ne, Domenichino was
only obeying the rules of Loyola's _Exercitia_. That he belonged to a
school which was essentially vulgar in its choice of type, to a city
never distinguished for delicacy of taste, and to a generation which was
rapidly losing the sense of artistic reserve, suffices to explain the
crude brutality of the conceptions which he formed of tragic
episodes.[228] The same may be said about all those horrible pictures of
tortures, martyrdoms, and acts of violence which were produced by the
dozen in Italy at this epoch. We turn from them with loathing. They
inspire neither terror nor pity, only the sickness of the shambles. And
yet it would be unjust to ascribe their unimaginative ghastliness to any
special love of cruelty. This evil element may be rationally deduced
from false dramatic instinct and perverted habits of brooding sensuously
on our Lord's Passion, in minds deprived of the right feeling for
artistic beauty.

[Footnote 228: When I assert that the age was losing the sense of
artistic reserve, I wish to refer back to what I have written about
Marino, the dictator of the age in matters of taste. See above, pp. 273,
274.]

Probably Domenichino thought that he was surpassing Titian's Peter
Martyr when he painted his hard and hideous parody of that great
picture. Yet Titian had already touched the extreme verge of allowable
realization, and his work belonged to the sphere of higher pictorial art
mainly by right of noble treatment. Of this noble treatment, and of the
harmonious coloring which shed a sanctifying splendor over the painful
scene, Domenichino stripped his master's design. What he added was
grimace, spasm, and the expression of degrading physical terror.

That Domenichino could be, in his own way, stately, is proved by the
Communion of S. Jerome, in which he rehandled Agostino Caracci's fine
conception. Though devoid of charm, this justly celebrated painting
remains a monument of the success which may be achieved by the vigorous
application of robust intellectual powers to the working out of a
well-conceived and fully developed composition. Domenichino's gigantic
saints and Sibyls, with their fleshy limbs, red cheeks, and upturned
eyes, though famous enough in the last century, do not demand a word of
comment now.[229] So strangely has taste altered, that to our eyes they
seem scarcely decorative.

[Footnote 229: Go to S. Andrea nella Valle in Rome, to study the best of
them.]

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