Jacques Élie Faure, History of Art, vol. III., Renaissance Art, tr. Walter Pach (Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1923), ch. II., Rome and the School, sect. iv., pp. 143-147:
The spectacle that we now witness is the contrary of the cue presented by the decadence of Greece, during which sources of life could be opened up here and there in new countries because the original organism, having developed more slowly and more universally, broke up with less rapidity; but in Italy there was no arresting the descent. The School, step by step, becomes a mere factory. Its principal founder at Bologna, Annibale Carracci, was still, if not a great painter, at least a man of noble will, of grave mind, and of conscience. He adapted intelligently the inventions of others, and ornamented the great melancholy palaces of the Italian princes who had now lost their independence. In his hollow but severely arranged pictures, the pagan divinities bend under his wealth of rhetoric. With Domenichino, the drama becomes completely external, the gestures break up and disperse the overstrained composition, and the mimicry turns into grimacing, though sometimes in a bare arm or in a bit of sky there vibrates the ethereal soul of Venice. The genuine grace of Albani is so sugary and sophisticated that one has difficulty in doing it justice. The bombast of Guido Reni and of Guercino is well-nigh intolerable. What with false sentiment, icy and waxen color, the organization of the picture prescribed by recipe and conventional drawing, the discord that reigns in the art factory of fallen Italy becomes more and more accentuated and develops that gesticulating character which, in the seventeenth century, will culminate in the disjointed and indefatigable grandiloquence of Bernini.
With the contortions of his statues, with the battles and the romantic landscapes of Salvator Rosa, with the dregs of painting that we reach with the prestidigitation of Luca Giordano, the easy and questionable life of Naples invaded Italy and merged its troubled waters with the exhausted currents of the north. It contributed, at least, as much as was necessary to the Jesuit propaganda to mislead the tragic and passionate soul of Italy toward that baroque style in which passion turned to intrigue and tragedy to melodrama. We cannot deny that the style was lacking in abundance and in brilliancy. It had too much. Something of a Hindu exuberance puffed up the buildings and the pictures, and gave to the statues their convulsive appearance. But, within, there was none of the burning sap of India. Instead, there is a heavy look of vanity that inflates the forms with a desire to look well, to please, and to astonish. Under the dominion of bigoted and corrupt political organizations, the great Italian cities, from the sixteenth century onward, pay homage to their own wealth in extravagant churches, amiable and gilded, and in palaces ornamented, like the churches, with profuse decoration. Excepting Venice, where the atmosphere saves everything, this passion for building, for decorating, and for dazzling gave to certain of the cities, to Genoa, to Bologna, and especially to Rome, a character of obstinate power which approaches a kind of beauty; Genoa, however, is insolent, and Bologna pretentious. Rome, with her ruins overgrown with verdure, her red palaces whose reflection turns the fountains to blood, her enormous volumes of water—Rome haunts our memory with a monotonous heaviness. Through twenty centuries she has remained what she was, the place where nature, more than anywhere else in the world, has consented, with unwearying indifference, to take on the form of the will. Besides, in the eighteenth century, she, like Venice, has a moment of semi-awakening and lifts her stone shell to permit the entrance among her ruins of beautiful and princely villas surrounded by parks rich in sentiment. We cannot be sure as to the explanation of this, but it doubtless lies in the philosophic revolt that was taking place everywhere. Piranesi constructs his great staircases and dreams his terrible prisons; it is the last, deep sigh of Michael Angelo, a fantastic gleam in the shadow, the tragic spirit of Italy stifling under the crumbling walls and hidden behind the cellar bars, the violent and mysterious bound of her great heart which cannot be stilled. Rome is strange. Ugly when one comes to analyze it, the city preserves in its ensemble an artificial splendor which is garbed in living splendor by the people and the gardens.
In Italy, in England, and in France, as in the Orient, the garden is the only artistic expression that belongs to the aristocracies. It adapts itself to the most imperious needs of those beings who have been robbed of self-possession through idleness and wealth. It throws around them the solitude which they cannot seek within themselves. It is made to surround them with murmurs, with coolness and shade, the possession of which, amid the freedom of the earth, is the recompense of the poor. Even when it is amassed, shaped, and broken in, nature is never ugly. The trees remain the trees; the water remains the water; the flowers remain the flowers; and whatever artist arranges them, space and light retain the power of softening the contrasts, of organizing the values, and of orchestrating the colors.
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