It is with Giovanni Bologna as with Benvenuto Cellini. Some source of inspiration is lacking. Both have lost the habit of artistic worship. They no longer regard every blow of the chisel as in a very real sense forwarding some extra human end. The statue to them is a statue—nothing more. This had not always been the case. As we know it was no empty phrase when Michael Angelo began one of his sonnets with the words: “When that which is divine in us doth try To shape a face, both brain and hand unite To give, from a mere model frail and slight, Life to the stone by Art’s free energy.” BERNINI AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION Angelo really did believe in the divinity of his art. So did the artists of the age succeeding Cellini, Giovanni Bologna, and Sansovino. And it is this fact which adds an absorbing interest to the sculpture of the period dominated by the counter reformation which the sculpture of the previous half-century did not possess. The painters and sculptors who came under the influence of the wave of religious enthusiasm known as the Catholic Reaction fully realized that their efforts were forwarding a great ideal. The patrons for whom they worked, and the men and women to whom they appealed also felt that art which dealt with such matters was of real consequence. Looking at the problem after the centuries have cleared the air of the dust of dogmatic discussion, we can see that a lasting settlement of the religious controversy had become a necessity for every country of Europe. We now know that, for one reason and another, peace could only be secured upon a foundation of Protestantism in Scandinavia, in Northern Germany, England, and Scotland. Over the greater part of Southern Europe, Catholicism was finally proved to be essential. Spain, Italy, France, ten of the seventeen provinces of the United Netherlands, Poland, Bohemia and South Germany either declined to be seduced from the authority of the Pope, or eventually returned to the fold. The fact that the problem was of European rather than national importance, and the memory of the position the Church of Rome had held throughout the middle ages, explains why its regeneration was felt to be a social and political event of the greatest significance. During the first half of the sixteenth century a king like Francis I., and an emperor like Charles V., had reduced the occupant of the Papal chair to the position of little more than a counter in the political game. Now the Roman Church threatened to lead European thought and action as it had during the Crusades.