Page:Biographical catalogue of the principal Italian painters.djvu/17

x the Venetians; chiaroscuro, with the Lombards; general technical finish, with the Bolognese; and reality and force, with the Neapolitans. Idealism, or sentimentalism, was a general mannerism of the seventeenth century; and was, apparently, one of the ill effects of the spirit of eclecticism developed by the Carracci.

It remains yet to explain the special destination of this Table and Catalogue, as a companion or hand-book to Italian picture galleries. The work is so, of course, only generally, as supplying general information concerning Italian painting. It may be made serviceable wherever Italian paintings are to be found, whether in or out of Italy. It is expressly a book about Italian: painting and painters, not about pictures, these being enumerated only as examples of the work of the respective masters; the lists arresting the attention of the traveller, and directing him to such specimens as are supposed to be most characteristic of the painter. Its special use may be best illustrated by an example. Suppose the visitor to be in either of the galleries of the Academies of Florence or Bologna, and to be ignorant of the history of art. He will probably be dissatisfied with both collections: the one will appear to contain little besides crude old specimens of the infancy of painting; and the other, a series of sombre, melancholy pictures, of a very mannered School, or of a declining and purely technical art, without a charm to recommend them. Considering these specimens as absolute works of art, irrespective of all other considerations, he may be right, because art and nature are in both cases only very partially illustrated. But considered in relation to human progress, or the development of human ingenuity, each illustrates an important phasis of the social mind, and of the development of a great art. In turning to the Table he will find, in the first instance, that he is surrounded by the offspring of a race of intellectual giants—the pioneers of art; men who, by their simple efforts, had discovered a new province of delight, devotion, and instruction. In the Catalogue he will find the aspirations, the vicissitudes, the triumphs, of their lives, and learn to love the works for the sake of the workers. In the second case, he will find that he is surrounded by the works of the great names of the seventeenth century; men who endeavoured to imbue with new vitality an art that had been exhausted through the morbid efforts of the artist after notoriety, by the attractions of novelty. These men, too, were pioneers; but while the first drew from the cravings and emotions of the soul, the others thought only of preserving the technical beauties of their great predecessors, and prepared the well-cleared path of the so-called Academicians, whose whole aspirations are summed up in good drawing, good colour,