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Full Development and Decline of Painting Exhaustion of the old Motives Relation of Lionardo to his Pupils His Legacy to the Lombard School Bernardino Luini Gaudenzio Ferrari The Devotion of the Sacri Monti The School of Raphael Nothing left but Imitation Unwholesome Influences of Rome Giulio Romano Michael Angelesque Mannerists Misconception of Michael Angelo Correggio founds no School Parmigianino Macchinisti The Bolognese After-growth of Art in Florence Andrea del Sarto His Followers Pontormo Bronzino Revival of Painting in Siena Sodoma His Influence on Pacchia, Beccafumi, Peruzzi Garofalo and Dosso Dossi at Ferrari The Campi at Cremona Brescia and Bergamo The Decadence in the second half of the Sixteenth Century The Counter-Reformation Extinction of the Renaissance Impulse.
The latter, especially, favored toleration, and did not sympathize with the fanaticism of the Spanish branch of his family. He condemned the cruelties of Alva and the massacre of St. Bartholomew. With the accession of Rudolph II., a change took place. He had been brought up in Spain. The Catholic counter-reformation was now making its advance.
Meanwhile the Roman Church which stood rigidly for historic Christianity and had been preserved by the Counter-Reformation to the Mediterranean states, continued bound to the autocratic and highly centralized administrative system that had become universal among secular powers during the decadence of Mediaevalism, and from which it had taken its colour, and it kept even pace for the future with the progressive intensification of this absolutism.
The movement of the Counter-Reformation had begun, and any kind of speculative freedom aroused suspicion. This saintly princess was accordingly placed under the supervision of the Holy Office, and to be her friend was slightly dangerous.
Luther was indignant at the sale of indulgences; and his horror at the selling Church pardons for money was, by God's blessing, the occasion of the Reformation. The occasion of the new counter-reformation was the abolition of a certain number of bishoprics, that their revenues might be applied solely to church purposes; and that the Church might so be saved from a scandal and a danger.
And it is remarkable that from the day that the counter-reformation in the Catholic Church was headed by the early Jesuits, Protestantism gained no new victories, and in two centuries so far declined in piety and zeal that the cities which witnessed the noblest triumphs of Luther and Calvin were disgraced by a boasting rationalism, to be succeeded again in our times by an arrogance of scepticism which has had no parallel since the days of Democritus and Lucretius.
Very briefly, then, it, like many other institutions of its kind, was a product of the Catholic counter-reformation designed to stem the rising tide of Protestantism. It came into being in 1616, and was of the Ursuline order, which had been introduced into France not many years earlier.
The same phenomenon is repeated in the classical literature of the French at the time of Louis XIV. Not till the time of the Counter-Reformation did Mariolatry reappear in the higher Italian poetry. Meanwhile the visual arts had certainly done their utmost to glorify the Madonna. It may be added that the worship of the saints among the educated classes often took an essentially pagan form.
Yet whether, if the Divorce question had never arisen, he would have played an effective part in the Reformation is open to doubt, for at bottom the Puritan movement in these islands, the Lutheran movement, and the Counter-reformation, were all the outcome or expression of Moral ideals, not of state-craft; and for Wolsey morals were subordinate to state-craft.
Was there no importance, was there nothing akin to cultural hegemony, in the Counter-Reformation, of which Spain was the champion, and which in point of fact began with the sack of Rome by the Spaniards, a providential chastisement of the city of the pagan popes of the pagan Renaissance?
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