rnament, and this the
pupils of Raphael felt competent to supply without much effort. The result
was that painters who under favourable circumstances might have done some
meritorious work, became mere journeymen contented with the soulless
insincerity of cheap effects. Giulio Romano alone, by dint of robust
energy and lurid fire of fancy flickering amid the smoke of his coarser
nature, achieved a triumph in this line of labour. His Palazzo del Te will
always remain the monument of a specific moment in Renaissance history,
since it is adequate to the intellectual conditions of a race demoralised
but living still with largeness and a sense of grandeur.

Michael Angelo formed no school in the strict sense of the word. Yet his
influence was not the less felt on that account, nor less powerful than
Raphael's in the same direction. During his manhood the painters Sebastian
del Piombo, Marcello Venusti, and Daniele da Volterra, had endeavoured to
add the charm of oil-colouring to his designs; and long before his death,
the seduction of his mighty mannerism had begun to exercise a fatal charm
for all the schools of Italy. Painters incapable of fathoming his
intention, unsympathetic to his rare type of intellect, and gifted with
less than a tithe of his native force, set themselves to reproduce
whatever may be justly censured in his works. To heighten and enlarge
their style was reckoned a chief duty of aspiring craftsmen; and it was
thought that recipes for attaining to this final perfection of the modern
arts might be extracted without trouble from Michael Angelo's
masterpieces. Unluckily, in proportion as his fame increased, his
peculiarities grew with the advance of age more manneristic and defined;
so that his imitators fixed precisely upon that which sober critics now
regard as a deduction from his greatness. They failed to perceive that he
owed his grandeur to his personality; and that the audacities which
fascinated them, became mere whimsical extravagances when severed from his
_terribilita_ and sombre simplicity of impassioned thought. His power and
his spirit were alike unique and uncommunicable, while the admiration of
his youthful worshippers betrayed them into imitating the externals of a
style that was rapidly losing spontaneity and sense of beauty. Therefore
they fancied they were treading in his footsteps and using the grand
manner when they covered church-roofs and canvases with sprawling figures
in distorted at