The varying fortunes of Domenichino's fame form a curious chapter in the history of taste. In his own time and down to the end of the eighteenth century he was ranked among the greatest masters. Poussin placed him next to Raphael. Bellori attributed to him "the same wand which belongs to the poetical enchanters." Sir Joshua Reynolds speaks of him with high respect, and Lanzi describes him as the admiration of all professors, and records the enormous price which his pictures still fetched (1809). Against these panegyrics we may set Ruskin's invectives. "I once supposed," he says, "that there was some life in the landscape of Domenichino, but in this I must have been wrong. The man who painted the 'Madonna del Rosario' and 'Martyrdom of St. Agnes' in the gallery of Bologna is palpably incapable of doing anything good, great, or right, in any field, way, or kind whatsoever.... Whatever appears good in any of the doings of such a painter must be deceptive, and we may be assured that our taste is corrupted and false whenever we feel disposed to admire him.... I am prepared to support this position, however uncharitable it may seem; a man may be tempted into a gross sin by passion and forgiven, and yet there are some kinds of sins into which only men of a certain kind can be tempted, and which cannot be forgiven. It should be added, however, that the artistical qualities of these pictures are in every way worthy of the conceptions they realise; I do not recollect any instance of colour or execution so coarse and feelingless." Domenichino and the Carraccis were, says Ruskin elsewhere, mere "art-weeds." "Their landscape, which may in few words be accurately described as 'scum of Titian,' possesses no single merit, nor any ground for the forgiveness of demerit." "The flight of Domenichino's angels is a sprawl paralysed." "They are peculiarly offensive, studies of bare-legged children howling and kicking in volumes of smoke" (_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. § 13; vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. ii. ch. v. § 17; vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xviii. § 20; _Stones of Venice_, travellers' edition, vol. ii. ch. vi.; _On the Old Road_, vol. i. § 91). Ruskin's estimate, "though expressed with such a clangour of emphasis," yet fairly represents, as Mr. Symonds says, the feeling of modern students. Perhaps, however, the reaction against the once worshipped pictures of Domenichino has gone too far. His celebrated "Diana and her Nymphs" in the Borghese Gallery is "a charming picture," says Morelli, "worthy of a purer period of art. Full of cheerful animation and naïve and delightful details, it cannot fail to please" (_Roman Galleries_, p. 228). Of the moral obliquity which Ruskin seems