lost on them. They began
the false system of depicting ideal foliage and ideal precipices--that
is to say, trees which are not trees, and cliffs which cannot be
distinguished from cork or stucco. In like manner, the clothes wherewith
they clad their personages were not of brocade or satin or broadcloth,
but of that empty lie called drapery. The purpled silks of Titian's
Lilac Lady, in the Pitti, the embroidered hems of Boccaccini da Cremona,
the crimson velvet of Raphael's Joanna of Aragon, Veronese's cloth of
silver and shot taffety, are replaced by one monotonous nondescript
stuff, differently dyed in dull or glaring colors, but always shoddy.
Characteristic costumes have disappeared. We shall not find in any of
their Massacres of the Innocents a soldier like Bonifazio's Dall'Armi.
In lieu of gems with flashing facets, or of quaint jewels from the
Oreficeria, they adorn their kings and princesses with nothing less
elevated than polished gold and ropes of pearls. After the same fashion,
furniture, utensils, houses, animals, birds, weapons, are
idealized--stripped, that is to say, of what in these things is specific
and vital.

It would be incorrect to say that there are no exceptions in Eclectic
painting to this evil system. Yet the sweeping truth remains that the
Caracci returned, not to what was best in their predecessors, but to
what was dangerous and misleading.

The 'grand style,' in Sir Joshua's sense of that phrase, denoting style
which eliminates specific and characteristic qualities from objects,
replacing them by so-called 'ideal' generalities, had already made its
appearance in Raphael, Correggio, and Buonarroti We even find it in Da
Vinci's Last Supper. Yet in Raphael it comes attended with divine grace;
in Correggio with faun-like radiancy of gladness; in Buonarroti with
Sinaitic sublimity; in Da Vinci with penetrative force of psychological
characterization. The Caracci and their followers, with a few
exceptions--Guido at his best being the notablest--brought nothing of
these saving virtues to the pseudo-grand style.

It was this delusion regarding nobility and elevation in style which
betrayed so genial a painter as Reynolds into his appreciation of the
Bolognese masters. He admired them; but he admired Titian, Raphael,
Correggio, and Buonarroti more. And he admired the Eclectics because
they developed the perilous part of the great Italian tradition. Just as
Coleridge recommended young students of dr