,
the beauty of her monuments and sculpture came to her from Greece. Later,
when Christianity arose in Rome, it there remained impregnated with
paganism; it was on another soil that it produced Gothic art, the
Christian Art _par excellence_. Later still, at the Renascence, it was
certainly at Rome that the age of Julius II and Leo X shone forth; but
the artists of Tuscany and Umbria prepared the evolution, brought it to
Rome that it might thence expand and soar. For the second time, indeed,
art came to Rome from without, and gave her the royalty of the world by
blossoming so triumphantly within her walls. Then occurred the
extraordinary awakening of antiquity, Apollo and Venus resuscitated
worshipped by the popes themselves, who from the time of Nicholas V
dreamt of making papal Rome the equal of the imperial city. After the
precursors, so sincere, tender, and strong in their art--Fra Angelico,
Perugino, Botticelli, and so many others--came the two sovereigns,
Michael Angelo and Raffaelle, the superhuman and the divine. Then the
fall was sudden, years elapsed before the advent of Caravaggio with power
of colour and modelling, all that the science of painting could achieve
when bereft of genius. And afterwards the decline continued until Bernini
was reached--Bernini, the real creator of the Rome of the present popes,
the prodigal child who at twenty could already show a galaxy of colossal
marble wenches, the universal architect who with fearful activity
finished the facade, built the colonnade, decorated the interior of St.
Peter's, and raised fountains, churches, and palaces innumerable. And
that was the end of all, for since then Rome has little by little
withdrawn from life, from the modern world, as though she, who always
lived on what she derived from others, were dying of her inability to
take anything more from them in order to convert it to her own glory.

"Ah! Bernini, that delightful Bernini!" continued Narcisse with his
rapturous air. "He is both powerful and exquisite, his verve always
ready, his ingenuity invariably awake, his fecundity full of grace and
magnificence. As for their Bramante with his masterpiece, that cold,
correct Cancelleria, we'll dub him the Michael Angelo and Raffaelle of
architecture and say no more about it. But Bernini, that exquisite
Bernini, why, there is more delicacy and refinement in his pretended bad
taste than in all the hugeness and perfection of the others! Our own age
ought t