I. THE QUARRY 45

influence. It may be a serious question how far the Pausing of the Reformation¹ has been a consequence of this error.

The Rationalist kept the arts and cast aside the religion. This rationalistic art is the art commonly called Renaissance, marked by a return to pagan systems, not to adopt them and hallow them for Christianity, but to rank itself under them as an imitator and pupil. In Painting it is headed by Giulio Romano and Nicolo Poussin; in Architecture, by Sansovino and Palladio.

§ 37. Instant degradation followed in every direction,-a flood of folly and hypocrisy. Mythologies ill understood at first, then perverted into feeble sensualities, take the place of the representations of Christian subjects, which had become blasphemous under the treatment of men like the Caracci. Gods without power, satyrs without rusticity, nymphs without innocence, men without humanity, gather into idiot groups upon the polluted canvas, and scenic affectations encumber the streets with preposterous marble. Lower and lower declines the level of abused intellect; the base school of landscape* gradually usurps the place of the historical painting, which had sunk into prurient pedantry,-the Alsatian sublimities of Salvator, the confectionery idealities of Claude, the dull manufacture of Gaspar and Canaletto, south of the Alps, and on the north the patient devotion of desotted lives to delineation of bricks and fogs, fat cattle and ditchwater. And thus, Christianity and morality, courage, and intellect, and art all crumbling together in one wreck, we are hurried on to the fall of Italy, the revolution in France, and the condition of art in England (saved by her Protestantism from severer penalty) in the time of George II.

§ 38. I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.² But the harm which has been

* Appendix 11: “Renaissance Landscape” [p. 435].

¹ [Another illustration of Ruskin’s alarm, at this time, of Catholic Emancipation and Puseyism: see above, p. 29.]

² [A reference of course to one of the main themes of Modern Painters, vol. i.]

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