ssin,
1613; Salvator Rosa, 1615; Luca Giordano, 1632; Canaletto, 1697.]

We should be wrong, however, to treat the Eclectics as though they
succeeded without interruption to that 'giant race, before the flood.'
Their movement was emphatically one of revival; and revival implies
decadence. After 1541, when Michelangelo finished the Last Judgment, and
before 1584, when the Caracci were working on their frescoes in the
Palazzo Fava at Bologna--that is to say, between the last of the genuine
Renaissance paintings and the first of the Revival--nearly half a
century elapsed, during which art sank into a slough of slovenly and
soulless putrescence.[215] Every city of Italy swarmed with artists,
adequately educated in technical methods, and apt at aping the grand
style of their masters. But in all their work there is nothing felt,
nothing thought out, nothing expressed, nothing imagined. It is a vast
vacuity of meaningless and worthless brush-play, a wilderness of hollow
trickery and futile fumbling with conventional forms. The Mannerists, as
they were called, covered acres of palace and church walls with
allegories, histories, and legends, carelessly designed, rapidly
executed, but pleasing the eye with crowds of figures and with gaudy
colors. Their colors are now faded. Their figures are now seen to be
reminiscences of Raphael's, Correggio's, Buonarroti's draughtsmanship.
Yet they satisfied the patrons of that time, who required hasty work,
and had not much money wherewith to reward the mature labors of a
conscientious student. In relation, moreover, to the spiritless and
insincere architecture then coming into vogue, this art of the
Mannerists can scarcely be judged out of place. When I divulge the names
of Giorgio Vasari, Giuseppe Cesari (Cav. d'Arpino), Tempesta, Fontana,
Tibaldi, the Zuccari, the Procaccini, the Campi of Cremona, the scholars
of Perino del Vaga, I shall probably call up before the reluctant eyes
of many of my readers visions of dreary wanderings through weariful
saloons and of disconsolate starings up at stuccoed cupolas in Rome and
Genoa, in Florence and Naples, and in all the towns of Lombardy.[216]

In an earlier volume I briefly sketched the development of this
pernicious mannerism, which now deluged the arts of Italy. Only one
painter, outside Venice, seems to have carried on a fairly good
tradition. This was Federigo Baroccio (1528-1612), who feebly continued
the style of Correggio, with a certain