In the foregoing chapters I have not sought to write again the history of art, so much as to keep in view the relation between Italian art and the leading intellectual impulses of the Renaissance.  In the masters of the sixteenth century-Lionardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, and the Venetians-the force inherent in the Italian genius for painting reached full development.  What remained was but an after-bloom rapidly tending to decadence.  To surpass those men in their own line seemed impossible.  What they had achieved was so transcendent that imitation satisfied their successors; and if they refused imitation, originality had to be sought by deviating into extravagances.  Meanwhile no new stock of thoughts had been acquired; and students of history are now well aware that for really great art ideas common to the nation are essential.  The motives suggested by mediaeval Christianity, after passing through successive stages of treatment in the quattrocento, had received the grand and humane handling of the golden age.  The motives of revived paganism in like manner were exhausted, and at this time the feeling for antiquity had lost its primal freshness.  It might seem superfluous to carry this inquiry further, when we have thus confessedly attained the culminating point of painting.  Yet the sketch attempted in this volume would be incomplete and liable to misinterpretation, if no account were taken of the legacy bequeathed to the next generation by the great masters.

Lionardo da Vinci formed, as we have seen, a school at Milan.  It was the special good fortune of his pupils that what he actually accomplished, bore no proportion to the suggestiveness of his teaching and the fertility of his invention.  Of finished work he left but little to the world; while his sketches and designs, the teeming thoughts of his creative brain, were an inestimable heritage.  The whole of this rich legacy of masterpieces, projected, but not executed, was characterised by a feeling for beauty which has fallen to no other painter.  When we examine the sketches in the Royal Collection at Windsor, we perceive that the exceeding sense of loveliness possessed by Lionardo could not have failed to animate his pupils with a high spirit of art.  At the same time the extraordinary variety of his drawing-sometimes reminding us of German method, sometimes modern in the manner of French and English draughtsmen-by turns bold and delicate, broad and minute in detail-afforded to his school examples of perfect treatment in a multiplicity of different styles.  There was no formality of fixed unalterable precedent in Lionardo, nothing for his scholars to repeat with the monotony of mannerism.

It remained for his disciples, each in his own sphere, with inferior powers and feebler intellect, to perpetuate the genius of their master.  Thus the spirit of Lionardo continued to live in Lombardy after he was dead.  There alone imitation was really fruitful, because it did not imply mere copying.  Instead of attempting to give a fresh and therefore a strained turn to motives that had already received consummate treatment, Lionardo’s successors were able to execute what he had planned but had not carried to completion.  Nor was the prestige of his style so oppressive through the mass of pictures painted by his hand as to check individuality or to prevent the pupil from working out such portions of the master’s vein as suited his own talent.  Each found enough suggested, but not used, to give his special faculty free scope.  This is in fact the reason why the majority of pictures ascribed to Lionardo are really the production of his school.  They have the excellence of original work, but not such excellence as Lionardo could have given them.  Their completion is due, as searching criticism proves, to lesser men; but the conception belongs to the greatest.

Andrea Salaino, Marco d’Oggiono, Francesco Melzi, Giovanni Antonio Beltraffio, and Cesare da Sesto, are all of them skilled workmen, losing and finding their individuality, as just described, in the manner of their master.  Salaino brings exquisite delicacy of execution; d’Oggiono, wild and bizarre beauty; Melzi, the refinements of a miniaturist; Beltraffio, hard brilliancy of light and colour; Cesare da Sesto, somewhat of effeminate sweetness; and thus the qualities of many men emerge, to blend themselves again in what is Lionardo’s own.  It is surely not without significance that this metempsychosis of genius should have happened in the case of Lionardo, himself the magician of Renaissance art, the lover of all things double-natured and twin-souled.

Two painters of the Lombard school, Bernardino Luini and Gaudenzio Ferrari, demand separate notice.  Without Lionardo it is difficult to say what Luini would have been:  so thoroughly did he appropriate his teacher’s type of face, and, in oil-painting, his refinement.  And yet Luini stands on his own ground, in no sense an imitator, with a genius more simple and idyllic than Da Vinci’s.  Little conception of his charm can be formed by those who have not seen his frescoes in the Brera and S. Maurizio Maggiore at Milan, in the church of the Angeli at Lugano, or in the pilgrimage church of Saronno.  To the circumstance of his having done his best work in places hardly visited until of late years, may in part perhaps be attributed the tardy recognition of a painter eminently fitted to be popular.  Luini was essentially a fresco-painter.  None, perhaps, of all the greatest Italian frescanti realised a higher quality of brilliancy without gaudiness, by the scale of colours he selected and by the purity with which he used them in simple combinations.  His frescoes are never dull or heavy in tone, never glaring, never thin or chalky.  He knew how to render them both luminous and rich, without falling into the extremes that render fresco-paintings often less attractive than oil-pictures.  His feeling for loveliness of form was original and exquisite.  The joy of youth found in Luini an interpreter only less powerful and even more tender than in Raphael.  While he shared with the Venetians their sensibility to nature, he had none of their sensuousness or love of pomp.  In idyllic painting of a truly great type I know of nothing more delightful than his figures of young musicians going to the marriage feast of Mary, nothing more graceful than the genius ivy-crowned and seated at the foot of the cross. The sentiment for naïve and artless grace, so fully possessed by Luini, gave freshness to his treatment of conventional religious themes.  Under his touch they appeal immediately to the most untutored taste, without the aid of realistic or sensational effects.  Even S. Sebastian and S. Rocco, whom it is difficult to represent with any novelty of attitude or expression, became for him the motives of fresh poetry, unsought but truly felt. Among all the Madonnas ever painted his picture of Mary with the espalier of white roses, and another where she holds the infant Christ to pluck a purple columbine, distinguish themselves by this engaging spontaneity.  The frescoes of the marriage of the Virgin and of S. Catherine carried by angels to Mount Sinai might be cited for the same quality of freshness and unstudied poetry.

When the subject demanded the exercise of grave emotion, Luini rose to the occasion without losing his simplicity.  The “Martyrdom of S. Catherine” and the fresco of Christ after the Flagellation are two masterpieces, wherein the depths of pathos have been sounded, and not a single note of discord is struck. All harsh and disagreeable details are either eliminated, or so softened that the general impression, as in Pergolese’s music, is one of profoundest and yet sweetest sorrow.  Luini’s genius was not tragic.  The nearest approach to a dramatic motive in his work is the figure of the Magdalen kneeling before the cross, with her long yellow hair streaming over her shoulders, and her arms thrown backwards in an ecstasy of grief. He did well to choose moments that stir tender sympathy-the piety of deep and calm devotion.  How truly he felt them-more truly, I think, than Perugino in his best period-is proved by the correspondence they awake in us.  Like melodies, they create a mood in the spectator.

What Luini did not learn from Lionardo, was the art of composition.  Taken one by one, the figures that make up his “Marriage of the Virgin” at Saronno, are beautiful; but the whole picture is clumsily constructed; and what is true of this, may be said of every painting in which he attempted complicated grouping. We feel him to be a great artist only where the subject does not demand the symmetrical arrangement of many parts.

Gaudenzio Ferrari was a genius of a different order, more robust, more varied, but less single-minded than Luini.  His style reveals the influences of a many-sided, ill-assimilated education; blending the manners of Bramantino, Lionardo, and Raphael without proper fusion.  Though Ferrari travelled much, and learned his art in several schools, he, like Luini, can only be studied in the Milanese district-at his birthplace Varallo, at Saronno, Vercelli, and Milan.  It is to be regretted that a painter of such singular ability, almost unrivalled at moments in the expression of intense feeling and the representation of energetic movement, should have lacked a simpler training, or have been unable to adopt a manner more uniform.  There is a strength of wing in his imaginative flight, a swiftness and impetuosity in his execution, and a dramatic force in his conception, that almost justify Lomazzo’s choice of the eagle for his emblem.  Yet he was unable to collect his powers, or to rule them.  The distractions of an age that had produced its masterpieces, were too strong for him; and what he failed to find was balance.  His picture of the “Martyrdom of S. Catherine,” where reminiscences of Raphael and Lionardo mingle with the uncouth motives of an earlier style in a medley without unity of composition or harmony of colouring, might be chosen as a typical instance of great resources misapplied.

The most pleasing of Ferrari’s paintings are choirs of angels, sorrowing or rejoicing, some of them exquisitely and originally beautiful, all animated with unusual life, and poised upon wings powerful enough to bear them-veritable “birds of God." His dramatic scenes from sacred history, rich in novel motives and exuberantly full of invention, crowd the churches of Vercelli; while a whole epic of the Passion is painted in fresco above the altar of S. Maria delle Grazie at Varallo, covering the wall from basement to ceiling.  The prodigality of power displayed by Ferrari makes up for much of crudity in style and confusion in aim; nor can we refuse the tribute of warmest admiration to a master, who, when the schools of Rome and Florence were sinking into emptiness and bombast, preserved the fire of feeling for serious themes.  What was deadly in the neo-paganism of the Renaissance-its frivolity and worldliness, corroding the very sources of belief in men who made of art a decoration for their sensuous existence-had not penetrated to those Lombard valleys where Ferrari and Luini worked.  There the devotion of the Sacri Monti still maintained an intelligence between the people and the artist, far more fruitful of results to painting than the patronage of splendour-loving cardinals and nobles.

Passing from Lionardo to Raphael, we find exactly the reverse of what has hitherto been noticed.  Raphael worked out the mine of his own thought so thoroughly-so completely exhausted the motives of his invention, and carried his style to such perfection-that he left nothing unused for his followers.  We have seen that he formed a school of subordinates in Rome who executed his later frescoes after his designs.  Some of these men have names that can be mentioned-Giulio Romano, of whom more hereafter; Perino del Vaga, the decorator of Genoese palaces in a style of overblown but gorgeous Raphaelism; Andrea Sabbatini, who carried the Roman tradition down to Naples; Francesco Penni, Giovanni da Udine, and Polidoro da Caravaggio.  Their work, even while superintended by Raphael himself, began to show the signs of decadence.  In his Roman manner the dramatic element was conspicuous; and to carry dramatic painting beyond the limits of good style in art is unfortunately easy.  The Hall of Constantine, left unfinished at his death, still further proved how little his pupils could do without him. When Raphael died, the breath whose might sustained and made them potent, ceased.  For all the higher purposes of genuine art, inspiration passed from them as colour fades from eastern clouds at sunset, suddenly.

It has been customary to account for this rapid decline of the Roman school by referring to the sack of Rome in 1527.  No doubt the artists suffered at that moment at least as severely as the scholars; their dispersion broke up a band of eminent painters, who might in combination and competition have still achieved great things.  Yet the secret of their subsequent failure lay far deeper; partly in the full development of their master’s style, already described; and partly in the social conditions of Rome itself.  Patrons, stimulated by the example of the Popes, desired vast decorative works; but they expected these to be performed rapidly and at a cheap rate.  Painters, familiarised with the execution of such undertakings, forgot that hitherto the conception had been not theirs but Raphael’s.  Mistaking hand-work for brain-work, they audaciously accepted commissions that would have taxed the powers of the master himself.  Meanwhile moral earnestness and technical conscientiousness were both extinct.  The patrons required show and sensual magnificence far more than thought and substance.  They were not, therefore, deterred by the vacuity and poor conceptive faculty of the artists from employing them.  What the age demanded was a sumptuous parade of superficial ornament, 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 attitudes.  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. 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 ecstasy; and to delineate the joy of heaven upon those multitudes of domes and semi-domes was a point of religious etiquette.  False lights, dubious foreshortenings, shallow colourings, ill-studied forms, and motiveless agitation suited the taste that cared for gaudy brightness and sensational effects.  The painters, for their part, found it convenient to adopt a mannerism that enabled them to conceal the difficult parts of the figure in feather beds of vapour, requiring neither effort of conception nor expenditure of labour on drawing and composition.  At the same time, the Caracci made Correggio’s style the object of more serious study; and the history of Bolognese painting shows what was to be derived from this master by intelligent and conscientious workmen.

Hitherto, I have had principally to record the errors of artists copying the external qualities of their great predecessors.  It is refreshing to turn from the epigoni of the so-called Roman school to masters in whom the flame of the Renaissance still burned brightly.  Andrea del Sarto, the pupil of Piero di Cosimo, but more nearly related in style to Fra Bartolommeo than to any other of the elder masters, was himself a contemporary of Raphael and Correggio.  Yet he must be noticed here; because he gave new qualities to the art of Tuscany, and formed a tradition decisive for the subsequent history of Florentine painting.  To make a just estimate of his achievement is a task of no small difficulty.  The Italians called him “il pittore senza errori,” or the faultless painter.  What they meant by this must have been that in all the technical requirements of art, in drawing, composition, handling of fresco and oils, disposition of draperies, and feeling for light and shadow, he was above criticism.  As a colourist he went further and produced more beautiful effects than any Florentine before him.  His silver-grey harmonies and liquid blendings of hues cool, yet lustrous, have a charm peculiar to himself alone.  We find the like nowhere else in Italy.  And yet Andrea del Sarto cannot take rank among the greatest Renaissance painters.  What he lacked was precisely the most precious gift-inspiration, depth of emotion, energy of thought.  We are apt to feel that even his best pictures were designed with a view to solving an aesthetic problem.  Very few have the poetic charm belonging to the “S.  John” of the Pitti or the “Madonna” of the Tribune.  Beautiful as are many of his types, like the Magdalen in the large picture of the “Pieta" we can never be sure that he will not break the spell by forms of almost vulgar mediocrity.  The story that his wife, a worthless woman, sat for his Madonnas, and the legends of his working for money to meet pressing needs, seem justified by numbers of his paintings, faulty in their faultlessness and want of spirit.  Still, after making these deductions, we must allow that Andrea del Sarto not unworthily represents the golden age at Florence.  There is no affectation, no false taste, no trickery in his style.  His workmanship is always solid; his hand unerring.  If Nature denied him the soul of a poet, and the stern will needed for escaping from the sordid circumstances of his life, she gave him some of the highest qualities a painter can desire-qualities of strength, tranquillity, and thoroughness, that in the decline of the century ceased to exist outside Venice.

Among Del Sarto’s followers it will be enough to mention Franciabigio, Vasari’s favourite in fresco painting, Rosso de’ Rossi, who carried the Florentine manner into France, and Pontormo, the masterly painter of portraits. In the historical pictures of these men, whether sacred or secular, it is clear how much was done for Florentine art by Fra Bartolommeo and Del Sarto independently of Michael Angelo and Lionardo.  Angelo Bronzino, the pupil of Pontormo, is chiefly valuable for his portraits.  Hard and cold, yet obviously true to life, they form a gallery of great interest for the historian of Duke Cosimo’s reign.  His frescoes and allegories illustrate the defects that have been pointed out in those of Raphael’s and Buonarroti’s imitators. Want of thought and feeling, combined with the presumptuous treatment of colossal and imaginative subjects, renders these compositions inexpressibly chilling.  The psychologist, who may have read a poem from Bronzino’s pen, will be inclined to wonder how far this barren art was not connected with personal corruption. Such speculations are, however, apt to be misleading.

Siena, after a long period of inactivity, received a fresh impulse at the same time as Florence.  Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, or Razzi, called Il Sodoma, was born at Vercelli about 1477.  He studied in his youth under Lionardo da Vinci, training his own exquisite sense of natural beauty in that scientific school.  From Milan, after a certain interval of time, he removed to Rome, where he became a friend and follower of Raphael.  These double influences determined a style that never lost its own originality.  With what delicacy and naïveté, almost like a second Luini, but with more of humour and sensuousness, he approached historic themes, may be seen in his frescoes at Monte Oliveto. They were executed before his Roman visit, and show the facility of a most graceful improvisatore.  One painting representing the “Temptation of Monks by Dancing Women” carries the melody of fluent lines and the seduction of fair girlish faces into a region of pure poetry.  These frescoes are superior to Sodoma’s work in the Farnesina.  Impressed, as all artists were, by the monumental character of Borne, and fired by Raphael’s example, he tried to abandon his sketchy and idyllic style for one of greater majesty and fulness.  The delicious freshness of his earlier manner was sacrificed; but his best efforts to produce a grandiose composition ended in a confusion of individually beautiful but ill-assorted motives.  Like Luini, Sodoma was never successful in pictures requiring combination and arrangement.  He lacked some sense of symmetry and sought to achieve massiveness by crowding figures in a given space.  When we compare his group of “S.  Catherine Fainting under the Stigmata” with the medley of agitated forms that make up his picture of the same saint at Tuldo’s execution, we see plainly that he ought to have confined himself to the expression of very simple themes. The former is incomparable for its sweetness; the latter is indistinct and wearying, in spite of many details that adorn it.  Gifted with an exquisite feeling for the beauty of the human body, Sodoma excelled himself when he was contented with a single figure.  His “S.  Sebastian,” notwithstanding its wan and faded colouring, is still the very best that has been painted. Suffering, refined and spiritual, without contortion or spasm, could not be presented with more pathos in a form of more surpassing loveliness.  This is a truly demonic picture in the fascination it exercises and the memory it leaves upon the mind.  Part of its unanalysable charm may be due to the bold thought of combining the beauty of a Greek Hylas with the Christian sentiment of martyrdom.  Only the Renaissance could have produced a hybrid so successful, because so deeply felt.

Sodoma’s influence at Siena, where he lived a picturesque life, delighting in his horses and surrounding himself with strange four-footed pets of all sorts, soon produced a school of worthy masters.  Girolamo del Pacchia, Domenico Beccafumi, and Baldassare Peruzzi, though they owed much to the stimulus of his example, followed him in no servile spirit.  Indeed, it may be said that Pacchia’s paintings in the Oratory of S. Bernardino, though they lacked his siren beauty, are more powerfully composed; while Peruzzi’s fresco of “Augustus and the Sibyl,” in the church of Fontegiusta, has a monumental dignity unknown to Sodoma.  Beccafumi is apt to leave the spectator of his paintings cold.  From inventive powers so rich and technical excellence so thorough, we demand more than he can give, and are therefore disappointed.  His most interesting picture at Siena is the “Stigmatisation of S. Catherine,” famous for its mastery of graduated whites.  Much of the paved work of the Duomo is attributed to his design.  Both Beccafumi and Peruzzi felt the cold and manneristic Roman style of rhetoric injuriously.

To mention the remaining schools of Italy in detail would be superfluous.  True art still flourished at Ferrara, where Garofalo endeavoured to carry on the Roman manner of Raphael without the necessary strength or ideality, but also without the soulless insincerity of the mannerists.  His best quality was colouring, gemlike and rich; but this found little scope for exercise in the dry and laboured style he affected.  Dosso Dossi fared better, perhaps through having never experienced the seductions of Rome.  His glowing colour and quaint fancy give the attraction of romance to many of his pictures.  The “Circe,” for example, of the Borghese Palace, is worthy to rank with the best Renaissance work.  It is perfectly original, not even suggesting the influence of Venice by its deep and lustrous hues.  No painting is more fit to illustrate the “Orlando Innamorato.”  Just so, we feel in looking at it, did Dragontina show herself to Boiardo’s fancy.  Ariosto’s Alcina belongs to a different family of magnificent witches.

Cremona, at this epoch, had a school of painters, influenced almost equally by the Venetians, the Milanese, and the Roman mannerists.  The Campi family covered those grave Lombard vaults with stucco, fresco, and gilding in a style only just removed from the barocco. Brescia and Bergamo remained within the influence of Venice, producing work of nearly first-rate quality in Moretto, Romanino, and Lorenzo Lotto.  Moroni, the pupil of Moretto, was destined 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.