urse the artists went to Rome, but they changed sky and
not spirit. The pupils of the academy came back with their portfolios
filled with sketches in which we see nothing of the "lone mother of dead
empires," nothing of the vast ruins and the great sombre desolate
Campagna, but only Rome turned into a decoration for the scenes of a
theatre or the panels of a boudoir. The Olympus of Homer and of Virgil,
as has been well said, becomes the Olympus of Ovid. Strength, sublimity,
even stateliness disappeared, unless we admit some of the first two
qualities in the landscapes of Vernet. Not only is beauty replaced by
prettiness, but by prettiness in season and out of season. The common
incongruity of introducing a spirit of elegance and literature into the
simplicities of the true pastoral, was condemned by Diderot as a mixture
of Fontenelle with Theocritus. We do not know what name he would have
given to that still more curious incongruity of taste, which made a
publisher adorn a treatise on Differential and Integral Calculus with
amusing plates by Cochin, and introduce dainty little vignettes into a
Demonstration of the Properties of the Cycloid.

[27] Goncourt's _L'Art au 18ieme Siecle_, i.

There is one true story that curiously illustrates the spirit of French
art in those equivocal days. When Madame de Pompadour made up her mind
to play pander to the jaded appetites of the king, she had a famous
female model of the day introduced into a _Holy Family_, which was
destined for the private chapel of the queen. The portrait answered its
purpose; it provoked the curiosity and desire of the king, and the model
was invited to the Parc-aux-Cerfs.[28] This was typical of the service
that painting was expected to render to the society that adored it and
paid for it. "All is daintiness, delicate caressing for delicate senses,
even down to the external decoration of life, down to the sinuous lines,
the wanton apparel, the refined commodity of rooms and furniture. In
such a place and in such company, it is enough to be together to feel
at ease. Their idleness does not weigh upon them; life is their
plaything."[29]

[28] Goncourt's _Art au 18ieme Siecle_, i. 213.

[29] Taine's _Ancien Regime_, p. 186.

Only let us not, while reserving our serious admiration for Titian,
Rembrandt, Raphael, and the rest of the gods and demigods, refuse at
least a measure of historic tolerance to these light and graceful
creations. Boucher