artists of the late Renaissance had become absorbed in the admiration of
merely carnal beauty. With the exception of Michael Angelo and Tintoretto,
there was no great master left who still pursued an intellectual ideal.
The Romans and the Venetians simply sought and painted what was splendid
and luxurious in the world around them. Their taste was contented with
well-developed muscles, gorgeous colour, youthful bloom, activity of limb,
and grace of outline. The habits of the day, voluptuous yet hardy,
fostered this one-sided development of the arts; while the asceticism of
the Middle Ages had yielded to a pagan cult of sensuality. To draw _un bel
corpo ignudo_ with freedom was now the _ne plus ultra_ of achievement. How
to express thought or to indicate the subtleties of emotion, had ceased to
be the artist's aim. We have already noticed the passionate love of beauty
which animated the great masters of the golden age. This, in the less
elevated natures of the craftsmen who succeeded them, and under the
conditions of advancing national corruption, was no longer refined or
restrained by delicacy of feeling or by loftiness of aim. It degenerated
into soulless animalism. The capacity for perceiving and for reproducing
what is nobly beautiful was lost. Vulgarity and coarseness stamped
themselves upon the finest work of men like Giulio Romano. At this crisis
it was proved how inferior was the neo-paganism of the sixteenth century
to the paganism of antiquity it aped. Mythology preserved Greek art from
degradation, and connected a similar enthusiasm for corporeal beauty with
the thoughts and aspirations of the Hellenic race. The Italians lacked
this safeguard of a natural religion. To throw the Christian ideal aside,
and to strive to grasp the classical ideal in exchange, was easy. But
paganism alone could give them nothing but its vices; it was incapable of
communicating its real source of life--its poetry, its faith, its cult of
nature. Art, therefore, as soon as the artists pronounced themselves for
sensuality, merged in a skilful selection and reproduction of elegant
forms, and nothing more. A handsome youth upon a pedestal was called a
god. A duke's mistress on Titian's canvas passed for Aphrodite. Andrea del
Sarto's faithless wife figured as Madonna. Cellini himself, though
sensitive to every kind of physical beauty--as we gather from what he
tells us of Cencio, Diego, Faustina, Paolino, Angelica, Ascanio--has not
attempte