to the insipidities of the
Caracci, and produced such horrors as Domenichino's Martyrdom of S.
Agnes.]

There was at this time a native of Antwerp named Dionysius Calvaert, a
coarse fellow of violent manners, who kept open school in Bologna. The
best of the Caracci's pupils--Guido Reni, Domenichino and
Albani--emigrated to their academy from this man's workshop. Something,
as it seems to me, peculiar in the method of handling oil paint, which
all three have in common, may perhaps be ascribed to early training
under their Flemish master. His brutality drove them out of doors; and,
having sought the protection of Lodovico Caracci, they successively made
such progress in the methods of painting as rendered them the most
distinguished representatives of the Bolognese Revival. All three were
men of immaculate manners. Guido Reni, beautiful as a Sibyl in youth,
with blonde hair, blue eyes, and fair complexion, was, to the end of his
illustrious career, reputed a virgin. Albani, who translated into
delicate oil-painting the sensuousness of the _Adone_, studied the forms
of Nymphs and Venuses from his lovely wife, and the limbs of Amorini
from the children whom she bore him regularly every year. Domenichino, a
man of shy, retiring habits, preoccupied with the psychological problems
which he strove to translate into dramatic pictures, doted on one woman,
whom he married, and who lived to deplore his death (as she believed) by
poison. Guido was specially characterized by devotion to Madonna. He was
a singular child. On every Christmas eve, for seven successive years,
ghostly knockings were heard upon his chamber door; and, every night,
when he awoke from sleep, the darkness above his bed was illuminated by
a mysterious egg-shaped globe of light.[223] His eccentricity in later
life amounted to insanity, and at last he gave himself up wholly to the
demon of the gaming-table. Domenichino obeyed only one passion, if we
except his passion for the wife he loved so dearly, and this was music.
He displayed some strangeness of temperament in a morbid dislike of
noise and interruptions. Otherwise, nothing disturbed the even current
of an existence dedicated to solving questions of art. Albani mixed more
freely in the world than Domenichino, enjoyed the pleasures of the table
and of sumptuous living, but with Italian sobriety, and expatiated in
those spheres of literature which supplied him with motives for his
coldly sensual pictures. Yet