the
Oratorio it already outlined, were the most eminent masters of the
school which took its origin in the Florentine Academy of the Palazzo
Vernio.

To pursue the subject further, would be to transgress the chronological
limits of my subject. It is enough to have attempted in this chapter to
show how the destinies of Italian music were secured and its species
determined in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. How that art
at its climax in the eighteenth century affected the manners, penetrated
the whole life, and influenced the literature of the Italians, may be
read in an English work of singular ability and originality.[212]

[Footnote 212: _Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy_, by Vernon
Lee.]

CHAPTER XIII.

THE BOLOGNESE SCHOOL OF PAINTERS.

Decline of Plastic Art--Dates of the Eclectic Masters--The
Mannerists--Baroccio--Reaction started by Lodovico Caracci--His
Cousins Annibale and Agostino--Their Studies--Their Academy at
Bologna--Their Artistic Aims--Dionysius Calvaert--Guido Reni--The
Man and His Art--Domenichino--Ruskin's Criticism--Relation of
Domenichino to the Piety of His Age--Caravaggio and the
Realists--Ribera--Lo Spagna--Guercino--His qualities as
Colorist--His Terribleness--Private Life--Digression upon
Criticism--Reasons why the Bolognese Painters are justly now
neglected.

After tracing the origin of modern music at its fountain head in
Palestrina, it requires some courage to approach the plastic arts at
this same epoch.

Music was the last real manifestation of the creative genius in Italy.
Rarefied to evanescent currents of emotional and sensuous
out-breathings, the spirit of the race exhaled itself in song from human
throats, in melody on lute and viol, until the whole of Europe thrilled
with the marvel and the mystery of this new language of the soul. Music
was the fittest utterance for the Italians of the Counter-Reformation
period. Debarred from political activity, denied the liberty of thought
and speech, that gifted people found an inarticulate vehicle of
expression in tone; tone which conveys all meanings to the nerves that
feel, advances nothing to the mind that reasons, says everything without
formulating a proposition.

Only a sense of duty to my subject, which demands completion, makes me
treat of painting in the last years of the sixteenth century. The great
Italian cycle, rounded by Lionardo, Raffaello, M