ichelangelo, Correggio
and Tiziano, was being closed at Venice by Tintoretto. After him
invention ceased. But there arose at Bologna a school, bent on
resuscitating the traditions of an art which had already done its utmost
to interpret mind to mind through mediums of lovely form and color. The
founders of the Bolognese Academy, like Medea operating on decrepit
Aeson, chopped up the limbs of painting which had ceased to throb with
organic life, recombined them by an act of intellect and will, and
having pieced them together, set the composite machine in motion on the
path of studied method. Their aim was analogous to that of the Church in
its reconstitution of Catholicism; and they succeeded, in so far as they
achieved a partial success, through the inspiration which the Catholic
Revival gave them. These painters are known as the Eclectics and this
title sufficiently indicates their effort to revive art by recomposing
what lay before them in disintegrated fragments. They did not explore
new territory or invent fresh vehicles of expression. They sought to
select the best points of Graeco-Roman and Italian style, unconscious
that the physical type of the Niobids, the voluptuous charm of
Correggio, the luminous color of Titian, the terribleness of
Michelangelo, and the serenity of Raphael, being the ultimate
expressions of distinct artistic qualities, were incompatible. A still
deeper truth escaped their notice--namely, that art is valueless unless
the artist has something intensely felt to say, and that where this
intensity of feeling exists, it finds for itself its own specific and
inevitable form.

'Poems distilled from other poems pass away,
The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes;
Admirers, importers, obedient persons,
make but the soil of literature.'

These profound sentences are the epitaph, not only of imitative poetry,
but also of such eclectic art as the Caracci instituted. Very little of
it bears examination now. We regard it with listlessness or loathing. We
turn from it without regret. We cannot, or do not, wish to keep it in
our memory.

Yet no student of Italian painting will refuse the Caracci that tribute
of respect which is due to virile effort. They were in vital sympathy
with the critical and analytical spirit of their age--an age mournfully
conscious that its scepter had departed--that

'Nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of gl