EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 47 



th ever-increasing impetus, so that the artistic type 

 played itself more and more as a wonderful double rose of 

 Christianity and Paganism, exhaling twofold perfumes, and 

 expressing the two diverse factors of the modern spirit. A 

 third generation of painters, Lionardo da Vinci, Raphael, 

 Michel Angelo, Correggio, Giorgione, Andrea del Sarto, 

 brought the type thus elaborated to its fullest completion; 

 and so rapid was the evolution of energy in Italian painting, 

 that during the very lifetime of these men, and even in the 

 later works of some of them, the inevitable decadence became 

 perceptible. The masterpieces of this third period derive 

 their material indifferently from Christian and Pagan sources. 

 In them both motive powers are utilised for a common 

 artistic purpose ; and a complete aesthetic harmony is effected 

 for the apparently antagonistic elements which constituted 

 the basis of modern European culture. Beyond that point it 



- hopeless to advance. The spheres of Christian belief 

 and of Grn?co-Roinan mythology, as these were then under- 

 stood, had been ransacked ; all salient subjects seized upon ; 

 all artistic problems within the limits of the type solved; 



:'v combination and permutation of the primitive series 

 of numbers tried. Unless new ideas could be communicated 

 to the nation in an instant (and this would have implied the 

 genesis of a new type corresponding to them), Italian painting 

 had nothing left but to pass away into hebetude. The 

 passage to the fourth stage was wrought with singular 

 celerity. Michel Angelo survived to see his country swarm- 

 ing with pretenders and mountebanks, who carried the specific 

 qualities of himself and of his mighty compeers to absurdity, 

 while they bedaubed palaces and churches with specious shapes 

 which caught the eye, although they had no life-breath of the 

 spirit in them. Yet the machines of the Mannerists and the 

 Macchinisti, and the more strenuous labours of the Eclectics 

 and the Naturalists, retain their value for students, since these 

 demonstrate how impossible it is for industry and talent to 

 revitalise a type of art which has fulfilled the curve of its 

 existence. The curious point to notice about this decadence 

 of Italian painting is that it imposed its own taste and fashion 



