titudes. Instead of studying nature, they studied Michael
Angelo's cartoons, exaggerating by their unintelligent discipleship his
wilfulness and arbitrary choice of form.

Vasari's and Cellini's criticisms of a master they both honestly revered,
may suffice to illustrate the false method adopted by these mimics of
Michael Angelo's ideal. To charge him with faults proceeding from the
weakness and blindness of the decadence--the faults of men too blind to
read his art aright, too weak to stand on their own feet without
him--would be either stupid or malicious. If at the close of the sixteenth
century the mannerists sought to startle and entrance the world by empty
exhibitions of muscular anatomy misunderstood, and by a braggadocio
display of meaningless effects--crowding their compositions with studies
from the nude, and painting agitated groups without a discernible cause
for agitation--the crime surely lay with the patrons who liked such
decoration, and with the journeymen who provided it. Michael Angelo
himself always made his manner serve his thought. We may fail to
appreciate his manner and may be incapable of comprehending his thought;
but only insincere or conceited critics will venture to gauge the latter
by what they feel to be displeasing in the former. What seems lawless in
him, follows the law of a profound and peculiar genius, with which,
whether we like it or not, we must reckon. His imitators were devoid of
thought and too indifferent to question whether there was any law to be
obeyed. Like the jackass in the fable, they put on the dead lion's skin of
his manner, and brayed beneath it, thinking they could roar.

Correggio, again, though he can hardly be said to have founded a school,
was destined to exercise wide and perilous influence over a host of
manneristic imitators. Francesco Mazzola, called Il Parmigianino, followed
him so closely that his frescoes at Parma are hardly distinguishable from
the master's; while Federigo Baroccio at Urbino endeavoured to preserve
the sensuous and almost childish sweetness of his style in its
integrity.[399] But the real attraction of Correggio was only felt when
the new _barocco_ architecture called for a new kind of decoration. Every
cupola throughout the length and breadth of Italy began then to be
painted with rolling clouds and lolling angels. What the wits of Parma had
once stigmatised as a _ragout_ of frogs, now seemed the only possible
expression for celestial ec