But even in decline Italy was strong enough to hand on her torch to newer hands. From Titian stems the florid classicism and aristocratic portraiture of Rubens and Van Dyck, which dominated the whole eighteenth century in France and England; through Caravaggio and Ribera, Italy made Velasquez the founder of those most characteristic nineteenth century movements, realism and impressionism; through Raphael, the Carracci and Domenichino, she fed the white flame of Poussin’s classicism, which in one way or another has determined the academic development of all Western Europe. Thus Italian painting, eternally alive in the timeless region where dwells the fame of Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo, Giorgione, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, is as well most practically and actually alive in the recent and present struggles, failures, and triumphs of our modern schools. Without understanding Italian painting we cannot understand our own painting. And while the modern world will hardly return to the coherence, solidity, and grace of the great Gothic and Renaissance masters, I am confident that there can be no exit from our present confusion and incoherence until our painters learn at least to consult those great Italian predecessors who dwelt on the heights above which is the abode of the human spirit’s creative rest. ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER IX ON THE ECLECTIC IDEAL The nearly contemporary account of Carlo Cesare Malvasia, _Felsina Pittrice_, Bologna, 1841, Tom. I. p. 263 is instructive. “Lodovico ... was the first who supplied a firm prop to tottering painting and was able to save it from imminent harm and ruin. He was the one who courageously opposed that vainglorious time, which succeeded the most perfect age, and liberating it from the common ills of those erroneous mannerisms which dared to tyrannize that fair profession that had been raised so high, not only wished to restore it to its first vigor, but also to a state still more perfect and sublime.... Taking the best from all the best artists, one sees him, with a facility no longer used and valued, form from them a brief compendium, rather a precious extract, outside of and beyond which little more remained for the studious to desire. And coupling and uniting with the discretion of Raphael the intelligence of Michelangelo, and adding withal with the color of Titian the angelic purity of Correggio, he succeeded in forming from all these manners a single one, which had nothing to envy in the Roman, Florentine, Venetian and Lombard manners.” A Sonnet supposed, without complete evidence, to have been addressed by Annibale Carracci to the painter Niccolò d’Abate gives an even more complete and correct account of the elements that blended in the style of the Carracci. I quote it from Rouchès, _La Peinture Bolonaise_, Paris, 1913, p. 123, note 1.