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Opposite, perhaps, one of Fuga's golden-brown churches, with windy saints blowing out of their niches, overlooked the nereids of a barocco fountain, or an old house propped itself like a palsied beggar against a row of Corinthian columns; while everywhere flights of steps led up and down to hanging gardens or under archways, and each turn revealed some distant glimpse of convent-walls on the slope of a vineyard or of red-brown ruins profiled against the dim sea-like reaches of the Campagna.
The Norman invaders have added their never-failing gold mosaic, while the Spaniard, after painting sundry scenes from Ovid's "Metamorphoses" in a dreadfully barocco style, calls upon the world, in those magniloquent phrases which somehow belong as of right to your mighty Don, to admire the exquisite commingling of modern art with antique beauty, to which his fiat has given birth.
It is in vain to get ourselves up as romantic, or classical, or Christian, or Florentine, or barocco, or "national," in moribus et artibus: it does not "clothe us"! But the "spirit," especially the "historical spirit," profits even by this desperation: once and again a new sample of the past or of the foreign is tested, put on, taken off, packed up, and above all studied we are the first studious age in puncto of "costumes," I mean as concerns morals, articles of belief, artistic tastes, and religions; we are prepared as no other age has ever been for a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual festival laughter and arrogance, for the transcendental height of supreme folly and Aristophanic ridicule of the world.
After these men expand arid wildernesses of the Sei Cento barocco architecture, false taste, frivolity, grimace, affectation Jesuitry translated into false culture." Symonds is here speaking of the dawn of the seventeenth century, but the movement toward these conditions is quite clearly marked in the later years of the preceding cycle.
The false windows, repeated pillars, and barefaced aiming at effect, that mark the insincerity of the barocco style, are found here almost for the first time. What S. Peter's would have been, if Michael Angelo had lived to finish it, can be imagined from his plans and elevations still preserved.
A law," he took pains to impress it again and again on my foreign understanding, while I looked at him in consternation. I had not been half an hour in London before I had run my head against an Act of Parliament! What a hopeless adventure! However, the barocco apostle was a resourceful person in his way, and we managed to get round the hard letter of it without damage to its fine spirit.
The old priest sat at his open window to receive the offerings of the devout as they passed, but he did not seem to get more than a few bambini modelled in wax. Perhaps he was used to it. And the band played the barocco music on the barocco little piazza and we were all barocco together.
Considering how much account even two soldi are to these poor people, I was really angry when I heard the copper shower. Every member of the party had his or her pennies ready, and dropped them into the boxes. Whether it was the effect of the bad morning, or the ugliness of a very ill-designed barocco building, or the fault of the fat oily priest, I know not.
We need not wonder if a man of his calibre left the powerful impress of his personality upon an art in chaos, luring lesser craftsmen into the Barocco mannerism, while he provoked reaction in the stronger, who felt more scientifically what was needed to secure firm standing-ground.
Barely sixty years elapsed between the death of the one and birth of the other, and the space of a single lifetime separates the zenith of the Renascence from the nadir of Barocco art.
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