Page:Anecdotes of painters, engravers, sculptors and architects, and curiosities of art (IA anecdotesofpaint01spoo).pdf/234

 might reasonably exist in Italy at the end of the 15th, and the beginning of the 16th centuries, in the days of Alexander VI., Julius II., and Leo X.; when all the abominations of heathenism prevailed at Rome in practice, and when Christianity can hardly be said to have existed more than in theory. It would have been strange, amidst such universal depravity, that Art should escape unsullied by the general pollution. Still, it was against the abuses of art that the efforts of the Catholic church under Paul IV. were directed; and while those efforts gave a somewhat different character to the subjects and to their treatment in later schools, they cannot be said to have acted on either Painting or Sculpture with any repressive force.

But in Spain the case was wholly different. There was no transient insurrection of a purer morality against the vicious extravagancies of a particular period, but a constant and uniform pressure exerted without intermission on all the means of developing and cultivating the human mind, or of imparting its sentiments to others. Painting and Sculpture came in for their share of restriction, and the nature of the discipline to which they were subjected may be gathered from the work of Pacheco, (Arte de la Pintura) who was appointed in 1618, by a particular commission from the Inquisition, "to denounce the errors committed in pictures of sacred subjects through the ignorance or wickedness of artists." He was commissioned to "take particular care to