ined to become one of the most powerful
character painters of the modern world, and to enrich the studies of
historians and artists with a series of portraits impressive by their
fidelity to the spirit of the sixteenth century at its conclusion. Venice
herself at this period was still producing masterpieces of the genuine
Renaissance. But the decline into mannerism, caused by circumstances
similar to those of Rome, was not far distant.

It may seem strange to those who have visited the picture galleries of
Italy, and have noticed how very large a number of the painters flourished
after 1550, that I should have persistently spoken of the last half of the
sixteenth century as a period of decadence. This it was, however, in a
deep and true sense of the word. The force of the Renaissance was
exhausted, and a time of relaxation had to be passed through, before the
reaction known as the Counter-Reformation could make itself felt in art.
Then, and not till then, a new spiritual impulse produced a new style.
This secondary growth of painting began to flourish at Bologna in
accordance with fresh laws of taste. Religious sentiments of a different
order had to be expressed; society had undergone a change, and the arts
were governed by a genuine, if far inferior, inspiration. Meanwhile, the
Renaissance, so far as Italy is concerned, was ended.

It is one of the sad features of this subject, that each section has to
end in lamentation. Servitude in the sphere of politics; literary
feebleness in scholarship; decadence in art:--to shun these conclusions is
impossible. He who has undertaken to describe the parabola of a
projectile, cannot be satisfied with tracing its gradual rise and
determining its culmination. He must follow its spent force, and watch it
slowly sink with ever dwindling impetus to earth. Intellectual movements,
when we isolate them in a special country, observing the causes that set
them in motion and calculating their retarding influences, may, not
unreasonably, be compared to the parabola of a projectile. To shrink from
studying the decline of mental vigour in Italy upon the close of the
Renaissance, would be therefore weak; though the task of tracing the
impulse communicated by her previous energy to other nations, and their
stirring under a like movement, might be more agreeable.

FOOTNOTES:

[389] Frescoes in the Brera and at Lugano.

[390] S. Maurizio, on the Screen, inner church. Lugano in the Angeli.

[