Starting from the premises that such an art as sculpture expresses the deepest conviction of the people in which it arises, we are led at once from the works to the social circumstances in which the emotions arose. The briefest study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, shows that all the factors which had lifted sculpture to the summit operated no longer. The free burghers who had built and decorated the Church of Or San Michele or commissioned the Baptistery Gates had been forced to acknowledge the tyranny of a selfish nobility. A source of inspiration like Lorenzo de Medici was replaced by the crew of degenerates who represented the House of Medici in the sixteenth century. In the Roman Catholic Church, too, the Reformation called forth sterner qualities and less sunny energies. The Papacy was forced to relinquish the ideals of Julius II. and Leo X., at any rate for a time. Above all, intellectual life was entirely divorced from national feeling. Politics—“the art of leading the majority, not where they wish, but where they ought to go”—interested the individual, not, as in the earlier age, the mass of the people. We have then at our hand the key to the problem. A picture of Italy between 1527 and 1580 will give us the source of the characteristics of the art of Cellini and Giovanni Bologna. A sketch of the political and social consequences of the Catholic Reaction will explain the popularity of Bernini, the typical sculptor of our second period. First, the politics of sixteenth-century Italy. The outstanding feature of political life at this time was its utter instability. With the solitary exception of Venice, every principality and city was in a condition of constant ferment. State after state ceased to possess the essential elements of political stability. They had been ruined, for the most part, by the attempt to combine freedom within the city walls with dominion beyond. During the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the success attending the methods of Cæsar Borgia had suggested that a combination of moral agility and political knavery might produce the needful balance of power. The advent of the French, the Germans, and later of the Spaniards, destroyed even this semblance of political stability. Italian liberty became a thing of the past. The old absorbing interest in politics vanished, and with it the clarity of thought and logicality of form which public political discussion does so much to foster. In such a country art _exists_. It does not _live_. As Mazzini said two hundred years later: “Without a country and without liberty we might perhaps produce some prophets of art but no vital art. Therefore it is better for us to consecrate our lives to the solution of the problem, ‘are we to have a country?’ and turn at once to the political question. If we are successful, the art of Italy will bloom and flourish over our graves.”