

BELLARMINO, Cardinal, on the inviolability of the Vulgate, i. 212;

relations of, with Fra Paolo Sarpi, ii. 213, 222;

his censure of the _Pastor Fido_, 251.

BELRIGUARDO, the villa of, Tasso at, ii. 53.

BEMBO, Pietro, i. 30, 41.

BENDEDEI, Taddea, wife of Guarini, ii. 245.

BENTIVOGLI, the semi-royal offspring of King Enzo of Sardinia, ii. 304.

BIBBONI, Cecco:

his account of how he murdered Lorenzino de'Medici, i. 488 _sqq._;

his associate, Bebo, details of the life of a _bravo_, 389;

tracking an outlaw, 392;

the wages of a tyrannicide, 394;

the _bravo's_ patient watching, 395;

the murder, 397;

flight of the assassins, 399;

their reception by Count Collalto, 401;

they seek refuge at the Spanish embassy, 402;

protected by Charles V.'s orders, 403;

conveyed to Pisa, 404;

well provided for their future life, _ib._

BITONTO. Pasquale di, one of the assassins of Sarpi, ii. 212.

BLACK garments of Charles V., the, i. 43.

BLACK Pope, the, i. 275.

BLOIS, Treaty of, i. 12.

BOBADILLA, Nicholas, associate of Ignatius Loyola, i. 240;

his work as a Jesuit in Bavaria, 258.

BOLOGNA and Modena, humors of the conflict between, ii. 304.

BOLOGNESE school of painters, the, ii. 343 _sqq._;

why their paintings are now neglected, 375 _sqq._;

mental condition of Bolognese art, 376.

BONELLI, Michele, nephew of Pius V., i. 147.

BONIFAZIO of Montferrat, Marquis, one of the Paleologi, i. 23.

BORGIA, Francis (Duke of Gandia), third General of the Jesuits, i. 256;

prevented by Loyola from accepting a Cardinal's hat, 260.

BORROMEO, Carlo:

his character, i. 115;

a possible successor to Pius IV., 135;

ruled in Rome by the Jesuits, 142;

his intimacy with Sarpi, ii. 194.

---Federigo, i. 115;

letter of, forbidding soldiers' visits to convents, 316 _n._

BRANCACCIO, Diana, treachery of, towards the Duchess of Palliano, i. 378;

her murder, 379.

'BRAVI,' maintenance of by Italian nobles, i. 313;

tales illustrative of, 388 _sqq._;

relations of trust between _bravi_ and foreign Courts, 409.

BRIGANDAGE in Italy, i. 416.

BROWN, Mr. H.F., his researches in the Venetian archives, i. 189 _n._

BRUCCIOLI, Antonio, translator of the Bible into Italian, i. 76.

BRUNO, Giordano:

his birth, and training as a Dominican, ii. 129;

early speculative doubts, 130;

_Il Candelajo_, 131, 183;

early studies, 133;

prosecution for heresy, 134;

a wandering student, 135;

at Geneva, 136;

Toulouse, 137;

at the Sorbonne, 138;

the Art of Memory, 139, 154;

_De Umbris Idearum_, _ib._;

relations with Henri III., 140;

Bruno's person and conversation, 141;

in England, _ib._;

works printed in London, 142;

descriptions of London life, _ib._;

opinion of Queen Elizabeth, 143;

lecturer at Oxford, 144;

address to the Vice-Chancellor, 146;

academical opposition, 147;

the Ash-Wednesday Supper, _ib._;

in the family of Castelnau, 148;

in Germany, 149;

Bruno's opinion of the Reformers, _ib._;

the _De Monade_ and _De Triplici Minimo_, 150;

Bruno in a monastery at Frankfort, 151;

invited to Venice, 153;

a guest of Mocenigo there, 154;

his occupations, 156;

denounced by Mocenigo and imprisoned by the Inquisition, 157;

the heads of the accusation, 157 _sqq._;

trial, 159;

recantation, 160;

estimate of Bruno's apology, 161;

his removal to and long imprisonment at Rome, 163;

his execution, 164;

evidence of his martyrdom, 164 _sqq._;

Schoppe's account, 165;

details of Bruno's treatment in Rome, 167;

the burning at the stake, 167 _sq._;

Bruno a martyr, 168;

contrast with Tasso, 169;

Bruno's mental attitude, 170 _sq._;

his championship of the Copernican system, 172;

his relation to modern science and philosophy, 173;

conception of the universe, 173 _sqq._;

his theology, 175;

the _Anima Mundi_, 177;

anticipations of modern thought, 178, 182;

his want of method, 180;

the treatise on the Seven Arts, 182;

Bruno's literary style, 182 _sqq._;

his death contrasted with that of Sarpi, 239 _n._

BRUSANTINI, Count Alessandro (Tassoni's 'Conte Culagna'), ii. 301, 306.

BUCKET, the Bolognese, ii. 305.

BUONCOMPAGNO, Giacomo, bastard, son of Gregory XIII., i. 150.

---Ugo, _see_ GREGORY XIII.