nd for his Jupiter he used the bronze
castings which Primataccio brought from Rome.[157]

When an artist is so sure of success he no longer takes any trouble to
deserve it. "Che cartoni o non cartoni," cries Giorlamo da Treviso, "io,
io, ho l'arte su la punta dell pennello" ("Have I need of studies, I who
have art on the point of my brush!").

The scruples that Michelangelo had felt no longer checked the artists.
They were not afraid to finish what they had begun. Pomeranci, Semino,
Calvi, painted four square yards a day. Cambiaso painted, at the age of
seventeen, the story of Niobe without studies or sketches. He produced
as many works as a dozen painters together, and his wife lighted the
fire with bundles of drawings which he tossed off every moment. His
contemporaries compare him to Michelangelo, and add that the latter does
not gain by the comparison. Santi di Tito made a portrait in less than
half an hour. He set up a factory in his house and turned them out in
enormous quantities. His pupil, Tempesti, did not succeed in finding
sufficient occupation for his talents in the great frescoes at Rome and,
as a relaxation from painting, made fifteen hundred engravings. In a
month Vasari, Tribolo and Andrea del Cosimo built and decorated a
palace. In a day Perino del Vaga painted the Passage of the Red Sea.

[Illustration: THE DESCENT FROM THE CROSS

Duomo, Florence (1553-1555).]

The Venetians, thanks to their distance from Rome and Florence and to
their ardent communion with nature, which to the horror of Vasari they
dared to copy honestly,[158] were saved for a time, but in the end
caught the infection. The Florentine spirit won this last refuge of art,
and Tintoretto infused the spirit of Michelangelo into Venetian
realism.[159]

The brain of Italy was a prey to fever.[160] Michelangelo had destroyed
the balance of mind of a period dried out by intellectualism and
weakened by the taste for pleasure. The shock of his dazzling light on
their eyes, too feeble to bear it, blinded them and inspired a delirium
of imagination without poetry, without thought and without life.

The Carracci were needed at the end of the century, if not to snatch
Italian art from inevitable death, at least to lend it, emerging from
its follies and delusions, an air of dignity and a cold distinction in
which it could veil itself to die.

The greatness of Michelangelo was thus fatal to Italian art. So it is
with everything that rises to