e place of the representations of
Christian subjects, which had become blasphemous under the treatment of
men like the Caracci. Gods without power, satyrs without rusticity,
nymphs without innocence, men without humanity, gather into idiot groups
upon the polluted canvas, and scenic affectations encumber the streets
with preposterous marble. Lower and lower declines the level of abused
intellect; the base school of landscape[23] gradually usurps the place
of the historical painting, which had sunk into prurient pedantry,--the
Alsatian sublimities of Salvator, the confectionery idealities of
Claude, the dull manufacture of Gaspar and Canaletto, south of the Alps,
and on the north the patient devotion of besotted lives to delineation
of bricks and fogs, fat cattle and ditchwater. And thus Christianity and
morality, courage, and intellect, and art all crumbling together into
one wreck, we are hurried on to the fall of Italy, the revolution in
France, and the condition of art in England (saved by her Protestantism
from severer penalty) in the time of George II.

Sec. XXXVIII. I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done
anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape
painting. But the harm which has been done by Claude and the Poussins is
as nothing when compared to the mischief effected by Palladio, Scamozzi,
and Sansovino. Claude and the Poussins were weak men, and have had no
serious influence on the general mind. There is little harm in their
works being purchased at high prices: their real influence is very
slight, and they may be left without grave indignation to their poor
mission of furnishing drawing-rooms and assisting stranded conversation.
Not so the Renaissance architecture. Raised at once into all the
magnificence of which it was capable by Michael Angelo, then taken up by
men of real intellect and imagination, such as Scamozzi, Sansovino,
Inigo Jones, and Wren, it is impossible to estimate the extent of its
influence on the European mind; and that the more, because few persons
are concerned with painting, and, of those few, the larger number
regard it with slight attention; but all men are concerned with
architecture, and have at some time of their lives serious business with
it. It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three
hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a
nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridi