re, tender, and strong in their art--Fra Angelico,
Perugino, Botticelli, and so many others--came the two sovereigns,
Michael Angelo and Raffaelle, the superhuman and the divine. Then the
fall was sudden, years elapsed before the advent of Caravaggio with power
of colour and modelling, all that the science of painting could achieve
when bereft of genius. And afterwards the decline continued until Bernini
was reached--Bernini, the real creator of the Rome of the present popes,
the prodigal child who at twenty could already show a galaxy of colossal
marble wenches, the universal architect who with fearful activity
finished the facade, built the colonnade, decorated the interior of St.
Peter's, and raised fountains, churches, and palaces innumerable. And
that was the end of all, for since then Rome has little by little
withdrawn from life, from the modern world, as though she, who always
lived on what she derived from others, were dying of her inability to
take anything more from them in order to convert it to her own glory.

"Ah! Bernini, that delightful Bernini!" continued Narcisse with his
rapturous air. "He is both powerful and exquisite, his verve always
ready, his ingenuity invariably awake, his fecundity full of grace and
magnificence. As for their Bramante with his masterpiece, that cold,
correct Cancelleria, we'll dub him the Michael Angelo and Raffaelle of
architecture and say no more about it. But Bernini, that exquisite
Bernini, why, there is more delicacy and refinement in his pretended bad
taste than in all the hugeness and perfection of the others! Our own age
ought to recognise itself in his art, at once so varied and so deep, so
triumphant in its mannerisms, so full of a perturbing solicitude for the
artificial and so free from the baseness of reality. Just go to the Villa
Borghese to see the group of Apollo and Daphne which Bernini executed
when he was eighteen,* and in particular see his statue of Santa Teresa
in ecstasy at Santa Maria della Vittoria! Ah! that Santa Teresa! It is
like heaven opening, with the quiver that only a purely divine enjoyment
can set in woman's flesh, the rapture of faith carried to the point of
spasm, the creature losing breath and dying of pleasure in the arms of
the Divinity! I have spent hours and hours before that work without
exhausting the infinite scope of its precious, burning symbolisation."

* There is also at the Villa Borghese Bernini's _Anchises carried
by Ae