HKB
disappeared.... After the same fashion furniture, utensils, houses, animals, birds, weapons, are idealised--stripped, that is to say, of what in these things is specific and vital"[27] (Symonds, ibid. p. 233).
With regard to the historical development of the declining art whose general characteristics we have been discussing, it is usual to group the painters under three heads--the Mannerists, the Eclectics, and the Naturalists. By the first of these are meant the painters in the several schools who succeeded the culminating masters and imitated their peculiarities. We have already noticed, under the Florentine School, how this "mannerism" set in, and all the other schools show a like process. Thus Giulio Romano shows the dramatic energy of Raphael and Michael Angelo passed into mannerism. Tiepolo is a "mannerised" Paolo Veronese, Baroccio a "mannerised" Correggio. Later on, however, and largely under the influence of the "counter-Reformation"--the renewed activity, that is, of the Roman church consequent on the Reformation,[28]--a reaction against the Mannerists set in. This reaction took two forms. The first was that of the Eclectic School founded by the Carraccis at Bologna in about the year 1580. This school--so called from its principle of "selecting" the qualities of different schools--includes, besides the Carraccis themselves, Guido Reni, Domenichino, Sassoferrato, and Guercino. The last-mentioned, however, combined in some measure the aims both of the Eclectics and of the other school which was formed in protest against the Mannerists. This was the school of the so-called Naturalists, of whom Caravaggio (1569-1609) was the first representative, and whose influence may be traced in the Spanish Ribera (see page 220) and the Neapolitan Salvator Rosa. They called themselves "Naturalists," as being opposed to the "ideal" aims alike of the Mannerists and the Eclectics; but they made the fatal mistake--a mistake which seems to have a permanent hold on a certain order of minds, for it is at the root of much of the art-effort of our own day--that there is something more "real" and "natural" in the vulgarities of human life than in its nobleness, and in the ugliness of nature than in its beauty (see below under 172, and under Salvator Rosa passim).
The later Venetian pictures make a most interesting group. In the eighteenth century Venetian art experienced a partial revival, and the painters of this revival--Tiepolo, Longhi, Canaletto, and Guardi may here be well studied.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] It was this false striving after "the ideal," as Mr. Symonds points out, that caused Reynolds, with his obsolete doctrine about the nature of "the grand style," to admire the Bolognese masters. For Reynolds's statement of his doctrine see his Discourses, ii. and iii., and his papers in the Idler (Nos. 79 and 82); for Ruskin's destructive criticism of it, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. i.-iii.
[28] The realism and the morbid taint in the religious pictures of the Italian decadence were in some measure the direct outcome of ecclesiastical teaching. "Depict well the flaying of St. Bartholomew," said a Jesuit father, "it may win hearts to piety." The comment of Shelley on the Bolognese Schools was this: "Why write books against religion when we may hang up such pictures?"
THE EARLY FLEMISH AND THE GERMAN SCHOOLS
"Why is it, probably, that Pictures exist in the world, and to what end was the divine art of Painting bestowed, by the earnest gods, upon poor mankind? I could advise once, for a little! To make this poor authentic earth a little memorable for us. Flaying of St. Bartholomew, Rape of Europa, Rape of the Sabines, Piping and Amours of goat-footed Pan, Romulus suckled by the Wolf: all this and much else of fabulous, distant, unimportant, not to say impossible, ugly and unworthy shall pass. But I say, Herewithal is something not phantasmal; of indisputable certainty, home-grown" (CARLYLE: Friedrich, bk. iv. ch. vi., slightly altered).