Bolognese painters sufficed for the eighteenth century, whose taste
indeed they had created.[236] There is equally no doubt that for the
nineteenth they are insufficient.[237] The main business of a critic is
to try to answer two questions: first why did the epoch produce such
art, and why did it rejoice in it?--secondly, has this art any real
worth beyond a documentary value for the students of one defined
historical period; has it enduring qualities of originality, strength,
beauty, and inspiration? To the first of these questions I have already
given some answer by showing under what conditions the Caracci reacted
against mannerism. In the due consideration of the second we are
hampered by the culture of our period, which has strongly prejudiced all
minds against the results of that reaction.

[Footnote 236: The passage from Lodovico Caracci through Poussin to
Reynolds is direct and unbroken. 'Poussin,' says Lanzi, 'ranked
Domenichino directly next to Raffaello.' _History of Painting in Italy_,
Engl. Tr. vol. iii. p. 84.]

[Footnote 237: Perhaps a generation will yet arise which shall take the
Caracci and their scholars into favor, even as people of refinement in
our own days find a charm in patches, powder, perukes, sedan-chairs,
patchouli, and other lumber from the age despised by Keats. I remember
visiting a noble English lady at her country seat. We drank tea in her
room, decorated by a fashionable 'Queen Anne' artist. She told us that
the quaintly pretty furniture of the last century which adorned it had
recently been brought down from the attic, whither her fore bears had
consigned it as tasteless--Gillow in their minds superseding
Chippendale.]

The painting of the Eclectics was not spontaneous art. It was art
mechanically revived during a period of critical hesitancy and declining
enthusiasms. It was produced at Bologna, 'la dotta' or 'la grassa,' by
Bolognese craftsmen. This is worth remembering; for except Guido
Guinicelli and Francesco Raibolini, no natives of Bologna were eminently
gifted for the arts. And Bologna was the city famous for her ponderous
learning, famous also for the good cheer of her table, neither erudition
nor savory meats being essential to the artist's temperament. The
painting which emerged there at the close of the sixteenth century
embodied religion and culture, both of a base alloy. The Christianity of
the age was not naive, simple, sincere, and popular, like that of the
thirtee