was not the less felt on that account, nor less powerful
than Raffaello's. During his manhood a few painters endeavoured to add
the charm of oil-colouring to his designs, and long before his death
the seduction of his mighty mannerism began 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
Michelangelo's masterpieces. Unluckily, in proportion as his fame
increased, his peculiarities became 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 incommunicable, while the admiration of his youthful
worshippers betrayed them into imitating the externals of a style that
was rapidly losing spontaneity. 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
attitudes. Instead of studying nature, they studied Michelangelo's
cartoons, exaggerating by their unintelligent discipleship his
willfulness 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 Michelangelo'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