[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.

BUONVISI, Lucrezia, story of, i. 330; intrigue with Arnolfini, 331; murder of her husband, 332; Lucrezia suspected of complicity, 334; becomes a nun (Sister Umilia), ib.; the case against her, 338; amours of inmates of her convent, 340; Umilia's intrigue with Samminiati, ib.; discovery of their correspondence, 341; trial and sentences of the nuns, 344; Umilia's last days, 345.

—-Lelio, assassination of, i. 332.

BURGUNDIAN diamond of Charles the Bold, the, i. 38.

C

CALCAGNINI, Celio, letter of, on religious controversies, i. 74.

CALVAERT, Dionysius, a Flemish painter in Bologna, ii. 355.

CALVETTI, Olimpio (one of the assassins of Francesco Cenci), i. 350.

CALVIN, i. 73; his relation to modern civilization, ii. 402.

CAMBRAY, Treaty of (the Paix des Dames), i. 9, 15.

CAMERA Apostolica, the, venality of, i. 140.

CAMERINO, Duchy of, i. 86.

CAMPANELLA, on the black robes of the Spaniards in Italy, i. 44.

CAMPEGGI, Cardinal Lorenzo, i. 21.

CAMPIREALI, Elena, the tale of, i. 428.

CANELLO, U.A., on Italian society in the sixteenth century, i. 304 n.

CANISIUS, lieutenant of Loyola in Austria, i. 259; appointed to the administration of the see of Vienna, 260.

CANOSSA, Antonio, conspirator against Pius IV., i. 132.

CAPELLO, Bianca, the story of, i. 382.

CAPPELLA, Giulia (Rome), school for training choristers, ii. 316.

CARACCI, the, Bolognese painters, ii. 345, 349 sqq.

CARAFFA, Cardinal, condemned to death by Pius IV., i. 115.

—-Giovanni Pietro (afterwards Pope Paul IV.), causes the rejection of Contarini's arrangement with the Lutherans, i. 78; helps to found the Theatines, 79; made Cardinal by Paul III., 88; hatred of Spanish ascendency, 89; becomes Pope Paul IV., 102; quarrel with Philip II., 102 sqq.; opens negotiations with Soliman, 103; reconciliation with Spain, 104; nepotism, ib.; indignation against the misdoings of his relatives, 106; ecclesiastical reforms, 107 sq.; zeal for the Holy Office, 107 n.; personal character, 108; his death, ib.; his earlier relations with Ignatius Loyola, 242.

CARAFFESCHI, evil character of the, i. 105; four condemned to death by Pius IV., 115, 318.

CARAVAGGIO, Michelangelo Amerighi da, Italian Realist painter, ii. 363 n.

CARDINE, Aliffe and Leonardo di (Caraffeschi), condemned to death by Pius IV., i. 115.

CARDONA, Violante de (Duchess of Palliano), story of, i. 373 sqq.; her accomplishments, 374; character, ib.; passion of Marcello Capecce for her, ib.; her character compromised through Diana Brancaccio, 378; murder of Marcello and Diana by the Duke, ib.; death of Violante at the hands of her brother, 380.

CARLI, Orazio: description of his being put to the torture, i. 333 sq.

CARLO Emmanuele of Savoy, Italian hopes founded on, ii. 246, 286; friend of Marino, 262; kindness to Chiabrera, 290; treatment of Tassoni, 298.

CARNESECCHI, condemned by the Roman Inquisition to be burned, i. 145.

CARPI, attached to Ferrara, i. 40.

CARRANZA, Archbishop of Toledo, condemned by the Roman Inquisition to be burned, i. 145.

CASA, Giovanni della (author of the Capitolo del Forno), i. 393, 395.

CASTELNAU, Michel de, kindness of towards Giordano Bruno, ii. 141, 148.

—-Marie de, Bruno's admiration for, ii. 148.

—-Pierre de, the first Saint of the Inquisition, i. 161.

CATALANI, Marzio (one of the assassins of Francesco Cenci), i. 350.

CATEAU Cambresis, the Peace of, i. 48.

CATHOLIC Revival, the inaugurators of, at Bologna, i. 16; transition from the Renaissance to, 65; new religious spirit in Italy, 67; the Popes and the Council of Trent, 96 sqq.; a Papal triumph, 130; the Catholic Reaction generated the Counter-Reformation, 133; its effect on social and domestic morals, 301 sqq.

CELEBRITY, vicissitudes of, ii. 368.

CELIBACY, clerical, the question of, at Trent, i. 123.

CELLANT, Contessa di, the model of Luini's S. Catherine, ii. 360 n.

'CENA delle Ceneri, La,' Bruno's, i. 85 n.; ii. 140, 142, 183.

CENCI, Beatrice, examination of the legend of, i. 351 sqq.

—-Francesco: bastard son of Cristoforo Cenci, i. 346; his early life, ib.; disgraceful charges against him, 348; compounds by heavy money payment for his crimes, ib.; violent deaths of his sons, ib.; severity towards his children, 349; his assassination procured by his wife and three children, 350; the murderers denounced, ib.; their trial and punishments, 351.