a colorist of high rank, considering
the times in which he lived. Spagnoletto rejoiced in somber shadows, as
though to illustrate the striking sonnet I have quoted in another place
from Campanella.[232]

[Footnote 232: See above, part I. p. 47.]

This digression upon the Naturalists was needed partly to illustrate the
nature of the attempted revival of the art of painting at this epoch,
and partly to introduce two notable masters of the Bolognese school.
Lionello Spada, a street-arab of Bologna, found his way into the studio
of the Caracci, where he made himself a favorite by roguish ways and
ready wit. He afterwards joined Caravaggio, and, when he reappeared in
Lombardy, he had formed a manner of his own, more resplendent in color
and more naturalistic than that of the Caracci, but with less of realism
than his Roman teacher's. If I could afford space for anecdotical
details, the romance of Spada's life would furnish much entertaining
material. But I must press on toward Guercino, who represents in a more
famous personality this blending of the Bolognese and Naturalistic
styles. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri got his nickname of Il Guercino, or
the 'Squintling,' from an accident which distorted his right eye in
babyhood. Born of poor parents, he was apprenticed to indifferent
painters in Bologna at an early age, his father agreeing to pay for the
boy's education by a load of grain and a vat of grapes delivered yearly.
Thus Guercino owed far less to academical studies than to his own
genius. Being Lodovico Caracci's junior by thirty-five years, and
Annibale's by thirty, he had ample opportunities for studying the
products of their school in Bologna, without joining the Academy. A
generation lay between him and the first Eclectics. Nearly the same
space of time separated Guercino from the founder of the Naturalists,
and it was universally admitted in his lifetime that he owed to
Caravaggio in coloring no less than he derived from the Caracci in
sobriety and dignity of conception. These qualities of divergent schools
Guercino combined in a manner marked by salient individuality. As a
colorist, he approached the Tenebrosi--those lovers of surcharged
shadows and darkened hues, whose gloom culminated in Ribera. But we
note a fat and buttery _impasto_ in Guercino, which distinguishes his
work from the drier and more meager manner of the Roman-Neapolitan
painters. It is something characteristic of Bologna, a richness which we