upils--His Legacy to the
Lombard School--Bernardino Luini--Gaudenzio Ferrari--The Devotion
of the Sacri Monti--The School of Raphael--Nothing left but
Imitation--Unwholesome Influences of Rome--Giulio Romano--Michael
Angelesque Mannerists--Misconception of Michael Angelo--Correggio founds
no School--Parmigianino--Macchinisti--The Bolognese--After-growth of Art in
Florence--Andrea del Sarto--His Followers--Pontormo--Bronzino--Revival of
Painting in Siena--Sodoma--His Influence on Pacchia, Beccafumi,
Peruzzi--Garofalo and Dosso Dossi at Ferrari--The Campi at
Cremona--Brescia and Bergamo--The Decadence in the second half of the
Sixteenth Century--The Counter-Reformation--Extinction of the Renaissance
Impulse.

In the foregoing chapters I have not sought to write again the history of
art, so much as to keep in view the relation between Italian art and the
leading intellectual impulses of the Renaissance. In the masters of the
sixteenth century--Lionardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, and the
Venetians--the force inherent in the Italian genius for painting reached
full development. What remained was but an after-bloom rapidly tending to
decadence. To surpass those men in their own line seemed impossible. What
they had achieved was so transcendent that imitation satisfied their
successors; and if they refused imitation, originality had to be sought by
deviating into extravagances. Meanwhile no new stock of thoughts had been
acquired; and students of history are now well aware that for really
great art ideas common to the nation are essential. The motives suggested
by mediaeval Christianity, after passing through successive stages of
treatment in the _quattrocento_, had received the grand and humane
handling of the golden age. The motives of revived paganism in like manner
were exhausted, and at this time the feeling for antiquity had lost its
primal freshness. It might seem superfluous to carry this inquiry further,
when we have thus confessedly attained the culminating point of painting.
Yet the sketch attempted in this volume would be incomplete and liable to
misinterpretation, if no account were taken of the legacy bequeathed to
the next generation by the great masters.

Lionardo da Vinci formed, as we have seen, a school at Milan. It was the
special good fortune of his pupils that what he actually accomplished,
bore no proportion to the suggestiveness of his teaching and the fertility
of his invention. Of finishe