rd coloring, the
sublimity of Michelangelo, the truth to nature of Titian, the pure and
sovereign style of Correggio, Raphael's symmetry, Tibaldi's fitness and
solidity, Primaticcio's erudite invention, with something of
Parmigianino's grace (_Fels. Pittr._ vol. i. p. 129). Zanotti adds:
'This sonnet is assuredly one which every painter ought to learn by
heart and observe in practice.']

Part of this failure must be ascribed to a radically false conception of
the way to combine studies of nature with studies of art. The Eclectics
in general started with the theory that a painter ought to form mental
ideals of beauty, strength, dignity, ferocity, and so forth, from the
observation of characteristic individuals and acknowledged
masterpieces. These ideal types he has to preserve in his memory, and
to use living persons only as external means for bringing them into
play. Thus, it was indifferent who sat to him as model. He believed that
he could invest the ugliest lump of living flesh with the loveliest
fancy. Lodovico supplied Annibale Caracci with the fleshy back of a
naked Venus. Guido Reni painted his Madonna's heads from any beardless
pupil who came handy, and turned his deformed color-grinder--a man 'with
a muzzle like a renegado'--into the penitent Magdalen.[221] It was
inevitable that forms and faces thus evolved should bear the stamp of
mediocrity, monotony, and dullness on them. Few, very few,
painters--perhaps only Michelangelo--have been able to give to purely
imagined forms the value and the individuality of persons; and he
succeeded best in this perilous attempt when he designed the passionate
Genii of the Sistine frescoes. Such flights were far beyond the grasp of
the Eclectics. Seeking after the 'grand style,' they fell, as I shall
show in the sequel of this chapter, into commonplace vacuity, which
makes them now insipid.[222]

[Footnote 221: See Malvasia, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 277; vol. ii. p. 57.
The odd thing is that Malvasia tells these stories of the
Lodovico-Aphrodite and the color-grinder-Magdalen with applause, as
though they proved the mastery of Annibale Caracci and Guido.]

[Footnote 222: The later Eclectics--Spada, Domenichino, Guercino--were
to some extent saved by the influences they derived from Caravaggio and
the Naturalisti. But they had not the tact to see where the finer point
of naturalistic art lies for a delicately minded painter. They added its
brutality, as employed by Caravaggio,